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TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

• andros_rex@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  One could also argue, as Ta Nehisi Coates does quite elegantly, that Trump won his first term as a reaction to Obama. A sense of anger at the fact that a black man was in office. It’s almost as if he purposefully degrades the office out of spite - “if a black man can be president, the presidency should be meaningless.”

  It really is this.

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  • TheAlbatross@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    That feels like a sound read on things.

    I think a lot will have to change before America elects a woman, gay man, Jew or anyone else outside of the white straight man again.

    One could talk about the qualities of each candidate and argue how Hillary Clinton, Sanders, Buttigieg, Harris etc weren’t as strong as X other candidate, but twice now we’ve seen highly qualified candidates lose either primaries to a senile, milquetoast sack or generals to an unqualified demagogue.

    The country is fucked up.

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• givesomefucks@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

  it took a massive (coopted) grassroots movement to elect someone with a different skin color.

  On the other hand, 08 Obama showed with charisma and popular policy, skin color didn’t matter.

  He not only easily won the general, he carried a lot of down ballot candidates who were less popular.

  2012 after voters realized he wasn’t who he said he was is a better example for skin color not mattering.

  But if someone with comparable charisma ran on a comparable platform as 08 Obama, nothing else about them matters.

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  • Carrolade@lemmy.world ⁨3⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago

    Agreed. I understand people’s desire to look at the fact that both women lost, but we should also remember the fact that they both failed to unify their own coalition. This is a pretty big deal, if you can’t even unify your own coalition, your prospects are pretty damn challenging.

    That charisma element is very valuable for that, as is tossing your own faction members enough policy bones to satisfy them even if you’re not fully pleasing them. Clinton and Harris both failed to do this, and took their coalitions a little bit too much for granted. Harris came close with the Walz pick, but Gaza weighed very heavily on her with progressives. She needed to do more to distance herself from Biden to thoroughly win them over.

    Ultimately, I think our problem stemmed from them not understanding the appeal of the far right. This caused them to underestimate the strength of their opponent and fail to run as dynamically and aggressively as necessary. They played it too safe. With Harris in particular, I wanted to see the prosecutor prosecute the case against Trump, with the voters as the jury. Instead her stump speeches and interviews remained frustratingly soft. Hilary did this too.

    We the people can look at Trump as some big joke, and make fun of him and his supporters as much as we want. But the opposition candidate has to take him deathly seriously, and give him the gravity he is due as a potentially fascist leader of the worlds most powerful military. That is no laughing matter.

    This sort of speech by AOC is what we needed more of, and even it is a little bit soft: youtu.be/OO7SE4Zpd9s

    Bernie could have done it too, I think. He did come fairly close in the primary, even though he was fighting upstream against lingering negative sentiment about “socialists” in middle America. I think the country has changed enough in the past 10 years, partly due to his trailblazing, that that’s no longer as much as an albatross as it once was though.

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