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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   28085 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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https://apple.news/APEuOPHP2TWqeUTR_h8QypA

So the Republican speaker of the house has decided to open an impeachment inquiry into Joe Biden’s business dealings with hunter. I have serious doubts that this will go very far as democrats still control the senate. This looks like an attempt to stir up the base for re-election season.

I personally see this as a big distraction as we have a lot of very serious problems that need to be addressed. BRICs, Taiwan, Ukraine, inflation, and

The pro move for Democrats would be to use this to replace Biden with someone with a pulse.

30 years ago Bill Clinton was POTUS, John Major was PM of the UK, Kim Campbell was PM of Canada, Paul Keating was PM of Australia... these people are now half-forgotten relics of yesteryear, and all of them are younger than Joe Biden.

Problem is, who do you replace him with? Kamala Harris? She seems to be regarded as unelectable. Governor Newsom? Yeah, right. Elizabeth Warren? Shot her bolt. Any other possible candidates have all been clawed at by their rivals so that suggesting A means "yeah but remember the accusations about A the last time they ran?"

I've seen a few names floated, but they all have the same problem of not really being able to deliver on "yeah the nation as a whole wouldn't hate them". Either their appeal is strictly local and won't scale up, or they're "who?", or they've been clawed by rivals so it's "you really think people will vote for the person who bullies their staff, or the person who is a hypocrite on [thing], or the person who....".

One theory I've heard on this is that the Clinton campaign went around and made sure that there would be absolutely no prospective challengers to her running in the future after Obama, and so put pressure on the DNC to subtly shift funding and resource allocation in order to make sure that there wasn't another Obama that the people could pick instead of her. It sounds like cartoonish villainy, but it is the same campaign that made "make sure everyone sees lots of Donald Trump" their election strategy (lol).

There does seem to be some evidence that the DNC was in hock to the Clinton campaign to get it out of debt, and afterwards the campaign treated the DNC as their personal fiefdom, funnelling the money into their own hands, etc. Donna Brazile came out with a tell-all book in 2017 and excerpts/publicity in the media before it was published, but that seems to have quietly faded away. Having Trump as the all-purpose bogeyman seems to have helped there - you can't attack us while Orange Man Bad in power. Presumably the tell-all had less shock effect coming from Brazile, who had already fielded allegations of leaking to the Clinton campaign, so it could be seen as sour grapes on her part:

I had promised Bernie when I took the helm of the Democratic National Committee after the convention that I would get to the bottom of whether Hillary Clinton’s team had rigged the nomination process, as a cache of emails stolen by Russian hackers and posted online had suggested. I’d had my suspicions from the moment I walked in the door of the DNC a month or so earlier, based on the leaked emails. But who knew if some of them might have been forged? I needed to have solid proof, and so did Bernie.

...As Hillary’s campaign gained momentum, she resolved the party’s debt and put it on a starvation diet. It had become dependent on her campaign for survival, for which she expected to wield control of its operations.

...The Saturday morning after the convention in July, I called Gary Gensler, the chief financial officer of Hillary’s campaign. He wasted no words. He told me the Democratic Party was broke and $2 million in debt.

“What?” I screamed. “I am an officer of the party and they’ve been telling us everything is fine and they were raising money with no problems.”

That wasn’t true, he said. Officials from Hillary’s campaign had taken a look at the DNC’s books. Obama left the party $24 million in debt—$15 million in bank debt and more than $8 million owed to vendors after the 2012 campaign—and had been paying that off very slowly. Obama’s campaign was not scheduled to pay it off until 2016. Hillary for America (the campaign) and the Hillary Victory Fund (its joint fundraising vehicle with the DNC) had taken care of 80 percent of the remaining debt in 2016, about $10 million, and had placed the party on an allowance.

Having Trump as the all-purpose bogeyman seems to have helped there - you can't attack us while Orange Man Bad in power.

This was specifically before the election had started. They promoted Trump and wanted media organisations to give him airtime because they thought that he was so bad that he'd drive voters away from the Republicans just for considering him.

who had already fielded allegations

I like the rest of your post but I think this is being a bit too nice. "Fielding allegations" is not really a strong enough term to use given that there's clear and unequivocal evidence that the allegations were true. She actually did leak to the Clinton campaign and she even admitted it (though based on the timing on that same article she apparently then went back and said it was alleged afterwards).

I think the situation is actually less desperate than people imagine. The problem lies with the progressive wing of the DNC having so much influence on narrative, particularly in media. There are real options for them. Sherrod Brown, Joe Manchin, and Bob Casey have shown the ability to win many elections and appeal to electorates more similar to the country than California and NY. They just so happen to be white guys that aren't known for aggressively pissing off rural and suburban people, like a certain old white guy in the White House. So they aren't treated as serious options for now. But they will be if Biden is off the table, and they could do well.

Holding an unusual position is not enough to make someone a compromise candidate. You’re not going to win elections by being “the Democrat who hates abortion” or “the Democrat who just loves coal.” Especially in a saturated field, that just pushes the moderate Democrat voters off to other candidates.

I suspect it’s much easier to rule someone out than in. That would suggest compromise candidates who are closer to blank slates—they offend the fewest members of the base. Honestly, I think Biden’s campaign was in that category. He made vaguely appropriate mouth sounds and didn’t promise much. Did he win on the strength of Not Being Trump? Maybe.

Point is, Manchin and Casey and (previously) Sinema don’t have crossover appeal any more than Bernie Sanders. They just alienate a different group of people.

Did he win on the strength of Not Being Trump? Maybe.

No, he largely won on the strength of the intelligence community and social media knowingly suppressing true stories about his various scandals.

Cuomo would have been good as a national candidate but the power played him out of NY. He still has the personality of being a person from a time and place that people can connect to sort of like Joe. He would have some COVID death issues but every candidate has something.

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