post malone ergo propter malone: De-escalation — Subium • Bluesky web client

The thing that's telling and exasperating about the centrist "Biden must drop out" calls is that... this was their guy! They act like the left insisted on him! But Biden was the guy they were saying Democrats should instead rally around when it looked like we might pick Bernie!

Dude, it never looked like we were going to pick Bernie. He had no chance whatsoever with the majority of the actual Dem base, whose concerns he dismissed as "identity politics."

Bernie wasn't able to break 30%, & ironically for a socialist, didn't realize he was presenting his opponents with a very simple collective action problem.

bernie was beating biden in one-on-one polls a few days before that happened. it was obvious they could do this, but what surprised me was the dramatic effect it had on polls between like friday and monday.

He actually wasn't, is the problem. Biden took a big jump as he absorbed Klobuchar, Buttigeig, & O'Rourke's supporters (& also much of Warren's) but he was already leading Bernie. Also you need to ask yourself why all those millions of voters switched to Biden instead of Sanders in the first place.

Bernie as I said couldn't break 30% but then all the shitlib voters worked collectively towards their "Bernie Sanders shouldn't be the nominee" goal & decided on a single candidate to vote for & now Biden is president.

yes, and as i said, the surprise on my end at the time was not that they might do this, but that it would so effectively sway their voters, given previous head-to-head polling.

Also bears saying that Sanders could have cut Buttigieg and Klobuchar into his coalition if he'd anything to offer and were constitutionally capable of that sort of dealmaking

he tried to offer Warren both the VP slot and secretary of (i think treasury?). i don't know what more you can even give someone.

Consistent respect before you need something?

hey Harris started off calling Biden racist and now she's VP. Bernie has never been anything but respectful. Warren read too many articles about mean tweets i guess.

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Real talk as a Warren voter: If she'd endorsed Bernie I'd be disappointed in her & start looking at other candidates.

you were in the minority of those supporters.

I won't pretend her signaling that he was a dick she didn't want to work with colored my opinion of him, but setting aside that's on Sanders as a candidate, I was pretty primed to support someone else before those revelations

But Proof how would you have known the guy who hired Briahna Joy-Gray, David Sirota, & Jeff Weaver was a dick if Elizabeth Warren didn't mind control you into thinking as she commanded?

having fun building elaborate mythologies around random progressive political staffers, whom you only know from their being hired by bernie

Random staffers like press secretary, the literal mouthpiece of the candidate?

i just don't think we needed to convince the kind of people who have a list of grievances against obscure progressive media figures.

They're not obscure, that's the whole fuckin issue! They're critical parts of the Bernie campaign!

yes, but i don't think most people know who you are talking about.

People know when you’ve hired a terrible press secretary because that’s the person who speaks for the candidate, in the most literal sense imaginable.

And, you know, let's hand him the point. Most people don't know he had a shit staff, seems true enough Everyone on this thread does, so this is "imagine a dumb voter so we can pretend bad staffing is a non-issue." Among other issues with that, the results his hires got speak for themselves!

Right exactly. Campaigns make bad hires all the time. Good campaigns recognize and recover from bad hires by professionalizing their operation. Bad campaigns double down and isolate their candidate from necessary feedback.

Sanders campaign literally said their goal was to keep things divided with no one winning before the convention and then fighting it out there.

sanders coming into the convention with a plurality, not a majority, was the expected outcome, yes. i do not think there would need to be any fight in such a case though, unless the delegates had tried to dispute the clear winner of the election.

By the rules, a plurality is not a clear winner. And a 30% plurality winner is by no means the person we should automatically hand the rest of the votes to without a discussion.

that is how it works in many elections in the US. in better-administrated countries, they have a runoff in this place. your position seems to be that a bunch of party leaders should decide.

I mean, the convention delegates, being the people we voted in to select a winner, would select a winner. It’s not the best system I agree, but then it’s weird sanders wanted to use that to win over just getting 50% of the votes.

i think sanders wanted to get 50% of the votes, but recognized that this rarely happens in elections with more than two credible competitors.

No, his goal was to pull 30% but hope his opponents stayed divided.

it is also clear that his support would expand if he did well in the early divided primaries. 538 had him at about 45% to win a majority, 70% to win a plurality after nevada. i think that if super tuesday had gone off without the endorsements, you would have seem major unification behind sanders

He probably should have done something to get endorsements then.

i think he offered warren about as much as it is possible to offer another candidate. this clearly did not work. i think we need to think critically about the problem, but not without noting that most party leaders just have a first-principles opposition to his politics.

I mean, this is clearly false. He and his campaign offered Warren bile and venom before maybe offering something specific. Way too little way too late.

no, the campaign was respectful, but she read too many mean tweets from twitter supporters. i think vice president and secretary of the treasury as a single person was a good offer. biden got buttigieg and klobuchar for much, much less

No, the campaign itself wasn’t respectful, nor was the candidate. And sanders was either oblivious to being an asshole to her or unable to smooth over misunderstandings.

What people made of this exchange was heavily colored by what they already thought of the two people, myself included, but Sanders certainly had not done the political art of making Warren feel like a coalition partner at this point

Exclusive: Warren accused Sanders in tense post-debate exchange of calling her a ‘liar’ on national TV | CNN Politicswww.cnn.com In a tense and dramatic exchange in the moments after the Democratic debate Tuesday night, Elizabeth Warren accused Bernie Sanders of calling her a liar on national television.

And while yes it certainly was colored by my expectations, importantly sanders campaign treated it as an insult and not a wound to heal.

I don't know what you can even say to that. You are asking him to say that he did think a woman can't be president, but should be forgiven for this? Would you have forgiven him? We expected the progressive policy agenda to be the key thing, but did you even prefer Bernie's policy agenda to Biden's?

Turns out that people care as much about the person running as a list of platitudes.

And sanders both the person and the campaign should have told the chapo assholes to cool it off. There’s value in directly saying respect is important.

can i take this as a clear answer that you preferred biden to sanders, that you prefer sanders's policy program, but find him to be personally reprehensible?

No I think sanders’ policy platform was pretty bad as well. I was a Warren supporter.

To be clear, I don't think their policy platforms were that different but it is absolutely not true in the slightest to claim Sanders made any real honest attempt to cross the divide with Warren and Sanders campaign was openly hostile to Warren repeatedly. Not his Twitter followers, his staff.

I'm literally stunned by this revisionist nonsense that Sanders tried to make nice with Liz. That's just complete horseshit. He and his comms people burned the FUCK out of that bridge.

can you show me any statements? i am aware of what his supporters were saying, but saw nothing negative from him.

this got a little press at the time, you might remember it

U.S. debate mystery solved: Warren told Sanders he called her a liar on national TVwww.reuters.com The mystery of what presidential rivals Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders said to each other in a heated exchange after Tuesday night's Democratic debate has been solved, with debate host CNN revealing that Warren accused Sanders of calling her a liar on national television.

"You called me a liar. You told me – all right, let's not do it now." i don't think any of this is disrespectful. he de-escalated.

De-escalation

trying to jam somebody into lying for you and throwing staff under the bus: a very respectful move

he is asking no one to lie for him. he is deflecting the accusations of lying from the candidate to her staff.

he is saying “obviously Liz didn’t say I said that thing I said. right, Liz? just staffers making it up”

yeah.

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