President Biden: The NEW one and only politics thread

Inside the Capitol building, or fundraising, Pelosi is superb. Outside as a party face to the public, not so much at all. Everyone has different skill sets. Besides, Biden is the party leader in fact and in the public mind. It's HIS job to lead a fight against the Court. Alas for him, his party and the country, a a half-century of marination in institutional Washington has sorely damaged the "fight fight fight" side of his personality.

 

Pelosi, Schumer, Biden have all had a lot of party sway in the last 25 years or more- in that time, they've proven they can't protect Roe. Time for someone else to at least show they can do an equally poor job protecting it.

 

I defer to Lisa Simpson on this day.

 

Voted for her in 2016 twice, but it was, I can honestly say, the first hold-your-nose choice since I first cast a presidential vote in 1980.

 

True story: I contributed to O'Malley's presidential campaign because I didn't like Bernie or Hillary (I voted for HRC in Nov. 2016 of course). But I lived in a state (like most of them) that held their primary after Iowa and thus never got a chance to vote for him. I still have the O'Malley 2016 bumper sticker somewhere and I used to get Christmas e-cards from his family for a whle.

 

Two points as I’ve been stewing about all this today:

1. The Electoral College — or at least the winner take all version of the Electoral College — is how we got this radical right wing Supreme Court. A sizable majority of voters cast ballots against Trump. Even more voters — and Americans — support abortion rights. Yet here we are.

2. Sometimes you have to acknowledge what “the other side” did well and learn from it. When Roe v. Wade happened in 1973, only a small minority of Catholics were vehemently opposed to it. Evangelicals and other conservative Christians didn’t care about the issue. Within 15 years it became the most important part of the GOP platform and a litmus test for that party’s candidates.

From this point forward, liberals and left wingers need to be as ruthless about stacking the court as the other side has been.

 

If you really want to go back, you can say you never get Nixon and Reagan if the Kennedy brothers lived but that’s like saying suppose my mother and father never met

 

The problem is this will drive Democrats to the coasts at an even greater rate, when the party needs young Democrats to move to red states to turn the tide.

If the party were forward-looking, it would quietly be looking to organize recent college grads to live in red states for a couple years to build up a legislative majority.

Us all huddling in liberal enclaves in two states isn’t going to undo this.

 

Is there a time in modern American history where rights have been taken away from citizens so brazenly as they have in the last week? I'm sure I'm missing something.

 

Someone I know once argued for a "reverse Palestine" — let's abandon everything but the coasts and let them have at it in the middle.

 

The “Get Out” strategy bought us this Supreme Court and this Senate.

A few hundred thousand strategically placed in swing states could completely change the map.

The court is a lost cause for 20 years. Legislative victory is the only way out.

It would have to be done quietly, like the way the the right wing infiltrated school boards.

It’s time to stop playing by gentleman’s rules.

 

The tens of thousands of 20s-age liberals you would need to swing red states are not gonna live in North Dakota. Or South Dakota. Or Kansas. Or Wyoming. Or Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas. Or West Virginia, or Idaho outside of Boise. If you're young and liberal, or gay, or trans, you're getting out of there as fast as possible. The brain drain in the Buffalo Commons Taliban states is significant.

Guys like Byron Dorgan, Kent Conrad, McGovern and Tom Daschle aren't ever going to be elected again in the Dakotas. Ever.