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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Sanders has the issue that while most of his policy ideas are pretty likeable he as a candidate isn’t.
His policy ideas have become the party mainstream now, which leaves him without a big point of appeal, he’s got issues around women’s issues, issues around his disrespect for racial minorities, issues around his isolationism and big issues around his personal ego and cult of personality.
The big draw of Sanders in 2016 was that he pushed radical new ideas that were needed and remain popular now, but he may well be a victim of his own success, with everyone having adopted his policy ideas we’re just left with an old white man who has a massive ego and keeps unprompted telling women and minorities that they need to run on more than being women and minorities.
I’m interested to see now Gabbard’s campaign reacts, as she logically should be endorsing him.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranThe reason why the "the 2016 primary is rigged!" narrative arose is that a) Hillary worked on from early to get all important endorsements and support to the point of sucking all air out of the room for other candidates and b) the now-departed DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schulz had a lot of conflicts of interest and made questionable decisions about things like debates.
According to this article anyway
. It ain't something like "Clinton bribed other candidates into not running" or actual corruption, these accusations are just alternative facts.
Re: An independent run of Sanders? Aside from the lack of evidence that he is considering one, the last time someone encouraged him to do that he said that independent candidacies are useless and went on to endorse Hillary. See [1]
and [2]
.
Yeah Sanders isn’t going to run for President as an independent, he likely will however leave the Democratic Party by December 2020 regardless of what happens.
Sanders isn’t a team player, his ego is to important to him to be part of a team and that’s concerning.
I’m actully expecting Gabbard to endorse Sanders, not the other way around. As for why Sanders has close ties to Gabbard despite her being a horrible bigot? I wish I knew, it seems to be because she’s a big supporter of him and he will take any support he can get, even from homophobes.
Edited by Silasw on Feb 19th 2019 at 1:38:07 PM
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ Cyran![]()
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Even if his policies have become more mainstream there is still a sense that other democrats will be too flakey to actually implement in full. Medicare-for-All turning into just a Medicare expansion or buy-in as opposed to a true single payer system is a common example.
I think it will be pretty easy for him to manuevor himself as being the person who will actually follow through.
How so?
Edited by Mio on Feb 19th 2019 at 8:38:17 AM
Edited by sgamer82 on Feb 19th 2019 at 6:38:34 AM
How the fuck is it "egotistical" to not fully support a party with a lot of troubling figures currently running it?
That's why I edited it.
Edited by golgothasArisen on Feb 19th 2019 at 7:39:32 AM
"If you spend all your heart / On something that has died / You are not alive and that can't be a life"Not fully supporting the leadership on everything and standing by your beliefs that they’re wrong is fine, refusing to be a member of the party because you like to style yourself as independent is just ego pandering.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranIt's funny; this conversation sounded familiar, and then I realized that we had the exact same debate with you, golgothas, a few weeks ago. I even found my posts saying why I don't like Sanders:
Bad-faith debate is when you refuse to engage with other people's arguments and keep repeating the same things over and over. Ironically, exactly as Sanders does.
Edited by Fighteer on Feb 19th 2019 at 8:44:00 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Then explain to me how he's all talking points. It's the same narrative that was pushed by pro-Hillary people in 2016; "oh, he can't win, he hasn't done anything and his economic / healthcare policies aren't extensive enough." Meanwhile, multiple other candidates have adopted nearly identical policies (with tweaks making them more moderate) and haven't gotten half the criticism he's received.
No other candidates has as radical of economic policy as Sanders. Sure, there's Warren, but she's still unabashedly pro-capitalism. If you actually look at his record, he's campaigned more heavily than any other candidate for minority rights, especially that of the LGBT community.
"If you spend all your heart / On something that has died / You are not alive and that can't be a life"![]()
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Warren being pro-capitalism is likely a feature, not a bug, since most Democrats, including here on this thread are still pro-capitalist.
And frankly outside of the fairly obscure policy of his to promote the formation of cooperatives ( which I don’t know if he is even pushing anymore) nothing he is promoting can really be called socialist.
Edited by Mio on Feb 19th 2019 at 8:55:58 AM
Of fucking course it's not socialist. No actual socialist policy would get anywhere in current American politics. But compared to every other candidate, Bernie is advocating for the most aggressive economic reform, actually holding rich pieces of shit accountable (unlike Booker, Biden, O'Rourke).
"If you spend all your heart / On something that has died / You are not alive and that can't be a life"@Le Garcon: On healthcare, he basically created the Medicare-for-All proposal. On foreign policy, there's the bill cutting funding from the Yemen war. Good starting point at this early stage.
Life is unfair...
What exactly was being sanctioned, given that's a rather broad range of possibilities? Don't really care about Sanders one way or the other, but it's very possible to apply broad sanctions that screw a whole bunch of random ordinary people over for comparatively little gain.
Edited by DeathorCake on Feb 19th 2019 at 2:25:49 PM
As a card carrying Democratic Socialist I honestly see little in the way of policy difference between Sanders and Warren, the big difference I see is that Warren seems to understand collective activity and being part of a team more than Sanders does. Sanders talks about acting as a collective plenty but his constant insistence on trying to paint himself as an outsider seems to indicate that he doesn’t get it in practise, in practise he wants others to just follow him and do as he says.
You want serious socialism in America, than you need someone who can not just preach socialist principles but also run both their campaign and their party along the same principles.
Also his foreign policy views are trash, socialism shouldn’t stop at the border, be it the borders of Vermont (looking at you nuclear waste dumping incident) or the borders of the US.
“And the Bunny nails it!” ~ Gabrael “If the UN can get through a day without everyone strangling everyone else so can we.” ~ CyranAt the time, the sanctions were deliberately being imposed so that they'd do maximum harm note to the oligarchs who effectively run the Russian Federation.
Still not embarrassing enough to stan billionaires or tech companies.Those Russian sanctions also included a reimposition of sanctions against Iran despite them remaining in compliance with the Obama era nuclear agreement, which is what Sanders claimed he was voting against, but true or not that's not something that makes for good optics.
That's the story of Sanders' political career though; occasional ill-conceived moments of standing up on principle but usually just the same politicking you get from any other official with an extra dose of self-righteousness.
@Zephyr: Unless your preferred candidate is Joe Biden*, that's not looking likely; early polling has Sanders in 2nd even with Warren and various other candidates running to the left this cycle.
* And he or some other moderate WASP candidate would be very likely to win against Trump, so I'm not judging if he is.
Edited by CaptainCapsase on Feb 19th 2019 at 9:50:06 AM

Edited by Mio on Feb 19th 2019 at 8:27:22 AM