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Young voters are being given really shitty choices.
I wonder when this magical time was where voting for the president had great choices. What many young voters fail to understand is that it’s not all about the president. Get enough Democrats into Congress, and they will be able to vote for progressive legislation, and if you send that to your far-from-ideal president’s desk, they’ll sign it.
It's certainly a much easier task than having an awesome progressive president who begs a near 50-50 Congress to pass good bills, and it just doesn’t happen.
We had 60 and they killed the public option. How many do we need?
People need to study how the Moral Majority took control of the GOP. Nixon was a dead duck after he lost his California Senate race, but he knew that an ex-Vice President was a big deal in small places. He campaigned tirelessly for years, getting lots of Reps, Governors, and Mayors elected. In 1968 he breezed in because he had the Party base on his side.
The MMs did the same. They would show up at every local GOP meeting with enoughvotes to get their agenda enacted. One day the Party big shots looked around and realized that all the dog catchers, county clerks, and sheriffs in their state were MMs.
What is an MM?
Abbreviation for the Moral Majority that they mentioned in the first paragraph.
Oh gotcha thanks.
Thanks for explaining
Ok, so we need to force the system to change outside of its normal paths of power to have choices. No one thinks this time existed, everyone understands the current situation is bad.
repeated comment
Who woulda thunk that grassroots campaign works? Even for the side that you don't like?
There is no exact number. The more there are, the bolder they can be.
Please tell me you’re not talking about the two month window in 2010 where they had a filibuster-proof majority, and passed a major healthcare reform bill, but it was kneecapped because it relied on Joe Lieberman to pass. Because that’s a case where a couple more Democrats would have made a huge difference in what we would have gotten, and also turned 2 months and some change into two years. That’s my point that there’s no exact number.
Having enough is a spectrum: the more there are, the bolder the legislation and the more likely it is to pass. So however many you get, you always fall short of doing even better with more.
Single payer healthcare had been discussed in the early stages — and it was clear they wouldn’t have 60 votes for it, so it was a non-starter. Because there were exactly 60 D/Is, there was no wiggle room. And the GOP held up the 60th Senator in the courts as long as they could because they had no wiggle room. And then Ted Kennedy had to vote for the ACA on his virtual deathbed, and after that their 60 votes were gone, so they couldn’t spend more time on healthcare or move on to other tough issues. Lieberman forced them to remove the public option from the bill.
But you are just overlooking that they did pass a major, consequential healthcare reform bill that solved some very important problems, which couldn’t be accomplished for decades before then, even though people tried.
And this all touches on my original point: a couple more Senators would have changed things significantly at that time, but a more progressive president would not have.
Yes, this is tradition.