Thoughts on Super Tuesday
I have a few thoughts about Super Tuesday (regarding events before, during, and after it), as well as a question from a listener.
Imagine touting the benefits of unionization to your audience, but when your employees want to unionize, you get upset. Teachable moment?
Mentioned links:
Hemingway: If Bloomberg couldn’t buy 2020 with $600M, how could Russia have bought 2016 with $300K?
Yet Another Media Favorite Bites the Dust
The Young Turks’ Progressive Founder Urged His Staff Not To Unionize
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Show transcript
I get emails! That’s right, and you can write to me and suggest show topics. Longtime listener Barb did just that and here’s what she said.
Don’t you find it interesting that both Amy and Pete dropped out of the race THE DAY BEFORE Super Tuesday – and are endorsing Biden? Normally candidates drop out AFTER the big day — when they see the results. Must be some very powerful backroom negotiations with Pelosi and her crew at the head of the table — desperately trying to derail crazy Uncle Bernie’s momentum — must be scaring the dickens out of them.
Guessing they arm-twisted Amy and Pete, promising them big positions in the White House/cabinet in the event of a Democratic victory (which they believe they can bring home), and on the flip side, told Biden that they will pick his VP candidate and this is how he wins — that he needs to “get on board”
I don’t think Biden is smart enough or savvy enough to think this up himself — much less negotiate it — I think it was an “intervention”
My oh my…..
I would be interested to hear your thoughts…..
And not only do I get emails, I send replies! This is basically what I said.
Any thoughts I would have regarding why Klobuchar and Buttigieg dropped out before the big day would be no more than a guess. But I think Barb is right; the party apparatus saw how well Bernie was doing and thought either that he was too far left, or (worse) that he was fine but that he personally couldn’t beat Trump.
Or perhaps they are fine with Bernie’s ideas but just not now. Maybe after 8 years of Biden, the country would be ready for commu…I mean socialism.
And sometimes I wonder if Biden just can’t believe his party is sliding so far down the slippery slope. So much has changed since he got into politics.
Indeed candidates usually drop out after seeing the writing on the wall. Perhaps this time, instead of the primaries doing the writing, the Democratic Party did, with promises of sweet jobs that would be a better launching pad to the Presidency. Mayor Pete especially has plenty of time for a future run, and desperately needs a resume boost.
Well speaking of Super Tuesday, on the Democrat side, it really looks like we are down to a 2 man race at this point. Say what you want about a youthful and diverse Democratic Party, what they are left with are the 2 old white guys. And who would have thought that Joe Biden would be the youngest Democrat male candidate left standing?
That’s one takeaway from the primaries. Another one is that money doesn’t necessarily buy you the votes. I saw Molly Hemingway on Fox News say something to the effect that if $600 million only gave Michael Bloomberg 6 delegates, then how can you say that Russia, which spent $300,000 on Facebook ads, influenced the 2016 election? It’s a fair point.
Another takeaway is that, in the aftermath of Super Tuesday, Elizabeth Warren suspended her campaign. Is this sexism at work here? Well if it is, you can’t blame it on the usual suspects. Jim Geraghty writing at National Review breaks it down.
If this is indeed sexism, this [it] is a sexism that is rampant among Democratic primary voters in 19 states now. Two-thirds of women in Massachusetts voted for someone else. For once, Warren fans can’t blame Republicans or Donald Trump or Fox News or conservatives. This was a contest among their own. If sexism indeed tanked Warren’s campaign, it means the Democratic Party and its voters are [as] much an obstacle to women’s advancement as that dastardly GOP is. The sexism is coming from inside the house!
You can expect to hear Democrats come to the realization that rejecting a woman for a job isn’t automatically bigotry. Well, that will last until a Republican does it, of course.
The Democratic Party has typically been known as a friend of labor unions. However, Donald Trump has been eroding some of that support with bringing manufacturing jobs back to the US and promises of infrastructure rebuilding. Democrats would still like you to believe that they hold a lock on caring for workers through the unions.
Except of course when they are the ones having to deal with unions. The most recent example of this is the liberal activist site The Young Turks (TYT for short). Cenk Uygur [chenk yu-ger] runs that site, and he called a meeting to discourage employees from forming their own union.
His talk ? at times emotional, the staffers said, with Uygur throwing his papers to the ground at one point, and chastising an employee ? seemed to contradict the progressive, worker-first ethos that TYT broadcasts to its millions of lefty followers. Jack Gerard, who is acting as the company’s chief operating officer as Uygur runs for Congress in California, told the staff they were not discouraging unionization.
But the message from Uygur was clear ? and, to at least some staffers, discouraging.
So basically the message is, you people watching us should form unions but we should be exempt from them. It’s interesting that he is all for fairness for workers except when those workers are his.
His argument was that a union does not belong at a small, independent outlet like TYT. He said if there had been a union at the network it would not have grown the way it has. So then, he’s saying that unions restrict growth; at least that certainly sounds like what he’s saying. Or maybe he’s saying that smaller companies shouldn’t have to pay fair wages (whatever he means by “fair”).
I think unions generally have more negatives than positives, which is why the percentage of workers who are in a union has dropped to 10%. But for or against unions, either way, no matter how you parse his words, it’s not a good look for Cenk.
The post Episode 284: Super Tuesday, 2020 / Unions For Thee But Not For Me appeared first on Consider This!.