I don’t think they are planning to need votes anymore.

Only if the Constitution is still relevant.

stupid griping that the Dems don’t do anything.

That’s hardly fair. The Dems did plenty to bring us to where we are today. They just didn’t do anything to stop it.

I just feel bad for the Chinese operatives who had to read all those Republican emails.

Making a phone call or two is not the same thing as dictating how millions of people vote.

Yeah, talking to you is useless. I never said he did that. I explained exactly what I was talking about, and Obama directly influencing individual voters was not part of it. We’re done.

I don’t contest that Trump is an oligarch. Whether he is part of the establishment is (or rather was) a matter of definition. If, by establishment, we mean the specific cliques that run the two party system, then he was an outsider. He had the cash to run in their circles, but they despised him. Thus came Hillary’s “pied Piper” strategy to encourage the media to pay attention to Trump in the Republican primary. She never even dreamed he could beat her in the general.

If we are being more general and referring to both the moneyed and political establishment then, yeah, he has always been establishment. He might not have been allowed to sit at the establishment cool-kids table, but he was one of them.

Still, none of that is relevant to his brand. He successfully positioned himself as an outsider breaking through the walls of power. That’s what has made him so politically invulnerable. The more the political establishment and their talking heads talk about how bad Trump is, the more voters liked him. The list of things that Trump did or said that would have destroyed an establishment politician is a mile long but, in every case, it helped him.

You havn’t given any proof that Obama has magical powers to chose nominees.

When did I assert that? Note that I’ve given you links for several points so far and you just ignore that you were wrong and pick at the rest. It’s like creationists where every newly found “missing link” just creates two more missing links before and after. However, in full knowledge that this is a waste of time, here are some links.

https://www.salon.com/2019/11/27/obama-privately-vowed-to-intervene-in-primary-to-stop-bernie-sanders-from-winning-nomination-report/

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/11/26/obama-privately-considered-leading-stop-bernie-campaign-combat-sanders-2020-surge

https://www.foxnews.com/politics/obama-warns-2020-democrats-warren-sanders

https://www.politico.com/news/2020/04/09/barack-obama-joe-biden-2020-campaign-178115

And a quote from that last link:

But some of his aides now concede that behind the scenes Obama played a role in nudging things in Biden’s direction at the crucial moment when the Biden team was organizing former candidates to coalesce around Biden.

That’s about as close as your going to get when it comes to back room deals. There were also a number of people from inside the campaigns and Obama’s team that spoke to Obama’s involvement, but those are harder to find and I doubt you would care anyways.

I am fucking sick of ALL identity politics. It is the main reason why Dems are losers.

It’s certainly a factor. However, it’s the way the Democrats use identity politics to avoid real issues. Biden in particular blatantly uses these issues as a shield.

This is citing a case where the outcome was literally already determined. That is hugely different from your assertion,

Not really. It happens in every single contested Democratic primary, and voters rarely have an accurate understanding of where a race stands.

That wasn’t a “deal”. That was Pete Buttigieg taking unilateral action, then many of the others…

Believe what you want, but it wasn’t just “many others”. It was every establishment friendly candidate, and several of them were well ahead of Biden at that point in the race. Absent any specifics whatsoever, the “Occam’s razor” explanation was coordination by party leadership. However, there were multiple reports from inside each campaign but Warren’s of Obama’s involvement.

It was ridiculous that anybody even mentioned this piece of ancient history. EVERYBODY was against school integration

Not EVERYBODY. For instance, not Sanders. Anyways, I made no judgement over the question of Biden and racism. It was Kamala, and it’s notable that it was the only time she briefly moved up to be remotely relevant in the 2020 primary. If we are going to consider Biden’s willingness to project racism (I won’t dare to guess his real views) then this clip should at least get some consideration.

Would you stop insulting millions of voters?

LOL, um, are you aware of who is currently sitting in the oval office?

Who the fuck would be stupid enough to change your vote just because somebody on TV wanted you to. ESPECIALLY if you are voting Bernie Sanders.

Sanders had more committed voters than anyone, but not everyone who might have voted for Sanders was that committed. I’m not spinning theories here. This is a pretty well understood aspect of how narratives work in politics.

But probably nothing that doesn’t insult the intelligence of voters in general

Have you ever seen any “man on the street” interviews with the voting public? Not every voter is an ignorant fool, but a whole lot of them definitely are. The reasons many people give for their votes, even when it’s for someone I like, are absolutely insane. Again, I reference the current president.

Since the whole deal is about loyalty checks, this response would unfortunately give them exactly the truth they want to know.

Better to make shit up and end every sentence with “to the glory and vision of Donald J Trump and his witness Elon Musk.”

What is happening is different and what is being reported is different.

That’s just the thing. It’s different for you.

I want to go back to having political discussions where I may vehemently disagree with someone else but where the stakes weren’t literally life and death

The stakes are always literally life and death. You’ll be hard pressed to come up with any kind of important legislation that ultimately doesn’t save or kill people. Gay marriage is a life or death issue. Vehicle efficiency is a life of death issue. The environment is definitely a life or death issue.

I fucking can’t stand how divided we’ve gotten

The divides have always been there. Some people just weren’t being heard. The problem isn’t that we are divided, the problem is that it’s no longer below the surface. It’s not just the fascists and other Republicans (if there any other Republicans anymore), it’s the comfortable suburbs that were satisfied to ignore rural and urban issues and act like we had all the time in the world to solve them.

All I want to do is to sink into the same oblivious disengagement that got us here.

No sympathy.

So, establishment Republicans,who everybody hates, including most right leaning voters, made sure everybody understood that they hate Trump. Gosh, that almost seems like something that could backfire.

Being hated by the political establishment is Trump’s entire brand. Americans loathe the political establishment. Were it not for Trump’s bungling of COVID, he would have won with Biden’s help in 2020. People thought I was crazy to say we might ultimately wish he had won, but I think it’s pretty clear now that it would have been better.

If attacking Trump was going to help Democrats, it would have happened a long time ago. For a lot of voters it might as well be an endorsement. All the worst things Trump actually did in his 2016 term were standard Republican shit. Biden should have called that out and tied them to each other. Trump is an anchor on establishment Republicans, and establishment Republicans are an anchor on Trump. That’s how you use narrative to win elections. Voters don’t work the simplistic way Democrats seem to believe.

I’m sorry, did you sleep through the 2020 primary? Obama brokered the deal behind the scenes where right before super Tuesday every single establishment friendly candidate dropped out simultaneously and endorsed Biden, even though most were well ahead of him at that point.

The only other candidate that stayed in besides Sanders was Warren. Warren was at that point too far behind to have a chance and had effectively shut down her campaign, but she held onto enough of the progressive vote to be an anchor on Sanders. She is the only candidate that it hasn’t been confirmed that Obama pressured, but I’ll go to my grave with the pretty much obvious assumption that he did.

Voters might not care who Obama wants them to vote for, but black voters in North Carolina care very much who Jim Clyburn wants them to vote for. Clyburn has tremendous pull over the black churches that are the social hubs of the black community there. Clyburn had announced he would stay neutral but, the same time everything else happened, he got a call from Obama and immediately gave Biden his enthusiastic endorsement. Just in case you think I’m exaggerating his influence, watch Bill Clinton’s speech at RBG’s funeral. He takes that opportunity to publicly thank Clyburn for “settling the dispute” in the Democratic party.

Biden won North Carolina with overwhelming support from black voters, despite being attacked by Harris early on for his former stance against bussing for school integration. That was the only moment where Harris momentarily became relevant in the race, but voter interest in her lasted about three days before she crashed back to the bottom. Yet, we ultimately got her as the nominee anyways, despite overwhelming rejection in the only primary she was in. Kinda makes you wonder how she got on Biden’s ticket in the first place, but that’s a whole other deal.

Despite the fact that less than a quarter of the country had voted after Super Tuesday, the Democratic party and their media talking heads immediately started treating Biden as the presumptive winner. Whether people do it consciously or not, as soon as that happens in a primary the remaining votes shift massively towards the presumptive winner. Obama’s machinations didn’t directly shift enough votes to lock the race for Biden, but they provided the window for the media to steer the narrative. Narratives are everything in politics, a fact that Democrats understand in primaries but somehow forget in general elections.

There is a whole lot more I could say on the subject, but I don’t want to write a book here.

Obama was instrumental in orchestrating Biden’s rise over Sanders in 2020, which was exactly the moment a fascist victory became inevitable. No, he doesn’t get to play the fucking “retired” card now. This is a fucking war with actual casualties and the future of nations and the world at stake. What’s going on right now is arguably more impactful than even WW2. It’s all hands on fucking deck - even shitty former Presidents, if they have anything to offer.

They know how to fight. We’ve seen how they consistently fight dirty against progressives, especially Bernie Sanders. They know how to play the game, they just don’t do it against Republicans. Republicans get invited to speak at DNC conventions.

Not all oligarchs are intent on cutting their own taxes until the guillotines come out. That doesn’t put them on the side of working Americans, it just makes them the marginally more benevolent tyrants. Even among slave owners there better and worse individuals.

It’s not all about taxes. Under Democrats corporate consolidation has generally moved just as fast as under Republicans. Democrats have been almost as bad as Republicans on deregulation. They work in lockstep on feeding the military industrial complex.

It was Bill Clinton who said “The era of big government is over” right before dismantling much of the federal safety net programs. Bill won with the support of unions, then fucked unions over every chance he got.

Obama’s first actions on taking office were to rescue Wall Street on the backs of workers. Then his singular major domestic accomplishment was to implement a healthcare plan that was designed by the same Heritage Foundation that wrote project 2025. That plan was explicitly designed to derail actual reform efforts, and Democrats have used if like a cudgel to do exactly that ever since it was passed. It was also arguably the biggest wealth transfer to the elites from a single law in US history.

Biden was a breath of fresh air in that he generally tried to nudge things in the right direction. He was pathetically the most progressive President since FDR, which doesn’t make him a progressive President. Even Biden used executive orders to accelerate the privatization of Medicare, which is nothing but a government handout to insurance companies at the expense of vulnerable retirees.

Even Biden’s most extreme tax reforms would have only clawed back a portion of Trump’s tax cuts, and he made up for that with the oligarchs by handing them even more government power and wealth.