For someone who'd presumably never heard of Buttigieg a few months ago (he didn't make your poll) you're pretty quick to judge.
O'Rourke just vowed to stop taking fossil fuel money. Pretty bold step for a Texas congressman. Insipid elitism doesn't seem fair to me.
I know I'm constantly at you on this but the loyalty to Sanders while tearing through other candidates kinda baffles me.
I had heard of him, but thought Buttigieg would be another Inslee or.... one of those dozen other ones whose names I've already forget.
**P.S. anyone wishing to vote Buttigieg in the poll should just click Beto, because they are basically different brands of the same product**
Buttigieg's rise is the product of a lifetime of contorting himself into what the 500 or so people who write political journalism in America think ordinary people want;
an extremely aggressive attempt to flatter said political journalists; and the political media's concurrent boredom and need to fill a 24-hour news cycle while nothing of substance is happening.
Credit where it is due: it has worked wonders in the very short term.
And yet, no ordinary person knows who he is never mind likes him.
Now that Biden is the Great Lib Hope, I expect his 15 minutes are nearly up.
O'Rourke, meanwhile, has spend his entire career lying about who pays him. He made the same promise about oil donations while running for Senate, and,
when his lie was revealed, refused to return the fossil fuel donations.
But he looks good on television, and repeats the word 'hope' four times per minute, so I'm sure it will be different this time
Anyhow, what baffles me about you is the fact that you claim to support Warren, and clearly spend a lot of time thinking about politics, but still don't seem to understand the function that Buttigieg, Biden, or O'Rourke are being paid to fulfill. Or how to read between the lines.
For example, Biden praising Cheney - what on earth did you expect? How can anybody, at this point, possibly not understand who, and what, Joe Biden actually is?
He has been constant his entire career. It's not a gaffe. It's the genuine article. It's who is he is, and what he represents. It is his essence.
But for you, the trouble seems only to be that he's old.
Similarly, again, why do you actually support Warren? Is it because she's a nice lady? Is it because people on television keep signalling that she's smart? Or some sort of technical policy wizard (even though her widely-hailed student-debt relief is
literally less than 2,500 words on medium)?
Or is it because you want to see the changes that she promises actually implemented? If so, if there is any substance behind your support, then how can you possibly not know that Joe Biden has
done more than anyone else to prevent Warren's reforms from being implemented?
It was not an accident, or a regrettable error, on Biden's part. It is the performance of a service on which his entire career has been based. It is who he is, and what he is for.
Politics isn't a game. It isn't a soap opera. It isn't like rooting for Everton, or Best Actor at the Oscars.
Unlike every other candidate running, Warren and Sanders actually do intend to reshape the balance of political power, and to pursue meaningful change.
The people who hold this power, economically and politically, are desperate to stop this from happening. They are not your friends, and they are not your teammates (at least, if your support for Warren is anything more than superficial).
And their vehicles are Biden, O'Rourke, Buttigieg, Harris, Gillibrand, or whoever else emerges as the consensus establishment favourite against Sanders, or less plausibly, Warren.
There two types of candidates: those who will actually try to do something, and those who deliberately will not:
Bankers’ biggest fear: The nomination goes to an anti-Wall Street crusader like Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) or Sanders. “It can’t be Warren and it can’t be Sanders,” said the CEO of another giant bank.
So why my loyalty to Sanders?
You won't believe me, but I am not a personality cultist.
I don't especially care if he is smart, or a nice man, or a Troop, or religious, or multilingual, or gay, or a good father, or attractive on camera, in the way that the television constantly reminds us that we should do.
I support him because of what he represents, and because I want to see the changes that he describes implemented. He is no more than a means to the end, not the end itself (which is the entire premise of political 'identities' like Beto or Buttigieg, where we're meant to believe that their inherent virtue or intelligence, and the happy feeling they give us, will in itself solve all our problems even if nothing has changed).
It certainly would be better if Sanders were a bit more 'diverse' and willing or able to perform 'wokeness', not because it actually matters (and in fact a small part of me died inside just writing that), but because it would make it more difficult for the people paid to preserve America's stupefyingly corrupt status quo to discredit him.
Sanders knows this as well as anyone, and if there was anyone else representing his vision, he would not have run.
But there isn't, so he is.
As I've repeated ad nauseum, I'd be very pleased if Warren became President, though it won't happen because she doesn't have the mass movement Sanders does - and, as the Jacobin piece astutely points out, she also doesn't understand why she needs it, or what she is up against.
That said, I do think that if she'd had the courage of her convictions to take on the Clintons in 2016, she, and not Sanders, would be the emblem of contemporary left-wing politics. She was in a vastly stronger position than he was in 2014-15. His success was as surprising to him as it was to anyone, and he would not have contested Clinton if Warren had done so first.
And on that note, if you actually understand how transformative, and how threatening to comfortable interests her agenda would be, and still want it to happen, then the fact that she was scared off by the likes of Hillary Clinton - probably the worst candidate for any party in 30 years - should at the very least give you pause about her suitability as an agent of change.
