Discussion for article #243979
I find it impossible to see Clinton as anything more than just another corporatist.
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I’d like to disagree with you but I can’t.
I just keep thinking Supreme Court, Supreme Court, Supreme Court…
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Bernie had his best debate performance yet. But the same is true of the other two candidates. I would say O’Malley actually gets “most improved,” he had some great moments, including his strong opening. But he’s still just not as comfortable on that stage as Hillary or Bernie.
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When you’re starting from that low a point, it’s hard not to improve a little. But he was still awful.
He gets better after he gets warmed up. He had some really awkward, over played moments early in the debate. But as it went on, he gets more comfortable and falls into a rhythm.
I do fell sorry for the guy. He is a solid Democrat all across the board, and he deserves much better polling numbers than he has received. He actually should be holding the position between Hillary(to her left and Sanders(to his right).
But Dems seem pretty well decided from early on. Even when the non Biden campaign finally ended, O’Malley got nothing from it.
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Bernie will never be elected, and as much I agree with his general stance, its because of “speeches” like this.
He couches his approach in too much revolutionary rhetoric. Breaking up the “too big to fail” financial firms…absolutely. Painting as angry mobs descending upon Wall Street with pitchforks and torches? Its just not salable to middle America.
Same with Single Payer. Great idea and I totally get behind it. But make the logical case, don’t state it as a “right to the people” Ditto for college tuition (though he made a mistake on that one tonight. If college is tuition free…why would people need additional governmental aid in paying off college loans? Room and board is something people have to pay for no matter where they are).
When you couch everything with rhetoric like that, and are making SWAGS at the numbers by “making the rich pay more in taxes”…it doesn’t sound serious. It sounds like lets burn it all down and start over…and that NEVER works.
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If college is tuition free…why would people need additional governmental aid in paying off college loans?
Well, first, a lot of people already have huge student debt burdens, so there’s that group. And second, his proposal is for free tuition at public universities, not all universities. He does include big increases in Pell grants in his proposal, but presumably there would still be plenty of private university students who would still be taking on debt, though hopefully quite a bit less debt.
Painting as angry mobs descending upon Wall Street with pitchforks and torches? Its just not salable to middle America.
I think some of the millions of working Americans who find themselves falling out of middle America and into the status of working poor, and some of those already there, aren’t as far away from embracing a pitchforks and torches approach as we might want to think. But I agree, not a majority, and a lot of rank and file mainstream Democratic voters, despite liking a lot of Bernie’s actual policies, may nonetheless get turned off by the talk of “revolution,” even a political revolution. They do want change but not potentially scary change. But if things keep going in the direction they’re going in this country – with already record-high inequality continuing to rise, an increasingly inadequate minimum wage, slow or nonexistent wage growth at the bottom and in the middle, and so on, then the pitchforks and torches may start to look pretty good compared to the status quo.
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