Last edited Thu Jan 24, 2019, 09:56 PM - Edit history (2)

She was very strong, passionate and enthusiastic. She certainly one-upped the bland Gilliebrand and the, sorry folks, the luke warm Warren.

And the people the poster mentioned, half aren't running and one is a republican. He/she needs more tune to evaluate actual, potential candidates.

She's very sharp.

she didn't talk about them.

and add a "Lord have mercy!"

Here we go again.

Just to say the blindingly obvious: There is no such thing as a slam dunk candidate. There are excellent candidates, good candidates, mediocre candidates, and terrible candidates.

How can you recommend such a candidate?

Let's get real, now.
Fart just blows Sigh away. We all need to get behind Fart.
Or, in front of.
Politics confuses me.

I kind of like a Sherrod Brown and Kamala Harris together.

both my top choices of those running.

...and raise you a facepalm...

That's the ticket!

He's still something of a Washington outsider and could bring democrats together. He could run with brown which would help lock up the midwest.

Not sure if he's the same guy he once was anymore, but damn did I want him to win in 2004

I have seen him speak to small Democratic groups in Burlington a few times. One observation, hearing him answer questions of others around me, what seemed to generate the most real interest and excitement was the type of thing he did so well at the DNC -- supporting people running for races across the country.

The first time I heard him, it was with the other Burlington area former governor, Madelyn Kunin. I was surprised that both my husband and I were blown away by Kunin's words .. and found Dean rather underwhelming. I also know many of the progressives and Democrats in town and one constant is that they all speak of being surprised by the "2004" angry Dean, who was considered a conservative Democrat.

I have also seen John Kerry in person several times at Boston area speeches between 2005 and 2013 and he was always very good bringing people to their feet. He also was far more impressive in person. He was not the Bill Clinton extrovert, but he made up for that by being naturally very genuine and honest.

Bush was at 60 percent approval in December 2003. It was always going to be a longshot winning 2004. Kerry, with a positive convention and excellent debates, made it close enough they had to cheat in Ohio by limiting the number of voting machines in Democratic strongholds. Not to mention the whole SBVT to try to eliminate the character reference he had from the men actually there with him.

In 2004, the voting issue was national security and foreign policy. These are usually - even when Democrats hold power - Republican issues. Kerry with his experience made it close. Kerry, who though his career was more liberal than Dean, did get the vast majority antiwar and left votes. Even in the Iowa primary, people meeting both face to face gave Kerry 38% of the delegates to Dean's 18%.

He was dynamic.

Let us hope one emerges.

and only O'Rourke would even be a decent candidate. The Rock Dwayne Johnson was standing on stage at the republican national convention during Bushes run and as for Oprah America isn't going to want another President with no experience in government after Trump.

isn't Dwayne Johnson a Republican?

Wasn't he talking smack just within the last few months? Seems like it. Love the guy in the movies but, ahhh no.

With the implication that he was indy or leaned Dem, as I observed it

rock on. Good luck.

..I think he was at the 2000 Republican convention.

Not sure now though.

isn't the answer. Dems have very attractive, experienced choices-my personal favorite is Gov. Gavin Newsom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gavin_Newsom

He's worked his way up through Gv't bureaucracies, knows how it works.

He'd have to start campaigning without having even served a year into his term. I don't think he would do that to California.

I do see him being a very strong candidate in the future though, especially coming off of a successful California governorship.

electorally with results similar to Obama-McCain 2008

...

Someone will rise to the occasion.
I like Cory Booker on the charisma front ( I know DU loves to hate him for being a corporate Dem); Beto is good too (but DU will hate him for same reasons).
Pure policy, I'm Liz Warren at this point.

being a "slam dunk" this early on and if they were, they probably never made it through the primaries.

Good example you brought up.

That wasn't a slam dunk. And the financial collapse in fall 2008 helped define the 2 men further.

we thought we had a slam dunk candidate last time around.
Now, I'm not sure there is one. We need a candidate who is no smart, forward thinking, and appeals to enough voters to win. We'll sort it out in the primary that is shaping up to offer a broad field of choices.

His star power was unparalleled.

We will see lots of stuff most of it designed to tell us whoever we did pick is no good.

electability, means little in the US, and can even be damaging.

If he can make the southern states actual battlegrounds, it's game over for Trump.

But I think Harris would be a much stronger candidate and would be very popular in the south, especially with non-white voters.

Who was the last Democratic Presidential nominee to win the Presidency while losing his home state?

Sure, FL likely voted for Gore and he was robbed. But if he lost FL and won TN, he would have been President.

And I think a lot of people watched them. Some in their entirety. When voters watch an entire video of a guy doing fun stuff it can lead to them voting for that candidate.

It seems like other candidates could follow a similar model though.

But the results might not be the same. Especially if folks don’t watch the entire video the candidates produce.

There will be more candidates and we'll see different sides of the ones who have jumped in the race.

Meanwhile, what we absolutely don't need is an inexperienced celebrity like Oprah or Dwayne Johnson. We saw how well that went with the republicans. Michelle Obama has no presidential aspirations. Beto O'Rourke will likely throw his hat in the ring, but I'm more inclined to see him as a possible VP choice. We'll see. What works well in a senate race might not work in a presidential race.

We will have a lot of excellent choices and we certainly won't agree on all of them, but pretty any of them could wipe the floor with Trump.

I am sorry but

Do you understand what the corporate owned mainstream media - including the vaunted NPR - does to anyone that looks like a serious Democratic candidate for any office from dog catcher on up?

Pete Buttigieg? He's the mayor of a small city. Let the Republican echo chamber have at him and you won't recognize him in 2 weeks.

Warren, Harris, Sherrod Brown, et alia have already been chewed and are still standing.

Last edited Thu Jan 24, 2019, 03:42 PM - Edit history (1)

Biden/Harris is the most slam dunkiest ticket ever!!

No candidate is perfect. No one. Michelle Obama and Oprah, don't want the job. This is not a position or the time for a reluctant candidate.nor is it the time for someone without experience.

The Dem bench is deep!! If you don't like old white establishment guy Biden, there are soooooooo many young progressives that could be paired with Harris it is not even funny. 2020 could be a huge year for Dems if they just keep their eye on the prize!!

we need an old white dude if we want to take back the white house. There's no way around it.
This country is too racist. He appeals directly to the demographic that went for trump over clinton. No brainer. Biden and harris is the dream ticket in my head at this moment.

I agree - Biden may be old but he has experience to clean up the Dotard's mess.

While Joe Biden has had his moments in the past, he is by far the most qualified and well respected potential candidate. He would be in a position to make a really bold choice for the VP slot, someone who would excite people and be groomed for the top of the ticket. There are a number of candidates for that slot.

While you want someone like Obama was in 2008, after Trump, people very well want someone in the WH who is calming, steady and restore sanity to the Federal Government. If the Democrats are fortunate enough to put one of their own in the WH, he/she will have a lot of repair work to do both domestically and internationally. Thus we need to be realistic in our selection in relationship to what can actually be achieved. I watched the latest Madam Secretary and liked the conversation that it was either the President of COS had with Elizabeth McCord on the number of actual accomplishments that can actually be achieved upon winning the WH and how do you want to spend your political capital.

There are a few candidates (declared and undeclared) that I like so I am not locked into anybody yet.

WE JUST HAD AN ELECTION, AND WE WON BIG. BLUE WAVE!!!!
Its two years away...nothing more pressing today than punk'ing out who's stepped up already? How about supporting who we just elected so we wipe out the criminals? 2 years is a long time. I for one am soo sooo worn out w the continuous electioneering. Let's see what the people we just elected can do? Maybe a slam dunk will surface from all of it? In the meantime...lots to think about other than a presidential election 21.5 months from now. Lots to politics other than the next stupid horse race for president. (IMHO)
p.s. I see a whole raft of people that have stepped up that are a million times better than what we have.

Time to start thinking about this

the slam dunk...it shows in the numbers. Good luck on your journey.

1992 - was Clinton a "slam dunk candidate"? HA!
2000 - lots of people considered Gore a "slam dunk candidate", didn't help avoid the steal...
2004 - Kerry?
2008 - Obama? HA!! He was supposed to get boat-raced by HRC
2016 - HRC was absolutely considered a "slam dunk candidate"...I freely admit that I believed even on election day there was simply no way in hell America would elect an unqualified complete asshat as POTUS...I was not along in being wrong that day...

There is no such thing a "slam dunk" candidate and if there were? I'd start to worry more...

explode our turnout at the voting booth.

I mean bigger than Obama in 2008 kind of turnout that we will need in order to win in 2020.

Also, we need to give our next President a Democratic Senate in 2020 so I think that we can afford to "lose" a senator from California where Harris will be replaced by a Democrat automatically, unlike a Sherrod Brown of Ohio, or even Elizabeth Warren in MA, a state that too recently sent Scott freaking Brown to the Senate in a special election.

Not Harris, but Oprah?



Sid

You don't see an absolutely enormous canyon of difference in pre-existing popularity between Oprah and Harris? Oprah has deep familiarity and goodwill with Americans, cutting across the entire country and both parties, and age, probably moreso across genders. Hell, the whole world knows her. She'd be an incredible leader.

One’s an experienced lawyer and lawmaker, the other’s an anti-science celebrity who has unleashed nonsense like Dr Oz and The Secret upon the world.

Sid

Legislative experience, state and federal? Ability to understand complicated contexts and multiple crises, and in that, set and prioritize goals and tactics to accomplish them ? Ability to execute multiple strategies? Ability to discern what is important from what is secondary when there’s a lot going on? Verified proven values that go to the heart of things?

Ability to communicate in a very meaningful way resonates with people and rings true to people in very different part of this country and kind of families and communities? And can they do that in as few words as possible so they can get it across in the milliseconds that we’re given to talk about anything important for the ridiculous commercial bullshit story of the day crowds the airwaves?

Can they inspire people to set aside their needs and volunteer for them tirelessly for at least a year, in huge numbers ? Ability to select a team of outstanding Competent, ethical people and inspire them as well?

Ability to work their heart out in the middle of random bullshit storms stirred up to keep them from doing their work by their own countrymen?

Or alternatively, is name recognition important as the sole criteria?

"What I want" is a candidate that is simply going to out campaign anyone that gets in his or her way. That is what President Obama did and it worked out.

wise up before election time. What's you high school prom king up to right now? Maybe you could draft him.

Meanwhile, maybe you should rethink us having any risk at all of Trump being the President for another 4 years. Didn't work out well last time.

movies! Phew, phew, phew....(insert CGI explosion here)

* ?

because, as I already pointed out the frontrunners we have so far sure aren't flawless.

...started looking for the sarcasm smiley.

but he hasn’t announced if he is running. Biden is a huge gamble because I can’t quite figure out how his views are any different than Clinton or Obama for that matter; so we can’t expect a different result.

Sherrod's been doing one huge thing forever that needs to be done- he knows how to talk to people who've been voting Republican against their own interests. It's a helluva thing, not easy to do in this environment. But don't forget that Trump is a master- exclusive, even- culture warrior. All he does is racism. I'm not sure how Brown would stay out of that muck, and that's the key for him. He just said it himself, a few days ago, in so many words.

any of those you mentioned will do just fine for me. Yes, I want to see Trump brought to justice. But this is not about vengence. That's Trump's game. I want a POTUS to get this country back on track of ethical morality, democratic values, science, and justice for all. I want to see funding for education, a living wage, healthcare, and retirement with dignity.

Though I do think our country needs to clearly repudiate at the polls this unbelievable, ridiculous mistake that was made

I'm sure we could all use a lot of humor and laughs after drumpf.

The dream ticket would be Ellen DeGeneres/Alexandra Wong to change the mood of the country and win the Presidential Election. THAT is star power!

While I'll vote for anyone over Trump, I am sick of the cult of Oprah and I'm sure I'm not the only one.

he might be Dem/Indy (maybe just Colbert bringing up the idea):

http://digg.com/video/dwayne-johnson-colbert

Regardless, I would take someone like Johnson over Trump any day

We don't need another TV personality in the White House.

"The Secret".

None for me, thanks very much.

News flash. There’s no such thing.

How about just watch, pay attention, vote in the primary and support whoever becomes our eventual nominee.

In fact, that made it easier to just nominate Clinton, this idea that anyone would just beat Trump because he is such a clown. We need the opposite, this time- certainty that we are putting up the best candidate to contrast with Trump's faults and beat him thoroughly.

I love Hillary. She was my favorite Democratic nominee of my lifetime and would have made an awesome president. But we erred not nominating her in 2008. By 2016 she had very low upside in a general election. I always thought she would lose narrowly...until the other side nominated Donald Trump and he imploded during late summer. Then I had some confidence she would win narrowly, and that should have happened if not for James Comey.

Misogyny is still a huge problem. We can't be dense enough to look at midterm results and apply them identically to a presidential general election. We need someone who can win outright based on popularity, instead of relying on Trump and his low approval rating to dictate the result. Any woman is going to be ruthlessly attacked and attacked again. Trump has enormous advantages in that regard this time, far beyond anything he owned in 2016. Things we can't imagine now will be used against our nominee. Jeffrey Toobin has predicted that the Democratic nominee will be under investigation...no matter who it is or what the rationale.

Charisma is the ticket. A nominee lacking charisma will be knocked down the approval charts by the GOP vultures. We don't need to be sitting here in mid 2021 with Rachel Maddow rationalizing what went wrong.

I would not be confident with Warren or Gillibrand. They are overly weak, IMO. Easy prey. I don't have that concern with Kamala Harris. She would be strong enough but without knowing much about her personality my early instincts are that she lacks ideal instincts, and would make one mistake after another, along with coming across as somewhat mean instead of likable and charismatic.

That is not a cemented conclusion. I am willing to take a look. But mostly I hope Beto and/or Klobuchar enters the race. I don't want to be sitting there throughout the primaries knowing that we going to robotically nominate a woman who is competent enough but not likable enough. If Trump taught us anything it should be that logic and issues don't matter. Truth doesn't matter right now. The swing voters either like you or they don't. Female prosecutor from California scares the heck out of me, remembering how Marcia Clark came across in that famous trial, while facing opposition and dirty tricks she had never experienced before and lacked the charisma to deflect.

we've learned these past few years.

I caught part of a radio interview with him yesterday and I was impressed.

Dwayne Johnson?

and Oprah?
Oprah's seen better days. In her latter years, she's believing her own publicity too much and adopting a God complex. Many who used to be fans - including me - are very tired of "The World According to Oprah". Think again on this one.

Good luck with that quest.

I don't know if such a thing exists, because all candidates are human.

But I just chalk that up as equal chance for most, and don't go with anyone too shady

Of the voting public is in decline, and has been for some time as this society's average intelligence seemingly plummets. Values, if you can even call them that, in their downward spiral, are not focused on bastions of morality, unflappable calm, or depth of political experience.

Telling ourselves any different is going to result in a catastrophic loss against Trump in 2020.

Americans do not want any of those things, they align with charismatics. Right or wrong (read: wrong, so very fucking wrong), what is said is less important than how it's said, and how loudly. Americans have imported their acquired taste for Reality TV and infotainment and bashed political reporting into the mold of live action drama.

That's what they want: drama.

Swearing, finger pointing, mockery, backstabbing, cat calling, and grandstanding. Crudeness wins because it disarms. Trump is a natural savant genius at manipulating a crowd into believing that he's one of them.

Obama won due to his own incredible charisma, make no mistake, and for the record, he's the only "good guy" charismatic that isn't a raging dickhead. It crept in with Bill Clinton and never really left us, finally going critical mass with Trump and his euphoria inducing rallies.

I don't think that this is a permanent development, God I hope not, but until we are able to break the cycle of charasmatics, we will lose without putting one forward.

Personally, I'd love to see Schiff as president, but he is a perfect example: put him onstage in a debate with Trump, and no matter what he says, he would lose. Badly.

Unfortunately, in this regard, all of the existing candidates fucking suck; we've got to do much, much better than this, at least with 2020.

Aa

Trust me, that's not an observation I take any pride in whatsoever.

The entire country has been transmogrified into a goddamn Gladiator Camp, they don't want peace, they want strife, peace is boooooring.

They want to be engaged, infotainment is an addiction because it stimulates where normal discussion and tone does not.

I'm the first person to applaud Pelosi, she's among the best of our very best, but for fuck's sake, listening to her speak, she's got the passion and fervor of a freshly harvested catfish liver. She's not engaging, if she was, she'd be the most deadly weapon in Washington, ten times her might we see today.

Maybe our candidates should consider taking a couple of courses on method acting, I don't know. I don't know the solution, I only know for sure that we have a huge fucking problem with this.

and even some life experience and wisdom. I agree with you that we should be able to expect more of Americans. It's just not reality, though.

I tend to look at it as fighting evil with evil, but if I'm honest with myself, I don't consider Obama to have n evil bone in his body.

That first speach he gave last year, THAT'S what we need. I must have binge watched that speach at least six times the day he gave it, awesome stuff.

Thanks for putting it into words better than I ever could. Down and dirty, throw Trump off his game.

We pull down his pants.

I'm not yet sure about Gillibrand but Harris or Warren easily could defeat Rump. I also am convinced that Sanders will launch soon after the shutdown is resolved and we KNOW from 2016 that he could cruise to victory, even in a lopsided fight.

Key point to remember: Hillary 2016 was an amateurish campaign and Trump ran on an entire case of tissues of lies. Now, the people have seen the genuine article. Further, many Trump voters were Sanders voters who couldn't bring themselves to vote for Hillary.

He's another 4 years older. 2016 might have left marks on him within the party, too.

But the more important point is that he's just not as strong of a candidate as we, theoretically, could run. He's certainly not, of all the possible candidates, among the most likely to beat Trump. And that's, by far, what I care about the most. I'm really not screwing around, here.

By April he wasn't cruising anywhere. And Hillary was not amateurish. Given the mountains of opposition she faced... Russians, the Cons, the fake Dems and the money, and so on and so forth, she still had millions of more votes than Individual 1. You know, the person she tried to warn us about, the 'puppet' as she named him.

And given recent revelations about the Senator and his issues with women and people of color, authentic is the last thing I would call him. In addition, the gloves will be off next time around if there is one, which I doubt, and he will finally be forced to answer a lot of questions and put up or shut up on those tax returns.

is not perfection, it is about exposing the fraud. imo