President Joe Biden, speaking to the nation from the Oval Office Wednesday evening, framed his decision to step aside from the 2024 presidential race as a matter of saving democracy and passing “the torch to a new generation.”
nah. i won’t call him a “hero” but this is the best way it could have happened, rather than republicans having YEARS to foment hatred and spin conspiracy theories and make everyone waste time debunking lie after lie about harris.
and nobody’s going to switch from D to R because it’s harris instead of biden. you can be fairly certain, however, that there WILL be people voting who weren’t going to vote at all when it was biden instead of harris
should he be applauded? yes. is he a hero? no. should he have announced it years ago? no fucking way.
LOL good job parroting fox news’s desperate “bIdEn ChEaTeD tHe DeMs!!!” talking points. i’ll bet you’re doing it for free too.
news flash-- biden isn’t running, and you could have voted for anyone you wanted in the primary. so this entire “debate” about biden’s shoulda/woulda/coulda, while entertaining to obliterate people in, is getting the tankie position exactly nowhere
LOL why weren’t you and the apparently millions of other like minded yous mobilizing to either get someone else on the ballot, or writing in someone else?
or were you just accepting what you were told to, like you’re accusing everyone else of doing now?
again–what do you think you’re going to accomplish with all of these sad desperate dEmScHeAtEd attacks? making people not vote now?
again–what do you think you’re going to accomplish
Did you not see what happened to the Republican party when they stopped holding their politicians accountable?
Why are you trying to make the democratic party just as shitty?
btw: voter registrations for 18-34 year olds surged AFTER harris became the nominee. that means people are registering specifically to vote for harris. does that grind your gears? LOL
No…
It’s a good thing, I’ve spent over a year saying Biden and Hillary are the only two who could.lose to trump…
I’m glad Biden finally listened to people who knew what he was talking about about. But I’m still mad that he waited so long we didn’t get a primary.
You seem to be operating under football logic where people pick a team and only say good things about them.
Which again, is what made the Republican party into what it is today.
So I ask again, why do you want both major parties to act like Republicans?
If youre not gonna answer, there’s no point in me wasting time with you.
Your argument here might hold some weight if it weren’t for the fact that the only reason this conversation is even happening is that the presumptive Democratic candidate just voluntary withdrew from the race when it became clear that he couldn’t win. The last guy staged a fucking coup after he lost.
How many months did you just spend bitching and moaning about how anyone would be better than Joe? Now you have anyone else and you’re still salty about it. I wonder how you could make it any more transparent that your goal is just to discourage people from voting.
Since you seem willing to engage in discourse about this, I feel similarly to the person you replied to and can explain my position. I don’t want to discourage anyone from voting, I have two goals:
Don’t concede the White House to Trump
Fight back against the Democratic Party’s efforts to reduce the voice of the people.
I’m guessing we agree on #1 and disagree on the premise of #2. I see #2 as a systemic pattern that really launched after the 2008 primaries when Obama disrupted the plan to place Hillary in the White House. It came to a head in 2016 and has been rippling ever since.
I never believed Joe should have run again in the first place, and in the last month it became clear that him running was detrimental to #1. So we push for him to step aside, while I still think he shouldn’t have run in the first place. He steps down, and you feel satisfied because goal #1 is protected. But I’m deeply unsettled by the damage that has been done to #2. The Democrats just figured out how to skip the voice of the people entirely.
The last time this happened (1968 primaries, eerily similar) the Democrats launched a committee to reform the primary process into what it is today. A big improvement over what it was before, but Biden just revealed a significant weakness in it.
I’m happy to vote for Harris to fulfill #1, I’m thrilled that there was a surge in registrations. But if the Democrats don’t address the critical problem of this process we all just witnessed, I fear #2 becomes unreachable. The Democrats are our only hope of saving our democracy, so if they abandon democracy within their party (like I have seen happening over the last 16 years), it’s a hollow victory.
I’m not convinced that the party rallying behind the incumbent president and/or VP is nearly as much of a problem as you’re making it out to be. Hillary got more votes than Bernie in 2016 and I know all the Bernie bros complain that the party conspired against him, but they always ignore the fact that Bernie is only a Democrat during the campaign and an Independent the rest of the time. Why would the DNC throw its weight behind someone like that rather than someone who has been active in the party for decades?
Joe probably shouldn’t have run again, but it’s not really a surprise that he did. What would have been nice is if Kamala had been out there pushing some policy and letting people know who she is over the last four years, but for some reason that didn’t happen and here we are. Maybe the party’s processes do need reform. Super delegates are inherently undemocratic, but I don’t think they’ve tipped the scales one way or the other too badly recently.
You can also just look at give’s history. He was relentlessly “genocide joe, blue maga, both sides…” for months. Even on articles that had nothing to do with Biden or Gaza and has developed a reputation for not being a good faith participant in any of the discussions around here which is why I felt the need to call him out. Especially when he keeps yelling about how the democrats are just as bad as republicans in an article about the Democratic president voluntary backing out of the race.
I’m guessing we agree on #1 and disagree on the premise of #2. I see #2 as a systemic pattern that really launched after the 2008 primaries when Obama disrupted the plan to place Hillary in the White House. It came to a head in 2016 and has been rippling ever since.
THANK YOU. It’s fucking insane seeing people claim “well uhhh nobody ever complained about this before! maybe you should’ve complained about this before, maybe then things would’ve changed!” just because republicans decided to adopt it as a talking point since they’re scrambling to come up with a new strategy and their plans have gone to shit. It’s partisan brainworms of the highest order. I guess it’s not surprising that they haven’t heard these complaints or noticed these trends when they all only become fixated on keeping the pendulum republican candidate out for 6 months out of every four years at most and then completely go back to sleep for the rest of the time.
LOL ok. you can sit there and say dems are “acting like republicans” for the rest of your life, but you’ll die having NEVER been correct. dems have not tried to run fake electors. dems have not attempted an insurrection on the capitol to overthrow an election. dems don’t nominate a rapist conman. this is among MANY, MANY things that blatantly throw your notion of “both sides are the same” out the window. honestly it’s been tiresome for years
the immediate objective, right now, which should be everyone’s absolute top priority, is keeping trump out of the white house. that’s it. your motivation for trying (poorly) to undermine that doesn’t matter. what matters is that your arguments are weak and without substance
yet still, assuming some parallel universe where you’re right, you still haven’t spelled out exactly what actions you expect people to take. i’m assuming it’s not to vote at all. so, again: have fun with that
Looks like we’re back in full “you can’t criticize the Democrats at all or you’re a Russian troll” territory. I hate this sycophancy.
I’m with you on this one. The Democrats have been skirting democracy to the best of their ability for years. I’m glad we’ve got a better chance of defeating Trump now, but I’m unwilling to concede the democratic process of nominating candidates. If we celebrate this fucked up process instead of holding their feet to the fire, they’re just going to learn that actually they don’t need to bother involving the people at all. We cannot give a single inch to the plutocrats at the top.
That’s a really awful take. It’s good that Biden has stepped aside but our lack of a primary absolutely isn’t “a good thing”. Primaries are how we battle test our candidates and Harris has never performed well in one. I hope to hell she wins but I’d have more confidence if she’d been able to secure the nomination through traditional means.
I don’t know where you’ve been but I’ve been bitching about this for the past six months. I absolutely loathe the fact that we don’t have a real primary when we have an incumbent president and I was really disappointed when Biden changed his tune from being a one term president. I also really appreciate what Biden did do in office even though I thought he’d be an awful president during the last election!
Thanks for making so many assumptions about me though, I’ll be sure to mulch my garden with all these strawmen you set up.
Oh and you better fucking vote, don’t even think about sitting out the election - it’s cowardly and immature!
i stand corrected. however, “dems stole your primary” is already a favorite of republicans, not to affect meaningful change, but to make people vote for anything except D. so sorry to say, you’re in for more of that
No worries. I know it’s easy to generalize about other people on the internet and, if you spent much time on Reddit, you’ve been exposed to a lot of bad faith arguments and sadistic (instead of for the lulz) trolling.
It took me a bit when I first came to lemmy to realize that most people here (even ones I often strongly disagree with like anticolonist) are consistent in their view points and usually trying to have a discussion in good(ish) faith.
Well, she didn’t do well in her presidential primary, no argument there. But she did do well enough in her primaries for AG and Senator for California to win not only those nominations but those elections, too.
nah. i won’t call him a “hero” but this is the best way it could have happened, rather than republicans having YEARS to foment hatred and spin conspiracy theories and make everyone waste time debunking lie after lie about harris.
and nobody’s going to switch from D to R because it’s harris instead of biden. you can be fairly certain, however, that there WILL be people voting who weren’t going to vote at all when it was biden instead of harris
should he be applauded? yes. is he a hero? no. should he have announced it years ago? no fucking way.
The best way was this happening a year ago so we could have a primary…
But you don’t think Dem voters should have had a say?
I’m a lot more democratic than you apparently…
LOL good job parroting fox news’s desperate “bIdEn ChEaTeD tHe DeMs!!!” talking points. i’ll bet you’re doing it for free too.
news flash-- biden isn’t running, and you could have voted for anyone you wanted in the primary. so this entire “debate” about biden’s shoulda/woulda/coulda, while entertaining to obliterate people in, is getting the tankie position exactly nowhere
What?
So if Faux News says we didn’t get a real primary…
We have to lie and say we did?
That’s Trumper logic man
Have fun with that.
Edit:
In my state (and others) Biden was the only Dem on the primary ballot…
LOL why weren’t you and the apparently millions of other like minded yous mobilizing to either get someone else on the ballot, or writing in someone else?
or were you just accepting what you were told to, like you’re accusing everyone else of doing now?
again–what do you think you’re going to accomplish with all of these sad desperate dEmScHeAtEd attacks? making people not vote now?
have fun with that
btw: voter registrations for 18-34 year olds surged AFTER harris became the nominee. that means people are registering specifically to vote for harris. does that grind your gears? LOL
Did you not see what happened to the Republican party when they stopped holding their politicians accountable?
Why are you trying to make the democratic party just as shitty?
No…
It’s a good thing, I’ve spent over a year saying Biden and Hillary are the only two who could.lose to trump…
I’m glad Biden finally listened to people who knew what he was talking about about. But I’m still mad that he waited so long we didn’t get a primary.
You seem to be operating under football logic where people pick a team and only say good things about them.
Which again, is what made the Republican party into what it is today.
So I ask again, why do you want both major parties to act like Republicans?
If youre not gonna answer, there’s no point in me wasting time with you.
Your argument here might hold some weight if it weren’t for the fact that the only reason this conversation is even happening is that the presumptive Democratic candidate just voluntary withdrew from the race when it became clear that he couldn’t win. The last guy staged a fucking coup after he lost.
How many months did you just spend bitching and moaning about how anyone would be better than Joe? Now you have anyone else and you’re still salty about it. I wonder how you could make it any more transparent that your goal is just to discourage people from voting.
Removed by mod
Since you seem willing to engage in discourse about this, I feel similarly to the person you replied to and can explain my position. I don’t want to discourage anyone from voting, I have two goals:
I’m guessing we agree on #1 and disagree on the premise of #2. I see #2 as a systemic pattern that really launched after the 2008 primaries when Obama disrupted the plan to place Hillary in the White House. It came to a head in 2016 and has been rippling ever since.
I never believed Joe should have run again in the first place, and in the last month it became clear that him running was detrimental to #1. So we push for him to step aside, while I still think he shouldn’t have run in the first place. He steps down, and you feel satisfied because goal #1 is protected. But I’m deeply unsettled by the damage that has been done to #2. The Democrats just figured out how to skip the voice of the people entirely.
The last time this happened (1968 primaries, eerily similar) the Democrats launched a committee to reform the primary process into what it is today. A big improvement over what it was before, but Biden just revealed a significant weakness in it.
I’m happy to vote for Harris to fulfill #1, I’m thrilled that there was a surge in registrations. But if the Democrats don’t address the critical problem of this process we all just witnessed, I fear #2 becomes unreachable. The Democrats are our only hope of saving our democracy, so if they abandon democracy within their party (like I have seen happening over the last 16 years), it’s a hollow victory.
I’m not convinced that the party rallying behind the incumbent president and/or VP is nearly as much of a problem as you’re making it out to be. Hillary got more votes than Bernie in 2016 and I know all the Bernie bros complain that the party conspired against him, but they always ignore the fact that Bernie is only a Democrat during the campaign and an Independent the rest of the time. Why would the DNC throw its weight behind someone like that rather than someone who has been active in the party for decades?
Joe probably shouldn’t have run again, but it’s not really a surprise that he did. What would have been nice is if Kamala had been out there pushing some policy and letting people know who she is over the last four years, but for some reason that didn’t happen and here we are. Maybe the party’s processes do need reform. Super delegates are inherently undemocratic, but I don’t think they’ve tipped the scales one way or the other too badly recently.
You can also just look at give’s history. He was relentlessly “genocide joe, blue maga, both sides…” for months. Even on articles that had nothing to do with Biden or Gaza and has developed a reputation for not being a good faith participant in any of the discussions around here which is why I felt the need to call him out. Especially when he keeps yelling about how the democrats are just as bad as republicans in an article about the Democratic president voluntary backing out of the race.
THANK YOU. It’s fucking insane seeing people claim “well uhhh nobody ever complained about this before! maybe you should’ve complained about this before, maybe then things would’ve changed!” just because republicans decided to adopt it as a talking point since they’re scrambling to come up with a new strategy and their plans have gone to shit. It’s partisan brainworms of the highest order. I guess it’s not surprising that they haven’t heard these complaints or noticed these trends when they all only become fixated on keeping the pendulum republican candidate out for 6 months out of every four years at most and then completely go back to sleep for the rest of the time.
LOL ok. you can sit there and say dems are “acting like republicans” for the rest of your life, but you’ll die having NEVER been correct. dems have not tried to run fake electors. dems have not attempted an insurrection on the capitol to overthrow an election. dems don’t nominate a rapist conman. this is among MANY, MANY things that blatantly throw your notion of “both sides are the same” out the window. honestly it’s been tiresome for years
the immediate objective, right now, which should be everyone’s absolute top priority, is keeping trump out of the white house. that’s it. your motivation for trying (poorly) to undermine that doesn’t matter. what matters is that your arguments are weak and without substance
yet still, assuming some parallel universe where you’re right, you still haven’t spelled out exactly what actions you expect people to take. i’m assuming it’s not to vote at all. so, again: have fun with that
Looks like we’re back in full “you can’t criticize the Democrats at all or you’re a Russian troll” territory. I hate this sycophancy.
I’m with you on this one. The Democrats have been skirting democracy to the best of their ability for years. I’m glad we’ve got a better chance of defeating Trump now, but I’m unwilling to concede the democratic process of nominating candidates. If we celebrate this fucked up process instead of holding their feet to the fire, they’re just going to learn that actually they don’t need to bother involving the people at all. We cannot give a single inch to the plutocrats at the top.
That’s a really awful take. It’s good that Biden has stepped aside but our lack of a primary absolutely isn’t “a good thing”. Primaries are how we battle test our candidates and Harris has never performed well in one. I hope to hell she wins but I’d have more confidence if she’d been able to secure the nomination through traditional means.
who do you think would have won (or should have won) this hypothetical primary that was “stolen” from us?
I don’t have a fucking clue because we never got to have one.
funny how no one started whining about it until just now.
what might have happened, i wonder, if all the hissy fits were thrown back then, instead of AFTER biden stepped down (thanks to hissy fits)?
don’t answer. that was a rhetorical question. congratulations, you have been successful in your mission to poopooh biden and make me not vote for him.
LOL
I don’t know where you’ve been but I’ve been bitching about this for the past six months. I absolutely loathe the fact that we don’t have a real primary when we have an incumbent president and I was really disappointed when Biden changed his tune from being a one term president. I also really appreciate what Biden did do in office even though I thought he’d be an awful president during the last election!
Thanks for making so many assumptions about me though, I’ll be sure to mulch my garden with all these strawmen you set up.
Oh and you better fucking vote, don’t even think about sitting out the election - it’s cowardly and immature!
i stand corrected. however, “dems stole your primary” is already a favorite of republicans, not to affect meaningful change, but to make people vote for anything except D. so sorry to say, you’re in for more of that
No worries. I know it’s easy to generalize about other people on the internet and, if you spent much time on Reddit, you’ve been exposed to a lot of bad faith arguments and sadistic (instead of for the lulz) trolling.
It took me a bit when I first came to lemmy to realize that most people here (even ones I often strongly disagree with like anticolonist) are consistent in their view points and usually trying to have a discussion in good(ish) faith.
Have a nice day!
Well, she didn’t do well in her presidential primary, no argument there. But she did do well enough in her primaries for AG and Senator for California to win not only those nominations but those elections, too.