What does a BIDEN Presidency look like?

[Sheilbh]

I don't think AOC should be lumped with the rest.  Despite her portrayal on the right, and her willing association with the rest of the squad on the left, she has a far more nuanced understanding of politics than she's given credit for.

I think she is brilliant and the future of the party. Unlike Tlaib and Omar.

Yeah I think I agree. I don't really see much about Tlaib and Omar. But AOC is clearly a star.

[grumbler]

AOC is the most charismatic and articulate of the leading figures on the left fringe, but that doesn't make her more nuanced, I don't believe.  She claims to favor social democracy, but her goals seem to be purely socialist.  She has stated that capitalism is irredeemable and needs to be replaced.  Her Green New Deal (net zero carbon emissions by 2030) proposal is impossible on the face of it.  Her proposal for a federal jobs guarantee flies in the face of repeated national experiences (including in the socialist countries she seeks to emulate) demonstrating that it doesn't work.  She favors MMT when even its proponents concede that it's actual basic tenet (that people will accept a fiat currency even in the face of uncertainty about its future value) is, at best, unproven.

It may be that AOC is staking out these extreme positions to give herself room to negotiate for what she actually wants, but I doubt it.  She seems more honest than that.  However, pragmatic is not a word one would associate with her.  She is of more use to the Democrats as a gadfly than a serious legislator, and if she is the future of the Democratic Party, then Hod help the Democrats.

[Tonitrus]

I've gotta take the curmudgeon/grumbler side on the AOC analysis. 

[alfred russel]

She dramatically changed the game as a freshman house member with the green new deal. No nothing got enacted and nothing ever would get enacted under the trump administration (and with a filibuster in the senate it is unlikely anything major is possible now). From an advocacy perspective it was brilliant. Hell, Schumer said at the start of this term that his #1 priority was climate: when he said that AOC was almost certainly in the back of his mind. Honestly she is probably living in his head right now, which is pretty amazing for someone at this point in her career.

She also was instrumental in killing the Amazon HQ2 move to NYC.

For a junior backbench house member, with an activist mentality, she is doing very well.

(for the record I would not vote for the green new deal nor do i think that killing the Amazon HQ2 move was a positive for her constituents)

[Tonitrus]

If you're arguing that she has managed to leverage her media attraction to expand influence/introduce ideas more effectively than other House members of similar tenure, sure.

[Sheilbh]

She dramatically changed the game as a freshman house member with the green new deal. No nothing got enacted and nothing ever would get enacted under the trump administration (and with a filibuster in the senate it is unlikely anything major is possible now). From an advocacy perspective it was brilliant. Hell, Schumer said at the start of this term that his #1 priority was climate: when he said that AOC was almost certainly in the back of his mind. Honestly she is probably living in his head right now, which is pretty amazing for someone at this point in her career.

She also was instrumental in killing the Amazon HQ2 move to NYC.

For a junior backbench house member, with an activist mentality, she is doing very well.

(for the record I would not vote for the green new deal nor do i think that killing the Amazon HQ2 move was a positive for her constituents)

Yeah I think she's just clearly very good at politics. I also don't think her primary win should be underestimated because the Democrats don't really have a history of doing that type of thing and I'm not convinced it was inevitable that if someone on the left ran they'd win.

Plus I've mentioned before but I think Green New Deal is superb rhetorical framing of climate - I'd probably be tempted to try and link it to covid and the vaccines now. But it's had huge impact not just in the US but across European politics too where the concept of a Green New Deal is now part of our politics in one form another, using that rhetorical framing.

[alfred russel]

I also don't think her primary win should be underestimated because the Democrats don't really have a history of doing that type of thing and I'm not convinced it was inevitable that if someone on the left ran they'd win.

Yeah just winning that primary was a shot across the bow of the party.

[crazy canuck]

She dramatically changed the game as a freshman house member with the green new deal. No nothing got enacted and nothing ever would get enacted under the trump administration (and with a filibuster in the senate it is unlikely anything major is possible now). From an advocacy perspective it was brilliant. Hell, Schumer said at the start of this term that his #1 priority was climate: when he said that AOC was almost certainly in the back of his mind. Honestly she is probably living in his head right now, which is pretty amazing for someone at this point in her career.

She also was instrumental in killing the Amazon HQ2 move to NYC.

For a junior backbench house member, with an activist mentality, she is doing very well.

(for the record I would not vote for the green new deal nor do i think that killing the Amazon HQ2 move was a positive for her constituents)

Yeah I think she's just clearly very good at politics. I also don't think her primary win should be underestimated because the Democrats don't really have a history of doing that type of thing and I'm not convinced it was inevitable that if someone on the left ran they'd win.

Plus I've mentioned before but I think Green New Deal is superb rhetorical framing of climate - I'd probably be tempted to try and link it to covid and the vaccines now. But it's had huge impact not just in the US but across European politics too where the concept of a Green New Deal is now part of our politics in one form another, using that rhetorical framing.

Agreed.  She is the class of the political field.  I am very happy she emerged - she gives me a lot of hope for the future of what politics can become.

[OttoVonBismarck]

I really like James Carville because he's frankly much smarter than any of us about how politics really works. He actually prescribed some very specific advice, all of you left of center folk then spent over a week and several hundred posts whinging about use of the word woke. I'm still a conservative--but I haven't been a Republican since 2013 or so, and I don't view the Republican party as a conservative party. Maybe because I'm from that side of the aisle I get it. I think the Lincoln Project guys get it too, so maybe conservatives are just better at fighting, I don't know.

But let me actually illuminate for a second--Carville's advice that was posted was to fucking fight back, it was not to fight on terms favorable to Republicans. The Democrats have had zany, stupid, crazy lefties for longer than I've been alive. That used to basically not matter because the whole fucking party wasn't perennially tarred by their existence. The emergence of the culture wars in the late 80s, Limbaugh, Fox News, Drudge, TheGatewayPundit, Breitbart, Daily Caller, manufatured outrage, OAN, Newsmax etc dramatically changed how Republicans attack. It has worked.

The core reality of all the attacks by those groups is they are built on lies, dishonesty, and poison pill debates that you can never win, because just engaging in them makes you weaker. The correct response about Jim Jordan blasting Democrats over woke culture isn't to whinge about woke culture. It's to fucking ignore his argument, and respond with a better one: Hey Jim, you were on the coaching staff at Ohio State when young men were raped by the team doctor, why did you do nothing?

Jim Jordan should not be allowed to speak in public without being asked "Why did you do nothing about student athletes being raped?" "Why do you support rape?" Hillary Clinton faced permanent conspiracy theory opprobrium from the right wing outrage machine for far fucking less. I don't much care if Jim Jordan knew that the team doctor was raping the wrestlers, what I care about is if we talk about it all the time, it hurts Jim Jordan. That is how Republicans think, and that's how you should think. When someone asks you a bullshit question--you punch them in the fucking face. You don't argue about their bullshit question. When Trump says Make America Great again, why wasn't the response, "Why do you employ illegal immigrants? Why do you have Chinese bank accounts?" Why wasn't stuff like that the topic of discussion every day for four years? Because Democrats are cucks that don't know how to fight.

You might want to consider learning.

[OttoVonBismarck]

And by the way, somewhere, somehow, someone "got to Obama" in 2012 and his people learned this exact fucking thing. Because how did they beat Romney?  By ignoring all the shit Romney tried to throw at him--which was frequently at least some of the same bullshit Jim Jordan and other asshats manufactured against Obama, just packaged in a nicer way, and continually running attacks not to brush back bullshit claims, but to just fuck Romney up head on. Romney is an out of touch rich guy. He calls 47% of the country parasites. Romney said something that was a little out of context, and Obama's team just fucked him up the ass with it for months, and it absolutely beat him. It's identical to how the GOP used the "close a lot of coal mines" comment from Hillary. Why would you mess around in the mud of an argument that's toxic and stupid for you when you could just hit them from another angle that is far worse for them?

[crazy canuck]

You describe a reprehensible politics.

You might consider learning from AOC

[OttoVonBismarck]

No I describe fighting in a modern day cold civil war, in which if you aren't firing bullets you might as well give up.

[OttoVonBismarck]

You describe a reprehensible politics.

You might consider learning from AOC

I'm going to circle back to go ahead and tell you to fuck off. Your attitude is pretty consistently bad and stupid. You are a morally sanctimonious bitch and people like you represent a lot of why my country is going to hell in a hand basket. We've had a generation of imbeciles like you lined up to fight Rush, Jim Jordan, Sean Hannity, O'Reilly et. al. and I've watched them let my country slip into the fucking toilet. You are not needed or wanted in this battle. Luckily you're in Canada so you're irrelevant and pointless, but the virus in your mind that makes you weak affects far too much of the American left too.

[alfred russel]

The core reality of all the attacks by those groups is they are built on lies, dishonesty, and poison pill debates that you can never win, because just engaging in them makes you weaker. The correct response about Jim Jordan blasting Democrats over woke culture isn't to whinge about woke culture. It's to fucking ignore his argument, and respond with a better one: Hey Jim, you were on the coaching staff at Ohio State when young men were raped by the team doctor, why did you do nothing?

Jim Jordan should not be allowed to speak in public without being asked "Why did you do nothing about student athletes being raped?" "Why do you support rape?"

I think a better question is:

"Four of the worst sex abuse scandals in US history: Jerry Sandusky at PSU; Larry Nassar at MSU; Richard Strauss at OSU; Robert Anderson at Michigan, were on Big 10 campuses. How many other scandals is the Big 10 hiding, and at this point how can we not conclude it is primarily a joint criminal enterprise for the sexual abuse of young people?"

[Malthus]

And by the way, somewhere, somehow, someone "got to Obama" in 2012 and his people learned this exact fucking thing. Because how did they beat Romney?  By ignoring all the shit Romney tried to throw at him--which was frequently at least some of the same bullshit Jim Jordan and other asshats manufactured against Obama, just packaged in a nicer way, and continually running attacks not to brush back bullshit claims, but to just fuck Romney up head on. Romney is an out of touch rich guy. He calls 47% of the country parasites. Romney said something that was a little out of context, and Obama's team just fucked him up the ass with it for months, and it absolutely beat him. It's identical to how the GOP used the "close a lot of coal mines" comment from Hillary. Why would you mess around in the mud of an argument that's toxic and stupid for you when you could just hit them from another angle that is far worse for them?

Problem with this strategy is that it risks ending up with both sides being more or less the same - and both unpleasant.

I prefer Biden's apparent strategy, which seems to have worked, at least so far.