Thread by @ButBernie

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 1/ My metric is a 2 pass system, first non-political qualifications to do the job. Honesty. Leadership. Delegation. Teamwork. Second platform. I can't do a second pass yet because platforms are in flux. Harris, Castro, Klobuchar, Biden, Gillibrand, Beto and Warren look qualified.

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 2/ The non-political parts really do matter a lot. They are why Trump is so much worse than Bush even though they are both Republican. When 9-11 happened Bush immediately sought to prevent retaliatory violence. Trump would NEVER give this speech.

qz.com/1074258/911-vi…

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 3/ And remember when McCain stood up to a screaming crowd of people whose votes he needed and told them Barak Obama is a Christian and a good man and you don't have to be afraid if he is elected? That isn't politics, that is **decency**, and leadership.

time.com/4866404/john-m…

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 4/ Then there is the mechanics of leadership. Good leaders can delegate, recognize merit, praise others, and overcome personal dislike to accurately asses ability/utility. Everyone hires from within their peer group, but a good leader doesn't confuse "friend" with "qualified".

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 5/ Most of what a President does is appointing other people to do things. Holding grudges, demanding personal "loyalty", or insisting on ideological purity in things that don't impact a given job generally results in an inferior appointment. Anti-expert sentiments are toxic. RUN!

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 6/ I see a lot of Trump in Bernie. They both have high turnover and a long line of angry employees behind them. Our Revolution lost 8/15 employees in the first week. Vermont papers chronicle a long history of verbal abuse to his staffers.

sevendaysvt.com/vermont/anger-…

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 7/ Both have a lying problem. Not white lies, not exaggerations, not differing opinions. Strongly asserting something they absolutely know is false. Like Bernie claiming endorsements he doesn't have.

cnn.com/2016/02/11/pol…

Receipts go back to 1986:

bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/0…

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 8/ Now he's been caught in lies about many things(releasing his taxes). But lying about endorsements is huge. Earning endorsements is a form of vetting. It involves candidate interviews, people poring over records, the stuff we don't have time for. Lying here is stolen valor.

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 9/ Speaking of taxes, both Bernie and Trump are opaque financially. This should make you suspicious. His PAC doesn't disclose its donors. Citizens United means it doesn't legally have to ... but it could do so voluntarily. It doesn't. Which is part of why those 8/15 people quit.

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 10/ Listing your conflicts of interest and financial entanglements is standard practice for hiring any executive of this level. Everyone has them - the point is disclosing them so that when they are effecting your judgement advisors know and can ask you to recuse your opinion.

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 11/ Oh god advisors. I watched a Trump biography where the biographers talked about how hard it was to find friends to interview. Trump would lists friends, but when approached they would deny being his friend. Bernie listed imaginary policy advisors.

politico.com/story/2016/01/…

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 12/ Which brings me to Trump and Bernie's shared disdain for expertise. Per Trump, the Intelligence Community is "naive" for not agreeing with him. Per Bernie, farmers would do better than economists at running the federal reserve (Red Alert! Hard Pass).

politico.com/story/2015/12/…

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 13/ Both Trump and Bernie are fundamentally adversarial in their rhetoric. They both have an enemy (immigrants/wall street) that they promise to crack down on and then a miracle happens and then everyone is better off. At their heart, they are both about hurting the right people.

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 14/ But this never works. Destroyers can't build. Builders do hurt people and growing pains are real but there is a fundamental difference between someone like Warren - whose main drive is to help people - and someone like Bernie whose top priority is hurting the right people.

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 15/ An example of this is the VA scandal. If Warren had been chair of Veterans Affairs investigations and action would have been prompt. Her top priority would be the vets. Bernie accused the messenger of being paid by the Koch brothers to lie. Vets died.

nytimes.com/2016/02/07/us/…

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 16/ You can see in the VA scandal how Bernie's adversarial attitude taints his perception of the world and impacts his ability to make good executive decisions - again like Trump. Qualified presidents don't dismiss facts they don't like as lies told by their enemies(fake news!).

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 17/ Here is a paper about how both left and right wing populists damage democratic institutions and increase corruption when they come to power. When you see yourself as locked in combat with The Enemy it's easy to justify corruption to win. This spreads.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha 18/ I can go on for hours with different examples but the jist of it is that I spent a year explaining to Republican relatives why Trump was a different beast than Bush. That his problems transcended politics.

I'm not a hypocrite. I won't do what I begged them not to do.

@HynesRL @TheRealGRAF @kharyp @eclecticbrotha @ThreadReaderApp unroll