Alienation, autonomy, and ideology
These are posts on elections from the blog Base and Superstructure. Topics include international elections, American elections, and local Iowa elections. There’s a particular focus on describing and explaining leftist electoral results.
If you’re a long-time reader, you know I offered some friendly advice to each Democratic presidential campaign back in February. Let’s follow up on that. Now it’s time for some grading. Did the campaigns take my advice? Have they done what they need to do in the early stages?
The grades are in.
One of my first pieces of political writing I can still recall was a criticism of an allegedly socialist House member in the late 1990s for voting in favor of US intervention in Yugoslavia. That House member was, of course, Bernie Sanders. I still think there’s value in criticizing Bernie in some ways and in some circumstances. But let’s talk a bit more about that.
Twitter debate over the Bernie Sanders campaign degenerated into a dumpster fire a long time ago. Or, to put it more accurately, it degenerated twice. Once during the 2016 race against Hillary Clinton. And then a second time during the 2020 campaign. And so, I’m writing a post about criticizing Bernie in light of all this. Do people do it well or poorly? And how do we do it well?
Let’s say you put together a team and you’re running for president. You generally don’t make it that far in politics without some bad stuff happening. Taking some corporate donations here. Maintaining the status quo there. You know, politics.
So, what’s each candidate afraid of? For each candidate, there’s got to be a downside. Something about their politics that doesn’t line up with the image they’re presenting to you. After three debates, maybe it’s worth asking.
Eh, or maybe I’m just being dramatic.
But, really though, here’s a post about each candidate’s dark side. If you’re looking for a close and careful reading of the candidates, try some of my other posts. This one’s more in the spirit of fun. Read on for some (probably only mildly) exaggerated takes on what’s wrong with the candidates. A one-line objection to each.
So, the third Democratic debate was last night. But, really, let’s start with a confession. I think these debates are pointless. Lots of grandstanding and one-liners. As a result, I usually don’t watch. I follow some of the coverage and watch highlights.
Most of what I have to say is based on that.
When the 2020 campaign started, I thought it was relatively open-ended. The key word here is relatively. In fact, we usually have a pretty good idea about who’s going to win a party’s nomination. When the ballot includes an incumbent, the incumbent wins. When the ballot includes a sitting or recent vice president, the vice president wins. Simple enough.
Sometimes surprises happen, but usually not too surprising. Clinton led in 2008 until Obama won the nomination. But Obama was hardly a nobody. And while Trump’s nomination surprised lots of people, myself included, we probably shouldn’t have been too surprised. The polls predicted it early. In fact, even early primary polling predicts pretty well.
But I’ve seen some legitimately surprising things this time. This post is about the surprises of the 2020 campaign.
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