Besides the obvious civ-mil reasons why Gen. Austin is a bad pick, there's a larger issue: his background doesn't lend itself to someone who would make for a good Sec Def
He's been a highly effective battlefield commander, which is not really good training for a civilian position like Sec Def. It's true he was Cent Com commander but running a military organization is very different than running a civilian bureaucracy like the Pentagon
To be an effective Sec Def you need to have strong administrative and political skills. You need to have distance from the military. You need to bring a civilian mindset to the job. Austin really has none of those qualities.
What made Mattis a bad pick for Sec Def is that he brought the insularity of the military to the job. He relied too much on the Joint Chiefs and sidelined military advisors. He eschewed transparency and accountability. Hard to see why Austin would be different.
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This map is dumb but from a narrow political perspective - and assuming a finite set of resources - it’s not wrong to argue that Democrats should, aside from GA and NC, focus their resources elsewhere
Personally I don’t like a strategy of ignoring whole swaths of the country - for either party - but this election suggests that outside NC and GA Democrats aren’t getting traction in the South
I should add Texas to this list. It’s still a red state but there are clearly opportunities for Democrats there
Ok so along with my good friend @mahler3 I’m rewatching Contagion ... so prepare for some live tweeting. For those who want to follow along it’s on HBO
There are so many great subtle touches in this film about how the virus is spread ... the bowl of nuts for example that Paltrow is eating out of in the hotel bar
As bad as that Trump statement was, keep in mind that close to 70 million Americans voted for four more years of it
You want to talk about the divide in America? On any every news network, even Fox, pundits and analysts will eviscerate Trump for what he just said. Tens of millions of Americans who voted for him thought it was great.
I said earlier that the issue raised by this election is not that Democrats have a bad message or can't communicate with voters ... it's that tens of millions of voters are ok, even applauding, of the president's lying, corruption, and bats**t insanity. How do you fix that?
I've seen a lot of folks praising Stacey Abrams for everything she did to help Democrats win in Georgia. Oddly, I don't see her name on the ballot in either of the state's two Senate races.
In case there's some confusion about what this means, Abrams sat out the Georgia Senate race because she wanted to be Biden's VP. She actively lobbied for it. Had she run for Senate it's not hard to imagine that Democrats would have done better than they did.
And yes I know the argument that Abrams didn't want to run for senate. I'm pretty sure Hickenlooper and Bullock didn't want to run either. But they gave Dems the best chance they had of picking up Senate seats. The same is true of Abrams in Georgia.
So I've seen some people argue that one of the takeaways from the 2020 results is that America is a center-right country ... let's take a look at the numbers THREAD
Since 1988, Democrats have won the popular vote in 7 of the last 8 POTUS elections
Republicans have won more than 47.9 percent of the popular vote one time (50.7 in 2004)
Democrats have won more than 47.9 percent of the vote in every single election, except 1992
Democrats have won more than 50 percent of the vote in presidential elections three times.
Republicans have won the presidency while losing the popular vote twice (2000 and 2016). Assuming Trump loses, two Republican incumbents will have lost their bids for reelection