Bernie Bros, The Moderate Vote, and A Waiter in the West Village

~ Laura

I don’t care about football.

I usually watch the Super Bowl every year, because of the parties, the fun munchies, and the commercials. Everything else is a big snore for me. So, last night, I skipped the whole thing and went out with a couple of girlfriends to grab drinks and dinner in the New York City.

We were ensconced in a bar in the West Village eating super salty fries and drinking pitchers of beer along with the 20-year olds, when the conversation turned to the election. Who were we going to vote for in the primary?

One friend said her vote was for Warren or Bernie. The other friend said, anybody but Bernie. I said, anybody who has the best chance of beating Trump. I said that if the polls tell me that Biden has the best chance, I’ll vote for him. I’m, in a sense, a single issue voter right.

So, we were fighting it out about who had the best chance, who would carry the youth vote, and did the youth vote matter (no), when our waiter demanded to know what we were fighting about. I said, “politics”. He said, “move over. I want to hear this.” So, I pushed our coats away and gave him a seat.

He was a 30-something, probably gay, mixed race guy. He said that he didn’t like Bernie. While he was very in favor of gay rights, he was a libertarian about a lot of things. He thought that people should be able to carry guns, as long as they followed certain rules. He also said that 70 percent of his friends weren’t going to vote at all.

When he got up, I didn’t say, “I told you so.” But I was thinking it.

At this point, I think people are either going to vote for Trump or they won’t. I can’t imagine there is a single person in the country, who hasn’t made that decision. There are a whole lot of people, who may or may not show up to vote. And that’s the real election now.

The Democrats have to put someone forward who will get their people to the polls, but won’t annoy weak Republicans so much so that they decide to show up and vote for Trump.

There is definitely a “silly season” in every primary, where the media doesn’t feel that it’s totally necessary to back the serious candidate. That’s why Trump got as far as he did. The media let him go unchecked through silly season, until it was too late.

Is the same thing happening now? Mayor Pete is really too young to be a serious candidate. Bernie may actually be a terrible candidate, as Hillary hinted last week. (I think her comment wasn’t off-the-cuff, but was a calculated attempt by Democrat leaders to take Bernie out.) Biden is doing really well with minority voters.

Then the waiter came back again and told me that I looked just like the landlady on the Kimmie Schmidt show. After a little googling on our phones, we realized that he meant Carol Kane. Apparently, I look like a crazy old lady, with big eyes and wild hair, so take this waiter’s comments with a grain of salt.

Published by Laura

24 thoughts on “Bernie Bros, The Moderate Vote, and A Waiter in the West Village”

  3. I don’t think it’s just the weak Republicans that the Democrats need to worry about. There are plenty of weak Democrats who aren’t wild about Donald Trump, but don’t sit around hating him all day, and who might vote for another candidate, but not if it’s a hard left nut like Sanders or Warren. I’m pretty sure that Laura’s husband meets lots of people like that in his professional life, and Laura could meet plenty of them if she went someplace really bizarre, like the local country club.

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    1. “..don’t sit around hating him all day, and who might vote for another candidate, but not if it’s a hard left nut like Sanders or Warren”
      Me, for example…

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  4. “So, we were fighting it out about who had the best chance,”, yeah, a group of middle-aged well-off/liberal/white women fighting about “who has the best chance” is, as I’ve said before, what gets us John Kerry (i.e. more precisely, since I know this better, left coast progressives/liberals arguing about who is most likely to get the vote of a working class white person in Ohio who doesn’t think it’s all that unreasonable to tell a man born in Indiana that he can’t be a fair judge because his parents, or grandparents, or great grandparents immigrated from Mexico or to tell a woman born in Brooklyn to “go home” or to stop Microsoft employees of Iranian descent at the border).

    I think we have to let the primaries play out and do our best to support strongly whoever wins the primary. I don’t trust the polls well enough (especially when it comes to subgroups voting in particular states) to use them to make meta decisions about who to vote for in the primary. In conversation lat night, we did agree that we’re glad that we aren’t gong to have to caucus, but will be able to vote in a primary this year.

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    1. “So, we were fighting it out about who had the best chance,”
      People generally aren’t very good at ‘beauty contest’ games like this. Better to just vote for the candidate you like than try to figure out who everyone else will like.

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      1. Tulip said, ““So, we were fighting it out about who had the best chance,”
        People generally aren’t very good at ‘beauty contest’ games like this. Better to just vote for the candidate you like than try to figure out who everyone else will like.”

        True!

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  5. I’m hearing some interesting conversations at work from people in their late 50s who are contemplating being let go (a major process is being moved to another location). A lot of them are saying they would not have thought of Warren but now they’re facing potentially 5 years or more before Medicare kicks in and the costs are astonishing.
    They aren’t sounding decisive though so I’m not saying we have a big change afoot.

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  7. Just a heads up. Ian had a really bad seizure last night. Came downstairs covered in blood and vomit. Lots of phone calls to school and doctors. I’ll be back when things calm down.

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  10. Thanks all. He had a really bad seizure, which was very disturbing. He isn’t on a full dosage of his medicine yet, because his doctor wants to slowly ramp up to make sure that there isn’t any side effects. When he’s fully dosed up, he should be fine. There’s very good medicine these days.

    However, this seizure just reset our clocks. Until he goes for six months without a seizure, he can’t be left alone at all. So, I’ll be continuing to work from home during the week. And I’ll hire babysitters and enlist help from family, when we can’t avoid going out on our own. Not a big deal.

    Okay, I’m back to work here. I’ll post something about the end of democracy or something a little later today. I can’t leave you all alone when there is so much to talk about.

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    1. That’s good to hear, that it’s something that will be controlled eventually. A challenge to not leave him alone at all, but at least that seems workable. Hope today is a better day.

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    2. That’s scary – I’m so sorry. We had a situation a few years ago where we couldn’t leave one of ours alone for an 18 month period – it’s hard, but one makes it work. How is he doing with it all?

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    3. That’s really scary. My father has seizures from a TBI, and the medication really is good now but it can take a while to work out. Don’t be shy about activating your network. I have many friends for whom I’d be willing to come work at their house for a while, or bring a project over, so they could get out and about.

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