| HylianSwordsman said: Yeah I'm really happy to hear Warren make the commitment to no big money in the general, that's really huge for me and does a lot towards rebuilding the trust I once had for her. I'm just glad Biden isn't the frontrunner anymore. Let's hope things stay that way. I'll be cheering, campaigning, and voting for Bernie until the bitter end, but Warren is a huge step up in frontrunner, from my last place choice to my second place choice. I hope if she gets the nom she picks Bernie as VP. I think his strategy of political revolution could still work well as VP. It functions off the bully pulpit, which he kind of already has simply by having a movement, but even the vice presidency is enough of a legitimacy boost that the media wouldn't be able to ignore him. I think the Dem establishment understands this to some degree, hence why they gave him the Chair position of the Outreach Committee. Making him VP would be that on steroids, even if it isn't the actual presidency, so he could end up being the most effective VP in history, considering most VPs accomplish little if anything, while Sanders could be the guy rallying the people behind Warren's plans, and holding her to account if she ever seems to stray towards the establishment. You know, it's funny, back in 2015 when I'd first heard of Bernie Sanders shortly before he announced his candidacy, I immediately liked the guy, and was a huge Warren fan at the time. My immediate thought was that a Warren campaign should put Bernie on the ticket as VP, that was my dream team. As I got to know Sanders, and since Warren wasn't running, I figured a Sanders-Warren ticket could still work. It wasn't until much later that I started to distrust her at all, when she refused to endorse anyone before super Tuesday due to pressure from the establishment for having signed a petition encouraging Hillary to run, long before she knew Sanders would run. It just seemed like cowardice to me, at a time when the progressive movement felt ascendant. When it came out that the primary had been rigged, Hillary's campaign chair was behind it, and Hillary had corrupt financial connections to the party's national fundraising infrastructure, and Warren still endorsed her and didn't denounce any of it, it really pissed me off, it just felt so cowardly. Eventually though I realized as Sanders did when he endorsed her too that Trump was an existential threat to democracy and Hillary wasn't, so it wasn't simply a "lesser of two evils" choice anymore, it was an existential crisis. Even after that, I still had a bad taste in my mouth for Warren because I still felt like if she'd lent her progressive weight and credibility to Sanders before Iowa, he'd have won the primary and the general in a landslide, and we wouldn't be in this nightmare, and it still just felt like it was cowardice on her part. Since then, however, she's shown a lot of courage and started making major moves to fight hard for systemic change again, and reminded me why she was once my favorite politician. Like I said, I'm with Bernie to the bitter end, but with Warren's latest commitment against big money, and her new lead in the polls, I feel like we have a pretty exciting alternative to Bernie that actually looks like she'll win the primary. That can only be good news. |
I was part of the campaign petitioning Elizabeth Warren to run in 2016. She was my first choice back then too. She was considered the de facto leader of the progressive movement in the Congress at the time. She was leading the fight against the TPP that Obama was hawking and just before that had galvanized resistance to a proposed budget deal reducing public welfare spending in a number of areas. Those were her two latest projects at the time, both of which notably involved standing up not to an unpopular Republican president (which is usually pretty easy for a member of the opposing party who holds a safe seat in the Senate to do), but to a fairly popular Democratic one, which I found particularly audacious and brave. I wound up voting for Bernie Sanders because she didn't run. I think there are a lot of people who thought like me about that out there and that's what you're seeing bear fruit now that they're both running. That's much of the reason I think that Warren is faring as well as she is (i.e. she always would have, I believe) and much of the reason why, in turn, Sanders is the first choice of only about one-third as many people as in 2016 so far this time around.
It captures what I mean to highlight that the most shared remark at Thursday's LGBTQ+ town hall broadcast on CNN was this one (perhaps the only non-PC comment of the whole evening), and also that simply using female pronouns to describe a hypothetical future president was good enough to win cheers and applause in the room by itself. There are a lot of women in this country who would very much like to live to see the day when it becomes possible for a woman to be president. I'm one of them. Many feel very strongly about that. I think it would bring a significantly different perspective than has yet been there to bear, and also encourage more women to run to public office in the future, including for the presidency, to set the precedent. Elizabeth Warren affirmatively scratches that itch not just by being female, but by tacitly reminding you she is from time to time in these sorts of ways. That adds something to a progressive policy recipe that Bernie Sanders by definition cannot offer, and it's something that's in much higher demand in the real world than it is here on this basically all-male message board that couldn't understand if it collectively tried.
Last edited by Jaicee - on 12 October 2019
