It’s my general disdain for having to deal with the political process this early.
Another Ask Roger Anything reply! Bill, who I know because he’s a friend of my sister Leslie: OK, here’s my question: Whither?
There’s obviously a lot going on in my subconscious.
To which, Dan, who I know IRL, replied: Wither? Zither!
In a recent dream, I’m at some sort of conference, where the participants are sitting in a large circle. The instructor is riding me constantly for being so backwards. I’m using a tablet when everyone else is using their smartwatches.
I’m becoming increasingly irritated. After repeated snark, I storm out of the room.
For some reason, rioting ensues on the campus. I am sitting on a toilet, with people pounding on the door to get in; it is NOT the only stall.
Bernie Sanders walks into my stall. I get up and throw him down a flight of stairs.
This is obviously a dream about my technophobia. Plus it’s my general disdain for having to deal with the political process this early. It’s not so much antagonism towards Bernie, who I voted for in the 2016 Democratic primary.
To wit, Kevin, who I’ve known since college, asked: Who do you favor for the Dem. nomination for Pres at this point in the campaign?
As I noted here and especially here, I don’t care all that much, yet.
I AM grumpy about people saying that Joe or Bernie or Elizabeth – who appear to be the front runners, so far – should not run because they’re over 70, or will be soon.
I don’t think my senator Kirsten Gillibrand has a shot. She was perceived as too “corporatist” early, and she got Al Franken booted out of the Senate. (The actual facts re: the latter are irrelevant to the narrative.)
Re: Beto, I’m still trying to figure out if there’s a there there.
I get more email from Jay Inslee, governor of Washington state, than any other candidate, almost entirely on environmental issues. It IS a way to differentiate himself.
Pete Buttigieg is the mayor of South Bend Indiana, Mike Pence’s state. I had barely heard of him, yet he’s up at the top of my leader board. Who the heck is he?
There is a political quiz that Arthur took called Who Do I Side With? It contains questions on a wealth of issues from national security to education and health care.
If YOU should decide to fill it out, consider clicking on the “other stances” each time in order to get more nuanced responses. I filled this out in June 2016, and – SURPRISE – Bernie Sanders was my pick, with 92%, followed by Hillary Clinton at 68% and Jeb Bush at 28%.
Note that the guy who ultimately won the election isn’t even on the matrix, as he had just announced his candidacy that month.
You’ll see that virtually all the declared candidates on the Democratic side fare about the same with me. In other words, I REALLY don’t care yet.
That said:
Pete Buttigieg – he’s the mayor of South Bend Indiana, Mike Pence’s state. I had barely heard of him, yet he’s up at the top of my leader board. Who the heck is he? Arthur (oh, HIM again) needed to find out. Here’s an article from his hometown paper. There was a compelling interview on ABC News’ This Week earlier in February that I can’t access presently, but he was very impressive.
Beto O’Rourke – has a recently defeated candidate ever gotten more traction than he?
Kamala Harris – the US Senator from California sat down with an extended interview with Trevor Noah, and I found her impressive; you may not be able access it overseas. The noise about whether she’s black enough annoys me greatly.
BTW, the graphic that’s included Arthur kindly designed for me in Photoshop because I know where my skills lie, and it is assuredly NOT in graphic design. Gracias, amigo.
Yeah, dissect the candidates on the issues, but not on personality quirks, which the incumbent will surely exploit. I’m not willing to say that someone ought not to run.
Is it just me, or are the discussion about the Democratic candidates in the 2020 election feel 1) counterproductive and 2) WAY too early? Hey, if you’re excited by a candidate, then fine. Go work for her or him.
But too much of the rhetoric I’m seeing seems to tear down people before the race has even started. By this standard, NO ONE is qualified to be the nominee. One can write off everyone who’s running, or thinking about it, as too old, too shrill, too corporate, too Harold Stassen, throws things, is wrong on one issue or the other. Trump wins in 2020 against a fractured Democratic party.
Yeah, dissect the candidates on the issues, but not on personality quirks, which the incumbent will surely exploit. I’m not willing to say that someone ought not to run. The announced candidates, shockingly, are imperfect, but are infinitely better than the current occupant of the White House. I’m unconcerned about Starbucks’ Howard Schultz launching a third-party candidacy; early signs suggest he won’t last.
As Mark Evanier noted last month: “The Democratic National Convention to select their next presidential nominee will take place July 13-16, 2020. Someone might have a lock on it before then but maybe not too far before then. In any case, 7/13/20 is 1 year, 5 months… from now. I do not have to start thinking about whether I want it to be Bernie or Beto or Elizabeth or Kamala or any of the 7,244 others who will toss their chapeaus into the ring or be seriously mentioned.”
I’m an old poli sci major, but right this moment, I can’t be too concerned. “I can wait to see who else becomes a possibility and what all the contenders have to say, even about issues that do not yet exist. I can wait until the debates and — most of all — the inability to raise money whittles the field down to a dozen or so.” Yeah, maybe there will be 23 or 37 people in the first half of 2017, but that won’t be the case six months from now.
When I say “I don’t care yet” about the 2020 election, that’s not 100% accurate. I follow the announcements and the reaction to the same from the left and right. It’s that I’m not all that interested in talking about it yet. Give me until September 2019 when the landscape becomes clearer.
On a related matter, a good friend floated the suggestion that perhaps Presidential and Vice-Presidential contenders need to run as a team right from the declaration of intent, rather than AFTER the selection of the Presidential candidate. I oppose this, in part because if one goes down in a scandal, real or imagined, it taints them both. Imagine if John Edwards had agreed to partner with Barack Obama in 2008. Edwards’ behavior would have sunk them both.
“We have to fight isolationism, protectionism, and nativism. We have to defeat those who would worsen our divisions.”
I’m SO conflicted about John McCain. He fought in Vietnam, a war that I had actively opposed. But it’s long been my feeling that war is in the providence of civilian leadership. I understand that McCain, son, and grandson of four-star admirals, found his own way to serve his country, after his carousing youth, and suffered five and a half years of torture as a result.
After returning from Vietnam, McCain remained in the Navy until 1981, after which he embarked on a second career in politics. He was elected to the House of Representatives as a congressman from Arizona in 1982, then to the Senate in 1986.
His Vietnam experience made him a powerful advocate against “enhanced interrogation” by the United States, which this country, to its shame, surely participated in. And it created in him a great supporter for veterans. But it also helped make him an unrelenting war hawk, with whom I largely disagreed.
The first time I participated in the ABC Wednesday, in October 2008, it was re: the Keating Five when I wrote about McCain receiving about $112,000 in political contributions from Keating and his associates in 1987, but hesitant about intervening on the financier’s behalf in the dealings with the Lincoln Savings and Loan.
That lapse, which he owned up to, led him to be an advocate for campaign finance reform with Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) in legislation now rendered moot by the Supreme Court’s Citizen’s United ruling.
The Weekly Sift captured the reason why I would have voted for John McCain in the New York Republican primary for President in 2000, had I been eligible to do so, against George W. Bush.
“Presidential politics in New Hampshire traditionally has revolved around the town hall meeting, and McCain was the absolute master of that form. No matter what they’re asked, shallow candidates find a way to segue into their canned talking points. But… McCain always answered the questions he was asked. Usually, he did it knowledgeably and articulately while radiating a sense of earnestness tempered by self-deprecating humor.”
Then, of course, he blows it by pandering to South Carolina voters over the Confederate flag then hanging over the statehouse. Later that year, he admits he was wrong.
During the Iraq war, John McCain was right about those non-binding resolutions the Democrats tried to pass: it’s immoral to continue to, on one hand, fund the war and on the other hand, suggest the war is wrong.
During the 2008 campaign for President, McCain went to Selma, Alabama where on March 7, 1965, peaceful civil rights demonstrators were attacked by state and local lawmen. “I’m aware of the fact that there will be many people who will not vote for me. But I’m going to be the president of all the people and I will work for all of the people and I will listen to all of the people, whether they decide to vote for me or not.”
I became sure that John McCain would finally become President that year because of the Clinton/Obama infighting. He had considered then-Senator Joe Lieberman, a hawkish Democrat from Connecticut to be his Vice-President. But once again, to his greatest detriment, he essentially allowed the party to pick the relatively unknown former mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, Sarah Palin.
Frank Schaeffer, a longtime supporter of John McCain, wrote in October 2008 that McCain-Palin rallies were starting to resemble lynch mobs. “If your campaign does not stop equating Sen. Barack Obama with terrorism, questioning his patriotism and portraying Mr. Obama as ‘not one of us,’ I accuse you of deliberately feeding the most unhinged elements of our society the red meat of hate, and therefore of potentially instigating violence.”
Does that sound familiar? No wonder he had to correct that woman during a town hall event.
If not for Palin, or maybe Tina Fey, McCain might have won. Or not. I thought in September 2008: “McCain’s self-declared lack of strength in the economic side is problematic. His economic policy, deemed ‘incomplete’ by the hardly liberal US News makes the rich richer. He declares that fundamentals of the economy are strong even as Wall Street collapses.” John McCain and Ted Kennedy, Died August 28, 9 Years Apart, of Brain Cancer (Jim Watson, Getty Images)
In August 2009, McCain noted that the health care debate has been stymied in part because his friend Ted Kennedy (D-MA), the “Lion of the Senate”, wasn’t able to participate in the debate fully. Kennedy, like McCain, was an “old-time” senator who really DID work “across the aisle.”
In 2012, McCain called out the sheer lunacy of Congresswoman Michele Bachmann (R-MN) when she and four Republican colleagues accused Hillary Clinton’s deputy chief of staff Huma Abedin of being circuitously connected to the Muslim Brotherhood. He needed to do that sort of thing more often.
In his October 30, 2017 speech to the Naval Academy, he said: “We have to fight against propaganda and crackpot conspiracy theories. We have to fight isolationism, protectionism, and nativism. We have to defeat those who would worsen our divisions. We have to remind our sons and daughters that we became the most powerful nation on earth by tearing down walls, not building them.”
In a most divisive time in history, two former presidents, Obama and Bush 43, the guys who kept him out of the Oval Office – have been asked to deliver eulogies at the funeral.
Another Ask Roger Anything reply! Bill, who I know because he’s a friend of my sister Leslie: OK, here’s my question: Whither?
There is a 
Is it just me, or are the discussion about the Democratic candidates in the 2020 election feel 1) counterproductive and 2) WAY too early? Hey, if you’re excited by a candidate, then fine. Go work for her or him.
I’m an old poli sci major, but right this moment, I can’t be too concerned. “I can wait to see who else becomes a possibility and what all the contenders have to say, even about issues that do not yet exist. I can wait until the debates and — most of all — the inability to raise money whittles the field down to a dozen or so.” Yeah, maybe there will be 23 or 37 people in the first half of 2017, but that won’t be the case six months from now.
I’m SO conflicted about John McCain. He fought in Vietnam, a war that I had actively opposed. But it’s long been my feeling that war is in the providence of civilian leadership. I understand that McCain, 