I don’t think anyone posted this interview with Chuck Schumer, but I thought it was an interesting glimpse into how he’s thinking. He thinks James Carville is full of shit, he’s not worried about an AOC primary challenge (not gonna happen, in my opinion), and he likes someone who isn’t a fan favorite around here:
ANAND: I wonder what you’ve learned from her as a next-generation politician who’s clearly communicated in a very effective way.
CHUCK: I’ll answer the question a different way. [Editor’s note: The filibuster is alive and well.] The person who has those kinds of views whom I’m very close to is Bernie Sanders. And he’s not the younger generation, but he and I think alike in many ways, because you need a strong, active government.
ANAND: Has he changed your mind on anything fundamental in recent years?
CHUCK: Yeah. I’ll give you a great example. So when we won the Georgia election, I spoke to Stacey Abrams, and there are eight African-American women’s groups who were very active. And I said, “OK, we’re going to get Medicaid expansion. Give money to rural hospitals. This and that.” And you know what one of those ladies said to me? “What about the checks?”
Bernie Sanders had also been pushing the $2,000 checks for people. And, at first, when he said it, I said, “I don’t know.” But that’s what mattered the most to people. They needed money to feed their kids. They needed money, and a government program is good, but money in their hands was really good.
And Bernie was right. And one of the reasons I’m pushing so hard for the $50,000 forgiveness of student loans with Elizabeth Warren, even though Joe Biden hasn’t gone along with it — again, it’s the same thing. You have to show people that government works for them, and that will inspire.
Having Bernie Sanders pushing as the head of the Budget Committee, rather than having Kent Conrad holding back, is part of why Biden is going to have a better time getting his agenda passed than Obama.
schrodingers_cat
BS from Vt is in no way shape or form responsible for Biden’s successes. He and his stans were responsible in no small measure getting the Orange Menace elected in 2016. For which he shall forever remain unforgiven
Biden is an unthreatening avuncular older white man who reminds the Rs and the national media of their favorite uncle and that’s the reason that he is having an easier time than President Obama. That and the last 12 years have made elected Ds realize that compromise with the Rs is next to impossible.
Baud
Obviously, Bernie is more progressive that Kent Conrad was. But I don’t want to keep falling for the same fallacy that the only thing that matters is the people in leadership positions. The public is in a different place than it was in 2009. It’s not just a change in leadership that allows us to do the things we’re doing.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
Not untrue. And Conrad was just one of the fifteen or so Joe Manchins that Obama had to deal with. But Bernie has much to atone for.
ETA:
@Baud:
This is also true. A complicated and fundamentally different reaction to the Covid-related economy and the Wall St crashed economy, and trump seems to have killed off, or at least severely wounded, the ideas of the Rs as fiscal conservatives that somehow survived cutting taxes and putting two wars on the blessed National Debt.
Baud
Also, too, I think Nancy Peolsi deserves some credit for the checks.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: Good points
Baud
@Jim, Foolish Literalist:
He’ll never atone. But except for Needs Tanden, he’s been a team player since the election. I’ll settle for that if he keeps it up.
schrodingers_cat
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: I am so old that I remember people from BS campaign or close to it were pushing stories about Biden being senile and giving credence to the Tara Reade stories.
ETA: When left kneecaps the center, the vacuum usually benefits the RW. I have seen it happen in India and over here in 2016.
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: He is xenophobic and misogynist. He used to be one of Lou Dobbs favorite “leftie” guests.
Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix
@Baud:
Yes, let’s give a change in leadership (which also includes Ron Wyden instead of Max Baucus on the Senate Finance Committee) the proper due. It’s not the only thing, but it’s an important thing.
@schrodingers_cat:
Oh, don’t worry, anyone reading the comments on this blog know that you’ll never forgive him for sins real and imagined.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
Thanks. It mostly comes up when people talk about Biden’s accomplishments, which by law apparently must be accompanied by slamming Obama for not accomplishing it sooner. It’s an irritating tic.
Baud
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix:
Agree. The Dems caucus today is really the best it’s ever been.
schrodingers_cat
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix: Yes I imagined the rigged primaries bit in 2016. And the pouty red face at HRC’s convention with screaming fans booing the likes of John Lewis.
Baud
@schrodingers_cat:
He’s also a low priority for me at this point. I’ll keep a watchful eye, but we have bigger fish to fry IMHO.
debbie
@Baud:
They’re surprisingly unified.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Baud: the desire to rewrite/erase the Obama administration has been remarkable, and it’s not just coming from the usual suspects on the right and the crazy left
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: True. I should learn to ignore MM’s BS purana.
(puranas: Collection of old myths about your favorite deity, there is a Vishnu purana, Shiv purana etc.)
schrodingers_cat
@Jim, Foolish Literalist: The MSM never did like President Obama.
Kropacetic
Fight! Fight! Fight! Fight!…
Wait. Is fighting good?
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat:
Co-sign.
The Thin Black Duke
You know, it is possible to value both Biden and Obama at the same time.
gene108
@Baud:
Republican misrule for 12 of the last 20 years has a way of changing people.
zhena gogolia
@schrodingers_cat:
If you imagined it, we were imagining the same thing at the same time.
zhena gogolia
@The Thin Black Duke:
I sure do!
Kropacetic
That’s an awfully charitable acounting of the Republican history of misrule.
schrodingers_cat
@The Thin Black Duke: @zhena gogolia: Me too.
Baud
@gene108:
That’s a big part of it. Another part of it is demographic change, which results in a new audience who may be more receptive to our message. Another part of it is good old fashioned shoe leather by people doing the unheralded work of changing hearts and minds on the ground.
The Thin Black Duke
@zhena gogolia: Not to mention that St. Bernie was recently on Colbert giving MAGAs and Qboys a Hall Pass by pushing that “economic anxiety” bullshit again. Fuck him.
Another Scott
Leadership’s job is to get enough votes for whatever the party wants to pass. Obama and Reid did that. Biden and Schumer did that.
Leadership beating up on members of our team when every vote is critical isn’t good politics. Chuck and Uncle Joe knows that just as Barry and Harry did.
Cheers,
Scott.
gene108
@Baud:
I wonder how much of that receptiveness is due to Republican perfidy for pretty much the entirety of their lives?
?BillinGlendaleCA
@schrodingers_cat: I agree.
debbie
@The Thin Black Duke:
Biden would be the last person to throw Obama under the bus.
?BillinGlendaleCA
@Kropacetic: Yeah, I’d go with 32 of the last 60 years.
mrmoshpotato
@The Thin Black Duke:
Oh the economic anxiety that’ll make you fly halfway across the country and storm the Capitol building with deadly intentions because your racist, orange god lost trying to be re-installed by the Russkis.
Baud
@gene108:
The GOP had a chance to get a larger share of Lations and Asians, and way back when (Nixon) made a feeble attempt at black voters. At each inflection point, they went with the racists that the Dems abandoned.
Kropacetic
@The Thin Black Duke: I’m sure there are plenty of R voters whose primary concerns are…nominally economic. Economically illiterate, sure, and I’m just as sure the people formulating their arguments were merely trying to put an economic veneer on the racism.
But if it let’s someone tell themselves they’re not racist…
Geminid
@Four Seasons Total Landscaping mistermix: I notice that a lot of women here will never forgive Sanders for sins that are real. But imagined?! I don’t think these women have to make things up, and I don’t think they do make things up.
I myself don’t like Sanders, either as a person or as Leader of a Movement, and I think he helped trump beat Clinton in 2016. I can still be accepting of him as part of Chuck Schumer’s team. But I am a white, native-born male. I’ll never feel Sanders’ nativism and fixation upon “the [white] working class” like an immigrant or person of color. And I may be pro-choice, but I’ll never feel the menace this Supreme Court holds for women’s freedom the way a woman feels it. Imagination is not at issue here.
gene108
@Baud:
You don’t need to go back as far as Nixon. Bush. Jr. successfully increased Republican’s share of the Latino vote, and proposed a good immigration reform bill to increase that share that his party shot down.
Edit: Misread your comment. I thought you said Nixon tried to get a larger share of Latino and Asian votes.
Baud
@gene108:
Nixon was referring to black voters. He did well with them in 1972. Agree that Bush tried to make inroads with Latinos.
ETA: saw your ETA.
Another Scott
@The Thin Black Duke: Is this the Colbert segments that people are upset about? From 4/29?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3Ua6vXykpU (9:25).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YOLiEjDepCc (6:01)
It sounds like very standard Democratic comments to me, though I may have missed something.
Thanks.
Cheers,
Scott.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Another Scott: as I said last night when that clip came up, I hate Bernie’s guts, and I wish rich (often) white (mostly) liberals with big media platforms would stop/had never started using him as a virtue signal, but there’s nothing in that clip that suggests he’s talking about Q-Anon or even trump supporter
ETA: not gonna watch the longer clips cause I hate the sound of his hectoring self-righteousness
JPL
@schrodingers_cat:
True!
Geminid
I’ve been following @SashaBeauloux on twitter a lot lately. She is perceptive, well grounded, and earnest. I guess her content is about 1/3 general, 2/3 political.
Some of Beauloux’s political tweets are directed at Republicans, and some are directed at leftie critics of the Democratic party: Berners, if you will. As for Sanders himself, Beauloux nails her colors to the mast with the pinned tweet that heads her account:
“Like it or not, the Democratic Party is one of the ONLY forms of institutional power Black people have in this country.
Bernie Sanders running on a promise to destroy the Democratic Party and all it stands for?
Damn right I heard that as a threat.
A lot of Black people did.”
karen marie
@mrmoshpotato:
@Geminid: Thank you.
Patricia Kayden
WaterGirl
@Patricia Kayden: Fucking hypocrites!
mrmoshpotato
@karen marie: True, but not just the jet-owning fascist trash.
rikyrah
Kaitlyn Greenidge (@surlybassey) tweeted at 5:22 PM on Sat, May 01, 2021:
“A self-described “numbers guy,” Mr. Yang left the group’s budget depleted…In 2017, when he left to run for president, the nonprofit spent $2.6 million more than it raised, ending the year with only about a month’s worth of cash in reserves.” https://t.co/igJcavPKdc
(https://twitter.com/surlybassey/status/1388619753791569921?s=03)
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: Yang would be a disaster. NYC can’t possibly be dumb enough to choose a yahoo with no experience, right?
rikyrah
@rikyrah:
Kaitlyn Greenidge (@surlybassey) tweeted at 5:23 PM on Sat, May 01, 2021:
“Mr. Yang also failed to recruit many participants of color, even creating a points system for applicants that ended up hurting graduates of historically Black colleges, records show.”
(https://twitter.com/surlybassey/status/1388620000727126019?s=03)
rikyrah
@WaterGirl:
I hope not ?
rikyrah
@rikyrah:
Kaitlyn Greenidge (@surlybassey) tweeted at 5:31 PM on Sat, May 01, 2021:
“Venture for America sent its fellows into cities populated largely by people of color, but its first classes were more than 80 percent white, and nearly 80 percent male, records show.”
(https://twitter.com/surlybassey/status/1388622159451467790?s=03)
Formerly disgruntled in Oregon
Kamala Harris had a great policy proposal in the primary – increase the child tax credit, make it fully refundable (and available to all families with children), and distribute it monthly.
Sound familiar? Kamala should definitely get some credit for the checks. They help people and they’re good politics.
bbleh
Good interview! Read the whole thing!
Sure Lurkalot
@rikyrah: Yikes. While I applaud the small scale UBI experiments that have occurred, Yang’s version was ill conceived and as far as I can see, his only trick. Why he’s polling so well I have no idea. Unless worse than DiBlasio is the goal.
brendancalling
You know, I see Anand’s name and immediately stop reading. I can’t stand him. I think it was just last week Betty Cracker or Anne Laurie that posted an article that tore his fraudulent ass to shreds, and it was SO satisfying.
rikyrah
CeeJay Yellow Hawk (@AdriftAlchemist) tweeted at 1:18 PM on Sun, May 02, 2021:
The Blackfeet Nation in Montana gifted their surplus COVID-19 vaccines (750 doses) to nearby residents in Alberta, Canada.
People drove for hours and lined up for miles on the highway to be vaccinated at a mobile clinic set up at the border crossing. https://t.co/7gdjVYvT9F
(https://twitter.com/AdriftAlchemist/status/1388920848505970688?s=03)
Geminid
@rikyrah: Andrew Yang was not seen as a serious contender when he ran for President, so people never examined the man and works behind the affable, forward-looking image he projected well. When I saw that Yang was running for NYC mayor, I thought, well, he’s just building his brand in a high-profile race he can’t win. Once Yang led the polls, though, the floodlights turned on, and people are combing his record and coming up with receipts. When this primary race is over, Yang may be wishing he hadn’t peaked so early, or maybe that he hadn’t peaked at all.
Fair Economist
I’ve long said Schumer isn’t one of us, but he’s somebody we can work with. He’s seeing that helping the public increases his power, so he’s doing the right things. Good enough.
@schrodingers_cat:
Which is why I think the professional kneecappers are generally right-wing plants.
Williamc
Reading this on a sunny day in PDX has me marveling about how everything worked out for the best from this time last year! Reading my plague journal from then, I was (privately) still raging at the Bros having destroyed Warren’s spot at VP and blaming Bernie for it, while I stewed in my room quarantined away from the pandemic, and now it’s just amazing how little I care about the Bros, the Trumpenproletariat, the MSM whatabouters, and (after being vaccinated) the pandemic, after all the other annoyances of politics that I used to wake up and rage over the past 4 years…it literally feels like a new day!
The only thing that would make me think better of American politics right now is if some of these “moderate Republicans” would come off it, switch parties, and help destroy the GOP. I feel like we all know that that is what has to happen to make them stop with the bad behavior, but none of them have the guts to go go for it. They can’t save the Republicans: the Tea Party begat the Birther Party to become the Insurrection Party and the Trump Train is taking them all to the Conspiracy Party. But the problem with all Republicans is that they hate anyone to the Left of themselves more than they hate fascists, even though the fascists want to kill them as well.
Oh well, sucks to be them! Off to ride my bike in the sun with the other Portland Pinkos!
JPL
@Geminid: I hope you’re right.
Cameron
Hey, the Berner isn’t even a real Democrat. Throw his ass off that budget committee chairmanship and put in a REAL Democrat. I’d go with Joe Manchin, but maybe that’s just me.
Geminid
@Sure Lurkalot: There are a lot of people in that race, I think six at least. So Yang may be leading, but I think he is just polling in the 20s. There is no runoff, so he still might win with a plurality. More likely, the woman in second place will start to separate from the others, and pass Yang by the June primary. She sounds like a solid candidate.
Geminid
@Geminid: Correction. Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams is in second place in the NYC Mayor’s race with 17% in a recent poll. Yang had 23%, and the woman I thought was in second, former City Counsel Dawn Wiley, polled at 8%. I’ve heard good things about Wiley, but it seems she has yet to gain traction..
Woodrow/asim
Seconding that people should maybe actually read the interview. Chuckie S., for whatever reason, is out here Doing the Work. Hell, he might be more direct on opinions I agree on — like how Carville is way outta line — than either Biden or Pelosi.
He’s even open to disagreeing with Biden, in ways that read more progressive:
Ain’t saying he’s suddenly some hyper-Leftish leader. Yet he’s clearly shifted in some intense ways, and I think that’s worth acknowledging and understanding, in this moment.
Geminid
@Fair Economist: I don’t think David Sirota, Brihanna Joy Gray, Michael Moore and others like them are right wing plants. They often act like it, but I don’t think they are.
Urban Suburbanite
@Williamc: But the Antifa destroyed Portland yesterday!
Brachiator
@rikyrah:
What a great story.
Urban Suburbanite
There’s definitely some things about Chairman Sanders that annoy me, and that blind spot of his about the Q cultists is just a part of it. In some respects, he reminds me of Corbyn – mostly in how his followers built him into the One Man Who Can Save the Party/Nation.
As for the commissar-congresswoman, I don’t know if she could actually take a shot at Schumer, but I hope she does. The Democrats desperately need people who don’t predate the threat of Bolshevism. I have noticed that since the possibility of her running came up, the Very Centrist types have been taking shots at her.
Yutsano
I’m just gonna focus on the interview with Chuck, which is actually a fun read. I’m glad he’s choosing to push healthcare off until probably next year. It’s a tough thing but I agree with that approach. Let’s do infrastructure in 2021 and get the major health care changes before the 2022 midterms. That way Democrats have a bunch of good things to run on and the Republicans get squat.
Geminid
@Urban Suburbanite: I don’t think Rep. Ocasio-Cortez (NY-14) will challenge Schumer next year. That would be a tough race for her to win. She might possibly fight the Brooklyn Senator to a draw in the City, but she’d probably get crushed upstate. More likely, she’ll wait to challenge Gillebrand in 2024.
Either way, Ocasio-Cortez would have to give up her Congressional seat. If she is the transformational politician some believe her to be, that won’t matter even if she loses a Senate primary; she will still find a way to exercise power and influence. But Ocasio-Cortez could be an average talent with an outsized reputation, and might fade in relevance without the platform and status of a Congresswoman.
Jackie
@Geminid: Exactly. Look what happened to Joe Kennedy III.
Geminid
@Jackie: Who?…Oh yeah, now I remember him.
Jackie
@Geminid: ?
James E Powell
Where did this AOC running against Schumer thing come from? Aren’t we struggling to hold onto the house & expand a lead in the senate? I call for incumbent protection!
Besides, AOC will be appointed to Gillibrand’s seat when Gillibrand takes a cabinet position in the Kamala Harris administration.
rikyrah
@Geminid:
Truth
Urban Suburbanite
@James E Powell: If you’re a suspicious sort, the commissar-congresswoman might have been testing the waters for a future Senate run. It could have also been a manifestation of irritation with Schumer’s leadership in the Senate. And while I do think it’s too early next year, I wouldn’t rule out a Senator AOC in the future, though.
Sure Lurkalot
@rikyrah: Too lazy to connect to geminid, but totally agree. I think AOC has an audience and potential and is not an empty suit like ….hmmm, too many to mention. Time will tell if she gets things done, for her constituents and country.
PJ
@Geminid:
As things stand now, either Schumer or Gillibrand would crush AOC in a Senate race – I have my doubts she could even win in a citywide election in NYC. She’s not going anywhere soon.
Jim, Foolish Literalist
@Urban Suburbanite:
right after they make twitter a state?
Geminid
@Sure Lurkalot: Ocasio-Cortez was one of 60 new Democratic Representatives in the class of 2018. She certainly got the most attention, and may still. But there are many that impress me more. Veronica Escobar of Texas, Lauren Underwood of Illinois, and Crissy Houlihan of Pennsylvania are just a few.
Ohio Mom
Schrodinger’s_cat @16:
Judaism also has Puranas, we call them midrash. They are elaborations on Bible stories, filling in gaps and adding alternative perspectives.
I am skipping ahead because it is too late for me to read the whole thread. My impression so far is, we now have BS inside the proverbial tent, pissing out, instead of the previous other way around. Fine by me.