SUPERTHREAD: 2020 United States Elections

[Coop D'etat]

So maybe this is me putting my pants on my head but is there a logic in a Biden/Sanders ticket? Assuming they can find common enough ground on policy and more importantly at least try to retain party solidarity...

The main point of Biden's VP pick is to elevate an heir apparent out of the field and to throw a bone to loyal demographics. Sanders accomplishes neither, both he and Biden are pushing at the edges of how old you can get away with being when you're running and shouldn't be running again.

Besides, VP is a useless position if you're out of step with the sitting president, as VP only has the power POTUS delegates. Far less independence than, say Cabinet members.

This is also why Warren isn't a great choice for the job.


The unifying concession Sanders should have been looking for is the one he explicitly got from Biden, a huge amount of imput on the platform. This is the much ignored strength of Biden's low ideology transactionalist approach to politics that he rode to victory. Prizes are on the table for working together.

[The Romulan Republic]

Well, VP is important because the Senate could very easily end up tied, and because VP is basically setting someone up to be the next nominee, but yeah, people demanding Sanders as VP are not getting the point of a VP. Or they're Bernie or Busters looking for an excuse to say Biden isn't reaching out to progressives and stay home/vote third party/vote Trump.

Beyond the obvious concern of picking someone who is prepared/qualified to take over the Presidency if need be, VP is a younger person's post, or it should be, and its also traditionally used in the general election to shore up demographic/geographical weaknesses in your coalition. For Biden, that means some combination of the following:

-Woman (which he's already pledged).
-Younger (likely).
-From the Midwest, South, or Southwest.
-Person of colour.
-To his Left.

Its unlikely they'll tick all those boxes, but the more they tick the better.

Bernie's gotten the first big thing he needs, which is concessions on platform. Not, admittedly, the one his supporters most want, which is Medicare for All, but even there Biden has shifted a bit closer to him. And the shifts on education and minimum wage are very significant.

The other thing is cabinet appointments. I think Biden would do well to announce picks for the top spots at least no later than the convention, and the list should include Warren and at least one person who endorsed Sanders, as well as the usual Centrist party insiders/Wall Street figures. But I'm sure Bernie and Biden are having those discussions, along with their respective survivors.

[The Romulan Republic]

Some more information on Obama's role, and how he helped to negotiate Sanders' withdrawl and endorsement of Biden:

https://nytimes.com/2020/04/14/us/polit ... imary.html

Over the past year, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and former President Barack Obama practiced a political distancing of sorts, with Mr. Obama maintaining a posture of public neutrality in the Democratic primaries, offering counsel to any candidate who called (most did), and Mr. Biden saying he wanted to win on his own.

But with calibrated stealth, Mr. Obama has been considerably more engaged in the campaign’s denouement than has been previously revealed, even before he endorsed Mr. Biden on Tuesday.

For months, Mr. Obama had kept in close contact with senior party officials, in hopes of preventing a repeat of the protracted and nasty 2016 primary race.

Then, in the weeks after it became clear that Mr. Biden was the party’s near-certain nominee, Mr. Obama — telling a friend he needed to “accelerate the endgame” — had at least four long conversations with his former vice president’s remaining rival, Senator Bernie Sanders. Mr. Obama’s efforts to ease the senator out of the race played a significant role in Mr. Sanders’s decision to end his bid and endorse Mr. Biden, according to people close to the Vermont independent.

By that time, Mr. Biden and Mr. Obama had already begun hashing out the thorny questions of how, when and where to deploy a former president thrust into an unfamiliar role as his sidekick’s sidekick.

How to proceed is a negotiation between friends, but a delicate one. The terms of the reunion, however welcome, are complicated by an intermingling of political and personal issues, according to interviews with a dozen people close to both men who spoke mostly on the condition of anonymity.

Mr. Biden’s team knew better than to ask Mr. Obama for his overt support during the primary campaign. But they felt he might have done more to spare them a few tribulations, and were incensed that some former Obama advisers, especially David Axelrod, repeatedly questioned Mr. Biden’s viability. When Naomi Biden, the candidate’s granddaughter, took to Twitter in February to describe the former Obama aide as “a jerk with a microphone,” cheering could be heard at the campaign’s headquarters in Philadelphia, according to a person who was present. (Mr. Axelrod has said he considers himself an impartial observer.)

Party officials were more direct, prodding Mr. Obama to be more active behind the scenes, especially after Mr. Biden had begun his comeback by winning the South Carolina primary. But the former president, often communicating through Eric Schultz, a political aide who has also served as a bridge to the Biden campaign, insisted that his best use would be as a passive peacemaker.

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“He kept his powder dry, and that gave him credibility, which made all the difference,” said Tom Perez, the Democratic National Committee chairman, who served as labor secretary under Mr. Obama.

Now, with the primary campaign over, Mr. Biden and his aides are eager to deploy the former president as quickly as possible, especially on fund-raising, as they race to compete with President Trump’s small-donor juggernaut.

“Biden has obviously achieved something huge here on his own, but the president is a surrogate unlike anyone else anyone can bring to bear — I mean, who has Trump got?” said Joel Benenson, Mr. Obama’s longtime pollster and a top adviser to Hillary Clinton in 2016. “Getting to the point where he can get Obama involved, you know, that’s a big deal.”

Mr. Obama is open to whatever the campaign suggests, according to several people familiar with his thinking. But he continues to counsel caution, the better to preserve his political capital and to avoid the perception that he is somehow coming in to rescue Mr. Biden.

A more immediate matter is the logistical challenge of taking on a sitting president during a pandemic and an economic collapse. And Mr. Obama, like Mr. Trump, is less adept at recording direct-to-camera pitches than at delivering rousing speeches before live crowds, a scenario that social-distancing restrictions have made impossible for the foreseeable future.

The Obama endorsement came in a sober but impassioned 12-minute endorsement video released Tuesday morning. “I’m so proud to endorse Joe Biden for president of the United States,” Mr. Obama said, his face shot in close-up. “I believe Joe has all the qualities we need in a president right now.”

Mr. Obama offered a preview of how he plans to pitch Mr. Biden, less as a traditional stand-alone candidate than as the standard-bearer for a larger Democratic coalition bound by decency and competence. And after drawing Mr. Sanders into that fold, calling him “an American original, a man who has devoted his life to giving voice to working people’s hopes,” he concluded the video with: “Join us. Join Joe.”

The camps are still working out the details of engaging Mr. Obama in fund-raising. But David Plouffe, who remains Mr. Obama’s most trusted political adviser, has offered to pitch in, and plans to participate in several virtual Biden fund-raisers that could be a dry run for Mr. Obama’s participation, according to people briefed on the plans.

Mr. Biden’s emergence as the Democrats’ presumptive nominee relatively early in the political calendar is unwelcome news to Mr. Trump, his bluster notwithstanding, several of the president’s advisers said. Last Thursday, after trying to goad an anti-Biden revolt among Sanders supporters, the president suggested dark motives for Mr. Obama’s hesitancy in endorsing Mr. Biden.

“You know what? I’ll tell you, it does amaze me that President Obama hasn’t supported Sleepy Joe,” Mr. Trump said at a White House coronavirus briefing, in between questions about his administration’s response to the crisis. “It just hasn’t happened. When is it going to happen? When is it going to happen? Why isn’t he? He knows something that you don’t know, that I think I know, but you don’t know. So it’ll be interesting.”

That claim was Trumpian misdirection. Mr. Obama timed his video to follow Mr. Sanders’s endorsement on Monday.

But the Biden-Obama relationship, which deepened from a congenial partnership into a real friendship in 2015, when the president consoled Mr. Biden during his son Beau’s illness and death, is not without complications.

Mr. Biden is grateful for Mr. Obama’s friendship but increasingly proud of his historic comeback. When news reports surfaced that Mr. Obama had called to congratulate Mr. Biden on his victory in South Carolina, the candidate made it clear to his staff that while his connection to Mr. Obama played a role in delivering African-American voters, Mr. Obama “had not lifted a finger” on his behalf, according to a senior Democrat with knowledge of his remarks.

Well, maybe a pinkie. Last year, Mr. Obama consulted with Mr. Biden’s team on campaign strategy, and he bucked up Mr. Biden after his loss in the Iowa caucuses. In a private dinner last fall with members of the liberal Democracy Alliance, Mr. Obama offered thinly veiled criticism of Mr. Sanders’s “revolutionary” policies and opined that voters wanted change, not to “tear down the system.”

Mr. Obama is relieved that the Democratic contest is over early, but he had other plans for 2020 — hoping to finish, publish and promote his White House memoirs before the campaign kicked into high gear.

He had intended to engage publicly only after the convention (now scheduled for August, at the earliest), in line with his fall barnstorming campaign on behalf of Mrs. Clinton in 2016 and congressional candidates in 2018. He resisted calls by some Democratic officials earlier this year to intervene on Mr. Biden’s behalf in the wake of Mr. Sanders’s victory in the Nevada caucuses, arguing that he did not want to “thumb the scale” for his friend.

Nonetheless, he was becoming more agitated by the state of the race as Mr. Sanders surged, and Mr. Biden slumped. By late February, he was telling people in his orbit that he thought Mr. Biden’s campaign had an alarming lack of “infrastructure” and shared his doubts about Mr. Biden’s belief that he could win the nomination after losing Iowa and New Hampshire.

Democratic officials say Mr. Obama had no direct role in the campaign shake-up that happened soon after. But people with knowledge of the situation say he made it clear that he supported Mr. Biden’s decision to name a new campaign manager, Jennifer O’Malley Dillon, a former Obama campaign field organizing specialist, and to move another Obama veteran, the former White House communications director Anita Dunn, into a more powerful role.

Mr. Obama did not directly encourage Mr. Sanders’s rivals to endorse Mr. Biden ahead of the decisive Super Tuesday primaries. But he did tell Pete Buttigieg, a moderate, that he would never have more leverage than on the day that he was quitting the race — and the former South Bend mayor soon joined the avalanche of former candidates backing Mr. Biden.

Mr. Sanders, who in 2016 accused the Democratic establishment of conspiring to support Mrs. Clinton, took note of all these moves, but he has made no such charges against Mr. Obama.

In fact, one of his campaign advisers, speaking on the condition of anonymity in the wake of last month’s string of Sanders defeats, said the senator was grateful for Mr. Obama’s neutrality throughout the campaign. And Mr. Sanders, who has denied reports that he contemplated a primary challenge to Mr. Obama in 2012, had made a point of reaching out to the former president several times in recent months to update him on the progress of his campaign.

Before those conversations, the two men had a polite but frosty relationship, and some of their private exchanges over the years devolved into policy debates, former aides said. But Mr. Obama saw Mr. Sanders’s overture as an opening to assume the peacemaker’s role he believed himself best suited to play.

Since leaving office, Mr. Obama has ruminated about what he could have done differently, both as president and as a campaign surrogate for Mrs. Clinton, to stop Mr. Trump’s ascent, and concluded that he needed to do more to repair the damage from party infighting.

“His true north is winning back the White House, period,” said Valerie Jarrett, a close friend and adviser to the former president, in a phone interview last month. Mr. Obama, she added, would “have backed any nominee, any of them, with the same conviction.”

Mr. Sanders is much closer personally to Mr. Biden despite their political differences, but Mr. Obama, unlike Mr. Biden, remains a trusted figure to many Sanders supporters, so much so that his campaign released an ad that featured a patchwork of clips with Mr. Obama lavishing praise on Mr. Sanders.

In the end, Mr. Sanders concluded that negotiating a détente through the former president would ease the blow of his withdrawal on his base. Whether Mr. Obama’s involvement will ultimately draw Sanders voters to support Mr. Biden’s candidacy remains an open question, and some supporters, including Mr. Sanders's own campaign press secretary, say they won’t.

In late March, Mr. Obama reached out to Mr. Sanders. The two men would talk at least three more times, with the former president reassuring Mr. Sanders that he had already accomplished much of what he had set out to do, moving the party — and Mr. Biden — substantially to the left, according to two people with knowledge of their interactions.

But, the people said, he mostly listened to Mr. Sanders, who was in a reflective mood, speaking candidly about his post-campaign plans and feelings about the race, the kind of conversation the two men had never had before.

Mr. Sanders, for his part, is intent on protecting his open line of communication with the former president. When asked for a readout during an interview on MSNBC shortly after dropping out last week, he replied, “They’re private conversations,” waving a don’t-even-ask-me-about-it hand at the camera.

The interviewer, Chris Hayes, plowed ahead: “Well, can I ask about your conversations with Vice President Biden?”

“Oh, yes,” Mr. Sanders answered, with a laugh.

I'll say this for Obama- while I regard him as a mediocre President overall, he's an excellent campaigner.

[The Romulan Republic]

Well, here's another way to undermine the election and suppress mail votes: let the postal service run out of money.

https://vox.com/2020/4/12/21/21/8151/us ... azon-trump

The US Postal Service, like many American businesses, is suffering from sharply declining demand due to the coronavirus crisis: Last week, members of Congress were informed that it will “run out of cash” in September without federal assistance.

Congressional Democrats have largely been amenable to this request, adding USPS funding to their list of priorities for a fourth coronavirus relief bill.

Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, remain narrowly focused on putting more money into the Paycheck Protection Program for small businesses — and are opposed to broadening the scope of what will be considered in the next bill.

But the Trump administration also appears to be specifically hostile to the idea of a Postal Service bailout. Its distaste for a postal bailout merges ideological conservatives’ generic preference for postal privatization with the president’s hang-up about the idea that the USPS is giving Amazon a sweetheart deal on shipping.

In general, there are a lot of complexities to the long-term postal policy picture in the United States, but the immediate crisis is actually pretty simple: Mail volumes are plunging, taking USPS revenue down with them. And unless something is done relatively quickly to make up for those lost revenues, it’s hard to see how significant layoffs and service reductions can be avoided.

The Postal Service’s long-term problem
The Postal Service has been organized in several different ways across American history, but its modern paradigm, dating from the 1970s, dictates that the USPS is supposed to be a self-funded, independently operating public sector entity.

And at the core of that entity is a two-sided bargain. On the one hand, the Postal Service gets a monopoly on the provision of daily mail services. On the other hand, the Postal Service undertakes a series of public service obligations that a private company would not provide — most notably, daily mail delivery and flat postage rates regardless of where you live.

But the volume of first-class mail — the source of the lion’s share of USPS revenue and the cornerstone of both its monopoly and its universal service obligations — peaked in 2001 at 104 billion pieces of mail. Decline has been fairly steady since then, falling to just 55 billion pieces in 2019. The cost of meeting USPS’s basic service obligations, by contrast, has essentially remained steady, creating an obvious financial problem.

There’s little reason to think the decline of paper mail will reverse in the future, so one possible response would be to cut costs by closing post offices, canceling Saturday delivery, and laying off workers. Congress has generally opposed that, pushing the postal service to instead find new sources of revenue such as its parcel delivery business in which it competes with UPS, Federal Express, and other private companies.

A few other solutions have been floated, but none have taken hold. For instance, many people on the left would like to see laws changed to allow USPS to begin offering banking services to both increase revenue and create a public option that would compete with private banks. On the right, the general preference is to privatize postal services (which is what’s largely happened in Europe) and end the mix of special monopolies and special service obligations that currently governs postage.

Back in 2006, a lame-duck Republican Congress turned up the pressure on privatization by forcing the Postal Service to prefund decades of pension and retiree health costs through investments in low-yield government bonds. That onerous obligation made USPS technically insolvent before the coronavirus hit. But rather than achieving its apparent intended result of spurring privatization, in practice it mostly served to give privatization opponents something to complain about rather than addressing the underlying decline in USPS’s business model. Along the way, however, USPS did find a promising new line of business as a contractor delivering Amazon packages.

And while some major tech CEOs, like Apple’s Tim Cook, have gone out of their way to kiss up to Trump since he became president, Bezos largely hasn’t. Instead, Amazon’s top spokesperson is Jay Carney, who served as White House press secretary under President Barack Obama and who has occasionally offered harsh criticisms of the Trump administration on a wide range of grounds.

Bezos also owns the Washington Post, and Trump has made no secret of his desire to use the power of the government to punish Amazon financially unless the Post changes its coverage of him. Facebook seems to have paid attention to this message and deliberately altered its editorial practices to try to ensure more favorable regulatory treatment from the Trump administration. The Post, which is run by professional journalists with ethics, has refused to do the same. Adding to the tension between the parties is the fact there’s currently litigation underway exploring allegations that Trump’s highly irregular cancellation of a major military contract with Amazon was motivated by partisan payback.

In the context of that feud, Trump has pushed the Postal Service to start raising the prices it charges Amazon.

New York magazine’s Josh Barro has dug into the substance of the parcel pricing controversy and finds that Trump’s contention that the Postal Service could improve its financial situation by doubling what it charges Amazon is false. The key issue is that because of USPS’s universal service obligations, it can’t drastically reduce its real estate footprint or the number of trucks it sends driving around the country. The reason it gives Amazon good rates is that the facilities it’s using would otherwise be half-empty. Raising prices without making any other operational changes could lead to Amazon looking elsewhere for delivery services, which would leave the post office in even more desperate financial circumstances.

What’s true, however, is that if USPS were privatized and its special obligations went away, then it would be possible — and profit-maximizing — for the hypothetical future USPS to charge Amazon higher rates. In other words, the long-standing conservative goal of postal privatization aligns well with Trump’s personal agenda of punishing the Washington Post. But it’s not true that soaking Amazon would, per se, provide the Postal Service with a way out of its financial problems.

Democrats want to save the Postal Service
USPS consistently rates as the most popular government agency. It employs a lot of unionized workers, and its costliest business practices help out rural communities that are given disproportionate weight in the political process.

Therefore, Democrats’ inclination for a while now has been to say that the federal government should either just directly subsidize the Postal Service or else help them out by changing the rules to let USPS get into more lines of business like banking.

The sharp crisis induced by the coronavirus is compelling USPS to ask openly for government support, with House Democrats describing a proposal for $25 billion in operating subsidies, $25 billion in capital grants for modernization, and $25 billion in guaranteed loans from the Treasury.

Trump, by contrast, has emphasized his incorrect ideas about Amazon as a solution that would somehow simultaneously address both the short-term and long-term issues.

“They have to raise the prices to these companies that walk in and drop thousands of packages on the floor of the post office and say, ‘Deliver it,’” he said at a press conference last week. “And if they’d raise the prices by actually a lot, then you’d find out that the post office could make money or break even. But they don’t do that. And I’m trying to figure out why.”

None of that is true, and whether or not Amazon gets charged higher prices, the agency is going to go bust because people aren’t sending enough mail.

Of all the things the federal government could conceivably spend money on, subsidizing six-day-a-week delivery of paper mail has never struck me personally as a particularly compelling value proposition. But given USPS’s popularity with the public, it’s also not really clear why spending money on this would be a big problem other than a principled opposition to having the government do anything at all.

In the immediate circumstances of a collapsing national economy that coincides with a census, a huge surge in people’s dependence on delivery services, and the potential need to convert the entire fall election to vote-by-mail, laying off tons of postal workers seems obviously unhelpful. But unless Congress can reach some sort of deal, that’s the situation they’ll be facing by late summer.

Yup, without more funding the US Postal Service is broke by September, and have to lay off large numbers of employees. I don't think we need to place bets on whether the money to save it will get past Moscow Mitch's Senate and a Trump veto.

Edit: link didn't work, used a different article.

[The Romulan Republic]

Seriously, mail your vote as EARLY AS POSSIBLE. This is always true, but especially this year, given the likely slowdowns.

[The Romulan Republic]

Some more info on how Bernie plans to be involved in the campaign:

https://businessinsider.com/bernie-sand ... den-2020-4

Sen. Bernie Sanders, who dropped out of the 2020 presidential race last Wednesday, raised the most money in the Democratic field — by a lot.

But while the Vermont lawmaker this week endorsed former Vice President Joe Biden, who raised less than half of what Sanders did this cycle, he told The Wall Street Journal on Tuesday that he doesn't have plans to fundraise for the presumptive nominee.

During a livestreamed conversation on Tuesday with rapper Cardi B, Sanders said he plans to "organize" and "educate" his supporters, encourage Americans to vote for Biden, and campaign in-person for the nominee when the coronavirus pandemic subsides.

"We're going to use our live streaming capabilities to bring people together, to organize, to educate," he said.

But Sanders says he'll leverage his powerful network of grassroots donors for down-ballot candidates running for Congress and local office. He didn't rule out the possibility of fundraising for Biden or the Democratic Party in the future.

"Right now, what we are planning to do is to activate our lists to elect progressive members of the Congress and defend members of the state legislatures around the country and lower-ballot candidates, whether it's school board or city council, who are running progressive campaigns," Sanders told The Journal.

A month ago, Sanders halted his campaign fundraising efforts and asked his supporters to give their money to groups aiding victims of the pandemic. Meanwhile, President Donald Trump and the Republican Party have set new records in fundraising, raking in over $212 million in the first quarter of this year.

The long-time senator is already working to push Biden to the left on a host of issues. The two have established six task forces made up of both progressives and moderate Democrats with the aim of designing policy proposals to address big issues, including climate change.

"It is no secret that Joe Biden and I have disagreements on a number of issues, and what we thought would be a good idea is to bring together proponents from his camp and proponents from my camp to see how we can kind of unify the party's ideological wings and move forward," Sanders told The Journal.

I'm sure that there will be much whinging from the Usual Suspects about how Sanders isn't doing enough to help Biden. I'm also sure that he and Biden negotiated and are continuing to negotiate carefully what sort of role Sanders will play. While Bernie's fundraising machine would be useful to Biden, it'll also be very useful for downballot races- which we'll need to win if Biden wants to be able to actually do anything as President except pass executive orders that then get overturned. It also may be that Bernie will have an easier time getting the more radical of his supporters to back downballot progressive races than to donate to Biden. Better they be encouraged to donate downballot than not donate at all.

Of course, Bernie is also no doubt trying to retain a bit of leverage- exactly how much he does directly for the Biden campaign, beyond withdrawing and endorsing him, will depend on the results of their task forces' meetings (and maybe Joe's cabinet picks).

I'm skeptical as to how much in-person campaigning either of them can or should be doing. I'd rather neither Bernie or Biden risk their lives or others by going to rallies over the summer, even if COVID does die down a bit then.

[FireNexus]

Watching the crowd turn on Bernie the past few days has been really funny for me.

But, credit where it is due. Bernie dropped at a reasonable point and will probably extract more policy concessions than if he’d taken it to the wall.

[FireNexus]

And I think, by the way, this is the kind of behavior from Bernie that warrants being rewarded with policy concessions and reaching out. I don’t think it will matter to the crowd, but it will teach reasonable people who support Sanders that the roses’ way is not actually useful.

[The Romulan Republic]

I think that the overriding theme of this primary has been "stop Trump at all costs", and that's going to remain the case. There will be a few malcontents, but most people, on both sides of the moderate/progressive split, don't want another 2016. It was reflected in the civil tone of the early debates, it drove Biden's victory, the belief (right or wrong) that he was the safe choice to stop Trump, even for many who agreed with Bernie on policy. It probably influenced Bernie to get out now, though COVID likely played a role too. And its probably making Biden more willing to reach out to Sanders.

[The Romulan Republic]

Annnd, Warren's endorsed.

[Darth Yan]

Watching the crowd turn on Bernie the past few days has been really funny for me.

But, credit where it is due. Bernie dropped at a reasonable point and will probably extract more policy concessions than if he’d taken it to the wall.

Most of Bernie’s supporters have been far more reasonable than vice versa

[The Romulan Republic]

Watching the crowd turn on Bernie the past few days has been really funny for me.

But, credit where it is due. Bernie dropped at a reasonable point and will probably extract more policy concessions than if he’d taken it to the wall.

Most of Bernie’s supporters have been far more reasonable than vice versa

True, but the Bernie or Busters tend to get all the attention (probably because a lot of them are actually Russian bots or troll farms).

There's a reason I hate them even more than the open Trumpers at times- I see them as piggybacking on Sanders' movement in order to undermine the Democrats, then jumping ship and leaving the rest of us with the blame. Give me an honest enemy over a turncoat wearing our colours.

[FireNexus]

There is a reason I talked about the rose emojis and not “Bernie Supporters” here. There are Bernie supporters who are being reasonable, and there are rose types who are not. My scorn is specifically for the rose types.

Basically, the Bernie fandom is splitting into the truly toxic and the partially toxic by their association with those types. I would not be so quick to blame all that toxicity on bots, however, when the campaign’s national press secretary is one of the former.

[The Romulan Republic]

AOC has yet to endorse, but says she is in talks with Biden's team:

https://politico.com/news/2020/04/15/ao ... ist-187678

Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Wednesday called for Joe Biden, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, to shift leftward on four key policy issues in a bid to earn the trust of his party’s progressive wing.

“There are very real, tangible areas where Democrats even fell short perhaps during the Obama administration that I think I would like for us to have a plan to improve,” the New York Democrat told POLITICO Playbook in a virtual interview — citing federal treatment of Puerto Rico, immigration, health care and climate change.

On the subject of Biden’s health care proposals, Ocasio-Cortez said his support for lowering Medicare’s eligibility age to 60 is not “going to be enough for us,” adding that the party is “going to have to pursue a much more ambitious health care policy.”

Ocasio-Cortez also elaborated on Biden’s stance toward climate change, characterizing his preferred methods for combating the threat from rising global temperatures as inadequate.

“I don’t think that the vice president has a climate change policy that is sufficient right now,” she said, “and I’d like to see us really work on that.”

The remarks from the freshman lawmaker, while largely critical of Biden’s platform, seemed ultimately aimed at bridging intraparty divides through securing certain ideological concessions from the former vice president.

Biden, who is viewed skeptically by some liberal Democrats, has taken significant steps to consolidate broad party backing in recent days, rolling out successive endorsements from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, President Barack Obama and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

But Ocasio-Cortez has yet to formally throw her weight behind Biden, and tensions between the two politicians — one a pillar of the party’s more moderate establishment, the other a superstar of its progressive grassroots — intensified earlier this week.

In an interview with The New York Times published Monday, Ocasio-Cortez said she had not been contacted by the Biden campaign and predicted unification among the party’s various factions would not come easily.

But Wednesday, the congresswoman revealed that her staff was now “having conversations with Biden’s team” in an effort “to figure out what some of these policy conversations will [be] looking like” as the race for the White House moves forward.

“You know, I would love to see the vice president clarify and deepen his policy stances on certain issues. But aside from that, you know, I think it’s incredibly important that we support the Democratic nominee in November,” Ocasio-Cortez said, stopping short of explicitly endorsing Biden’s candidacy.

The congresswoman also offered advice on the most important decision Biden will make in the coming weeks, casting his choice of vice presidential nominee as another litmus test of the candidate’s progressive credentials.

Although Ocasio-Cortez said she was heartened by Biden’s pledge to name a female running mate and his openness to a woman of color being on the Democratic ticket, she argued that “what’s really important is not only just that woman’s identity, in terms of gender and cultural terms, but ... who that woman is and [what] her stance is.”

“There is a wide spectrum, politically, of women of color. There’s some that are very conservative, in terms of Democratic context, and there’s some that are more progressive,” she said.

Just as Obama selected Biden as his running mate in 2008 partly because “Biden was more conservative than Obama at that time,” Ocasio-Cortez said, it would be “encouraging if Biden also picked someone who was a little bit more progressive, that he knows may push him.”

Hope she doesn't drag her heels too long, but I'm really glad she mentioned Puerto Rico there. The treatment of Puerto Rico (and the other territories) is simply appalling, outright second class citizenship (and the kind of "taxation without representation" that was used as a justification for the Revolution).

[Knife]

More demographics. Old versus new, as well as who funds the Dems now. Biden is plugged in and Sanders is definitely not. That said, I would not mind one bit, though some of the Dem party really wants a woman so Biden/Sanders will alienate them. The Dems painted themselves into a corner with this.

[The Romulan Republic]

More demographics. Old versus new, as well as who funds the Dems now. Biden is plugged in and Sanders is definitely not. That said, I would not mind one bit, though some of the Dem party really wants a woman so Biden/Sanders will alienate them. The Dems painted themselves into a corner with this.

There is nothing unreasonable about wanting over half the nation's population represented on the ticket, especially when a lot of women are still justifiably deeply frustrated over the fact that the first viable female candidate for the Presidency lost to a man who bragged about grabbing them by the pussy. Not to mention Joe Biden's own issues with women, to put it mildly. And the fact that female voters switching from R to D helped power the Blue Wave two years ago.

The Democrats didn't "paint themselves into a corner"- unless you think that picking a woman for VP and picking a good VP are mutually exclusive. I trust that's not your intent.

As to Sanders, and I say this as a supporter, he would have been a poor choice regardless of whether Biden picks a woman. He needs someone younger, and from a different region of the country.

[Ralin]

Wouldn't a ticket that puts Sanders one heartbeat away from the presidency be a highly effective way to ensure people who think he's the socialist messiah don't go Bernie or Bust?

[The Romulan Republic]

Wouldn't a ticket that puts Sanders one heartbeat away from the presidency be a highly effective way to ensure people who think he's the socialist messiah don't go Bernie or Bust?

It would.

Then again, some of them would probably scream that he'd sold out and still not vote for Biden.

The downsides are pretty big though, regardless.

[Ralin]

I mean, what consequences? Are blacks or Hispanics (who heavily favored either Biden or Sanders going in) going to turn their noses up at them if they form another two white men ticket? Are there really a significant number of women who weren't put off by Biden's unwelcome handsy-ness and rape accusation (and a decent number of dumbass comments by Sanders on things like abortion over the years for that matter) who will treat not getting a female VP as their line in the sand?

[The Romulan Republic]

I mean, what consequences? Are blacks or Hispanics (who heavily favored either Biden or Sanders going in) going to turn their noses up at them if they form another two white men ticket? Are there really a significant number of women who weren't put off by Biden's unwelcome handsy-ness and rape accusation (and a decent number of dumbass comments by Sanders on things like abortion over the years for that matter) who will treat not getting a female VP as their line in the sand?

The ones I already mentioned.

1. He's older than Biden.

2. He doesn't help bolster Biden in any key state or region.

Far more important is where Biden stands on policy, where he's already given Bernie a lot, and I'll also be taking a close look at his cabinet picks.

I also think that frankly the more than half of the country without a dick between their legs should be represented on the ticket. I'd rather a more progressive woman than whoever Biden is likely to end up picking, but I've got zero problem with Biden pledging to put a woman on the ticket. It might help a little with turnout, and if it doesn't, its still the right thing to do. Especially as whoever he picks is likely the favorite for nominee next time around, which means that its a big step toward finally having a woman President (in fact, if AOC runs in four or eight years, we could end up with both wings of the party behind a female candidate, making a female nominee almost certain).

[bilateralrope]

I've got two questions regarding the possibility of Bernie becoming VP:

- Would he have more capability to promote his agenda as VP or in the senate seat he currently holds ?
- Who is likely to take his senate seat if he vacates it to be VP ?

[The Romulan Republic]

I've got two questions regarding the possibility of Bernie becoming VP:

- Would he have more capability to promote his agenda as VP or in the senate seat he currently holds ?
- Who is likely to take his senate seat if he vacates it to be VP ?

Yeah, this is a really good point. Vermont currently has a Republican governor, who could name a replacement until a special election.

So, is having Bernie in the VP spot (where he'll realistically be too old for a future Presidential run) be worth replacing the most Left wing Senator with a Republican appointment? I think not.

Remember, other than breaking Senate ties (where any VP is likely to just vote with the Democrats), and setting someone up for a future Presidential run (not plausible for Bernie), a VP has exactly as much power as the President chooses to give them. In short, almost everything Bernie could gain by being VP he can gain anyway by negotiating his way into the role of a policy advisor to the Biden campaign, without having to surrender the country's sole Socialist Senate seat to the Republicans.

Edit: In fact, on that basis alone, picking Sanders for VP would be bordering on insanity. Ditto Warren (she's likewise in a blue state with an R governor). There are plenty of good VP picks that don't require ceding a Senate seat in a year when control of the Senate could easily come down to a single seat.

[The Romulan Republic]

A major Muslim group just endorsed Biden:

https://politico.com/news/2020/04/16/to ... den-190136

Bernie says opposing Biden is "irresponsible":

https://apnews.com/a1bfb62e37fe34e09ff123a58a1329fa

He's also supposedly said that the rape allegations against Biden are relevant, but as I cannot find a source for that quote other than Fox, take it with a big grain of salt.

Speaking of, Fox is has really started to pick up on the rape allegations, so its likely that it will be one of the main talking points against Biden in the election, and a source of endless Whataboutism to defend Republican rapists and claim that "Democrats are the REAL rapists". Not that Fox (the network of Roger Ailes and Bill O'Riley) actually cares about abuse of women, of course. Its just a tool to help reelect the biggest rapist of all.

Guess the Reich has found its replacement for Bill.

They're also trying to argue that Bernie didn't really concede to Biden because he's still on the primary ballots. Just to remind everyone who's really pushing Bernie or Bust, and why (ie, reelect Trump).

[Ralin]

Fair point on the Senate bit

I also think that frankly the more than half of the country without a dick between their legs should be represented on the ticket. I'd rather a more progressive woman than whoever Biden is likely to end up picking, but I've got zero problem with Biden pledging to put a woman on the ticket.

Nominating Biden has shown that the Democratic Party doesn't give a shit about women or sexual assault in general. How much is 'representation' worth here when whichever woman he goes with is someone who's clearly willing to disregard that? Palin was a woman too, after all.

[The Romulan Republic]

Fair point on the Senate bit

I also think that frankly the more than half of the country without a dick between their legs should be represented on the ticket. I'd rather a more progressive woman than whoever Biden is likely to end up picking, but I've got zero problem with Biden pledging to put a woman on the ticket.

Nominating Biden has shown that the Democratic Party doesn't give a shit about women or sexual assault in general. How much is 'representation' worth here when whichever woman he goes with is someone who's clearly willing to disregard that? Palin was a woman too, after all.

I suppose how much its worth is ultimately up to female voters to judge.