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Tuesday, January 1, 2019

OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES

This is a link, courtesy of David Auerbach, to a very interesting piece by a young man named Benjamin Studebaker completing a doctorate at Cambridge.  It is an argument, which I find quite persuasive, that in 2020 we should nominate Bernie [or Jeff Merkley, but that is a non-starter.]

I think Bernie can beat Trump [I also think he would have won in 2016], despite the fact that he has a serious deficit with people of color.  I have already indicated why I think he is one of only four or so people who can actually get the nomination.

He would have to up his game, I think, but perhaps he can do that.  read the piece and tell me what you think.


6 comments:

Dean said...

Sanders "has a serious deficit with people of color." I hear this, but usually in the context of a refutation, as in this recent post: https://freethoughtblogs.com/singham/2018/12/27/bernie-sanders-and-women-and-people-of-color/

Glenn Greenwald similarly laments that critics of Sanders conveniently ignore the voices of POC who are pro-Sanders. Any idea what the real numbers might be?

Robert Paul Wolff said...

I was not judging him, just reacting to his poor showing vis-a-vis Clinton in the Southern primaries. If he can do better this time, or if he did better than I thought, all to the good.

Dean said...

I wasn't taking your comment as a judgment of him, but as a statement about a demographic state of affairs. Now I see you're referring to the primary results, not current polling.

Anonymous said...

I'm curious why Kamala Harris is seen as insufficiently left wing. I have been expecting her to be the best bet if Bernie doesn't run.

Howie said...

They call the election a horse race for a reason- they're hard to accurately pick. You like Sanders so you use your body English to make a case that he's a sure win. Nobody saw the Trump voters in swing states coming-emotions are volatile and people are hard to read and might keep their cards close to the table.
Even if you give actual analysis and not good vibrations, I'm not convinced it means anything other than which horse you're picking.

LFC said...

Studebaker says at the end of the linked post that (I'm paraphrasing) "we need someone who was too left-wing for the Dem Party not just in the 90s but in the 70s," and he says Sanders is the only living politician who fits that description.

Bit of an overstatement. Fred Harris, at that time a Senator from Oklahoma, ran a redistributionist-oriented primary campaign for the presidency in '76. He's still alive. Of course, that doesn't refute Studebaker's argument that Sanders is the only one with a chance of getting the nomination who fits into the "too left-wing for the party in the '70s" category.

However, Studebaker may be painting w too broad a brush in dismissing all Dem politicians of roughly the Clintons' age as hopeless "triangulators." I just don't know enough about some of them to know whether this is an accurate view of them all.