Mojo Hand

Also, another aspect of taking strong stands is that it brings out the real nuts on the other side. Guys like Briscoe Cain come out of the woodwork as the face of the gun rights movement. That moves public opinion too.

I don't think that comparison works. The political equivalent of bulletin board material would be something like Hillary's "deplorables" or Romney's 47% comments: it has no real substantive content and just pisses off a ton of people. Beto's comments are a policy statement. He's not saying that gun owners are morons with small dicks. He's just taking a confident policy stance that we should confiscate high capacity guns. Yeah, that pisses some people off, but it also energizes and leads plenty of other people, because it has real substantive content.

While your position is reasonable, I strongly disagree. Let's get real: everyone knows/thinks that Dems would ban and confiscate most guns if they could do it without any risk of negative political fallout. If 70% of the country was suddenly vocally anti-gun, would Dems be as horrified by that development as staunch Republicans? Hell no, we all know Dems would be falling over themselves to head the confiscation movement. What has each party done with this reality? The Republicans tell everyone that no matter what Dems say, they are fucking liars and want to take everyone's guns. Which is pretty much true, so gun people are enthusiastic R voters. Meanwhile, Dems say, no, please believe us, we don't want to take your guns, we just want some band-aids and there's no slippery slope. Which (1) doesn't make many gun people vote Dem (2) alienates all of the anti-gun voters, and (3) tells all of the sheeple in the middle that it's not okay to be anti-gun, so they sort of check out on the issue. I don't know why Dems are so scared to own their beliefs and take progressive stands. Look at all of the fucking blue on this chart from the Great Depression until Clinton, and look at all the red since then: The Dem obsession with not scaring the middle has led to its collapse.

Yeah, and that's the real problem with Pete's youth and inexperience. We don't know how he'll respond when push comes to shove, as it inevitably does. My guess is that he's like Obama in that respect: he'll waste years thinking that he can persuade Republicans to deal based on the power of his reason and vision. Obama showed plenty of signs of that during the campaign, and Pete is too. The notion that Beto is playing into Republicans' hands by giving them a sound bite is completely divorced from reality, in which Republicans have not needed any sound bite to rally every person that a sound bite would rally. The gun nuts thought Obama was about to confiscate their guns for 8 years, despite him never "playing into their hands" by saying something like Beto said. 30+ years of GOP strategy has been based around them setting the terms of the debate through bold, confident pronouncements from the far right. And the Dems have long played into their hands by accepting those terms and trying to left-center positions within a framework already skewed to the far right. What Beto (on guns) and Bernie and Warren (on other issues) are doing may scare a few people, but far more people will hear them and realize it's okay to be for the same ideas too. That's how you move public sentiment rather than just accepting where the other side has moved it.

I don't know the specifics of the bills, but is there not a mechanism whereby current company contributions to private health insurance automatically have to be diverted either to the MFA system or into the employee paychecks?

If Trump were to introduce jizz jars at his rallies, every single poster on this site who is still a Republican would have his dick out in a heartbeat. The Randall's guy and Swam would be like, "this isn't like aggy at all, we're doing it to show our burning desire to own the libs! Haha you lib cucks pretend to be tolerant yet mock our homoerotic group rituals, so the joke's on you!"

This guy really reminds me of that aggy recruiting guy, Hamm

Pete's just running his campaign. Drawing contrasts and arguing why he's the best choice is what he's supposed to be doing. You don't have to agree with him, but there's nothing wrong with him trying to make the case that he represents the best balance of progressive ideas and pragmatism.

I was wondering who was going to get Eddie's other ticket to paradise.

So an AR-15 is even less useful for defending against government tyranny than I thought. Good to know.

Yeah. I actually know the guy (from about a decade ago, not recently) and he's a future Republican presidential candidate for sure. Think Ted Cruz with a Patrick Bateman instead of Zodiac killer vibe.

I don't want to know what Pence was putting near that horse's mouth.

Obama enacted centrist policies, but I don't really see him as heading a centrist movement. His success was built more around his personality and tone, sort of independent of ideology. He was a vocal "I'll take good ideas from all sides" guy. And he's such an inspiring and admirable guy personally that it smoothed over policy differences within the party. But he had no coattails, and the party pretty much fell apart throughout his tenure—even as he handily won re-election and ended office with high popularity. He never got anyone behind an ideological vision, centrist or otherwise, that other Dems could build on. I agree that Biden will be identical on policy. And that scares the shit out of me, because I don't want to know wtf happens to this country if Dems elect yet another leader who has no answer on wealth/income inequality, which I think is the defining domestic issue of our time. We know where the GOP's answer of racism and xenophobia leads.

I agree that Warren isn't part of the radical left, but a 1965 liberal Democrat isn't a moderate either, right? I mean, she has been against all of the bank protection/deregulation New Democrat bullshit over the last 20 years, plus she strongly opposed the TPP.

I'm old enough to remember when Trump was just running to be president of Twitter. That analysis proved a bit short-sighted as well. IMO, analyses like these tend to be biased by assumption that voters are ideologically static. Yeah, there are a ton of moderates in the Dem party, but plenty of them are just following the crowd and conventional wisdom in a party that, at the leadership level, has moved to the center since the 1990s. Their ideological position isn't written in stone; they just want policy that speaks to their core values. They can get behind MFA just as easily as an Obamacare tinker; it's workable universal coverage that they want. Just like on the other side, Trump took advantage of a decade-long deterioration in Republican core values to lead the party to open white nationalism and the violation of every principle the party had professed to holding before, apart from on abortion. Turns out, most of the people who claimed to hold moderate conservative positions weren't actually all that attached to them. To me, the question isn't whether there's a candidate who speaks for where most of the voters are; it's whether there's a candidate who can lead them to where that candidate wants them to go. A centrist can be an inspiring leader, like Bill Clinton, but I don't see any inspiring leaders among the moderate crowd in this race (maybe Pete, with a few more years to ripen). The only real leaders I see are Warren and Bernie, and Bernie seems to have hit his ceiling.

Bernie only has a 3% advantage over Biden as the second choice for Warren voters, and that wouldn't close the gap in Biden's lead. (And Biden is the second choice of Biden voters over Warren by only 2%): https://morningconsult.com/2020-democratic-primary/ I wonder if whole Bernie/Warren vote split thing is a little overstated at this point. Ideology is only one of many factors that go into supporting a candidate. One could reasonably argue, based on polling, that having both Warren and Bernie in the race is actually helping keep Biden low enough to avoid getting a critical mass of supporters, and thus giving him more of a chance to implode.

Up until a few years ago, I really respected the gun rights position, and I never would have supported any confiscation. I've done a total 180. Not simply because there have been more and more horrible mass shootings, but because I've lost a ton of respect for gun people. I used to think they were largely reasonable folks, and I think that was true, back in the days when you could get some gun limits through Congress. But their complete refusal in recent years to allow even minimal efforts to keep guns out of the wrong hands has been eye-opening. And they're showing their true colors more and more, with these threats of violence in response to lawful legislative proposals. It's clear to me now that this whole thing is a weird fetish cult with very little that is redeeming about it. And I get that gun owners don't give the slightest fuck about the collateral damage of their hobby, let alone my opinion about it. But there's only so many people they can afford to alienate before the policy tide swings sharply against them.

It's amazing to me that Biden is still so far out in front with people of color.

Those of you who are treating this like a health care referendum (i.e., most of you) are on the wrong track, in my opinion. There is no health care plan on the ballot. There isn't even a Brexit-like decision-sans-details on the ballot. It would take a lot more than Bernie or Warren winning to actually get MFA enacted into law. The public knows that. As I see it — and I think history bears this out — presidential elections are about vision, not policy details. If it were otherwise, none of the people who are surviving because they are on Obamacare would have voted for Trump, who promised to repeal it immediately. Yet many did, and articles afterwards showed that they didn't worry about the details because they trusted him to look out for their interests while policy was made. The American people will look for the same thing from the Democratic candidate: what is their vision, and what does that mean about how strongly they will fight for me on each particular issue I care about? In that sense, Biden is a total nullity on health care, and really everything else. In my view, the public won't be stressing about private insurers disappearing overnight with an MFA candidate. They're going to think, this person has health care as a top priority and will fight like hell for the best coverage at the lowest cost to me. And that's going to pay off.

And if I were you, I'd be embarrassed to show my face in public, let alone admit to being a GOP’er.

Bizarro Chris Hayes

Yeah, I think Castro hurt his VP chances too.

Yeah, because they loved the last corporate, moderate Dem that ran.

Klobuchar: resilience is your aide bringing your salad without a fork, and then dealing with that setback by using a hair comb instead!