Amy Klobuchar?
Who will Joe Biden pick as his running mate?
Fri, 2020-03-13 10:21
#1
Who will Joe Biden pick as his running mate?
Fri, 2020-03-13 10:34
#2
alan smithee
Klobuchar
Fri, 2020-03-13 12:22
#3
Which would guarantee his defeat. He will have no chance of winning if-assuming he's actually nominated-he makes no major concessions to progressives on anything.
Fri, 2020-03-13 14:33
#4
More brilliant analysis, eh!
Fri, 2020-03-13 17:22
#5
Chill NR. The only choice that would satisfy Ken is Jeremy Corbyn, based of course on his stirling electoral record
Fri, 2020-03-13 17:42
#6
More brilliant analysis, eh!
It's based on simple logic-in 2016, Hillary chose a running mate to her right. Her fall campaign never mentioned any of the Sanders items in the platform, never did any outreach to Sanders supporters, and she basically acted as though Bernie's whole campaign was either a total failure or never happened. The result was that she lost what should have been an unloseable election.
It goes without saying that the same thing will happen in 2016 if Biden chooses a bland centrist as running mate, has a platform-as he clearly wants-with no progressive policies and which disagrees with Trump only on nontransformative side issues like reproductive choice and the makeup of the courts, and Biden, like Hillary, runs on a "bear any burden, fight any foe" foreign policy which commits the U.S. to staying in every war it's currently in against the Arab/Muslim world.
And it goes without saying that if Labour does what nicky wants and goes all the way back to the useless, irrelevant 1997 policies, combined with the right-wing refusal to accept that the EU issue is settled once and for all-there is no Labour case for Remain or Rejoin-combined with a "we don't want to fight, but by jingo! if we do, we've got the guns, we've got the ships we've got the money too!" military policy, Labour will lose just as badly if not worse in the next election, since nobody wants Labour to go that far to the right.
Fri, 2020-03-13 18:04
#7
Chill NR. The only choice that would satisfy Ken is Jeremy Corbyn, based of course on his stirling electoral record
Give it a rest. I never worshipped Corbyn and it was insulting for you to act as if I did. I agreed repeatedly that the man made mistakes. It's just that I didn't despise the man and don't go along with your rigid, arrogant view that Corbyn should never have stood for the leadership, had no right to have won the leadership, and owed it to the party to stand down when the PLP passed its bogus "no-confidence motion".
It's not as though the ONLY possible positions a person can take towards Corbyn are mindless adulation or relentless derision. And no, it does NOT go without saying that Labour would have done better with anyone else as leader other than Corbyn. It clearly wouldn't have done better with a leader who erased all of the Corbyn policies and did another vicious and unjustified Kinnock-style purge of the socialists. It clearly wouldn't have done better with a leader who wouldn't have apologized on behalf of the party for the Iraq War or who blamed every problem in Northern Ireland on what Sinn Fein-along with the Loyalists, who were equally nasty-USED to do or who blamed everything in the Israel/Palestine dispute on Hamas and Fatah, as you would prefer. And it clearly wouldn't have made any difference if Labour had had a leader who joined in the pompous(and as it turned out unjustified) denunciations of Russia over what turned out to be the non-poisoning of the Skripals. And it wouldn't have made any difference in the results if Labour had had a leader who went totally right-wing and endorsed the bombing of Syria, bombing that could never have had any result other than the slaughter of innocent civilians and could never have led to anything progressive occurring.
And in any case...I have no influence on who Labour will choose as its next leader, nicky, so why are you so obsessed with trying to verbally bludgeon ME into agreeing with you? When it comes down to it, why do you even care what I think about this? It's not as though Corbyn would have stood down if only I had said he should.
BTW, in terms of the people who stood agianst him in 2015 for the leadership, you've never ever said who you would actually have preferred. Out of interest, who WOULD you have preferred?
And North, you can't seriously be arguing that Biden SHOULD nominated another bland, militarist centrist and run on a bland, centrist, militarist platform against Trump. As a Yank, I can tell you that, on this side of the border, there is no large bloc of support for making the Democratic message as indistinguishable from the Republican message as possible. There simply aren't any large number of people who won't accept there being any change to Trumpism other than the defense of reproductive choice and the appointment of non-reactionary judges to the federal courts. And nobody here other than defense contractors wants the Democratic ticket to be to Trump's right on the use of force.
It would be useless to have Biden run as the most conservative alternative to Trump possible, as you seem to want.
Fri, 2020-03-13 18:35
#8
Biden is on record saying his ideal running mate is Michelle Obama. She won't do it but there you have his preference.
Fri, 2020-03-13 18:39
#9
Given the nature of the political system in the US, I think that if Biden could convince Oprah to run as VP he might win easily. Dueling reality TV stars, one noted for meanness and the other for charity.
Fri, 2020-03-13 19:48
#10
Biden is on record saying his ideal running mate is Michelle Obama. She won't do it but there you have his preference.
His ideal running mate is somebody who would never BE his running mate. Interesting.
Fri, 2020-03-13 19:58
#11
"...Truly horrifying is the Democratic Party media and politics establishment's Orwellian determination to squelch public discussion of Biden's pitiful mental state - a problem of which the establishment is fully cognizant."
Dear Berners: Dementia Joe is How Much 'Your' Party HATES You
https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/03/13/dear-berners-dementia-joe-is-how...
PS: Bernie for VP?
Fri, 2020-03-13 20:08
#12
She'll be the human embodiment of section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, whoever she is.
Fri, 2020-03-13 20:13
#13
.
Fri, 2020-03-13 20:15
#14
She'll be the human embodiment of section 4 of the Twenty-fifth Amendment, whoever she is.
That would be a great show. The President elect outed as incapable by the VP elect and then reduced to a figurehead. A truly fascinating idea that might even apply to Trump if his VP is a Brutus. One thing that most people here agree on is that both men are mentally incompetent to serve as POTUS.
Fri, 2020-03-13 22:49
#15
Probably Klobuchar but maybe Kamala Harris. I think Stacey Abrams or even Elizabeth Warren still have outside shots. Most likely a woman will be chosen.
Fri, 2020-03-13 23:27
#16
One thing that most people here agree on is that both men are mentally incompetent to serve as POTUS.
Trump is obviously too mentally incompetent to be president. He's a psychopathic malignant narcissist. I think Biden is a run of the mill presidential candidate similar to other older presidential candidates like Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, and John McCain.
Sat, 2020-03-14 11:49
#17
COVID-19 could cost Trump his re-election chances.
Trump tells a nation terrified of coronavirus that none of this is his fault
Trump lied, insulted reporters, and explicitly refused to take responsibility for his own actions.
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President Trump arrives with Vice President Mike Pence to a news conference about the ongoing global coronavirus pandemic in Washington, DC, on March 13, 2020.
President Trump held a remarkable press conference Friday afternoon. It began with a parade of corporate CEOs who briefly took the podium to explain efforts their companies would take to improve coronavirus screening. But it quickly progressed into a parade of lies, insults, and buck passing by the president himself.
Trump’s core message: All of this is someone else’s fault.
One of the biggest failures — possibly the single biggest failure — of the United States’ response to coronavirus pandemic is our failure to deploy tests that will allow doctors, patients, and public health officials to determine who is infected. The United States has tested far fewer people per capita than any of its peer nations, and by a wide margin.
:no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/19788002/covid_19_testing_per_capita.jpg)
At one point, Trump was asked about the admission of Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, that our lag in testing was “a failing.” And he was asked if he takes responsibility for this failure.
Trump’s response: “I don’t take responsibility at all.”
The president claimed that “we were given a set of circumstances and we were given rules and regulations and specifications from a different time,” and this existing legal infrastructure “wasn’t meant for this kind of event with the kind of numbers that we’re talking about.”
It’s an astonishing claim, and it’s astonishing because Trump has spent the better part of his term dismantling the federal government’s pandemic fighting infrastructure.
How Trump made the government less able to respond to a pandemic
In 2005, the US Agency for International Development developed a program to help detect and research infectious diseases that arise in animal populations and eventual jump to humans — it’s likely that coronavirus is such a disease. This program, which was set up in response to the H1N5 bird flu scare, continued through the rest of the Bush administration and through the entire Obama administration.
The Trump administration shut it down last fall.
Trump has also repeatedly proposed budgets — he most recently did so last month — calling for sharp cuts to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health, although Congress resisted such cuts. Former CDC Director Tom Frieden warned that the public health cuts in Trump’s first budget were “unsafe at any level of enactment.”
In 2018, Trump ordered the White House National Security Council’s (NSC) entire global health security arm shut down. And that’s only part of what Trump’s done to hollow out the nation’s public health infrastructure. As Foreign Policy’s Laurie Garrett reports:
Neither the NSC nor [the Department of Homeland Security’s] epidemic teams have been replaced. The global health section of the CDC was so drastically cut in 2018 that much of its staff was laid off and the number of countries it was working in was reduced from 49 to merely 10. Meanwhile, throughout 2018, the U.S. Agency for International Development and its director, Mark Green, came repeatedly under fire from both the White House and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo. And though Congress has so far managed to block Trump administration plans to cut the U.S. Public Health Service Commissioned Corps by 40 percent, the disease-fighting cadres have steadily eroded as retiring officers go unreplaced.
And yet, despite his own efforts to dismantle so much of the nation’s public health infrastructure, Trump spent much of his press conference attacking the Obama administration’s response to the 2009 swine flu outbreak, claiming that “if you go back to the swine flu, it was nothing like this. They didn’t do testing like this and actually they lost 14,000 people and they didn’t do the testing.”
Trump lashed out at a reporter who pointed out his actual record
Not long after Trump refused to take responsibility for the lag in testing, a reporter asked him whether he takes responsibility for disbanding the White House pandemic office.
Trump responded by labeling this inquiry a “nasty question.” He then repeatedly deflected blame for closing down the White House’s pandemic response team to some other, unidentified person.
“I didn’t do it,” Trump claimed. He added that “I don’t know anything about it” and “it’s the administration, perhaps, they do that, you know, people let people go.”
Q: What responsibility do you take for cutting the global pandemic when you took office?
TRUMP: "I just think it's a nasty question...When you say me, I didn't do it....I don't know anything about it."
"We're doing a great job."
Presumably, the “administration” that Trump referred to here is the Trump administration.
President Harry Truman famously displayed a sign on his desk with a simple message: “The buck stops here.” The point was that, by accepting the awesome responsibility of the presidency, Truman also had to acknowledge that the nation’s welfare was his responsibility. It is the president’s duty to monitor his own administration. And it is the president’s fault if that administration is malicious or incompetent.
Trump himself expressed a similar sentiment in 2013.
Donald J. Trump✔@realDonaldTrump
Leadership: Whatever happens, you're responsible. If it doesn't happen, you're responsible.
Now that Trump is president, however, anything that goes wrong is someone else’s fault.
https://www.vox.com/2020/3/13/21179119/trump-not-my-fault-coronavirus-press-conference-public-health
Sat, 2020-03-14 13:31
#18
One thing that most people here agree on is that both men are mentally incompetent to serve as POTUS.
Trump is obviously too mentally incompetent to be president. He's a psychopathic malignant narcissist. I think Biden is a run of the mill presidential candidate similar to other older presidential candidates like Ronald Reagan, Bob Dole, and John McCain.
Indeed I love the group he fits into. Raygun is the classic example of the picture perfect President for the oligarchy. Biden could be just as good. The difference between them and Trump is they would never expect to do anything except what their "advsors" tell them do, so who cares if they are slightly past the point of being mentally sharp and only capable of smiling, glad handing and rubber stamping.
Sat, 2020-03-14 14:54
#19
Seriously, if he was looking for a GOOD choice for a running mate, I'd suggest Senator Tammy Baldwin, from Wisconsin. She's progressive enough to appeal to Sanders voters without being taken as a Sanders partisan, and she would make Wisconson, one of the three "firewall states" Trump flipped in 2016, a lock for the Democratic ticket, which means they'd only have to retake one more of those states to get Hair Fuhrer out. There'd be no downside to putting her on the ticket.
Sun, 2020-03-15 07:42
#20
Largest union in USA the NEA, supports Biden
Sun, 2020-03-15 09:51
#21
Misfit
Seriously, if he was looking for a GOOD choice for a running mate, I'd suggest Senator Tammy Baldwin, from Wisconsin. She's progressive enough to appeal to Sanders voters without being taken as a Sanders partisan, and she would make Wisconson, one of the three "firewall states" Trump flipped in 2016, a lock for the Democratic ticket, which means they'd only have to retake one more of those states to get Hair Fuhrer out. There'd be no downside to putting her on the ticket.
Paul Ryan is from Wisconsin. I don't think it would be locked up. And yes he is retired but he still does exert influence and shows that Wisconsin has strong Republican support. But yes, the Democrats do need Wisconsin.
Why not pick someone from Florida if they want a VP from a close state?
Sun, 2020-03-15 13:58
#22
That's why Klobuchar might be a good choice as she has support in 4 states that Trump barely won in 2016
Sun, 2020-03-15 16:21
#23
Misfit
CNN reported yesterday that Biden has little to no support from swing voters in some key close states, people who voted for Obama then for Trump.
i can't seem to link it. It is Michael Smerconish reporting on key swing battlegrounds.
Sun, 2020-03-15 17:27
#24
Misfit wrote:
Paul Ryan is from Wisconsin.
As was Robert M. La Follette. And Joe McCarthy. Interesting place.
Sun, 2020-03-15 18:45
#25
Why are we speculating about Paul Ryan?
How about Bernadine Kennedy Kent -- she has that special name in the middle and is from Ohio. Look at the bills she has sponsored.
Sun, 2020-03-15 18:59
#26
Why are we speculating about Paul Ryan?
I think Ryan just came up because people were debating the political nature of Wisconsin.
FWIW, that state has a fairly impressive history with public broadcasting.
(CBC definitely improved on the music, though.)
Sun, 2020-03-15 19:22
#27
That's why Klobuchar might be a good choice as she has support in 4 states that Trump barely won in 2016
Democrats have no chance of winning if Biden chooses a running mate, and adopts a platform, that leaves the progressive wing of the party completely out in the cold.
This is a huge issue, because it looks as though Biden is bound and determined to run to the RIGHT of the Clinton-Kaine ticket on the issues-and there's no space to Hillary's right without just adopting the GOP platform.
Sun, 2020-03-15 19:26
#28
Misfit wrote:
Paul Ryan is from Wisconsin.
As was Robert M. La Follette. And Joe McCarthy. Interesting place.
And it was where Eugene McCarthy forced Lyndon Johnson out of the race in 1968 by building an overwhelming lead in the polls heading in to the Wisconsin primary-McCarthy ended up taking 56% to 36% for LBJ, after LBJ had dropped out-there were estimates that, had Johnson stayed in, the margin might have been more like 64% to 26%.
The Democrats blew the governor's race after the massive anti-Scott Walker uprisings in Madison by nominating a bland centrist instead of a passionate left-populist who campaign in the spirit of the protests.
Mon, 2020-03-16 01:49
#29
Left Turn
Di anyone else watch the debate earlier tonight? Biden basically lied about his congressional voting record throughout the whole thing. No one from CNN called him on it, and then the commentators afterwards just declared him the winner of the debate. Completely unbelievable.
Mon, 2020-03-16 02:04
#30
Mon, 2020-03-16 02:33
#31
You'd be amazed how many believe. No matter how many times they lose no matter which team wins, they always come out to cheer on yet another game. Because they love the game. Even at their expense. Fool me once...