People seem to be waking up this weekend to the fact that there is very real grassroots pushback to efforts to force Biden off the ticket. Whether that is determinative or merited I’ll leave to the side for the moment. This should not come as any surprise.
2/ It also gets at what has always been the most worrisome to me about this whole process. This entire conversation is taking place among campaign staffers, journalists, political influencers, elected officials et al who know virtually nothing abt what rank and file Dems …
3/ feel about any of this. The thinking seems to be well what do they know. Well, maybe nothing. But they’re the voters, who the whole thing depends on. This is where the legitimacy comes in. People voted for Biden in the primaries. That means something.
4/ I’m not saying this prescribes any particular course of action. But again the entire conversation is essentially the political and journalist elite talking to each other.
5/ Addenda: I *think* it was Rep Debby Dingel who was on tv at the beginning of the week saying Biden needs to do a ton of press, needs to solve this etc. then she went back to the district and people were stopping her and saying hey what are you talking about?
6/ Like we had a primary. We chose Biden. What are you talking about? And then she seemed to realize this wasn’t as simple as she thought.
@Timodc 2/ And to be clear, when I say “elite” here I don’t mean it in a loaded or performative sense, just a purely descriptive sense. Connected people with profile jobs, big megaphones, elected officials etc. the people whose voices carry the farthest.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
I think Jon’s argument here is to a degree a straw man. He says at the bottom that the half dozen or so stakeholders in this conversation need to pick the best candidate. And if it’s Harris, he says, great, off to the races. His argument here seems to be…
2/ that the only reason to pick Harris is to avoid the wrath of a bunch of identity politics activist busybodies who are threatening to divide the party if Harris doesn’t get the nod. I don’t think that’s the case. As I’ve written, I think skipping over the black woman veep …
3/ when the vp is the natural person to take over for the president and the party is defined by the support of women and African Americans well … that’s a problem. A real probably and it doesn’t need rabble rousers to make it one. But there are other reasons. First is legitimacy.
The answers you get from Trumpers when you point out chronology of the Trump Crime Wave that Joe Biden had to clean up are quite something. And something in the sense of a spasm of special pleading, racism, whataboutism, what is time really?,and don’t be mean to Dear Leaderism.
I really have engaged this question with many of these folks. The answers are comical and revealing. We start with the calendar and how time works. And once we get past when 2020 is the space time continuum and I ask again what about the Trump Crime Wave you get an ….
3/ an answer which is basically “Trump didn’t do that. It was black people and their globalist allies when they got mad about the George Floyd thing.” To which one is forced to answer, “ Well I can’t really agree with that but okay let’s accept your premise for the sake of …
For all the Trumpers who are upset that this was only a "paper" crime. Remember that your dreams will come true when Trump faces charges for trying to overthrow the Republic and stealing truckloads of highly classified material to stow at his beach resort in random public places.
2/ Indeed, Trump could speed those cases up at any moment by stopping his delaying tactics and let people see the evidence against him in those cases. He could even do that in the documents case where one of the lawyers on his team turns out to be the judge.
3/ There's one thing the country is actually united on. Everyone knows Trump did these things. Virtually all the bombast and threats and huffy denials is meant to con people into thinking otherwise. All his supporters know he breaks the law all the time. He's simply created a ...
Truth Social just released their 8-K, so the SEC mandated disclosures where you can't lie without commiting a crime. Lots of focus on the dollars, which are hilarious: Just over $4.1 M in revenue, $58M in costs. ... app.quotemedia.com/data/downloadF…
I've mentioned before that this is only barely more than TPM brings in each year and since we're a real business we have costs well under $58m. But these aren't the important data points in this filing. In theory a social platform can be losing a lot of money and still ...
3/ legitimately be worth a ton of money. Facebook had already become a force of nature before Zuckerberg even real turned his attention to monetization. That turned out to be a really good idea. He put his energy into building network effects, platform dominance and only after...
One thing to consider here is that if the RNC is being fused with the Trump campaign and a big chunk of the staff is being fired, what’s the point exactly? That sounds awesome but it just leaves you with a single entity. The president/nominee controls the party apparatus…
2/ you don’t need to do this stuff to have control. It’s also helpful to have an allied group to handle other responsibilities. Gotv operations, working with allied campaigns and a million other things. The only real point of doing this is that you get the money.
3/ People contribute lots of money to national parties. That money is now under the direct control of Trumps family and campaign which really must mean that it goes directly to Trump fees and judgments or possibly that it goes to running Trumps campaign because they campaign …