Trump, Biden, and Warren

~ Laura

I’m increasingly stressed out about the presidential election next year.

Polls show that Trump has an edge in the battleground states — MI, PA, AZ, FL, WI, and NC — when matched up against Sanders and Warren. Against, Biden, Trump loses.

I don’t think anybody is excited about Biden, but those numbers are very concerning.

The rest of the Democratic candidates are looking at those numbers and regretting setting themselves up to be the next AOC. Watch them all move a step to the right during this week’s debates. The Twitter Democrats may have sunk the next election.

I do like Warren. I’ve been talking about here on this blog, since 2004. But she makes a lot of people nervous. Her healthcare plan got very mixed reviews this weekend.

Published by Laura

22 thoughts on “Trump, Biden, and Warren”

  1. Trump is running tv commercials in PA right now. The local economy is good, except in the manufacturing and extraction industries he promised to help. Those are now worse than under Obama.

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  2. The rest of the Democratic candidates are looking at those numbers and regretting setting themselves up to be the next AOC. Watch them all move a step to the right during this week’s debates.

    Not going to happen; the left has too much institutional momentum by now (thank goodness). Warren and Sanders will carry on, Biden will be Biden, Buttigieg will pretend to be Biden+, and everyone else will fade into obscurity, I suspect.

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  3. Biden and Sanders are both too old for me to support them in a primary. Warren is pretty close to that age, but young enough (relatively) that I’ll consider her. I’m just so sick of old white people.

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  4. I think that anyone with student debt is going have a hard time casting a vote for Biden. He spent decades in the Senate making it harder and harder and then finally impossible to get out of your student loan obligations if you declared bankruptcy.

    I also think anyone with any experience of the prison system is not going to think very kindly of Biden, once they hear more about his 1994 crime bill. And they will hear a lot more about it if he is the nominee.

    The are people still horrified at his performance as chairman of the Judiciary committee at the Anita Hill hearings.

    I think that leaves a group of people who are overly optimistic about Biden’s chances as the Democratic candidate, just like the last election.
With Biden, I think we are going to have another Democratic candidate which a lot of democrats and independents will have no enthusiasm to vote for—Just like in 2016. And the election might slip away again.

    I know the poll article shows otherwise, but I have no faith that those voters are going to show up and vote.

    The other candidates have their own problems of course, but at least they might have some folks that genuinely want to vote for them. That might not be enough. Can you tell that I’m a bit pessimistic about this?

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  5. Elizabeth Warren is a dangerous nut. She is De Blasio (if not Hugo Chavez) on a larger stage, and she would be disastrous for the financial services industry and thus for NYC. I didn’t vote for Trump, but if she is the Democratic nominee, I will this time.

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    1. Elizabeth Warren is a dangerous nut. She is De Blasio (if not Hugo Chavez) on a larger stage, and she would be disastrous for the financial services industry and thus for NYC.

      Honestly, the hyperbole. The idea that rolling back financial regulation to where it was in the 1980s, seriously enforcing antitrust law, and proposing the same sort of health care system that every other civilized western country has is tantamount to embracing Hugo Chavez is just over the top crazy talk.

      Bad for the financial services industry is not the same as bad for the country and it is just as likely that dismantling all the hedge funds (which even Warren doesn’t propose to do) would lead to greater economic growth as not. Is it possible to make your self-dealing pitch honestly, without comparing Warren to history’s greatest monsters?

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      1. Is it possible to make your self-dealing pitch honestly, without comparing Warren to history’s greatest monsters?

        Leave Jimmy Carter out of this!

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      2. De Blasio is one of history’s greatest monsters? He’s an incompetent, ideologically-driven mayor, nothing more. I don’t even put Chavez in the category of history’s greatest monsters. Anyway, for those who want reasoned critiques of Elizabeth Warren’s claims, it isn’t hard, you can start here. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2019/10/16/health-care-warren-sounded-like-student-who-hadnt-done-her-reading/ For those who want Elizabeth Warren’t reasoned response, I’m waiting with you. And the financial services pays my salary, and I intend to vote my interest, as opposed to those whose votes are driven by hatred and envy.

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      3. For those who work in financial services, I think stricter regulation is a benefit. I watched a lot of people lose their jobs working for banks that took crazy risks and were then absorbed by other banks. I’m still employed but I know people who has to change careers when they couldn’t find work doing their old jobs.

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    1. That’s my thought also. The next thing they’ll try to pin on her is that she’s going to hurt your health insurance company.

      I’m still mad nobody was jailed in 2008.

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    2. They already have — saw an article talking about how she has no answer to all the insurance company people who will lose their jobs (denying claims, presumably).

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      1. That’s basically proof her plan will be cheaper than the present system.

        Recruiters were calling me about jobs at health insurance companies in 2016. I don’t think the main work is denying claims so much as making sure your benefits package didn’t attract too many sick people. At least that was my guess. I didn’t interview for any of the jobs.

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  7. I’ve been doing research on families in financial trouble for more than twenty years to learn how many pople were abusing the bankruptcy system. My colleagues and I did a really extensive analysis and learned that families turn to bankruptcy not because they want to find a way not to pay, but because they are desperate. More disturbing, we released a study earlier this year [2005] that revealed that over half of bankruptcies are in the aftermath of medical emergencies.

    I never wanted to get involved in politics, but the bankruptcy bill now moving on a fast-track through Congress isn’t fair. It beats up teh average family already staggering under the weight of bad luck and huge debts, while it lets real abusers go free. That appears to have been the idea from the start.

    In 1997, financial services lobbyists wrote the bankruptcy bill and shopped it to “friendly” Congressmen. Since then, the bill has been introduced and re-introduced. Despite the very public bankruptcies of Enron, Worldcom, Adelphia, Polaroid, United Airlines, US Airways and TWA, there are no new provisions to rein in corporations that are paying millions to insiders while they cancel employee health benefits and wipe out retirement plans. Instead, this bill focuses on families, clamping down on people who have been driven to bankruptcy by job losses, by medical problems and by family break ups.

    Why?

    Because those are the people who owe credit card bills, and the credit card companies are the driving force behind this legislation. Some in the Senate recognize this.

    The bill is more than 500 pages long, all in highly technical language. But the overall thrust is pretty clear:

    * Make debtors pay more to creditors, both in bankruptcy and after bankruptcy, so that a bankruptcy filing will leave a family with more credit card debt, higher car loans, more owed to their banks and to payday lenders.

    * Make it more expensive to file for bankruptcy by driving up lawyers’ fees with new paperwork, new affidavits, and new liability for lawyers, so that the people in the most trouble can’t afford to file.

    * Make more hurdles and traps, with deadlines that a judge cannot waive even if someone has a heart attack or an ex-husband who won’t give up a copy of the tax returns, so that more people will get pushed out of bankruptcy with no discharge.

    There are people who abuse the system, but this bill lets them off. Millionaires will still be welcome to use the unlimited homestead exemption. And if they don’t want to buy a home there, they can just tuck their millions of dollars into a trust, a “millionaire’s loophole” that lets them keep everything — if they can afford a smart, high-priced lawyer.

    I don’t get paid by anybody on any side of this fight. I just think it isn’t fair.
    — Elizabeth Warren, March 6, 2005

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  8. Elizabeth Warren started out as a Republican. Her politics evolved as she encountered empirical evidence of structural obstructions that hamper hard-working working- and middle-class citizens’ attempts to achieve a decent standard of living. Hence, she is not an ideologue. She’s a problem-solver, who has been trying to figure out how to level the playing field by educating herself about the pros and cons of possible remedies. Anything she proposes will inevitably be whittled down through Congressional negotiations. Warren has shown a fair amount of pragmatism in her Senate dealings and would have to continue to do so as President. But okay, “advance” serious debate by calling her a “dangerous nut.”
    PS I would never vote for Biden just on the recurring plagiarism issue alone.

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    1. PS I would never vote for Biden just on the recurring plagiarism issue alone.

      I think it is important (at least for me) not to draw too many bright lines. Politics isn’t about emotional fulfillment and sometimes you just have to eat your lima beans. I’d vote for pretty much any of the Democrats running except Gabbard (because one president owned by the Russians is enough) or Williamson (because one nut who is not in complete touch with reality is enough) but aside from that, any will do.

      That said, Biden is awful for so, so, many reasons and he and Booker are fighting it out for being at the bottom of my list of preferences. I’ll still crawl over broken glass to pull the lever for either of them in November 2020, though.

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    3. “PS I would never vote for Biden just on the recurring plagiarism issue alone.”

      I won’t vote for Biden or Sanders in the primary (and yes, age is a big point for me with those two), but I wouldn’t hesitate to vote for them in the general election. Will have to agitate if they picked the other as a running mate (it seems a bit too much to rely on keeping control of the House & Pelosi is old, too).

      I don’t like to say no bright line, but I do often quote Gitlin, who wrote this in 2000, about the choices of Nader supporters:

      “On Earth, the only land ahead is the compromised land. Politics means satisfactions and dissatisfactions, not redemptions. There is this truth: We are condemned to share the Earth with people we dislike, even despise. In a democracy, we are condemned to share power with them. A large party — any large party — is a coalition of interests.”

      I don’t like to say no bright line, because there are some bright lines. I am willing to dismiss the plagiarism (in the general election) but I remain horrified by those who are willing to dismiss Trump’s outright racism.

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    4. I view both Sanders and Warren as ‘dangerous nuts’, and will probably not vote in the Presidential race if my choice is one of them or Trump. Can’t really stand the idea of voting for Trump. Last time, my solution was to vote for Johnson-Weld. My primary vote is likely to go to Bullock, Buttigieg, or Klobuchar. For all the good that will do me. I see Biden as sort of an enfeebled apparatchik, but will vote for him in the Presidential race if it’s Biden v Trump.

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  9. I am more middle of the road economically than Warren is (though I never vote based only on my own personal financial interests — other policies matter more to me), but I certainly have no care at all if her policies are bad for the New York Financial Industry (I still remain entirely unconvinced on what value they add). Also feel the same about blockchain. I am a bit more concerned about the incomplete ideas about breaking up “Big Tech” and regulating Facebook, but I think Warren might earn my primary vote (I still like Harris, but I don’t know that she will stay in long enough for me to vote for her).

    And, the polling doesn’t influence my vote. I’m probably repeating myself, but someone once wrote that John Kerry is who you end up with as your candidate when a bunch of people like me try to imagine who can win in Ohio. We are usually wrong (even when we grew up there). John Kerry looses in Ohio and he looses people like me, when some of them *are* actually, pretty much, forced to crawl across broken glass to pull their lever (or wait in 3 hour lines).

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  10. The crawling over broken glass is something that really worries me. There’s fairly abundant evidence of a concerted plan by Republicans to make it more difficult for those who they believe won’t support them (the young, people of color, . . .) to vote: the attempts to suppress voting by college students, the partisan gerymandering, the North Carolina legislature’s plan to not hold votes when all the Democrats are there, Florida’s machinations to undermine the people’s decision to allow Floridian ex-felons to vote, voter id laws, closing polling places in democratic/poc areas in Ohio, . . .

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  11. We live in a state that tries to make it possible for everyone to vote. We have all mail in elections. I vote in the comfort of my house with all the info I need. My kiddo was able to order a replacement ballot sent to her college address so that she could vote from there. When the one Republican in state government started closing polling drop off boxes, my county found funds to pay for mail in ballots (no stamp necessary) — and then, magically, the rest of the state found the money too. My other kiddo just got his driver’s license and he was offered the opportunity to pre-register to vote (to be activated when he turns 18). You can register to vote when you get your driver’s license, or when you buy health insurance. You can register on the day of the election, provisionally.

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