Jeff Tiedrich tweet:

[applegrove]

Link to tweet

[applegrove]

1. Seems like to be President these days you need to work within a group

of exceptional people and not take the lead at every turn. Called listening to the experts. It is sublime. Maybe that is what great presidents always have done and i just can't think past the darkness of the last 4 years.

[Indykatie]

2. I Was With Joe From the First So I don't Get These People Who Had Joe So Far Down on Their List

I know Jeff is being sarcastic about Joe not being his 16th choice but it's obvious Joe was way down on his list of preferred candidates. I can understand Joe not being someone's first or even second choice but I see too may comments where he wasn't even a person's 4th choice. WTF were they thinking? How could they be so dismissive of Joe's experience, temperament and ability to attract first class talent to his administration? There was no one else running that could hit the ground running but Joe.

[applegrove]

3. He was decent without Obama's pizazz. Buttigieg had pizazz. Bernie had Pizazz.

It was hard to think of running with someone who was not at the top of his game. After a few turns i saw the wisdom in being for Joe... the candidate who could win the middle and was not a threat to never Trumpers. He is much better than i had hoped and i had high hopes for him once i was all in for him. It was gut wrenching as nomination races went. So much was at stake. Biden's whole policy agenda so far has pizazz. I'm sure it will last. He is the right person for the job. I've always like him. He was just my #3 or #4.

[JI7]

5. If they had "pizazz" why didn't they do better. Especially those running for years ?

But Buttigieg did win Iowa and came close in NH. If his Iowa win was reported right away i'm sure he would have won NH also.

But Biden always had support among the base so once we got there he was going to take it.

[applegrove]

6. Bernie's supporters were quite often young. And they didn't come out to vote

in the primaries. Young people just vote in terribly low numbers. He had nobody to blame. He lost fair and square and that was good for Biden's campaign as nobody could blame him for Bernie's loss. Biden is the King of Pizazz now and that pizazz is in governing well and not letting Republicans sabotage his presidency. It shows vitality and a grown up kind of aggression we need.

[Hortensis]

7. :) Yes, Joe could win. Anyone who required a candidate who could win

had to have him among his top choices.

What we're doing is no revelation to me either, but getting here was definitely gut wrenching all the way. Joe also had the enormous advantage of being well known to the American people so that the various giant character assassin machines couldn't get traction. Uncle Joe the sexual predator and pocketer of millions in Ukraine failed badly, but we couldn't know how it'd all play out.

The character assassination's never stopped for the party itself, though. So one plus in this time of troubles is that more people are getting to see for themselves not just what the Democratic Party's liberal principles and goals really are, but that they really are.

[applegrove]

8. Yes. That may have been the biggest thing is that Joe was so well liked

and known by Americans. There was nothing the GOP or Trump could do about that.

[Hortensis]

9. Or the anti-Democratic left who get most of their support,

or just disaffection with Democrats, numerically from ordinary people who swallow their lies, and I'm hoping this hurts them also. Supposedly interest in socialism has been continuing to grow. Extremism and interest in extreme "solutions" do grow in troubled times. But of course Russia, Iran, China, and "the great RW conspiracy" are behind that as well.

It's not just the GOP we beat in 2020, and all battles are still on. But right now we're doing good.

[applegrove]

10. I went for Bernie at one point cause he was for public health care. I come

from canada that has lots of leftist policies. Works great to have mixed markets. The US could use more policies that help people and help the country in the future. I don't have much against the far left in the USA. They would be considered right of the Liberals in Canada on some issues. So we don't agree there. They generate new ideas. Ideas that do not always work. But ideas anyhow. The GOP is all for socialism when it comes to subsidies to oil and gas & farmers and the defence department. Nobody should be throwing around that word. And when they do they should be reminded of the socialism on their side that works.

As Mark Carney said in his recent book:

He said the advice he has offered governments is to divide their expenditures into three categories: COVID (emergency), current (ongoing programs like child care benefit and defence) and capital (measures to boost long-term productive capacity in the economy). “Their task is to move from the first category of spending to the last category of investment as quickly and transparently as possible,” he writes.

Socialism talk is old school. Moving from private healthcare to public would be a move from 2 to 3 as universal healthcare is much more efficient and equitable than the private healthcare you have now in the USA. Great schools would be 3. Alternative energy research and development would be 3. #3 might include regulations to make CEOs consider the longterm instead of one financial year and their bonus. How i see it anyway.

[Hortensis]

12. You and I are talking about two different things. I'm for the policies

you ascribe to them. They didn't create Canada's healthcare system. Reasonable people did, mostly driven by liberals but also moderate conservatives who saw the need. Again, I hope one thing that comes from this administration is more people realizing that all achievable progressive policies came from mainstream thinking, nothing radical about them, the big issue how achievable "now" and how to achieve them. (Democratically all the way for us.)

No, I'm talking about the far left fringe that's ANTI-Democratic Party, IL-liberal, frequently ANTI-democracy, and whose biggest role in history, and consolation in defeat, has been splinter support away from Democrats. These are the people who encouraged leaving the Democratic Party after Sanders lost in 2016 and abandoning the nation to the anti-progressive Republicans. Not rational, as dishonest and destructive as anything the Republicans can come up with, but betterment of mankind is not their most driving passion.

Psychologists say LW extremists fear the power of the mainstream left and that's at the root of their focus on stopping those closely aligned in ideology instead of the very different conservative right. Again, not rational, but that anti-Democratic/anti-liberal orientation is intense and defining.

Right or left, aside from comparing actions to rhetoric, a pretty definitive way to identify radicals and outright extremists for what they are is by how much dishonesty is required to support their beliefs, like the Q people, and by whether they believe it themselves. Eric Hoffer called them the True Believers.

Which leads to another on-point way of identifying them, which is to ask what big goals they've achieved over time. Nothing that makes you proud in Canada. They always fail because extremism is a dysfunction and because (mercifully for mankind) they're always a minority.

It's always the resented, sane mainstream -- overwhelmingly in the U.S. the Democratic mainstream this past 90 years -- that creates our advances. And in any nation, they're driven by liberals and liberal ideals.

And that's why people need a much better understanding of the players.

Go, Joe!

[applegrove]

13. Tommy Douglass of the NDP implemented universal healthcare in Saskatchewan.

The Liberals then did it nationally because it worked. He was a social democrat his whole career: CCF first then NDP. He implement a whole host of other firsts. He made some bad decisions in his youth but was a great leader as he aged.

[Hortensis]

14. Universal healthcare was not an extreme idea by then. Any more than

a national retirement system was by the time FDR came along.

Douglass obviously wasn't an extremist, he was an iconoclast. I'd put big money on that because of his ability to work effectively within his party and established institutions. Extremists typically have trouble playing well with others, again defining.

And of course not all socialists are extremists. Socialism, because it provides a platform to attack the power holders (whoever they are) from, just draws a lot of them is all.

Now, if he'd tried to block development of a national healthcare system because liberals were doing it, that would have been defining. But if he were like that he almost certainly wouldn't have gotten enough power in his party and province to accomplish it there first. Others would have.

Here in the U.S., as in Canada, extremists weren't behind either our revolution or the New Deal. Competent people were. We know from early writings that some thought that, because it's a revolution, and a genuinely new thing, they should be in charge, but our founding fathers shooed them away. The ones who arose with the Great Depression declared war on FDR and the despised, corrupt New Deal, despite the great support of the people, but they lost and the new party they formed fell apart soon after.

Which again brings us back to competence and competents. Go, Dems!

[hlthe2b]

11. +++. Especially to not have him within top ten...?

[Jamastiene]

4. Good point. He wasn't my choice either, but

I am glad Trump is not president any more and Biden is. He's not perfect, but at least he is trying to help us instead of all the horrors Trump kept this country suffering through.