This is great! As a moderate D I am enraged by how he has staffed his administration with goofy leftists and frankly they seem to run everything. Does anyone really think Joe Biden’ top ten thoughts include advancing radical Trans ideology? But that’s clearly a top 5 issue in this administration…which goes to his age. He’s not running things! His staff is - and they are overwhelmingly left wing kooks.
I feel like Biden's staff has contempt for him and they don't know what they are doing because they are in a progressive bubble. They always seem to undermine him and focus too much on appeasing the left.
There's been a steady drum of claims that many commenters here are to the right of the median Democrat, etc. Someone suggested that we had a lot of Romney/McCain voters. I'm sure I won't get much uptake this late in the day (maybe I'll repost for the daily thread) but if you're willing to say who you (would've) voted for in those elections or whether you vote Democrat when Trump isn't on the ticket, please do so below! https://www.slowboring.com/p/we-need-to-see-more-joe-biden/comment/49479631
I for one don't get to vote, but I'd have voted Democrat in every election I was old enough to know about at the time (1996). Politically I'm probably still reasonably closely aligned with Obama (without getting into details of his performance and areas of disagreement) which makes me a boring Millennial.
May be an idea to repost this question in the daily thread…but for president I’ve voted Democrat every time and was a neighborhood organizer for Obama’s 2012 campaign.
The thing that bugs me about the hostility to "safe, legal, and rare", is that you don't have to be religious at all to have moral qualms about the idea of a late-term abortion. The same kind of moral qualms that might make one consider vegetarianism or veganism, or in general refraining from hurting animals, apply to a very late-term fetus. I have no qualms at all about abortion of a clump of cells that has basically no brain. But at some point along the way you get a transition into a being that reacts to stimuli. Virtually nobody aborts in the third trimester "just because they feel like it", there almost always is some serious health reason, and regardless I think women are in a much better position to make these decisions, in consultation with their doctors, than politicians are. But I do understand why somebody would be wigged out by the idea of an abortion at eight months. That's the same feeling you should have about somebody killing a kitten. Killing a being that has self-awareness, sensations, and emotions, has a moral cost to it, even if it's the least-bad choice available.
I think most Americans have this intuition that earlier abortions are less of a a "problem" than later ones. Roe codified that in a kind of awkward way, with its viability standard, but it worked as a compromise, until the hardliners took over the Supreme Court.
Ethical vegan here who has qualms about late abortions for precisely this reason. (I'm not sure "potentiality for sentience" counts for nothing either--push me hard enough and I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with discarding IVF embryos. But I'm pretty comfortable saying that the pregnant person's interests should win out in those cases.)
The "common sense" moral view here--which I think can be readily defended rigorously--is that a fetus has greater moral status the more similar its capacities are to a newborn, which is why the near universal practice is to have gestational limits in some form. Both the view that a zygote has human rights like an infant and the view that a fetus in the third trimester has no moral significance are hard to defend and almost certainly wrong. (But the first view is more powerful and more threatening.)
Once again, an article where I mostly agree with Matt - I think Biden's messaging on this is fine, because it's what he believes, but I also think if we had President Whitmer running on a "abortion is a constitutional right" seemed to do fine in Michigan, which is full of the supposed non-college educated white voters who supposedly all personally hate abortion, but seemed fine with her message, despite no talk of rareness or personal opposition to abortion.
But, let's be honest here - most of the comment section took this as a another way to basically say anybody younger and to the left of them should never say anything they disagree with on social media. In shocking news, college-educated young women are a large and powerful part of the Democratic coalition. They're going to say things you don't like - guess what, they agree with Biden that RvW was good, they just don't like the message, and the secret is, despite mostly older guy in comment sections saying Democrat's abortion extremism will turn off voters, it turns out voters can understand the difference between people's opinions and Republican lawmakers trying to pass stupidly unpopular bans.
The whole age thing coming out of a deposition really pisses me off. It was glaringly, shockingly obvious that Biden had answered a bunch of questions "yes I recall the general situation, but at this time i do not recall the specifics" which is WHAT YOUR SUPPOSED TO DO when being deposed. Like, if he had a bad memory, he'd forget he was being deposed and just go off rambling answering questions that weren't even asked. I'm in disbelief nobody defended him on the merits by saying "he answered honestly but Hur wasn't well prepared, and Biden wasn't going to do his job for him".
Also genuine political malpractice that the first thing out of Biden's mouth at the press conference wasn't "man, woman, person, camera, tv".
Re: "it is Team Biden’s considered opinion that Joe Biden’s pre-2016 record in politics is cringe and bad and that they need to craft a different, more progressive persona for him."
This makes me think his staffers should read (or write!) some of those perennial articles about how to talk to your crazy old uncle during Thanksgiving dinner.
Is there going to be a Trump and Biden debate? I can’t wait for that. I can’t imagine them debating like three times but even one would be great to see.
“I do think an important counterpoint to this is that zero information has leaked into the public domain suggesting that Biden is behind the scenes incapable of doing the job.” - umm, really? The Justice Department report from last week doesn’t count?
Matt, we need to check in on Earth 2 at some point. You know, the timeline where the Democrats managed to narrowly take back the Houses in 2012 with the coattails from Obama's strong reelection. The GOP embraces the autopsy report about its failures to moderate in a diversifying America, as well as it's back to back cycles of outlandish Senate candidates giving up winnable races. A bipartisan immigration bill passes, with its pathway to citizenship as well as beefed up border patrol funding, but the populist backlash fuels the rise of Donald Trump, who narrowly wins the 2016 election.
That timeline featured bipartisan deals on spending to give Trump additional funding for his border wall--Mexico didn't pay for it after all--but as much as Trump tried to fudge the implementation of the legal status under the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act he couldn't do much. And then Covid hit ...
I think in 2024 Earth 2 is also experiencing a surge at the border from asylum seekers, as nothing improved the governance in Central and South America in the timeline nor the impacts of Covid. But that political system already "solved" the issue of undocumented Americans living inside the United States, and Trump's border wall was a smaller price to pay for other concessions to the left since it didn't ultimately endanger the legal status of anyone. But Earth 2 is also convinced it's experiencing a serious border problem.
All kidding aside: who are these staffers who can staff the Biden White House who wont view their boss as cringe. Many Progressives view letting JOE BIDEN be president IS the compromise they made. Moderates get their preferred candidate, and they get to dictate the message, policy and everything else (you know the stuff that actually matters).
The Democratic Party is going to screw itself and I have no sympathy for them, even though it will also damage the country.
I would like to volunteer myself as a staffer in the Biden White House. I will take a dramatic pay cut to serve the country over the next several months if it gets Biden elected.
Getting Biden out of his metaphorical basement will be good for the country. His staff is loyal, saying only that which an honest reporter, or a political partisan, would say. Given undeniable, recorded events, there are reasonable bases for suspecting his acuity. Let's remove the doubts.
LET BIDEN BIDEN!
This is great! As a moderate D I am enraged by how he has staffed his administration with goofy leftists and frankly they seem to run everything. Does anyone really think Joe Biden’ top ten thoughts include advancing radical Trans ideology? But that’s clearly a top 5 issue in this administration…which goes to his age. He’s not running things! His staff is - and they are overwhelmingly left wing kooks.
I feel like Biden's staff has contempt for him and they don't know what they are doing because they are in a progressive bubble. They always seem to undermine him and focus too much on appeasing the left.
But doesn't Biden have veteran centrist operatives like Bruce Reed on his staff? Is the problem that the staffers want careers after this is over?
There's been a steady drum of claims that many commenters here are to the right of the median Democrat, etc. Someone suggested that we had a lot of Romney/McCain voters. I'm sure I won't get much uptake this late in the day (maybe I'll repost for the daily thread) but if you're willing to say who you (would've) voted for in those elections or whether you vote Democrat when Trump isn't on the ticket, please do so below! https://www.slowboring.com/p/we-need-to-see-more-joe-biden/comment/49479631
I for one don't get to vote, but I'd have voted Democrat in every election I was old enough to know about at the time (1996). Politically I'm probably still reasonably closely aligned with Obama (without getting into details of his performance and areas of disagreement) which makes me a boring Millennial.
May be an idea to repost this question in the daily thread…but for president I’ve voted Democrat every time and was a neighborhood organizer for Obama’s 2012 campaign.
I'll do it tomorrow, missed my chance today.
I would have voted both times for Obama if I had been a US citizen at the time.
Posted. We're surprisingly aligned.
It doesn't help that everyone here is named David :P
The thing that bugs me about the hostility to "safe, legal, and rare", is that you don't have to be religious at all to have moral qualms about the idea of a late-term abortion. The same kind of moral qualms that might make one consider vegetarianism or veganism, or in general refraining from hurting animals, apply to a very late-term fetus. I have no qualms at all about abortion of a clump of cells that has basically no brain. But at some point along the way you get a transition into a being that reacts to stimuli. Virtually nobody aborts in the third trimester "just because they feel like it", there almost always is some serious health reason, and regardless I think women are in a much better position to make these decisions, in consultation with their doctors, than politicians are. But I do understand why somebody would be wigged out by the idea of an abortion at eight months. That's the same feeling you should have about somebody killing a kitten. Killing a being that has self-awareness, sensations, and emotions, has a moral cost to it, even if it's the least-bad choice available.
I think most Americans have this intuition that earlier abortions are less of a a "problem" than later ones. Roe codified that in a kind of awkward way, with its viability standard, but it worked as a compromise, until the hardliners took over the Supreme Court.
Ethical vegan here who has qualms about late abortions for precisely this reason. (I'm not sure "potentiality for sentience" counts for nothing either--push me hard enough and I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with discarding IVF embryos. But I'm pretty comfortable saying that the pregnant person's interests should win out in those cases.)
The "common sense" moral view here--which I think can be readily defended rigorously--is that a fetus has greater moral status the more similar its capacities are to a newborn, which is why the near universal practice is to have gestational limits in some form. Both the view that a zygote has human rights like an infant and the view that a fetus in the third trimester has no moral significance are hard to defend and almost certainly wrong. (But the first view is more powerful and more threatening.)
Once again, an article where I mostly agree with Matt - I think Biden's messaging on this is fine, because it's what he believes, but I also think if we had President Whitmer running on a "abortion is a constitutional right" seemed to do fine in Michigan, which is full of the supposed non-college educated white voters who supposedly all personally hate abortion, but seemed fine with her message, despite no talk of rareness or personal opposition to abortion.
But, let's be honest here - most of the comment section took this as a another way to basically say anybody younger and to the left of them should never say anything they disagree with on social media. In shocking news, college-educated young women are a large and powerful part of the Democratic coalition. They're going to say things you don't like - guess what, they agree with Biden that RvW was good, they just don't like the message, and the secret is, despite mostly older guy in comment sections saying Democrat's abortion extremism will turn off voters, it turns out voters can understand the difference between people's opinions and Republican lawmakers trying to pass stupidly unpopular bans.
The whole age thing coming out of a deposition really pisses me off. It was glaringly, shockingly obvious that Biden had answered a bunch of questions "yes I recall the general situation, but at this time i do not recall the specifics" which is WHAT YOUR SUPPOSED TO DO when being deposed. Like, if he had a bad memory, he'd forget he was being deposed and just go off rambling answering questions that weren't even asked. I'm in disbelief nobody defended him on the merits by saying "he answered honestly but Hur wasn't well prepared, and Biden wasn't going to do his job for him".
Also genuine political malpractice that the first thing out of Biden's mouth at the press conference wasn't "man, woman, person, camera, tv".
Re: "it is Team Biden’s considered opinion that Joe Biden’s pre-2016 record in politics is cringe and bad and that they need to craft a different, more progressive persona for him."
This makes me think his staffers should read (or write!) some of those perennial articles about how to talk to your crazy old uncle during Thanksgiving dinner.
Is there going to be a Trump and Biden debate? I can’t wait for that. I can’t imagine them debating like three times but even one would be great to see.
“I do think an important counterpoint to this is that zero information has leaked into the public domain suggesting that Biden is behind the scenes incapable of doing the job.” - umm, really? The Justice Department report from last week doesn’t count?
No
Matt, we need to check in on Earth 2 at some point. You know, the timeline where the Democrats managed to narrowly take back the Houses in 2012 with the coattails from Obama's strong reelection. The GOP embraces the autopsy report about its failures to moderate in a diversifying America, as well as it's back to back cycles of outlandish Senate candidates giving up winnable races. A bipartisan immigration bill passes, with its pathway to citizenship as well as beefed up border patrol funding, but the populist backlash fuels the rise of Donald Trump, who narrowly wins the 2016 election.
That timeline featured bipartisan deals on spending to give Trump additional funding for his border wall--Mexico didn't pay for it after all--but as much as Trump tried to fudge the implementation of the legal status under the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act he couldn't do much. And then Covid hit ...
I think in 2024 Earth 2 is also experiencing a surge at the border from asylum seekers, as nothing improved the governance in Central and South America in the timeline nor the impacts of Covid. But that political system already "solved" the issue of undocumented Americans living inside the United States, and Trump's border wall was a smaller price to pay for other concessions to the left since it didn't ultimately endanger the legal status of anyone. But Earth 2 is also convinced it's experiencing a serious border problem.
All kidding aside: who are these staffers who can staff the Biden White House who wont view their boss as cringe. Many Progressives view letting JOE BIDEN be president IS the compromise they made. Moderates get their preferred candidate, and they get to dictate the message, policy and everything else (you know the stuff that actually matters).
The Democratic Party is going to screw itself and I have no sympathy for them, even though it will also damage the country.
I would like to volunteer myself as a staffer in the Biden White House. I will take a dramatic pay cut to serve the country over the next several months if it gets Biden elected.
Getting Biden out of his metaphorical basement will be good for the country. His staff is loyal, saying only that which an honest reporter, or a political partisan, would say. Given undeniable, recorded events, there are reasonable bases for suspecting his acuity. Let's remove the doubts.
President Biden needs to fire some people.