So the next one is scheduled for Thursday, which probably means I’ll be trying to cut class short to go hole up and watch. The qualifying field is down to 10 choices, ranked here by my idiosyncratic preferences.
Sanders
Warren
Castro
Yang
Buttigieg
Booker
O’Rourke
Harris
Klobuchar
Biden
Three more who qualified on money raised, but failed to get an invite due to polling–they’re not quite toast yet:
Williamson
Gabbard
Steyer
Those who qualified on neither measure (no great losses here except a big maybe on DeBlasio):
Bennet, Bullock, De Blasio, Delaney, Messam, Ryan, Sestak
Dropouts:
Inslee
Gillibrand
Moulton
Hickenlooper
Notes.
The more I hear from Yang the more his stock rises, for sort of weird reasons. His pessimism on things like climate change and a roboticized workforce matches my own. I find myself slotting him just above the Mayor for that kind of reason. Not very rational, but there it is.
The way I’m feeling today, I would vote for anyone on the list to get rid of the orange dude. That’s something that’s always in flux and on the crucial day maybe I’ll feel differently. Obviously I won’t be voting R. The alternative is a fallback protest vote to the Greens again, and a lot of that depends on where I think my state’s electoral votes are headed anyway.
Perhaps a bigger question is whether I’ll feel compelled to switch registration briefly for the primary to help push a Sanders or Warren over the machine nominee.
I hardly even know anything about a few of these names (Steyer is the highest one on the list), but I also don’t feel very motivated to go finding out more.
If De Blasio were to make it back into qualifying for October, his name would end up just below Beto’s on the first list. Eric Garner RIP.
Michael Inslee, we’re going to miss you. As a species, I mean. Word on the street is that Sanders adopted your climate plan pretty much wholesale. I hope President Bernie makes you Secretary of Energy.
Edit:
On Thursday’s DemocracyNow (9/5), much of the hour was devoted to an analysis of CNN’s “Climate Change Town Hall”, a not-very-accessible bit of media that involved the front-runners (largely because the Democratic Party refuses to hold one separate debate out of the 12 total on the subject of climate).
Some further notes on that.
Bernie says yes, as a part of paying for the Green New Deal, Jeff Bezos’ and Amazon’s taxes will go up (from zero, in the case of the corporation). But there’s plenty of other money available too, because we won’t be spending 1.5 trillion a year on WMD.
I take the point and it goes down easy, but some quick digging seems to indicate he’s overstating the case. The point is we spend way too fucking much on maintaining the Empire and its military. How much? Well … 1.5T/yr. maybe … if you squint … but …
Probably closer to an even Trillion
But still vastly more than any other country ever
Warren, as per usual, came out just slightly behind the Sanders standard philosophically. Queried on whether she was for complete public ownership of energy utilities, Warren said no, she was for private capitalism, but a very tightly regulated private capitalism. To the extent of banning fossil fuels outright by 2035, thus rendering, in her view, the public ownership question moot.
I’d vote for her and happily. But laying down her markers as the capitalist socialist does not endear her to me at all, and it’s this sort of thing that always ends her up second on my list.
Booker says: sure, let’s have nuclear power too. Again, I get uneasy at this kind of pose, whether or not he has a point, and he probably does.
Finally, Biden continues to fire accurately and repeatedly into his own foot. Never change, Uncle Joe.