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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   26040 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 9, 2026

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As an actual Democrat, I can tell you right now that Newsom is not inevitable; in fact, I'd be rather surprised if he wins the nomination. He does not have the support of any component of the Democratic base that I can think of. Black people don't like him. Older people don't like him. Progressive young people don't like him. Moderates don't care for him. Conservatives who dislike Trump don't like him. Try finding a forum online where people keep talking him up. You won't. Maybe people from California like him. He offers absolutely nothing. Okay, he's willing to stoop to Trump's level, and seeing a Democrat do that was entertaining for a while, but the schtick has grown tiresome. He's not going to turn out the base, or any subset of the base, and his crossover appeal is nonexistent. The only reason his name keeps coming up is because he's the governor of a large state and everyone knows who he is. The nominee is probably going to be someone like Shapiro or Beshear who has shown he can appeal to moderates and hasn't accumulated much political baggage.

I want to see Pritzker run on a left-leaning populist platform. It's possible he could pull it off because, as a billionaire, he doesn't need to kiss the feet of the democratic donor class.

Wasn't that part of Trump's argument, i.e. "I'm already rich so you can trust that I won't be corrupt"?

He does not have the support of any component of the Democratic base that I can think of.

What about unmarried middle-class white women? What about Hispanics?

Black people don't like him. Older people don't like him. Progressive young people don't like him. Moderates don't care for him.

How did Harris fair in that kind of estimation? I get the impression she also lacked a natural constituency, but she ended up a presidential candidate anyway.

She lost her primary. She was then appointed VP because she was nonthreatening and stumbled into a big girl presidential run.

Even she admits that:

Biden had won the nomination because Congressman Jim Clyburn, leader of the Congressional Black Caucus, had thrown his support behind him. The Black vote in the South Carolina primary—especially Black women’s vote—had thrust him to victory. The pressure was on him to pick a Black woman running mate.

The press knew I was on the short list, so they had our DC apartment building staked out. When Doug and I stepped out to go somewhere, they’d follow. Occasionally I’d save them the trouble. I’d wander over to their van and say, “Doug and I are just going for coffee, can I bring you something?”

Honestly, I didn't expect much from this memoir when I bought it, but it's solid gold for an inside look at why it all crashed.

The prose here is extremely clunky and betrays a cringe personality but this anecdote betrays charm and an ounce of charisma. (That’s why it was chosen for the book, which is what makes it cringe.)

Wait till you get to the "charming" anecdote about how her staff threw her an impromptu birthday party but some misfortunate made the mistake of getting one of those balloons with the age on it.

Kamala does not like reminders of her age.

So she crushed the balloon saying "60" beneath her heel while looking at her staff. To me, that reads more like "this could be your head and will be if you fail me again":

That afternoon, when I climbed the steps to the plane, I discovered it had been decorated in streamers. My team on board were wearing gold party hats and presented me with a deliciously rich German chocolate cake, my favorite birthday cake. They had red velvet cupcakes for the press. There was also a big helium balloon with fat numerals: 60. My team knew that I stopped counting birthdays a long time ago. So I looked at them with a big smile when I landed my stiletto heel in the middle of that balloon. Then I went to find my Uggs.

And then she regales us all how she laid into her hubby dearest for not making special enough effort to celebrate her birthday. Oh yeah, "charming" is not the word I'd use. Imagine working for her. After reading this book, I now believe all the stories about how she was a terrible boss and the turnover in the VP staff was rapid and high:

He hadn’t put any thought into where we’d stay that night, so staff had picked a place for us that they thought would be a bit more special than the usual campaign hotel. It turned out to be a bland establishment whose red-and-black decor looked like it hadn’t been redone since the ’70s. The only distinguishing feature of the room was its larger size, but the curtains were broken.

Storm, knowing how much I love good food, had picked two possible restaurants from which to order dinner. She thought it would be nice if the meal was a bit of a surprise for me. So, on the plane, she knocked on Doug’s door to ask him to choose the menu. He’d shrugged and told her to ask me. So she picked the menu herself. Ordered a cake. Dressed the table with candles. My girlfriends had sent flowers.

Doug at least had thought to get a gift for me. It was a necklace by a designer I admired from Ojai, California, Jes MaHarry, the same designer who’d made the piece he’d chosen for my anniversary gift. This one featured a set of baroque pearls nestled in a gold setting. When I turned it over, I saw that the pearls’ backing had been engraved with the date. How thoughtful, to commemorate the milestone of my big birthday. But then I looked closer.

The date was not my birthday. It was the date of our wedding anniversary. He’d obviously intended to give me both pieces on our anniversary, until it occurred to him that by repurposing one piece, he could kill two birds with one stone. He could practice thrift and also save himself the bother of shopping for a birthday gift.

...I noted earlier that Storm speaks bluntly but always with correct protocol. The next day she told Doug, “Mr. Second Gentleman, you have to fix this.” She handed him a set of note cards. She’d numbered them one through five, for the nights we’d be apart through the end of the campaign. She instructed him to write a note on each one.

From then till the election, no matter what city each of us had landed in, at the end of the day I would find a note on my pillow, in Doug’s chicken scratch, telling me how much he loved me.

Yeah, I bet he remembered to leave her a card telling her how much he loved her. God Almighty, that's dog training, not how you treat a spouse.

At the risk of sounding sexist, just sounds like normal Boomer/early Gen-X, upper middle class, educated woman behavior to me. There are plenty of other reasons to dislike her as a political leader.

Eh, getting one of your minions to reprimand the guy (without even using his name, it's not "Listen, Doug" or "Listen, Mr Emhoff", it's "Mr Second Gentleman" which really is "know your place, peasant!") about not being sufficiently celebratory is something that would have been better kept private rather than telling the world "not alone is my husband dumb and neglectful, he's cheap" (that repurposing of the anniversary gift is all too much in the vein of jokes about Jews being money-grubbers, not something you'd want to perpetuate about your own husband, surely?)

She is entitled there, but a grain of sense or an editor with a backbone should have edited all that out to just "due to the stresses of the campaign, even my birthday was a time when my husband and I had a fight, but it all ended in [happy anecdote about learning experience]" not "I demanded X, Y and Z and when he failed to provide, I got my staff to discipline him".

I think it goes without saying that she didn't take the traditional path. Her own candidacy in 2020 is an object lesson in this. Reasonably well-known, sort of hyped by the media, candidacy goes over like a lead balloon before any votes are cast.

With the reputation as Copmala, she over-corrected by swinging too hard to the progressive side, wasn't able to pull off the course correction subtly enough and so gave a lot of hostages to fortune, and to top it off was running in a primary that everyone pretty much knew would be Biden's version of "It's my turn now" after his previous failed attempts at a run, and the desperate hope that the aura of Obama would cling to him and bring success in the election.

It worked, in fact it worked too well as he was only supposed to be a one-term placeholder to keep Trump out while the Democrats worked on their real pick for the next election, but he (and his inner circle of the family) convinced himself that he could run for the second term. And by the time it became painfully obvious that this was the wrong decision, there wasn't any real alternative but to run Kamala instead. And because of all those hostages to fortune from 2020 plus the indebtedness to Biden, her campaign swung wildly all over the place on the basis of "I'm not Trump!" plus "Time for the First Female Ever!" and not much else. Policy positions? Oh no no no, look I'm a black woman, vote for me or you're a racist sexist!

Jesus. I had forgotten that she even ran

But... but... but did you not listen to the "Call Her Daddy" podcast? Everyone listens to that instead of Joe Rogan! 🤣

It's okay, I think she forgot about that too.

Biden definitely forgot.

I get the impression she also lacked a natural constituency, but she ended up a presidential candidate anyway.

She didn't go through a primary in 2024 to get there. Her 2020 results speak for themselves.

Try finding a forum online where people keep talking him up. You won't.

You best start believing in ghost stories forums Ms @Rov_Scam, you're in one.

PotC memes aside, I actually agree with your assessment.

I must have missed all the Newsom fanposting on here.

If you want to shell out the ten bucks to Scott you can read his case for Gavin.

You'd have to pay me rather more than ten bucks to read more than a summary of any remotely modern Scott article. He's a prime example of a writer who spends 95% of the words on completely pointless waffling and even the remaining 5% only very occasionally contains something of value.

Someone would have to pay me $10 to have me read them making a case for Newsom.

Compared to other Democrats. Any candidate is hated by 70% of Democrats and loved by 30%. Even as a GOP I don’t see how you hate Newsome. He’s just mid. So maybe his route is no one loves him but only 50% of Democrats hate him.

Josh Shaprio is 5'8", which does matter I think. No US president since Carter has been under 5'11". He is also Jewish with a little bit of personal history in Israel, which could bad for him in the current political climate.

I know almost nothing about Andy Beshear, but at least he does seem to be within a typical height range for a US president in the modern era. He is also a gentile straight semi-Southern white man, which matters. Democrats have done well with that kind of combination in modern history and would almost certainly be served well electorally by trying to continue something like it rather than risking a black and/or gay and/or female candidate (Obama is commonly thought of as black and did great electorally, but he is also one of the most charismatic political figures in recent history, and people with that sort of charisma seem to be rare in both the Democratic and Republican parties).

Shapiro may be short and have a lot of baggage, but he is a tireless climber and a fairly smart, ruthless one at that. I wouldn't count him out.

I think the only thing that could legitimately knock him out of the running is if the Ellen Greenberg case actually gains some traction outside the Fox news info sphere.

he is a tireless climber and a fairly smart, ruthless one at that

Which seems to be the problem if the Atlantic story is any way accurate. Lot of enemies inside the party who will be all too happy to knife him in the back should he formally run:

The worst-kept secret in Pennsylvania politics is that the governor is disliked—in certain cases, loathed—by some of his fellow Democrats. The causes vary: policy disputes, personality clashes, accusations of meddling and sabotaging and ceaseless self-promoting. When Shapiro was being vetted for vice president in the summer of 2024, Erin McClelland, whom Democrats had recently nominated for Pennsylvania treasurer, stunned the state party by suggesting on social media that Shapiro would “undermine” Harris—adding other insults for good measure.

...The private commentary from Democrats is worse. In 30 years spent climbing the party ladder, Shapiro has acquired a long list of enemies. If he wasn’t already aware, the governor found out the hard way in 2024, when a not-small and not-subtle chorus of Democrats made their misgivings about him known to Harris and her team. (A Pennsylvania lawmaker told me that, at one point, a member of Harris’s vetting operation called him to say that in their decades working in party politics, they had never witnessed so many Democrats turning on one of their own.) If Shapiro chooses to run for president in 2028, Democrats in the state told me, the backlash will be far more visible.

Shapiro seems like their best candidate right now. But this isn’t the Supreme Court where you can place the Jew and nobody cares. What percent of Dems right now would never vote for a Jew?

Probably no higher than the percentage of Republicans who won't.

Never? Very few. There may be some Muslims or conspiracy-minded blacks that wouldn't vote for one, but they're at the fringes of the party. If you had garden-variety Free Palestine lefties in mind, these are the same people who probably already voted for a Jew twice.

I agree that the percent of registered Dems who would never hold their nose and vote for a Jew is well within Lizardman territory, but regarding which potential candidates receive the party’s blessing, I think you underestimate both how pervasive low-level antisemitism is among Blacks (perhaps it’s the lingering effects of Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam?), as well as how much Democrats think the Black vote is worth, both for reasons of woke-progressive virtue signaling and, to be fair, political reality in the Deep South.

I could easily imagine, in a smokevape-filled room at DNC headquarters, the progressive vanguard of the party putting their heads (such as they are) together and deciding, for reasons ideological as well as practical, that the most electable coalition they can realistically hope to assemble must rally around the tentpole of anti-Zionism.

As for

If you had garden-variety Free Palestine lefties in mind, these are the same people who probably already voted for a Jew twice.

I assume you are referring to Bernie Sanders, who has done a decent job—for a man of his advanced age—of navigating between the Scylla of his old-school, class-first leftist ideology and the Charybdis of the woke-progressive party line since 2016. In particular he has never, to my knowledge, given any public indication that he is a committed Zionist, or even a practicing Jew at all, or that his Jewish heritage endears him to the State of Israel.

The same cannot be said of Shapiro, who has repeatedly commented on his Jewish faith in ways that, at the very least, reverse-dog-whistle “Zionist bootlicker” to the watermelon-emoji Free Palestine types. Say what you will about their ilk (and believe me, I have an earful of my own criticism), but in my experience they are perfectly willing to accept that an ethnic Jew is not secretly doing Israel’s bidding, provided that the Jew in question makes the right mouth-noises, and avoids making the wrong ones. Sanders has pretty well passed that litmus test; Shapiro, regrettably, has not.

I think the allegations of black antisemitism are overplayed. Yeah, it may exist on the fringes, but one only has to look at the 2020 Georgia Senate Democratic primary to see that it isn't a huge factor. Jon Ossoff, a Jew who made his heritage part of his campaign, won overwhelmingly. I can't find exit poll numbers, but he got near unanimous support from black politicians in the state, most notably from John Lewis. Josh Stein, a practicing Jew, got nearly 70% of the vote in the North Carolina Democratic primary, running against a black guy in a state where the black vote is more important in the Democratic primary than it is in a lot of other places. It's hard to do a similar analysis for Shapiro since he never ran in a competitive gubernatorial primary, but by my calculations he got about 223,000 black votes in the general election. When Wolf ran for the first time in 2014, he got about 177,000 black votes. While the latter election had higher turnout, there's nothing in the data to suggest that blacks were especially put off by Shapiro, since he performed about as well as one would expect him to. It should be noted that blacks made up about 10% of the electorate in 2014 compared with 8% in 2022, but more blacks total came to the polls, and 92% of them voted Democrat in both elections. I don't know that any conclusions can be drawn from this, but I wanted to bring it up.

You're right that Shapiro's specific political positions may come into play when it comes to certain demographics, but that's different then saying that they'll never vote for a Jew, because they probably wouldn't vote for a Gentile who said the same things, either. And with Shapiro, you'd have to be really far to the Free Palestine side of the aisle for his comments to matter. His stance on Israel is similar to that of most Democrats: He accused Israel's military of overreaching, denounced Netanyahu, called for humanitarian aid to be allowed into Gaza, and called for an end to the war. What he refused to do was call for a unilateral cease fire without the hostages being returned, and refused to denounce Israel or Zionism altogether. The former position is now a moot point, and the latter position is likely to be held by whoever the nominee is. I agree that he's riskier on that front than a guy like Beshear, but he doesn't talk about it much and the perception of him could change when and if he's in a position where he has to talk about it more.

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