Wait. Gillibrand Is Running?

by · August 28, 2019

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Will Truman

Will Truman is the Editor-in-Chief of Ordinary Times. He is also on Twitter.

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45 Responses

  1. Saul Degraw says:
    August 28, 2019 at 7:55 pm

    You can make this point without including the orange shit.

    She was never a favorite of mine but she is not bad as a Senator. More people need to drop out. Right now, the serious politicians are the ones that are doing so.Report

  2. George Turner says:
    August 28, 2019 at 8:05 pm

    Trump’s tweet was troll level – Grand Master. I cracked up when I saw it on the news. ^_^Report

  3. Marchmaine says:
    August 28, 2019 at 8:08 pm

    “A sad day for the Democrats, Kirsten Gillibrand has dropped out of the Presidential Primary. I’m glad they never found out that she was the one I was really afraid of!”

    But it’s so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy’s? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me…Report

  4. Jaybird says:
    August 28, 2019 at 8:21 pm

    I just checked Al Franken’s twitter.

    He hasn’t commented.

    (Personally, I think he shouldn’t.)Report

    • Frank Benlin in reply to Jaybird says:
      August 28, 2019 at 10:25 pm

      I don’t think he will, but I’m sure somewhere in Minnesota he is enjoying a quiet chuckle.Report

      • Jesse in reply to Frank Benlin says:
        August 28, 2019 at 10:47 pm

        Tomorrow, and likely for as long as she wants to be, Kristen Gillibrand is a Senator. Al Franken…isn’t and for the forseeable future, his only power in Democratic party politics will be giving money, so I wonder how much he’s actually laughing.Report

  5. Frank Benlin says:
    August 28, 2019 at 10:26 pm

    Consider how she sold out Al Franken, it couldn’t have happened to a better fraud.Report

    • Jesse in reply to Frank Benlin says:
      August 28, 2019 at 10:44 pm

      Yes, damn Kristen Gillibrand for making Al Franken sexually harass multiple people and damn her for making the Democratic Party actually stand up for their values.Report

      • Frank Benlin in reply to Jesse says:
        August 28, 2019 at 10:59 pm

        Yes, the Democratic Party was so appreciative that she didn’t qualify for the third debate, unlike 10 others. She whiffed on both criteria.

        I find your mention of values to be funny since she hasn’t shown any values except to advance her own brand no matter who gets in the way.

        Also, I don’t believe Al actually sexually harassed anyone as a US Senator.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Frank Benlin says:
          August 29, 2019 at 1:56 am

          The tension between the members-in-good-standing who are willing to say “well, you have to understand” for Team Good and the members-in-good-standing who express disgust that someone would even mention Team Evil in a post is a lot of why I am not willing to jump all the way to “Trump doesn’t have a chance”.

          Yet.

          I’m sure that he’ll say something awful and be sunk at some point in the next 14 months, of course. But not today. Not yet.Report

      • Doctor Jay in reply to Jesse says:
        August 29, 2019 at 12:36 pm

        If she had said, “These are very serious charges, in which are described acts that are well outside of the bounds we consider acceptable, and the Senate Ethics committee should give them a thorough airing” without demanding Franken resign, that wouldn’t have been standing up for values?

        There’s no binary choice here. It isn’t all or nothing. And you have to ask, for any political act, what ensued? Did this make it easier to remove Donald Trump from office or hold him accountable for his own sexual harassment? It doesn’t look that way. Has it made it easier to hold other Senators accountable? I don’t see that, either.

        I like to evaluate two aspects to every political statement: How it makes me feel right now, and what its longer-term consequences are. Gillibrand did very well on the first, and very badly on the second.Report

        • Jaybird in reply to Doctor Jay says:
          August 29, 2019 at 2:32 pm

          Well, if you check out the comments here from Way Back When, you can see what it was like in real time. We moved from “Aw, c’mon… it was just one accusation!” to “okay… maybe there are eight…” and that changed things.

          Maybe, with hindsight, we can say “they should have handled it differently” but, at the time, we went from “it was one” to “it was eight” within spitting distance of the Cosby Reckoning.Report

        • Jesse in reply to Doctor Jay says:
          August 29, 2019 at 3:34 pm

          No, because “waiting for a Senate ethics committe” is essentially saying, “hopefully, people forget about this, and you get to get off scot free because the Senate Ethics committe, full of largely other white dudes, will do everything they can to get you off.”

          Also, what ensued – we won a seat in Alabama. We got rid of a sexually harassing Senator and replaced him with a woman who will vote 98% the same way as Franken and won’t allow Republicans to say, “Democrat’s say they’re against sexual harassment, but they won’t even have the courage to call for the resignation of their own handsy Senator, because they’re hypocrites who only care about attacking Republican’s.”

          I don’t care if Gillibrand calling out Franken didn’t make old white fundraisers unhappy.Report

          • Doctor Jay in reply to Jesse says:
            August 29, 2019 at 5:28 pm

            Well, that’s what it means in your head. And probably some others, too. And sometimes it does mean that.

            I had forgotten about Roy Moore, and what a dirtbag he is. So, that’s a fair point. Still, it seems to me very likely that Doug Jones will lose that seat in 2020 to a Republican.

            The things Al Franken were accused of were very, very different in character than the things Roy Moore were accused of. Very different. Ignoring any ideas I might have about the relative quality of the claims against the two individuals, they still seem to me to merit different treatment. Evidently you disagree, and so did Kirsten Gillibrand. This is what I mean by black and white.Report

  6. Michael Siegel says:
    August 28, 2019 at 10:37 pm

    I’m actually surprised. I would have thought she would be one of the top contenders.Report

  7. LeeEsq says:
    August 29, 2019 at 2:31 am

    Gillibrand’s main problem was that she never developed a brand. Biden, Sanders, Warren, Beto, Buttineg, Gabbard, Williamson, Harris, and most of the others had some persona that people could latch on to even if they aren’t that clear on policy. Gillibrand, who I like and was really hoping would be the nominee during the early Trump administration, doesn’t have this. Harris is dominating on the upper middle class professional stick. Warren is better on policy. Gillibrand comes across as something of a non-entity despite her early attempts to make herself the leader of the resistance; which failed.

    I think that Trump’s sheer awfulness also hurt Gillibrand. He is such a tempting target that most ambitious brand name Democratic politicians want to run for President so they can be the big hero that takes him down. If we had a more polished Republican like Jeb Bush or Marc Rubio as President, the field would be a lot smaller because the target Is less tempting.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to LeeEsq says:
      August 29, 2019 at 9:41 am

      I think she had one, but it was one that was nigh-impossibly to sell. She was “inconveniently principled”.

      And Republicans don’t want to get behind that, because they’re Republicans. And Democrats don’t want to get behind that in a crowded field because they *ALL* have different favorites, second favorites, and third favorites whose principles are more convenient.

      The only people she’d possibly appeal to are among the fabled “swing voter”… and they don’t even start thinking about the election until well past the convention.

      She had a brand. It just was an unsellable one (at this point in the process).Report

  8. InMD says:
    August 29, 2019 at 8:30 am

    I’m glad to see the carceral feminist nutbag go down so pathetically. Maybe her and mattress girl can concoct another rape hoax for publicity.

    Hers are the kind of tendencies I’d love to see driven from the party. If we want to vote for someone that hostile to reality we might as well become Republicans.Report

    • Jaybird in reply to InMD says:
      August 29, 2019 at 9:37 am

      “carceral feminist nutbag”

      See? This is *CRAZY* to me.Report

      • InMD in reply to Jaybird says:
        August 29, 2019 at 9:50 am

        My opinion of her is crazy or the fact that the chattering class doesn’t care about that aspect of her career/platform is crazy?Report

        • Jaybird in reply to InMD says:
          August 29, 2019 at 1:40 pm

          The only thing that people talk about is the Franken, Franken, Franken.

          And that gives me the undercurrent of “disloyal, disloyal, disloyal”.

          I mean, nobody was talking about her policies at all. Just Franken.Report

          • InMD in reply to Jaybird says:
            August 29, 2019 at 2:01 pm

            To me her main offense is that she’s essentially an anti-civil liberties candidate and shes made that her signature issue. Killing off Franken is ancillary. Maybe he had it coming, maybe he didn’t, but we’ll never really know, on the record. The fact that she wants the world to run that way is why I find her to be beyond the pale.

            But see also Stillwater’s comment above. She came into the house as a blue dog, gun-friendly, up state NY representative. She’s since become the kind of progressive everyone hates; an upper middle class scold mouthing intersectionality and pop critical theory platitudes while in practice being an essentially classist reactionary.

            If she was actually principled she’d be a female Joe Biden or more like Klobuchar which is where she was at the beginning. Whatever she is it isn’t principled, at least not in a way that’s positive.Report

            • Jesse in reply to InMD says:
              August 29, 2019 at 3:36 pm

              I like Gillibrand, but then again I’m probably the type of progressive you hate as well, because I see zero ways Gillibrand is a “classist reactionary” unless calling out working class dudes for shitty racist and sexist attitudes is reactionary these days.Report

              • InMD in reply to Jesse says:
                August 29, 2019 at 5:49 pm

                My guess is that a decent chunk of what you see as calling out racism/sexism I see as mostly a mix of talking down to poor people and purity rituals for the well to do. And that’s on its good days. On its bad days its an honest to goodness belief that witch hunts and fashionable superstitions are superior to careful fact finding and process.

                But shes gone and I assume you and I will end up voting for the same person in the end. We can fight about this later.Report

              • Jesse in reply to InMD says:
                August 29, 2019 at 7:52 pm

                As a poor kid who grew up with a single mother on welfare, I have no problem saying yes, poor people say racist and sexist BS all the time, and deserve to be called out on it, especially in 2019, when they should know better.

                This whole idea that only upper middle class and rich white progressives are the only people who care about racism and sexism is some of the most self-defeating BS I’ve heard in recent times by people who claim to care about poor people.

                Not sexually harassing people in an office or not using racial stereotypes isn’t a “purity ritual.”Report

              • InMD in reply to Jesse says:
                August 30, 2019 at 7:25 am

                All these things can be true and not merit the woke religion that Gillibrand attempted to cater to. You can agree that sexual harassment should be taken seriously while still believing that facts need to be soberly sorted out before reaching conclusions about particular cases. In fact that’s my own view.

                Same with racism. We can understand it’s a complicated and pernicious problem in our society that continues to cause great harm. It doesn’t mean every single incident of any kind needs to be analyzed through that particular lense to the exclusion of all other facts and considerations.

                You’d think these points would be self evident. Yet with this particular (thankfully former) candidate it’s apparently necessary. I mean, in her view we should still be taking people like Emma Sulkowicz and Jackie Coakley seriously as spokeswomen for the problems with sex crimes in America.

                Solving our problems doesn’t require rejections of reality and reasoned thought. That’s the distinction between a real liberalism that cares about these issues, complicated realities and all, and a shalloe adherence to fashionable nonsense.Report

    • George Turner in reply to InMD says:
      August 29, 2019 at 11:48 am

      I suspect she was overcompensating because at one time her father was being paid $25K a month by the infamous NXIVM sex cult. He had been hired by Keith Raniere but later distances himself, with lawsuits flying back and forth.

      Murky things like that lurking in the background are probably poison for major donors who would fear that the entire election could blow up in their face with just one juicy scoop from The National Enquirer followed by a series of sarcastic tweets from Trump.Report

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