2016 Democratic US Presidential Candidates

Ahh yes super delegates - LONG LIVE USA Democracy.


:rofl:

In today’s Boston Globe, Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman told reporter Annie Linskey, “there is no question that there will be women” on their list of potential vice presidential candidates.

For most of the campaign, it appeared Clinton would counter the historic nature of her own candidacy with a relatively ordinary political pick for the No. 2. spot, or she could select a Hispanic man, perhaps Julian Castro or Tom Perez, as her running mate.

But taking Clinton’s campaign chairman John Podesta at his word, what women could be on Clinton’s list? The list of Democratic women who have served as a governor or US Senator is not that long. There are just three Democratic women governors. One of them, New Hampshire’s Maggie Hassan, is running for US Senate this year. The other two are serving in their first term.

It is possible that Clinton could pick a business executive who has no background in politics (Sheryl Sandberg?). But that could prompt questions about her running mate’s preparedness and experience -- neutralizing that issue somewhat if she wants to criticize Donald Trump for the same.

All that said, here are the top five women Clinton could choose as her running mate, ranked:

1. Elizabeth Warren: The Massachusetts Senator can uniquely fuse the Sanders wing of the party with the Clinton wing. But as Linskey points out in the Globe, questions remain whether Warren even supports Clinton and if she would accept the offer to be on the ticket.

2. Janet Napolitano: Napolitano not only served as a popular governor of Arizona, but she also has experience as the secretary of the US Department of Homeland Security. She is currently the president of the University of California system. With Trump angering hispanic voters, some have wondered if her home state of Arizona could be in play as a swing state in 2016.


3. Jeanne Shaheen: She is the first female to serve as a governor and US Senator in the nation’s history. She is also close to the Clinton family and is the only politician on this list who comes from a true swing state -- even if New Hampshire only has four electoral votes.

4. Amy Klobuchar: The US senator from Minnesota started out as a legal assistant to another Vice President: Walter Mondale. After serving as county attorney she became the first woman from her state to be elected to the US Senate. If she is not on the ticket, the drumbeat will only get louder to put Klobuchar on the US Supreme Court some day.

5. Patty Murray: The US senator from Washington rose up through the highest level of American politics by starting out at the school board. She is liked among her colleagues and is a good fundraiser. The problem: She is running for re-election this year.

Wildcard picks: Maine Republicans Olympia Snowe or Susan Collins

https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/pol...EPO/story.html

^
interesting, but i don't think she'll take the chance.

why potentially alienate the few straight, white males over 50 who are considering voting for her.

i think it has to be a guy...and likely a hispanic....i'd put a small wager on tom perez.

her cabinet will be chock full of women, though.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by raycarey

her cabinet will be chock full of women, though.

---

Hardly a surprise for a lezza to do that.

The is long so you'll have to open the link to read the entire thing.

https://medium.com/@robinalperstein/...699#.agx4njqcj

On Becoming Anti-Bernie

"I started out liking Bernie Sanders, though I leaned slightly toward Hillary Clinton. Yet I’ve come to the point where I can barely stand his face, and I just want him to stop jabbing his finger as he brays the same slogans in every single venue, over and over. How did I get to this point, especially as someone who had reservations about Clinton and who is thrilled that Sanders has been able to unlock a thirst for liberal policy within the electorate, in a way that I haven’t seen in my adult life, and in a way that I hope may change the landscape of what is possible?

It’s been a gradual process. Here’s how it happened, with the warning that this post is not a comparative assessment of the two candidates or of their campaign platforms; I’m well aware that Sanders has strengths and Clinton has weaknesses, and I’m not trying to persuade anyone here to vote for her over him; what I’m trying to explain is how and why I have come to dislike him so — even though of course I’ll vote for him in the general (and even campaign for him) if I have to:

First, I researched. I went to his website, I went to Govtrack.us, I went to other sites examining his record to see how it squared up with his rhetoric. I tried to find unbiased articles assessing his tax policy, looking at how he would fund single payer (and what he meant by that) as well as “free college” and other promises he made. I looked at analyses on left-leaning blogs that have long advocated for universal health care to see what they thought, sites I respect and whose authors I have relied on for years for their basic objectivity within their admitted points of view. And I saw none who believed Sanders’ numbers added up.

When I saw that the estimates were based on the assumption that the U.S. economy would have an average growth at a 5% rate over his term, that was it for me. And the reason is this: when Jeb! announced he was running for President, he declared that his plan would result in a 4% economic growth rate — and the other GOP presidential contenders quickly followed suit. The Republican candidates’ claims that they “would” do this had been derided on all the same left-leaning blog sites I was now looking at to help assess Sanders. The 4% assertion had been dismissed as magical thinking — or in more straightforward terms, pulled out of Bush’s ass. There was no precedent for a sustained growth rate that high within the last 60 years; commentators pointed out that Reagan had achieved 4% twice in eight years, and Bill Clinton, five times, but 4% growth four years running? Never happened in recent memory — and that was in better economic environments. Sanders’ 5% number was even more magical than Jeb!’s. And so the entire basis of Sanders’ promises for (promises I wanted to believe) was an assumption unprecedented in the last half-century. You can’t base a radical re-imagination of the U.S. economy and the imposition of the largest tax increases in U.S. history on made-up numbers. Economist Gerald Friedman weighed in positively on his plan, but that analysis was ripped to shreds by many others, who showed that Sanders’ plan doesn’t add up on its own terms (estimates are something like a $1–2 trillion shortfall even at the 5% growth assumption). So I concluded that the backbone of Sanders’ plan is founded on, functionally, a lie.

That led me to more research. I concluded that the fact that Sanders only got three bills through Congress (two of which were for naming post offices) wasn’t the only meaningful measure, so I looked at the legislation he introduced during his senate career. It turns out that, every year, year after year, he introduced the same legislation to make a point, and no one else ever seems to have signed on to it. To me, this looked like showmanship rather than governance — an exercise designed to highlight his own support for a very progressive agenda. The hard work is to draft a bill that your co-legislators can get behind, in the political climate that exists and in the place where you work. I concluded that Sanders was less interested in actually accomplishing anything than he was in staging protests where he could claim some kind of moral high ground, not interested in getting in the weeds and doing anything to actually achieve his goals within the Congress he worked in. This research put Sanders’ supposedly pristine progressive agenda in perspective: it is very easy to maintain that agenda if you never make the hard choices necessary to get things done. Classic protester — yet handily collecting his $200,000 pay check and his lifetime of benefits while doing little to enact actual progressive policies to improve people’s lives.

I did more research than the above, but the two overarching themes I just described (magical thinking and ideological purity over practicality) seem tied together in terms of what Sanders has to offer the country with respect to governance. Further, those themes reveal a person who, while he has deep convictions about the ills of income inequality (which I wholeheartedly share), seems to be constitutionally incapable or unwilling to undertake the difficult task of actually coming up with workable, meaningful legislation and therefore who, in his own way, actually lacks character. What I started to see, and which seems to be on view more and more as this campaign goes on, is a person and a campaign that is intellectually and actually dishonest, hypocritical and sanctimonious, sexist, unprepared, lazy, cultish, and dangerous — and he has a poor temperament to boot.
Intellectual and actual dishonesty:

The tax plan is not intellectually honest. Using economic assumptions that effectively have no basis in modern historical reality so that you can make promises that are literally impossible to keep — even if you are elected and manage to sweep Congress — is not intellectually honest.
Pretending that these plans could be enacted, without acknowledging the reality of how the legislative body works, is not intellectually honest.

Rejection of compromise is not intellectually honest. Nor is it a workable strategy. It is intellectually dishonest because in the absence of a supermajority, legislation cannot be passed without compromise. As a Congressman, Sanders knows this, and, actually, compromise is not a bad thing. Should 51% of the people impose a radical new agenda on 49% who don’t want it? It makes sense to require compromise and the need for it is baked into the democratic process and our Constitution.

In rejecting compromise as a mark of lack of integrity, or worse, corruption, Sanders accomplishes two deeply disingenuous goals: (i) he sets himself apart from his colleagues in Congress as the only one who is allegedly “true” to his “values,” thereby creating the myth that he is morally superior and incorruptible; and (ii) he turns the necessity of compromise — without which literally nothing can get done in Congress — into a negative, very similar to the Tea Party and hardliners on the far right in Congress, thereby allowing him to transform his failure to compromise and thus his failure to have achieved any workable progressive legislation in 25 years into a “virtue” — a testament to his supposed integrity.

Attacking Hillary Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that her husband signed when she was First Lady is intellectually dishonest. This is so on several grounds. First, his attacks omit that he himself voted for that bill; Clinton supporters have had to bring that up. Second, Sanders keeps attacking Hillary for having on one occasion, two years after the bill was passed, used the term “superpredator”, when she has already apologized for it, said she would not use it today, and has put it in context (which I think makes clear it was not intended as code for race or to apply broadly), and yet he never admits that he used the term “sociopath” when supporting that same bill, nor has he ever apologized for doing so. Instead, he rips out all context and background for that bill, pins the entirety of its consequences on Hillary (who did not vote for it), and omits his own role in voting for it and the reasons why so many people supported it at the time, including him and the Congressional Black Caucus, despite its warts. So he blames Hillary for the draconian sentencing rules that the GOP insisted on in order to pass the bill, contributing to a false narrative he has constructed that Hillary is not actually a liberal".

^ She calls Bernie supporters, "Tea Party liberals" ... :rofl:

Retort to the post about Bernie:

Surprise! Author of viral ?Becoming Anti-Bernie? piece is corporate lawyer who defends hedge funds

"You may have seen this “On Becoming Anti-Bernie” piece, which is going around the internets. It’s one of the top three most popular posts on Medium’s politics section, has 1.4k likes, and over 600 comments. But who is the author? Robin Alperstein? She’s a corporate lawyer who specializes in defending hedge funds but also represents the occasional nanny-abusing, jet-setting, Chilean aristocratic Upper East Side couple".

Open link to read the entire response.

And then there's the troubling prospect of Hillary's foreign policy.
An interesting piece in the New York Times.

...As Hillary Clinton makes another run for president, it can be tempting to view her hard-edged rhetoric about the world less as deeply felt core principle than as calculated political maneuver. But Clinton’s foreign-policy instincts are bred in the bone — grounded in cold realism about human nature and what one aide calls “a textbook view of American exceptionalism.” It set her apart from her rival-turned-boss, Barack Obama, who avoided military entanglements and tried to reconcile Americans to a world in which the United States was no longer the undisputed hegemon. And it will likely set her apart from the Republican candidate she meets in the general election. For all their bluster about bombing the Islamic State into oblivion, neither Donald J. Trump nor Senator Ted Cruz of Texas have demonstrated anywhere near the appetite for military engagement abroad that Clinton has....

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/24/ma...hawk.html?_r=0

Both candidates have serious flaws but either would be a better choice than Trump or Cruz.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Humbert

Both candidates have serious flaws but either would be a better choice than Trump or Cruz.

---

no doubt.

and if you took an anonymous poll of republicans on who is more qualified, hillary would do very well against trump and cruz

Fox are floating ideas for Hillary's VP:

Kasich
Ryan
Ralph Nader

FFS

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by raycarey

and if you took an anonymous poll of republicans on who is more qualified, hillary would do very well against trump and cruz

---

What she has to overcome is the 60% national poll that finds her untrustworthy. Both Trump and Cruz have strong negative polling numbers too so the campaigns will be very negative and the ads run by super pacs on both sides will be nauseating to watch.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Storekeeper

The is long so you'll have to open the link to read the entire thing.

https://medium.com/@robinalperstein/...699#.agx4njqcj

On Becoming Anti-Bernie

"I started out liking Bernie Sanders, though I leaned slightly toward Hillary Clinton. Yet I’ve come to the point where I can barely stand his face, and I just want him to stop jabbing his finger as he brays the same slogans in every single venue, over and over. How did I get to this point, especially as someone who had reservations about Clinton and who is thrilled that Sanders has been able to unlock a thirst for liberal policy within the electorate, in a way that I haven’t seen in my adult life, and in a way that I hope may change the landscape of what is possible?

It’s been a gradual process. Here’s how it happened, with the warning that this post is not a comparative assessment of the two candidates or of their campaign platforms; I’m well aware that Sanders has strengths and Clinton has weaknesses, and I’m not trying to persuade anyone here to vote for her over him; what I’m trying to explain is how and why I have come to dislike him so — even though of course I’ll vote for him in the general (and even campaign for him) if I have to:

First, I researched. I went to his website, I went to Govtrack.us, I went to other sites examining his record to see how it squared up with his rhetoric. I tried to find unbiased articles assessing his tax policy, looking at how he would fund single payer (and what he meant by that) as well as “free college” and other promises he made. I looked at analyses on left-leaning blogs that have long advocated for universal health care to see what they thought, sites I respect and whose authors I have relied on for years for their basic objectivity within their admitted points of view. And I saw none who believed Sanders’ numbers added up.

When I saw that the estimates were based on the assumption that the U.S. economy would have an average growth at a 5% rate over his term, that was it for me. And the reason is this: when Jeb! announced he was running for President, he declared that his plan would result in a 4% economic growth rate — and the other GOP presidential contenders quickly followed suit. The Republican candidates’ claims that they “would” do this had been derided on all the same left-leaning blog sites I was now looking at to help assess Sanders. The 4% assertion had been dismissed as magical thinking — or in more straightforward terms, pulled out of Bush’s ass. There was no precedent for a sustained growth rate that high within the last 60 years; commentators pointed out that Reagan had achieved 4% twice in eight years, and Bill Clinton, five times, but 4% growth four years running? Never happened in recent memory — and that was in better economic environments. Sanders’ 5% number was even more magical than Jeb!’s. And so the entire basis of Sanders’ promises for (promises I wanted to believe) was an assumption unprecedented in the last half-century. You can’t base a radical re-imagination of the U.S. economy and the imposition of the largest tax increases in U.S. history on made-up numbers. Economist Gerald Friedman weighed in positively on his plan, but that analysis was ripped to shreds by many others, who showed that Sanders’ plan doesn’t add up on its own terms (estimates are something like a $1–2 trillion shortfall even at the 5% growth assumption). So I concluded that the backbone of Sanders’ plan is founded on, functionally, a lie.

That led me to more research. I concluded that the fact that Sanders only got three bills through Congress (two of which were for naming post offices) wasn’t the only meaningful measure, so I looked at the legislation he introduced during his senate career. It turns out that, every year, year after year, he introduced the same legislation to make a point, and no one else ever seems to have signed on to it. To me, this looked like showmanship rather than governance — an exercise designed to highlight his own support for a very progressive agenda. The hard work is to draft a bill that your co-legislators can get behind, in the political climate that exists and in the place where you work. I concluded that Sanders was less interested in actually accomplishing anything than he was in staging protests where he could claim some kind of moral high ground, not interested in getting in the weeds and doing anything to actually achieve his goals within the Congress he worked in. This research put Sanders’ supposedly pristine progressive agenda in perspective: it is very easy to maintain that agenda if you never make the hard choices necessary to get things done. Classic protester — yet handily collecting his $200,000 pay check and his lifetime of benefits while doing little to enact actual progressive policies to improve people’s lives.

I did more research than the above, but the two overarching themes I just described (magical thinking and ideological purity over practicality) seem tied together in terms of what Sanders has to offer the country with respect to governance. Further, those themes reveal a person who, while he has deep convictions about the ills of income inequality (which I wholeheartedly share), seems to be constitutionally incapable or unwilling to undertake the difficult task of actually coming up with workable, meaningful legislation and therefore who, in his own way, actually lacks character. What I started to see, and which seems to be on view more and more as this campaign goes on, is a person and a campaign that is intellectually and actually dishonest, hypocritical and sanctimonious, sexist, unprepared, lazy, cultish, and dangerous — and he has a poor temperament to boot.
Intellectual and actual dishonesty:

The tax plan is not intellectually honest. Using economic assumptions that effectively have no basis in modern historical reality so that you can make promises that are literally impossible to keep — even if you are elected and manage to sweep Congress — is not intellectually honest.
Pretending that these plans could be enacted, without acknowledging the reality of how the legislative body works, is not intellectually honest.

Rejection of compromise is not intellectually honest. Nor is it a workable strategy. It is intellectually dishonest because in the absence of a supermajority, legislation cannot be passed without compromise. As a Congressman, Sanders knows this, and, actually, compromise is not a bad thing. Should 51% of the people impose a radical new agenda on 49% who don’t want it? It makes sense to require compromise and the need for it is baked into the democratic process and our Constitution.

In rejecting compromise as a mark of lack of integrity, or worse, corruption, Sanders accomplishes two deeply disingenuous goals: (i) he sets himself apart from his colleagues in Congress as the only one who is allegedly “true” to his “values,” thereby creating the myth that he is morally superior and incorruptible; and (ii) he turns the necessity of compromise — without which literally nothing can get done in Congress — into a negative, very similar to the Tea Party and hardliners on the far right in Congress, thereby allowing him to transform his failure to compromise and thus his failure to have achieved any workable progressive legislation in 25 years into a “virtue” — a testament to his supposed integrity.

Attacking Hillary Clinton for supporting the 1994 crime bill that her husband signed when she was First Lady is intellectually dishonest. This is so on several grounds. First, his attacks omit that he himself voted for that bill; Clinton supporters have had to bring that up. Second, Sanders keeps attacking Hillary for having on one occasion, two years after the bill was passed, used the term “superpredator”, when she has already apologized for it, said she would not use it today, and has put it in context (which I think makes clear it was not intended as code for race or to apply broadly), and yet he never admits that he used the term “sociopath” when supporting that same bill, nor has he ever apologized for doing so. Instead, he rips out all context and background for that bill, pins the entirety of its consequences on Hillary (who did not vote for it), and omits his own role in voting for it and the reasons why so many people supported it at the time, including him and the Congressional Black Caucus, despite its warts. So he blames Hillary for the draconian sentencing rules that the GOP insisted on in order to pass the bill, contributing to a false narrative he has constructed that Hillary is not actually a liberal".

---

Which would make a better president:

One who will do little of he set out to do, but is not an incompetent bloodthirsty war monger and who will continue to expose the true nature of the corrupt political establishment that aligns itself with special interests and despises the ordinary citizen.

Or a coporate whore whose every significant policy enactment, no matter how its dressed up, will serve special interests, but continue to erode the living standards of the ordinary citizen, and will sign up for every war that is going and do everything to hide just how much corporate interests dictate the political agenda.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by longway

One who will do little of he set out to do, but is not an incompetent bloodthirsty war monger and who will continue to expose the true nature of the corrupt political establishment that aligns itself with special interests and despises the ordinary citizen.

---

This one meets an early grave.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by longway

Or a coporate whore whose every policy enactment, no matter how its dressed up, will serve special interests, but continue to erode the living standards of the ordinary citizen, and will sign up for every war that is going and do everything to hide just how much corporate interests dictate the political agenda.

---

This one gets reelected

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Norton

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by longway

One who will do little of he set out to do, but is not an incompetent bloodthirsty war monger and who will continue to expose the true nature of the corrupt political establishment that aligns itself with special interests and despises the ordinary citizen.

---

This one meets an early grave.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by longway

Or a coporate whore whose every policy enactment, no matter how its dressed up, will serve special interests, but continue to erode the living standards of the ordinary citizen, and will sign up for every war that is going and do everything to hide just how much corporate interests dictate the political agenda.

---

This one gets reelected

---

Sadly all too true.

Still anyone who considers Hillary a good candidate should seek medical help.

A race for president between Hillary and Trump will be an even bigger joke than Obama has been.

Move to France while you got the chance.:frog:

Quote:

---

why potentially alienate the few straight, white males over 50 who are considering voting for her. i think it has to be a guy...and likely a hispanic....i'd put a small wager on tom perez.

---

That makes me wonder if she would consider Sherrod Brown. And his Pulitzer prize winning wife seems to be popular with both white and black women.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

Move to France while you got the chance.

---

Canada or Mexico much closer. :)

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

Still anyone who considers Hillary a good candidate should seek medical help.

---

She's the best and most competent candidate still left in the race. And I think it's disgusting the lengths Bernie's sycophants have gone to discredit and distinguish her from him.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Storekeeper

Sherrod Brown

---

Although could help in the general to win Ohio, doubtful. He's not the darling of Dem establishment. Often at odds with Dem inner circle. Compared to Hillary he's quite progressive. A bit Sanders like.

He does work well across the aisle. A plus but sometimes displeases the Dems.

Who ever she picks will be risk free with Dem establishment. Let's face it Hillary is 99.9% establishment politics. She's got the game down pat. If folks liked the last eight years vote for Hillary. If not then move to Canada (or France) because she will be the next Prez.

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Norton

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

Move to France while you got the chance.

---

Canada or Mexico much closer. :)

---

If Trump wins, they'll both be building big fucking walls to keep the seppos out.

Looking ahead,……..

https://teakdoor.com/images/imported/2016/04/1078.jpg

https://teakdoor.com/images/imported/2016/04/1079.jpg

https://teakdoor.com/images/imported/2016/04/1080.jpg

Looking further ahead,……..

The Republican presidential nominee will need as many as 40 percent of Latino voters in some states to clinch a win in November.

Snip

A national poll released Thursday by America’s Voice and Latino Decisions found that 79 percent of voters had a “very unfavorable” opinion of Trump, with a total of 87 percent of Latinos finding him generally unfavorable. When asked about Trump’s policy plan to deport the country’s 11.3 million undocumented population, 80 percent of Latino voters indicated that they were “much less likely to vote for Trump,” with a total of 87 percent of voters less likely to vote for Trump generally.

https://teakdoor.com/images/imported/2016/04/1081.jpg

https://teakdoor.com/images/imported/2016/04/1082.jpg

https://teakdoor.com/images/smilies1/You_Rock_Emoticon.gif

For the next 8 years, our next president (Mrs. Hillary Clinton),……

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z1wRoI-8dhg

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Norton

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

Move to France while you got the chance.

---

Canada or Mexico much closer. :)

---

If Trump wins, they'll both be building big fucking walls to keep the seppos out.

---

And thats how trump will make mexico will pay for the wall. :bananaman:

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by longway

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by harrybarracuda

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Norton

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

Move to France while you got the chance.

---

Canada or Mexico much closer. :)

---

If Trump wins, they'll both be building big fucking walls to keep the seppos out.

---

And thats how trump will make mexico will pay for the wall. :bananaman:

---

He should admit it then. It's about time the dull fucker said something funny.

I don't reckon Bernie is going to throw in the towel just yet.

Quote:

---

With another record-breaking fundraising effort in March, Sanders supporters give campaign financial muscle to take political revolution all the way to the convention in June.....

---

Backed by Army of Small-Dollar Donors, Sanders Camp Forges Ahead | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community

Quote:

---

Originally Posted by Mr Earl

I don't reckon Bernie is going to throw in the towel just yet.

Quote:

---

With another record-breaking fundraising effort in March, Sanders supporters give campaign financial muscle to take political revolution all the way to the convention in June.....

---

Backed by Army of Small-Dollar Donors, Sanders Camp Forges Ahead | Common Dreams | Breaking News & Views for the Progressive Community

---

And that's OK. He wants to get his message out.

But he's doing it as an independent to all intents and purposes.

And here is your wonderful Hillary Clinton at her best,

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-dY77j6uBHI