• 2 Posts
  • 371 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 11th, 2023

help-circle
  • Do you think that source contradicts what I said?

    Mr. Miranda asked Ms. Wasserman Schultz whether they should call CNN to complain about a segment the network aired in which Mr. Sanders said he would oust the chairwoman if he were elected. “Do you all think it’s worth highlighting for CNN that her term ends the day after the inauguration, when a new D.N.C. Chair is elected anyway?” Mr. Miranda asked. Ms. Wasserman Schultz responded by dismissing the senator’s chances. “This is a silly story,” she wrote. “He isn’t going to be president.”

    Shocking. She didn’t speak kindly of a person who publicly attacked her, and opted to leave the story alone instead of doing anything.

    Same information, but cast with additional context

    Most of the shocking things mentioned in the emails were only mentioned, and are then dismissed.

    Your mistaking opinions and preference bias, which all people have, for unfair bias. Do you actually expect that the people who run a political party don’t have an opinion about politics?

    The coin thing didn’t happen.. At best she won six out of a dozen, which is what you would expect. The reality is more complicated.

    You grossly mischaracterize the agreement.
    From the article:

    This does not include any communications related to primary debates – which will be exclusively controlled by the DNC.

    Nothing in this agreement shall be construed to violate the DNC’s obligation of impartiality and neutrality through the Nominating process. All activities performed under this agreement will be focused exclusively on preparations for the General Election and not the Democratic Primary. Further we understand you may enter into similar agreements with other candidates.

    HFA will be granted complete and seamless access to all research work product and tools (not including any research or tracking the DNC may engage in relating to other Democratic candidates).

    In other words, her campaign agreed to give the DNC money to prepare for the general election, and in exchange they got to look at those preparations.
    This was definitely the Clinton campaign assuming she would be the candidate, but it’s not exactly a smoking gun for financial impropriety regarding the primary.

    Honestly, if your campaign can’t find a lawyer or accountant who can understand campaign finance management, you probably actually shouldn’t be in charge of a country. The financial arrangements weren’t particularly obtuse or obfuscated for moving millions of dollars between multiple political entities in multiple states.


  • Quoting a phrase from an internal email out of context makes you seem disingenuous. The emails that were stolen show people being mean, but it also shows that they were consistently not rigging anything. Or does someone making a shitty suggestion and then a higher ranking member of the party saying “no” not fit the narrative your drawing? Or that the only time they talked about financial schemes was after the Sanders campaign alleged misconduct?

    In context, Sanders told CNN that if he was elected, she would no longer be the chair person. The internal comment was “this is a silly story. Sanders isn’t going to be president” at a time where he was already loosing.

    Debbie Wasserman Schultz has to resign.

    She did. Eight years ago.

    Tldr, party leadership preferred Clinton over Obama. Turns out that preference without misconduct doesn’t have much impact.

    you refer to a 76 year old career politician like Sanders as a new person.

    Oh please. It’s even in the bit that you quoted: new to the party. I act like he was new to the party because he was, and his campaign was run by people who didn’t know the party structures. When their inexperience with the party tools led to them not taking advantage of them, they cried misconduct for the other campaigns knowing about them.


  • Depends on the state, and when exactly the candidate dropped out.

    Basically the state holds a primary, and then a little later they have a state convention to assign delegates.

    If they drop out before the delegates are picked, the delegate selections are usually reallocated to the remaining candidates. If they drop out afterwards, their delegates may be expected to vote for them anyway in the first round, or they may be free to vote as they please depending on the state. If the candidate has endorsed another candidate, the delegate is often expected to vote for the endorsed candidate.

    “Expected” is important because their votes aren’t disqualified if they don’t adhere to expectations or anything, they just risk their state party being mad at them and if they’re someone with continued interest in party involvement, that’s a great way to make them not want to involve you. This is in contrast with the electoral college where faithless electors can see their votes not count unless they’re cast according to the election outcome.
    In both cases, electors or delegates are chosen for a mix of loyalty and dedication, usually as sort of a minor honor or reward, so it’s not common for them to go rogue against expectations.

    It’s why there’s an advantage to staying in the race longer: you get to pick the delegates you won, even if you drop out afterwards, and you can use that to get the frontrunner to involve you in their campaign in exchange for an enforcement.



  • So what were the advantages? The usual one I hear listed is superdelegates, which doesn’t matter if more people voted for the winner, or that they didn’t proactively inform his campaign about funding tricks that the Clinton campaign already knew about.

    Are you saying that Clinton was an independent who just happened to align with the party for her entire political career?

    I’m not sure you know how political affiliation or “people” work. Being a member of the party for decades vs being a member for months matters. Those are called “connections”, and it’s how most politicians get stuff done: by knowing people and how to talk to them.

    The point of a primary is to determine who the candidate is, not who the party is more aligned with. Party leadership will almost always be more aligned with the person who has been a member longer, particularly when that person has been a member of part leadership themselves. It’s how people work. You prefer a person you’ve known and worked with for a long time over a person who just showed up to use your organization, and by extension you, for their own goals.
    We have rules to make sure that those unavoidable human preferences don’t make it unfair.

    The Obama campaign is a good example. He didn’t have the connections that Clinton did, so party leadership favored her. Once they actually voted, he got more so leadership alignment didn’t matter and he was the candidate. He then worked to develop those connections so that he and the party were better aligned and work together better, and he won. Yay!

    So what rules did they break for Clinton? What advantages did she have over Sanders that she didn’t have over Obama?
    Which of those advantages weren’t just "new people to the party didn’t know tools the party made available?”


  • It gets complicated because the parties can hold their primary elections however they want, independently by state because various rules mean you need a Democratic party for each state, plus the national party. So each state does it differently to some degree. Some vote for the candidate, and the delegates are assigned to vote for the winner, some get a proportion of the delegates, and in some the voters vote for the delegate based on who they support.
    They use that process to assign delegates who go and vote on who the national party will select for the national election. If the first election there doesn’t yield a majority winner, they keep voting but now the delegates can switch if they want, and members of party leadership can also vote. That hasn’t happened in quite a while though, since it’s much easier to know the counts accurately before the convention and do your politics by getting people to drop out and endorse you.



  • George Washington eschewed political parties because he didn’t want to establish a precedent where his choice as first president set the standard everyone else had to conform to, and there’s a little irony in people holding him up as an example in that light more than 200 years later.

    He, and the other founders largely, disliked political parties in their entirety, not just having some specific number of them.
    They also built the system that enshrined the two party dichotomy as the only option, actively sought to ensure that the “right” people could override the will of the people if needed, and founded the parties they had previously argued against.
    They are far from infallible bastions of correctness in this matter.



  • Dude, have you actually read vermin Supremes platform, or rather his actual political philosophy and beliefs?

    I read through some of them once, and had the horrifying realization that the contemporary political figure that I think I agree with most closely is:

    • unelectable
    • best known for wearing a boot on his head

    I couldn’t find where a lot of his actual opinions got discussed a bit more formally, but this random video snippet from 2008 does a decent job capturing it.

    If I had (got? Got. I’d love to need to make the choice) to pick between a democratic socialist or a social anarchist, I think I’d honestly lean towards the social anarchist, all things being equal.




  • See, you’re talking partisan politics, I’m talking “you literally have to pick someone”. We’ve had these candidates before. You already know which one you’re going to vote for. You picked your side four years ago when you were asked the same question.

    Beyond that though, there’s “parties” and then theirs “sides”. One side is xenophobic, homophobic and actively wishes harm on a lot of people. The other side doesn’t, for all their flaws.
    There are more parties than there are sides in the past few elections.

    By saying you think you should vote for someone who will be good for everyone, you’ve picked a side. The side that doesn’t want to do good for only the “right” people, or make sure only the “right” people get hurt.
    The only question is if you’ll vote for that side to win, or if you’ll let idealism or anger drive you to vote otherwise.