Clyburn’s decision, just ahead of the February 29th South Carolina primary, to endorse Biden and campaign for him, has been seen as transformative.
Oh? It was just "Clyburn's decision"? Wasn't it "engineered" by the Democratic moderates?
Biden won almost fifty per cent of the vote in the South Carolina primary, in what was then still a crowded field of seven major candidates; Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar promptly dropped out and endorsed him, just in time for Super Tuesday.
“If it were not for you, I don’t think he would have gotten the nomination,” Jake Tapper, of CNN, told Clyburn. “And I have no idea whether—whether or not I’d be covering a Democratic President-elect.”
Clyburn, in response, suggested that the real credit should go to an “elderly lady” he had encountered sitting in the front pew at a rural church, who had called him over and asked which candidate he was voting for. She added, “If you don’t want anybody else to hear, just lean down and whisper it in my ear.”
Oh! Mystery solved! No savvy moderate Dems engineering feats, but a little old lady in a rural church! We're supposed to believe that, but, good heavens, don't believe any of Trump's theories about what the Dems did to him.
“And I did what she asked me to do,” Clyburn said. What persuaded him to do more, though, was “the way she looked in my face and told me, ‘I needed to hear that, and this community needs to hear from you.’ ”
The way she looked in his face... and that's why Joe Biden became President.
The moral of the story, as Clyburn saw it, is that his choices and his actions had “bubbled up” from those of the people he served...
It was of the people, bubbling up, not anything that came down from the moderate Democrats.
... he had already decided that he would vote for Biden but wasn’t sure how vocal he would be about it until that woman looked him in the eye. And there is something worth contemplating in the idea that an elderly lady in a rural church might have had a part in changing history; it mattered not only that Clyburn endorsed Biden but that he did it so loudly and wholeheartedly, rallying voters....
It's worth contemplating the idea all right. I'm contemplating the idea that we're expected to believe it all happened organically.
Thanks for the laugh, New Yorker archive, but my question remains" Exactly how did "the moderate wing of the Democratic Party" "engineer" that "feat"?
I mean, your point is that "the G.O.P. would have to display the sort of coördination" the Dems displayed in 2020. So what was the "coördination"? Does the GOP just need its own little old lady in a pew at a rural church?
AND: "... after Bernie Sanders finished first in the New Hampshire primary..." No mention of the strange dragged-out proceedings in the Iowa caucuses. Was that part of "the sort of coördination" the Democratic moderates pulled off in 2020?
It's a great word — "coördination." I especially like The New Yorker's diaeresis here. So distracting! But I won't be distracted! I want to say "coördination" is so much like that word they don't want us to say: collüsion.
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43 comments:
Superdelegates.
Here's the problem for the GOP: Trump has the support of a substantial portion of the population who used to identify as Democrats and who have never previously identified as Republicans.
The "moderate Republicans" do not interest them. And the Republicans can't win without them.
Can someone explain why stopping a candidate with the most popular support is necessary in order to preserve democracy.
I was told engineering an election to get a pre-determined outcome never happened and was protected against by our fortified election system.
The moderate Democrats mentally snapped in 2020 because of four years of Trump-rage followed by widespread lefty misfires in the early COVID era (e.g., De Blasio and Pelosi pushing Chinatowns and eating out to stick it to Trump's "racist" and "paranoid" isolation strategy). As such, the Democrats all blindly bowed down to Clyburn and BLM following their circular firing squad debate. They then demonstrated a willingness to win at any cost, and had to out-Trump Trump with exaggerated COVID lockdowns and totalitarianism.
So, the puppet Biden corrupt deep state regime was installed -- and without question -- Biden is by far the worst president in US history. He's a "president" only to the extent that any senile marionette can be a president. He's not better than Barney the Dinosaur would have been. Biden makes Reagan in his calm and confused Alzheimer's phase look like a super genius.
The easiest way out of the Trump and Biden era of divisive self-defeat is for moderate Democrats to regrow their backbones and to admit to failure when they fail. This is simple pragmatics. This is simple maturity. Anyone at all who persuasively 'triangulates' a la Bill Clinton 1992 could win in 2024, be they nominal Ds or Rs. They are all in one big party anyway.
Bootyjudge and the comb salad woman were not running to win in the first place.
Name one thing Sanders would have done that Biden hasn't done. (Besides give a coherent speech)
From the post:
"Exactly how did "the moderate wing of the Democratic Party" "engineer" that "feat"? They just had to stop Bernie."
There is no longer a moderate wing in Party leadership at the DNCC. The radicals have co-opted the Party and have made the nomination into a coronation. How undemocratic.
Message to the GOP, remember when you demanded Trump sign an agreement that he would support whoever won the primary under the guise that the primary was fair and whoever won did so fairly? That the deal seems to be onesided and the GOP still seems hellbent not to support the former President and winner of the last two Republican primaries, this hurts the party more than it does Donald Trump. Maybe you should try beating Trump on substance rather than political games.
They keep portraying any Republican with an opinion that doesn't seem very submissive as a Nazi. So it's a party- according to them- filled with Nazis. So now they're asking the question, is there a group of moderate Nazis among the regular Nazis who can put a block to the top Nazi (Trump).
Then the problem comes with the 2nd Nazi in line, DeSantis.
Maybe they're looking for a return to Paul Ryan? I remember the Biden/Ryan Veep debate in which Biden kept guffawing every time Ryan tried to speak. We now know it wasn't what Ryan had said. It was a ping on his cell letting him know another deposit had just come into one of his 12 bank accounts.
Honestly- we don't need no stinkin' moderates. We'll be just fine. And this is not even close to being over. DeSantis on stage with Trump with decide it. If Trump ducks it, he'll lose. If he shows up, it'll be great entertainment, but also...it's provide a great view of the gap between how these think and act. Trump has not yet had to deal with a DeSantis in a debate. This isn't Jeb!.
There's a moderate wing of the Democrat Party?
The definition of a moderate Democrat is someone stupid enough to think Joe Biden is in charge. That, my fiends, is a shit ton of stupid people
Keep in mind, the Dems held a potemkin primary in 2016, too.
"Can someone explain why stopping a candidate with the most popular support is necessary in order to preserve democracy."
Because he doesnt have much popular support. He is like Hershall Walker and Dr. Oz. He can win a primary but he will get creamed in the general. Everyone knows this.
Geez Temujin. You sound like a pro-debate looney. Demanding political partisans debate topics directly is downright nazism.
If you were writing a story about a nazi or a klansman, could you come up with a better name than Whit Ayres?
Temujin: "Honestly- we don't need no stinkin' moderates. We'll be just fine. And this is not even close to being over. DeSantis on stage with Trump with decide it. If Trump ducks it, he'll lose. If he shows up, it'll be great entertainment, but also...it's provide a great view of the gap between how these think and act. Trump has not yet had to deal with a DeSantis in a debate. This isn't Jeb!."
Incorrect. Here's one reason why...
boatbuilder: "Here's the problem for the GOP: Trump has the support of a substantial portion of the population who used to identify as Democrats and who have never previously identified as Republicans.
The "moderate Republicans" do not interest them. And the Republicans can't win without them."
In the minds of a majority of Trump supporters in a republican primary, accurately described by boatbuilder, DeSantis is already fatally seen as a creature of the GOPe and no "performance" on a debate stage micromanaged by whatever Trump opponent "moderator" is going to change that.
The answer for the GOP was a simple one: build a new majority coalition of diverse working class/middle class populist movement...or stick with team globalist.
The GOP has made their choice.
In a real democracy 50% plus 1of the citizenry could decide to round up all the transers, lesbians and gays and exile them to a reservation in Maine.
They would be allowed to participate, of course. It's a democracy after all. It has to work for everyone.
No need for liberty and justice for all when you have democracy instead.
John lgb Henry
Biden was selected by the party in the traditional smoke-filled backroom. Bernie was paid off.
It's not complicated.
Yeah, sure, that little old lady is why Clyburn supported Biden publicly. Sure, fine, that's why Biden won South Carolina. But that's not how the field suddenly, miraculously, cleared for Joe Biden after he went 1 for 3 in the opening primaries.
The admission that Biden's nomination was engineered in a smoke-filled room by a handful of Democratic elites far from the voting booths of blue America may be new for The New Yorker, it may even be new for The New Yorker readers, who are not the most informed bunch in politics, but it's not new to the people who watched the primary season unfold.
People here are forgetting the main part of the mechanism used to drag Biden's carcass over the line on Super-Tuesday- it wasn't just Buttuvwxyz and Combforker dropping out and endorsing Biden, it also consisted of Warren staying in the race to draw off some of Sander's potential voters that night.
I expect the GOP to try something similar if it begins to appear that DeSantis can't defeat Trump in an open vote.
The "Moderate Wing" of the Democrat Party must mean the DNC because that's who engineered the Biden win. The GOPe might try that tactic but Republicans don't march in order like Hitler Youth. Democrats do. At least since the party changed its rules to nominate McGovern they do.
Apologies for the democracy comment. I meant that for the groomer post
John lgb Henry
The thing is, the "moderate Democrats," in that case Clintonistas, have neither scruples nor regard for their constituents. Also, the latter are typically not independent thinkers.
Republicans would find the going tougher.
Blogger Ambrose said...
Can someone explain why stopping a candidate with the most popular support is necessary in order to preserve democracy.
6/26/23, 7:25 AM
———————
Because the candidate with the “most popular support” currently trails a dementia patient in all of the swing state polls while his closest competitor leads said dementia patient in each one of the polls and polls better than the candidate with the most popular support by about 10 points in each of those swing state polls.
The problem is that the candidate with most popular support have a large number of supporters that love him more than they love the country.
AMDG: "The problem is that the candidate with most popular support have a large number of supporters that love him more than they love the country."
One of your more pathetic mindreading lies...and perfectly mimics the leftists.
But its all you've got left now that the "DeSantis will give us Trump policy results without the Trump drama" ploy has been thoroughly and irretrievably discredited.
Except the democrats never moved to a more "moderate" position in 2020...
Here's the problem for the GOP: Trump has the support of a substantial portion of the population who used to identify as Democrats and who have never previously identified as Republicans. The "moderate Republicans" do not interest them. And the Republicans can't win without them.
I came here to complain once again about the New Yorker’s ungrammatical and unAmerican deployment of the ersatz umlaut, but this comment caught my eye. Conventional Republican presidential contenders average around 60 million votes; Trump delivered 74 million votes in the last election. The difference, roughly 14 million votes, is highly unlikely to be garnered (sorry, couldn’t resist) by a Republican not named Trump.
The DNC pulled out the stops to thwart Bernie. Fair enough since he is a socialist who uses the party as suits his needs. But where were the cries about voter suppression?
The moderate wing settled on Joe Biden
The moderate wing.
Yeah, right.
I saw Collüsion when they opened for Metallica in the 90s. They were pretty heavy.
As for coördination, is that what they mean by Our Demöcracy?
The Stupid party couldn't stop Trump in '16. (Cruz although he is mean dog would have been a better president). I don't see where they summon up the wherewithal to deny Trump now. Particularly when he is polling over 50%. Perhaps if he self-destructs in the debates. He is not as competent at age 77. And DeSantis is a better politician than anyone in the '16 race.
A pointless post. Nothing turns on the difference between coordination and collusion. Bernie and Co thought it was collusion--so what? They still voted for Biden in the general.
And Clyburn's story at most explains his own conduct, not Buttigieg and Klobuchar.
The basic point remains--the moderate Dems cooperated/colluded/coordinated to boost a moderate, Biden, over a left winger, Sanders. And it worked. They got the nomination, and they got the general election too, when Bernie would almost certainly have gone down to Trump given his lack of appeal to swing voters.
So why is Althouse so focused on a diversion from the question of whether the non MAGA Republicans can or should do something similar? Hard to say, except that she generally avoids candid discussion of evidence showing how far Trump has now moved beyond any plausible claim to be fit for office or its impact on his fate with independents/moderates--that is, with voters like her.
It may be too early to assess those questions, because Trump's many existing problems and self destructiveness may still take him down, and also because the pecking order among non MAGA reps has not been established in a way that would allow for the also rans to recognize the greater good, withdraw and collectively throw their support to the front runner among them. But prediction: if Trump is going to trial in spring 2024, with essentially nothing credible to say in his own defense (as seems likely), a lot of non MAGA republicans, including McConnell, Romney and many many others will be looking hard at Dems 2020 example and trying to engineer something similar.
Honest Joe Biden was so shopworn in 2020 that the Demmie Powers That Be (the DPTB) wouldn't let him campaign. The DPTB took Obama's warning to heart ("Never underestimate Joe's ability to f*ck things up") and kept him in his basement. They juiced Honest Joe up with Adderall for the debates and encouraged Trump to be himself (not always a winning move for Trump). Joe, chemically enhanced, fended off Trump (who got the Covid-19 in the middle of things) and seemed relatively normal.
With us all, what goes up must come down. They can't keep Joe on the juice all the time.
Could they have won with Bernie? I doubt it. Mayor Pete, Fauxcahontas, and Amy (Don't I look like me Dad? Go Vikes!) Klobuchar weren't going anywhere. Giggles Harris didn't make it to the Iowa caucuses in the Dem Party. Obama killed the Demmie bench in 2010. No, it was Joe or no go. He had just enough in the tank (and a huge help from Demmie billionaires' efforts to "secure the vote") to crawl across the finish line ahead of Trump. Rigged election? See Mollie Hemingway's book "Rigged".
All opposition except for Bernie dropped out almost the same time, with the exception of Warren, who stayed around for one additional primary in order to kneecap Bernie. That’s how it was done. Pretending that Joe is a “moderate” is like pretending that Covid didn’t come from a lab. He is easily the worst extremes of both the Democratic and Republican parties.
The problem is that the candidate with most popular support have a large number of supporters that love him more than they love the country.
If this is not just snark then you really don't understand half the country. I have three degrees so am not "working class" but my parents were. They were upset when my first vote was for Nixon in 1960. When I was 18 I was also a Democrat but then I took an Economics course. I'm not sure such a course would be similar today because Marxism seems to have taken over universities. I lived in California for 55 years, 40 of that in Orange County. I watched as the state drove out small and even large business. Now it is a one party state and that party is insane. Global warming/climate change is similar to the "Tulip Mania" of 1636. Charles McKay described it in his book "Extraordinary Popular Delusions." Too bad he is not alive today. He would recognize this immediately.
In 2016, the Dems wanted the GOP to nominate Trump because they figured he'd be easy for Hillary to beat. Don't believe me? Go look at George Stephanopoulos on Good Morning America.
Of course, they were wrong.
But the Dems STILL want the GOP to nominate Trump. They are committed to attacking Trump in ways that (they think) will encourage Republican primary voters to vote for Trump, and they think he'll be easy to beat.
But Trump would be a lame-duck the day he's elected. We need a new President who can threaten the Democrat establishment for two terms. That's NOT Trump. You know who it is.
"And DeSantis is a better politician than anyone in the '16 race."
THAT is the problem. The base is sick and tired of the same old politicians who say what we want to hear. We are sick of the politicians who cave to the crazy left all the time. We want someone who will fight for us...NOT for the Politico's. We are sick and tired of getting lied to, and told NEXT time it will be different. It won't.
Think about how obtuse or purposefully blind someone has to be in 2023, with all that has been exposed over the last 7 years, to pen the following and ignore the astounding corruption of our systems and institutions and pretend its all about "Trump's many existing problems and self destructiveness".
stephen: "It may be too early to assess those questions, because Trump's many existing problems and self destructiveness may still take him down, and also because the pecking order among non MAGA reps has not been established in a way that would allow for the also rans to recognize the greater good, withdraw and collectively throw their support to the front runner among them. But prediction: if Trump is going to trial in spring 2024, with essentially nothing credible to say in his own defense (as seems likely), a lot of non MAGA republicans, including McConnell, Romney and many many others will be looking hard at Dems 2020 example and trying to engineer something similar."
Drago - Trump is toxic to a large contingent of voters. Wake up.
Because they have the most corrupt President sitting in office right now, and they like it???
RNC Research
@RNCResearch
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BIDEN (last week): "I sold a lot of state secrets and a lot of very important things..."
https://twitter.com/RNCResearch/status/1673448822628818944?s=20
There seem to be a lot of Biden supporters who love him more than they love our traditions of open elections, fair trials, and protection of the rights of the accused. All of these things now sound to Democrats like "fascism."
Not to mention the open corruption that Democrats are willing to not only tolerate, but embrace.
I still have to laugh at the idea that Joe Biden is a moderate. The Bernie Sanders who first got elected Senator in Vermont was far more moderate than Joe Biden has governed as. The national party has pushed Sanders into some funny territory, though.
"I sold a lot of state secrets and a lot of very important things..."
He sure seemed like he might have suffered a TIA right at that moment. He definitely blanked out for a second, there.
This goes right up there with him bragging that he had "the largest voter fraud organization ever assembled."
Imagine just looking the other way on this guy out of party loyalty. Talk about not caring about our country.
Friendo: "Drago - Trump is toxic to a large contingent of voters. Wake up."
DeSantis has become toxic to a large contingent of republican base voters who believe he is the groomed candidate of those GOPe-ers that spent years undermining every policy pushed by Trump and supported by those voters. Wake up.
Every known candidate on both sides is toxic to a large contingent of voters.
Did you really think you were offering up some invaluable insight with that comment?
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