The Democratic Presidential debate last night showed strong performances right from the beginning by Mayor Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar on the subject of health care, challenging Senator Elizabeth Warren and Senator Bernie Sanders on their promotion of Medicare For All.
Joe Biden held his own, which is significant, and Julian Castro and Kamala Harris improved their position. Bernie Sanders looked in good health, and Cory Booker made some good points regarding the need to focus on the record of Donald Trump, more than criticism of some candidates by others.
Totally unimpressive were Tom Steyer, Tulsi Gabbard, and Andrew Yang, and they should drop out of the race, as there are simply too many candidates.
Beto O’Rourke harmed his candidacy by his consistent stand on gun regulation including confiscation of weapons, not a winnable tactic.
In realistic terms, there should be eight Democrats left in the race—Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Pete Buttigieg, Amy Klobuchar, Julian Castro, Kamala Harris and Cory Booker.
I was not available to watch the 2020 Democratic Presidential Debate of October 15, 2019 from Ohio and, of course, this means I will not be able to comment on anything specific.
I came across an interesting report regarding Election 2020.
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‘Poll: 50 percent of Maine voters disapprove of Susan Collins’s job performance’
By Tal Axelrod (10.15.2019)
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/465899-poll-50-percent-of-maine-voters-disapprove-of-susan-collins-job-performance
Sen. Susan Collins’s (R-Maine) approval rating is deeply underwater about a year ahead of her reelection race, according to a new poll from the left-leaning firm Public Policy Polling.
Thirty-five percent of Maine voters polled approve of the job Collins is doing, while 50 percent disapprove. Collins trails a generic Democratic candidate 44 percent to 41 percent in the 2020 Maine Senate race, a drop from September, when she led a generic Democrat 44 percent to 38 percent.
…
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Susan Collins was first elected in 1996 as Democratic incumbent U.S. president Bill Clinton, who won Maine in a 1992 Democratic pickup, carried the state with re-election. Here is the history of the U.S. Senate election outcomes for Collins:
1996 MAINE U.S. SENATE:
• Susan Collins (R, party hold): 49.18%
• Joseph E. Brennan (D): 43.88%
• Margin: Republican +5.30
2002 MAINE U.S. SENATE
• Susan Collins (R, re-elected): 58.44%
• Chellie Pingree (D): 41.56%
• Margin: Republican +16.88
2008 MAINE U.S. SENATE
• Susan Collins (R, re-elected): 61.33%
• Tom Allen (D): 38.58%
• Margin: Republican +22.75
2014 MAINE U.S. SENATE
• Susan Collins (R, re-elected): 68.46%
• Shenna Bellows (D): 31.50%
• Margin: Republican +36.96
Here were the presidential results in Maine in 1996 and 2008:
1996 MAINE U.S. PRESIDENT
• Bob Dole (R): 30.76%
• Bill Clinton (D, incumbent, re-elected): 51.62%
• Ross Perot (Ref.): 14.19%
• Margin (statewide): Democratic +20.86
2008 MAINE U.S. PRESIDENT
• John McCain (R): 40.38%
• Barack Obama (D): 57.71%
• Margin (statewide): Democratic +17.33
Given the fact Susan Collins won four U.S. Senate elections—two of which were in midterm elections (2002 and 2014 were Republican majority-control pickups of the U.S. Senate) and two in presidential elections (1996 and 2008 were victories at the presidential level for Democrats Bill Clinton and pickup winner Barack Obama)—her margins steadily increased in successive elections. In 2002, 2008, and 2014, Collins carried every county in Maine. (She was personally popular with the electorate in Maine that it reached a point in 2008 in which she and Obama—affiliated with separate political parties—were 40.08 percentage points in margins spread. Even Obama didn’t carry every single county.)
Looking at the polls, and that Susan Collins is vulnerable, and if she were to run again and get re-nominated, I don’t think she would be able to carry every county—certainly not in the state’s 1st Congressional District with most especially Cumberland County (Portland)—and, if she were to win re-election, her margin at best would be similar to her first-term election from 1996. At this point, Collins is in trouble. And, if considerably more time passes, and the polls continue to show she is vulnerable—and if her internal polls indicate the same (or even worse)—I would anticipate a decision and announcement by Susan Collins to not seek a possible fifth term to the U.S. Senate. There are not many four-term incumbent U.S. senators, in a position of being vulnerable in one’s bid for re-election, who want to go out with a possible unseating. Most U.S. senators who have won beyond three terms want to go out due to retirement.
This is important because of two reasons: 1. The 2020 Democrats who want to be re-empowered with the presidency of the United States are going to have to unseat an incumbent Republican U.S. president. 2. The 2020 Democrats who also want to be re-empowered with the U.S. Senate are in need to flip a net gain of +4 seats—adjust it to +5 (because the party is unlikely to hold Alabama)—and it starts with Republican-held U.S. Senate seats in states which carried in 2016 for the Democrats. The path, partly for U.S. President and much more definitely for U.S. Senate, includes Maine.
Thanks, D, for your analysis of Maine and Susan Collins and the 2020 elections.
Agreed. Beto, Steyer, Yang, and Gabbard can go. Everyone else can stay.
Princess Leia, glad you agree, although that is certainly not required! LOL
I’m in agreement with Mr. Longman regarding M4A.
—————————–
I Hate to Admit the Moderates are Right About Medicare-for-All
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/10/16/i-hate-to-admit-the-moderates-are-right-about-medicare-for-all/
While there are some legitimate concerns that can be raised about Medicare-for-All on the merits—as opposed to on the politics—I am not convinced that it’s a problem that some people, like members of organized labor, have worked hard to negotiate good private health care plans. To me, this is a bit like arguing that we don’t need to eliminate Lyme disease because we can treat it with antibiotics. There is simply no value-added by having a profit or commercial basis to health insurance. If it is to exist at all, it should be strictly as a supplemental product.
But that’s an ideological opinion of mine and not a strategic analysis of what the Democrats should be pursuing on the health care front during the 2020 campaign. Watching the CNN debate on Tuesday night, I agreed with Warren and Sanders on the merits, but I thought the moderates had the better argument.
I have three concerns about pushing for Medicare-for-All right now. The first is that it’s obviously controversial and has big political vulnerabilities. Sanders freely admits that to pay for it will require taxes to go up on everybody who pays taxes, including the middle class. Warren is more reluctant to acknowledge this, although she doesn’t outright deny it. What they both argue, instead, is that overall costs will go down for the middle class because they will no longer have to pay premiums, co-pays, or out-of-pocket costs. This is most likely true in a general sense, although on an individual basis it might depend on how much health care someone uses in a given year. So, one problem lies in convincing people that a tax hike will benefit them, especially when it is not guaranteed that it will.
Another problem is the same one we see anytime health care reforms are proposed. People freak out about losing plans or access to doctors they like or having to wait in a queue to get treatment. This vulnerability isn’t avoidable or a good argument for not pursuing reforms but it does make it risky to propose something as disruptive as the abolishment of all private insurance. For me, this means that you should never propose something like this unless you’re serious about putting all your muscle behind it. And that gets to my third concern.
There is a basic cost-benefit error here. The chances of pushing a Medicare-for-All plan through the next Congress are almost nil. The Democrats would either have to overcome a Senate filibuster or they’d have to eliminate the legislative filibuster altogether. Let’s examine both of those scenarios.
The Democrats would need 60 votes to end a filibuster and they couldn’t get that many votes even if they won every competitive or semi-competitive Senate race next year. So, we can rule this out.
To end the legislative filibuster, they’d need 50 votes and the vice-president breaking a tie. But the Democrats will be lucky to have more than 51 or 52 seats even in a total landslide election. The problem here is that they’re unlikely to have enough unanimity in their caucus to end the legislative filibuster unless they can get closer to 55-57 seats. That’s both because senators are institutionally opposed to the change and because moderates get two valuable things out of the filibuster. First, it prevents radical legislation from passing which would endanger their political careers. Second, it puts them in the strongest negotiating position because they are the ones who can cut deals with Republicans (or so they like to think).
So, it’s not likely that the legislative filibuster will be eliminated by the next Congress. If it is, it will probably be after the first and most important year when even the moderates have to acknowledge that the rule is crippling their new president.
So, on a cost-benefit basis, there are easily identifiable downsides to proposing something that makes people apprehensive and that can be easily attacked and mischaracterized. What I can’t find is the upside. Where is the benefit in proposing something you won’t be able to enact?
And it’s not just the filibuster that makes it hard to enact. It’s also the lack of unanimity about it in the Democratic caucuses. I’m not at all certain that Nancy Pelosi could pass Medicare-for-All through the House. In the Senate, there could be a dozen or more Democratic senators who would never sign off on it. If the idea is to move the Overton Window to make Medicare-for-All more popular, that’s the job of a message candidate, not a candidate who plans on being the nominee.
This lack of unanimity was definitely on display during the debate last night when candidates like Joe Biden, Pete Buttigieg and Amy Klobuchar all attacked Warren for proposing Medicare-for-All. That footage will be manna from heaven for Donald Trump or whoever runs in his stead next year. We can be angry about Democrats echoing Republican talking points, undermining support for Medicare-for-All, prattling about budget deficits, and giving ammunition to the GOP for the 2020 campaign. But we can also be angry that we have serious potential nominees who couldn’t predict these problems and avoid them.
What’s particularly annoying is that if Sanders or Warren were to become president, they’d probably struggle to pass the plans proposed by Biden and Buttigieg and be accused of Leninism for even trying. That’s the best they could hope to do, and they’d be exceeding my expectations if they succeeded. So, all this is is a big fat political weakness that has no discernible upside at all.
And I simply can’t understand why anyone would gift a person like Donald Trump something he can grab and beat them with. It’s dumb politics and for once the moderates have the better side of an argument.
Republicans have already started running ads attacking M4A. Saw several last night during the debate.
I totally agree, Pragmatic Progressive, and Princess Leia!
Medicare for All is Pie in the Sky, would never happen, as we would never have enough Democrats in the Senate to stop a filibuster!
Warren can thread the needle by just saying she’s aiming to get Medicare for All but is also willing to improve Obamacare by making a public option available to all in addition to private insurance. I think she can also call for expanding non-profit HMOs to compete with for-profit health insurers, and call for further regulation of private insurers under Obamacare.
I think Dems are in a healthcare trap. It’s an important issue but it sucks up too much oxygen. TV debates are not about educating the public on what candidates propose, or what is most important. The bias is towards conflict. Dems have a real disagreement about M4A, esp. among leading candidates, and so that’s what TV debate moderators focus on. Other issues — climate, immigration, etc. — tend to get Dem responses drawing distinctions vs. Trump, and that is not as “interesting” for TV.
Cory Booker has played an interesting role in the debates. He’s the guy reminding everyone that they’re all on the same team. He’s got a good shot at being VP.
I would throw in Beto’s tax the churches and Beto and Yang’s decriminalize heroin as complete and total losers.
So why shouldn’t Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, and other organizations in the business of Religion be taxed? How much in local state, and federal taxes do these business organizations NOT pay in taxes?
And why shouldn’t heroin and every other drug be de-criminalized? i doubt anybody here is against the de-criminalization of marijuana. Why stop there?
The primary reason there is crime related to drug use and abuse is because all those dugs are illegal. Which keeps the prices [and the demand for more money to be spent on enforcement] up. How much money has the US spent on its so-called “War On Drugs” since launched by Bozo and Bush the Elder?
What’s the consensus on Yang’s $1000/month Freedom Check? i can only imagine.
And why is Everybody ~ Left, Right, and Muddled Middle ~ so frothed up about Trump’s “abandonment” of the Kurds?
Where was all this concern about what we were doing [in no particular historical order] to the folks who lived in Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan [under Cheney/Bush the Lesser], Libya, Somalia, Yemen, and Syria [under Obama and The Hillary]; among other places?
What utter, total, complete, blanket hypocrisy.
Jeffrey Moebus writes, “So why shouldn’t Churches, Synagogues, Mosques, and other organizations in the business of Religion be taxed?â€
I have been in favor, for years, of eliminating the tax exemption when anyone representing them, especially in a key role, endorses political candidates.
https://www.irs.gov/newsroom/charities-churches-and-politics
Mayor Pete nailed it concerning Tulsi. She’s no progressive when it comes to foreign policy.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/tulsi-gabbard-regime-change-wars_n_5da68baee4b02253a2fa51b0
Pelosi Gave a Master Class on How to Deal With a Misogynist Bully
https://washingtonmonthly.com/2019/10/17/pelosi-gave-a-master-class-on-how-to-deal-with-a-misogynist-bully/
Tulsi Gabbard, the controversial, long-shot Democratic 2020 candidate, explained
How Gabbard went from rising star to controversial figure.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/1/16/18182114/tulsi-gabbard-2020-president-campaign-policies
When Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI) was first elected to Congress in 2012 amid an ocean of positive press, the Iraq War veteran seemed like a sure thing for a 2020 presidential run. But her 2020 campaign has, so far, been a nearly complete nonstarter — averaging under 1 percent in national polls.
That’s because the onetime progressive star has alienated many of her early supporters over her conservative stances on Islam and foreign wars.
Gabbard initially excited the left because she was an outspoken economic progressive and a veteran who objected to American intervention abroad. She was also the first Hindu member of Congress. Nancy Pelosi called her an “emerging starâ€; MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow predicted she was “on the fast track to being very famous.â€
But in the following years, Gabbard staked out foreign policy positions that shocked her allies. She joined Republicans in demanding that President Obama use the term “radical Islam.†She was the member of Congress most willing to advocate for Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad. She dubbed herself a “hawk†on terrorism. Reporters documented worrying ties to anti-LGBTQ groups — including one run by her father — and anti-Muslim Hindu nationalists.
Gabbard has defenses of these positions, some more persuasive than others. She seems to have sincerely changed her mind on LGBTQ issues, defends her position on terrorism as a necessary response to the serious threat from jihadism to the United States, and argues that her outreach to the Syrian government is part of an effort to open up space for a peaceful solution to the conflict.
In 2016, she backed Sen. Bernie Sanders’s (I-VT) insurgent campaign over Hillary Clinton’s. The move isolated her from her friends in the establishment while getting her little traction with the party’s insurgent left, which remained skeptical of her foreign policy.
For 2020, Gabbard has run as an economic and social progressive, similar to Sanders on domestic policy in many respects. Her campaign website calls for “breaking up the big banks†and “healthcare for all.†But the site also foregrounds her views on war and peace, arguing that “Tulsi has been a leading voice fighting to end regime change wars and instead focus our military efforts on defeating the terrorist groups that attacked and declared war on the United States.â€
Yet it’s her policy views on these issues that have put her campaign in a tough place.
Experts, writers, and political figures on both sides of the Democratic Party’s internal divide have told me the result is that a politician once hailed as the future of the party has no natural constituency and few powerful allies. (Gabbard’s campaign did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) And given that she’s not the only candidate opposing wars of regime change in the 2020 field, it’s hard to see exactly how she breaks through and betters her consistently dismal polling numbers.
The making of a progressive star
For Tulsi Gabbard, politics is a family business. Her mother, Carol Gabbard, was on Hawaii’s State Board of Education; her father, Mike Gabbard, was a political activist and Honolulu City Council member, best known in Hawaii for being one of the state’s leading opponents of LGBTQ equality. He founded an organization called Stop Promoting Homosexuality that opposed not only marriage equality but the very idea of tolerance for homosexuality itself.
“Homosexuality is not normal, not healthy, morally and scripturally wrong,†he said in a 1992 interview, in which he also blamed the spread of AIDS on the repeal of sodomy laws.
Mike Gabbard’s opposition to LGBTQ rights (as well as abortion) seemed to stem from his religious background. Born in American Samoa, he is both Catholic and a member of an obscure offshoot of the Hare Krishna sect called the Science of Identity Foundation. The group’s leader, a self-described guru named Chris Butler, has condemned homosexuality, once arguing that it led to “an increasing number of American women [keeping] dogs for sexual purposes.’â€
Tulsi Gabbard grew up in Butler’s movement, which has faced allegations of cult-like practices. She told the New Yorker’s Kelefa Sanneh that he shaped her Hindu identity, speaking of her “gratitude to him for the gift of this wonderful spiritual practice that he has given to me.â€
Her early political career reflected both Butler’s views and her father’s. She worked for her father’s organization, which supported the use of “conversion therapy†to try to turn kids straight. She once blasted “homosexual activists†for trying to “force their values down the throats of the children in our schools.†During her successful run for the Hawaii Legislature in 2002, when she was just 21 years old, she vowed to pass a constitutional amendment against same-sex marriage.
Despite her conservative social views — she also opposed abortion — Gabbard was a Democrat, albeit not one likely to succeed on the national stage. But in 2004, she deployed to the Middle East for her National Guard unit, serving as a combat medic in Iraq and a counterterrorism trainer in Kuwait.
This was, according to her, a transformative experience. During her 2012 campaign for an open seat in the US House, Gabbard supported both same-sex marriage and abortion rights. She explained her change of heart in a December 2011 blog post on her campaign site. It’s worth reading her statement at length:
The contrast between our society and those in the Middle East made me realize that the difference — the reason those societies are so oppressive — is that they are essentially theocracies where the government and government leaders wield the power to both define and then enforce morality.
My experiences in the Middle East eventually led me to reevaluate my view regarding government’s role in our personal lives and decisions.
Slowly, I began to realize that the positions I had held previously regarding the issues of choice and gay marriage were rooted in the same premise held by those in power in the oppressive Middle East regimes I saw — that it is government’s role to define and enforce our personal morality.
Gabbard made a name for herself during the 2012 campaign as a Democrat to watch. The strength of her campaign — she won an upset primary victory after initially trailing by 50 points — and her compelling personal background caught the eye of national Democrats pretty early. That summer, Pelosi tapped her for a speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention.
She effectively moved beyond her controversial stands on social issues, situating herself as an economic progressive and a critic of the Bush-era wars in the Middle East. The latter was particularly important as she grounded her antiwar arguments in her personal experience witnessing the cost of war. This immunized her from the “soft on terrorism†charges so many Democrats were terrified to court, making her a powerful critic of “nation building†and “wars of choice.â€
Another famous biracial Hawaiian politician, President Barack Obama, endorsed her congressional run. After her victory, Gabbard was given one of five vice chair positions on the Democratic National Committee, a sign of the party’s faith in her. Another rising star, then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker, told Vogue in 2013 that “she’s one of the leading voices in the party now.â€
Tulsi Gabbard seemed like the perfect Democrat, the kind of politician everyone in the party was excited about. And then she shot herself in the foot.
Gabbard fought Obama — and lost the party
Gabbard’s fall from grace in the Democratic Party came in a peculiar fashion: She picked a series of high-profile fights with the Obama administration over foreign policy.
In 2015, terrorism was arguably the biggest fight in American partisan politics. ISIS had just swept across northern Iraq, seizing control of the country’s second-largest city; the Obama administration had launched a new war in Iraq to roll them back. In January, killers aligned with the Islamic State attacked the French satirical publication Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket, igniting fears of a global wave of terrorist violence.
Republicans blamed Obama. One of the most common arguments from Republicans in the runup to that year’s midterm election was that Obama refused to say the phrase “radical Islam,†arguing that the president’s commitment to political correctness was preventing him from identifying the root cause of jihadist violence: Islamist theology.
Very few Democrats were willing to echo the Republican arguments on this front. Gabbard was an exception. As early as January 2015, she started going on every cable channel that would have her — including Fox News — and bashing Obama’s policy on terrorism. She sounded indistinguishable from a Republican presidential candidate.
“What is so frustrating … is that our administration refuses to recognize who our enemy is,†she said in a January 2015 interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. “And unless and until that happens, then it’s impossible to come up with a strategy to defeat that enemy. We have to recognize that this is about radical Islam.â€
The problem with this argument, according to both the Obama administration and most terrorism experts, is that “radical Islam†paints with too broad a brush. The term implies that jihadist militants are part of a unified ideological movement rather than a series of discrete groups that are often at war with each other. It’s also insulting to the vast majority of Muslims around the world. President George W. Bush’s counterterrorism team refused to use it for these reasons.
This overwhelming focus on the threat from terrorism culminated in what’s now Gabbard’s most infamous policy position: quasi-support for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, the dictator responsible for the outbreak of the Syrian civil war and the conflict’s worst atrocities.
Gabbard argued, along with a small minority of foreign policy analysts, that the best way to defeat ISIS in Syria was for the US to align itself with Assad’s regime. She argued that the US should cut funding to the rebels fighting Assad, even sponsoring a bill in Congress to cut off US support. In the fall of 2015, when Russia began its bombing campaign in Syria, Gabbard celebrated it as a win for counterterrorism.
In fact, Russian forces were mostly targeting Syrian rebel groups overall rather than al-Qaeda-aligned rebel groups specifically. The goal was not narrow counterterrorism but rather defending a Russian-friendly regime that was (at the time) losing the war.
But there’s an internal logic here, one that the Kremlin itself has argued publicly. If you’re focused solely on the threat from the jihadist elements inside the Syrian opposition to the American homeland to the exclusion of moral concerns about Assad’s regime, then it makes a grim kind of sense to align oneself with the Syrian and Russian governments.
This appears to be how Gabbard, who once described Assad as “brutal,†could support Russia’s intervention on his behalf — even going so far as to unfavorably compare Obama to Putin: Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911, she wrote in a Tweet, dated October 1, 2015 at 12:03 pm
In January 2017, she traveled to Syria and met with Assad personally, catching the Democratic leadership in Congress off guard. After returning to the US, she went on CNN and parroted the regime’s line that there was “no difference†between the mainstream anti-Assad rebels and ISIS.
By this point, Democratic leadership considered her disloyal. “Rep. Gabbard loses me and, I think, many others when she claims to support peaceful values and policies that protect civilians and still engages with and even defends a murderous dictator, Bashar al-Assad,†Loren DeJonge Schulman, a senior NSC official in the Obama administration, told me earlier this year. “There is no excuse for this. The hypocrisy of these actions is astonishing. One can be antiwar without being pro-murderous dictator, a fact that seems obvious.â€
When Assad’s forces used chemical weapons against Syrian civilians in April 2017, Gabbard said she was “skeptical†that Assad was responsible, aligning herself with conspiracy theorists against both US intelligence and the overwhelming majority of independent experts.
Assad was not the only foreign authoritarian Gabbard praised for fighting terrorism. She issued a statement celebrating Egyptian strongman Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s “great courage and leadership in taking on … extreme Islamist ideology†— despite Sisi taking power in a coup and massacring more than 800 peaceful protesters in a single day.
She also proposed a policy of US special forces raids around the world and even expressed a willingness to authorize torture of terrorism suspects if she were president. She referred to herself in one interview as a “dove†on regime change but a “hawk†on terrorism, neatly summarizing her actual positions.
Gabbard and the left: she can’t replace Bernie
If Gabbard was estranged from the party leadership as a result of her views on terrorism, it was official when she endorsed Sanders over Clinton. Gabbard resigned her position as vice chair of the DNC to do it, a hard break with the party that she claimed was motivated by reservations about Clinton’s foreign policy instincts.
“We can elect a president who will lead us into more interventionist wars of regime change, or we can elect a president who will usher in a new era of peace and prosperity,†she said in a taped endorsement. “The stakes are just too high. That’s why today I’m endorsing Sen. Bernie Sanders to be our next president and commander in chief of the United States.â€
Much like Gabbard’s postwar conversion on abortion and LGBTQ rights, this seems both plausible and politically savvy. Her positioning on Syria and fights with the Obama administration had already alienated many people in the party’s more mainstream wing; courting the party’s insurgents seemed like a smart way to build a new base of national support.
In the years since, Gabbard has cultivated this relationship. She has endorsed a $15 minimum wage, Medicare-for-all, and the Green New Deal. When she faced a primary challenge in 2018, motivated in part by her Syria position, the pro-Sanders group Our Revolution endorsed her (as did actress Shailene Woodley, an Our Revolution board member). She has a vocal group of online fans from the so-called “anti-imperialist†left, a loose group of writers — like the anti-Israel gadfly Max Blumenthal — who share her position on Syria.
But on the whole, the left isn’t enthusiastic about Gabbard. Some of her harshest critics come not from the party mainstream but rather from the party’s left and democratic socialist flanks.
In 2017, the socialist publication Jacobin published a brutal takedown titled “Tulsi Gabbard Is Not Your Friend,†focusing on dispelling the myth of Gabbard as an opponent of America’s wars abroad.
“Gabbard’s almost singular focus on the damage these wars inflict domestically, and her comparative lack of focus on the carnage they wreak in the countries under attack, is troubling,†Jacobin’s Branko Marcetic writes. “It is nationalism in antiwar garb, reinforcing instead of undercutting the toxic rhetoric that treats foreigners as less deserving of dignity than Americans.â€
Reached via email, Marcetic told me he believes many on the American left share his view of Gabbard.
“My sense is there’s a pretty big cohort of the left that distrusts Gabbard,†he said. “Her anti-interventionism isn’t quite as peaceful as she makes it out to be.â€
In January, the Intercept, a left-aligned antiwar outlet, published a deeply reported exposé on Gabbard’s ties to Hindu nationalists. Gabbard has long supported Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, an anti-Islam right-winger who had previously been barred from entering the US due to being personally implicated in deadly anti-Muslim riots. In turn, American Hindu supporters of Modi had become some of Gabbard’s biggest donors — including some disturbingly Islamophobic groups.
“Hindu-Americans have supported Gabbard since the start of her political career, and that support has increased substantially since Modi’s election, much of it coming from Hindu nationalists,†Soumya Shankar writes in the Intercept piece. “Dozens of Gabbard’s donors have either expressed strong sympathy with or have ties to the Sangh Parivar — a network of religious, political, paramilitary, and student groups that subscribe to the Hindu supremacist, exclusionary ideology known as Hindutva.â€
These attacks in the left press underscore how divisive a figure she is even among the party’s insurgent wing. It’s hard to see why a faction that was troubled by Hillary Clinton’s foreign policy record would be open to someone who had engaged in borderline Islamophobic rhetoric about “radical Islam,†called for escalations in the war on terrorism, and backed anti-Islam populists and dictators abroad.
What’s more, the Bernie camp has a candidate they’d obviously prefer to Gabbard: Bernie. Sanders’s supporters have not defected in any meaningful numbers to Gabbard over the course of the campaign, and there’s no reason to expect they should.
What’s more, Gabbard isn’t even the other major left-identified candidate in the field. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, not Gabbard, has emerged as the other leading candidate competing for the party’s left reaches, even outpacing Sanders in some recent polls. There doesn’t seem to be room for anyone else out there besides Sanders and Warren, who both have better name recognition than Gabbard and lack her particularly encumbering baggage.
So while backing Sanders in 2016 was smart politics on Gabbard’s part, given her declining support in the mainstream, it simply wasn’t enough to overcome the hole she dug herself. Nobody made Gabbard cozy up to Assad or attack Obama for not saying “radical Islamâ€; she wasn’t forced to entertain the idea of bringing back torture or fundraising from hardline Hindu nationalists. These moves clearly weren’t politically clever, and they seem to have cost her allies around the party.
There’s only one clear explanation: Gabbard’s most controversial positions represent her authentic convictions. She deeply believes the US would have been better off helping Assad slaughter Syrian rebels, and that combating terrorism requires saying the magic phrase “radical Islam.†There’s something admirable about a politician expressing their deep convictions even though it’s politically devastating — except in this case, those convictions are morally repellent.
In an interview on CNN announcing her intent to run in 2020, Gabbard said she was running principally to advance her view of foreign policy. “There is one main issue that is central to the rest, and that is the issue of war and peace,†she said.
That also happens to be the main reason her campaign is in such a tough place.
Thank you for that, Pragmatic. That explains why we don’t like her.
Rustbelt – Sometimes I get the impression that they are competing to see who can out progressive each other on Twitter.
How to improve the debates.
https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/mayjune-2011/how-to-improve-the-democratic-primary-debates/
They need to set the poll bar higher, weed out the lower tier candidates.