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Vance lacks accomplishments. He wrote one acclaimed book. The rest of his career is a junior big law stint and then I guess he was good at befriending rich people and became a VC of which I see zero prominent investments.
He has never held a job long enough to do anything. I think it’s questionable “he had a life before politics”. He had internships to become a politician. Even Democrats who wanted to be in politics would spend 3 years in military service before going off to law school back in the day. He’s no Desantis in that regard.
He though is solidly blue tribe. Classic smart white guy marries Asian/Indian.
I don’t think he does much to extend the base. Maybe he helps to push engagement in Pennsylvania which is probably a swing state. Trumps biggest weakness is governance not winning the election. That may not matter for the election but in terms of getting things done Vance is a lightweight.
He reminds me a lot of Palin but with better education. I don’t even think Dems will fear him. He doesn’t remove the assassin risks with Trump.
vice president isn't a normal job where you need experience. The "job" is basically to give TV interviews and make the main guy look good. Maybe run for president in the future, but not now. It's a very strange job. For that, he's as qualified as anyone.
The whole reason that Trump is winning right now is that 1/ Obama thought this way when picking his VP in 2008, and 2/ Biden thought this way when picking a VP in 2020. Choosing a VP is monumentally consequential for your party. You need to make sure you are choosing the right guy if you care at all about the future of your party. And how can you think you have taken the measure of a man to know where he will be in the next decade or two when he's already a completely different man from what he was a decade ago?
I kinda of agree. I don’t have anything against Vance specifically. He in fact may turn out wonderfully. I just don’t know him—at all. He hasn’t had the eye of Sauron on him so I can’t trust him.
It’s why I would’ve preferred RDS. Of course Trump feels (I think really unfairly) that RDS betrayed Trump so was never going to happen.
DeSantis has his strengths, but they were on COVID response and anti-woke. I don't expect him to deport anyone and I don't expect him to stand up to China.
He can stay right where he is, it seems to suit him. Or maybe unseat Rubio and join the Senate.
Covid to me is still a big deal. There needs to be accountability for that. RDS also runs a very competent Florida government.
Also RDS showed he would respond to a hostile media without cowering. No reason to think that would change.
He is a very competent administrator albeit not a very inspiring personality.
Yes, I agree with your points, but they don't tell me that he's going to shut down the border or be tough on China. Those were, are, and forever will be Trump's biggest selling points to me, and many others.
I would be happy with him if I thought he would accomplish those things. I don't, especially when it comes to China.
What on earth makes you think Trump is going to be tough on China? He's not even supporting the TikTok ban.
And why should he?
In many respects, the TikTok ban seems less like 'tough on China' and more like the Democratic Party trying to assert control of yet another media company, after having spent decades with a partisan-media company alliance that has been used to the detriment of their political opponents.
There's plenty to dislike about social media like Tiktok, but the part that the Democrats were reacting to wasn't actual propaganda-techniques like inflaming election season via hyperbolic claims about political opponents. That was and is just standard Democratic party electioneering. Nor is it about personal data security- that's both old news and not unique. From a more skeptical perspective, the biggest distinguishing factor about TikTok- aside from the anti-PRC electoral hay- was that it was uncontrolled.
Donald Trump has just spent the better part of the last decade under unmitigated information warfare by the controlled or aligned media channels of the Democratic Party. Why would he want to support a Democratic administration assert control/coercion over another social media platform?
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It's not that monumentally consequential in a healthy political party. Part of the Democrat Party's problem is this weird desire to keep passing the Presidency to anointed successors instead of actually allowing any kind of party democracy to occur. That's how they got Clinton in 16, Biden in 20 and now look stuck with Harris in 24. But it really doesn't have to be this way, and it wasn't so long ago that it was quite normal to hand the Vice Presidency to an empty suit like Spiro Agnew or Dan Quayle.
Biden won a competitive primary in 2020. If he was Obama's annointed successor (he wasn't - part of the reason why Obama chose him as VP was that Obama thought he would be too old to run in 2016) he would have been on the ballot in 2016. If the "party decided" in 2020, then almost everyone who mattered in the Democratic Party would have endorsed Biden, when in fact the endorsements were all over the place.
Fundamentally, Biden won because none of the wonkier centrist candidates could win the support of the black political machines who deliver a plurality of the Dem primary vote, so the other centrists (by the time the voting started, that meant Buttigieg and Klobuchar) had to drop out and endorse Biden if they wanted to crush the Sanders/Warren wing. This was obvious to anyone who understands Democratic party politics after the South Carolina primary.
The fact that the best available talent on the centrist wing of the Democratic party in 2020 was Biden, Buttigieg and Klobuchar says something less-than-positive about the state of the American centre-left.
And this was the moment of anointing. Biden did not enter the primaries anointed- Biden was anointed into the primaries by how the inner-party party reacted in the face of an emergent threat to their control of the party as a whole, rather than allow an outsider wing raise as a result of voter preference in the primaries.
This is a bait and switch argument. At first the claim was "The party has current problems because instead of healthy party politics deciding leaders, they anoint whoever has the most name recognition or seniority in the previous regime", now it's "After a somewhat rigorous and unpredictable primary process with votes and wins all over the place, eventually they coalesced around a candidate who they thought was best (And who did in fact end up winning), which proves he was anointed"
Or, alternatively, it's re-affirming the original argument by not letting the counter-argument smuggle in assumptions (such as that a party-annointing must occur in advance of primaries) that are neither necessary nor disprove the previous argument.
Do you believe that the winner of the 2024 presidential election will only win because they were anointed by voters on November 8th? That seems like the weakest-possible stance.
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I think it's more about the party base than its leadership. Like you said, the black political machine is huge in Dem primaries, and they came out big for Biden. Buttigieg and Sanders did great in the early, mostly-white states of Iowa and New Hampshire. But then along came South Carolina with its huge black population and just absolutely crushed it for Biden. Almost half of the vote to just one candidate in a multi-way race, and more than half of the delegates in a fairly large state. No one else could touch him after that.\
It's an interesting question as to why he won so much black support. You might think Harris would have won their support, since she's part black. Or maybe someone more progressive. But no. They went hard for the fairly moderate guy who was also Obama's VP. In that case, being VP meant a lot. But I don't think that, say, Mike Pence would enjoy a similar bump- even the most ardent Trump supporters don't really like Pence.
He’s fairly moderate, tied to Obama, a bit quirky, very party insider, known quantity, straight man, professional politician. That’s what the black political machine seems to like.
I'm convinced it's something about his personality/charisma. Bill Clinton had a similar effect on the black community. It's like the affable alpha male politician who looks like he's having a blast whenever he's campaigning.
Biden is not that.
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I think this is tied to some specific events in January of 2021.
did they like him before that though?
More, certainly.
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Ahh yes - the competitive thing where everyone simultaneously dropped and endorsed you after a lot of backroom dealing.
A lot of the current mess dems are in could be traced to them trying to stop Bernie twice.
this reasoning is just straight forwardly poor. Bernie only looked like he had a chance because the centrist lane was crowded. When it became uncrowded he had no chance. This isn't "trying to stop Bernie". This is a group of 20 friends, 2 of which want to eat at the same slop house and the remaining 18 of them each preferring a different steak house deciding on a particular steak house that was only one guy's first choice rather than take a vote at the restaurant level and end up at a coordinated minority's preference.
A tremendous amount of people came out of that primary thinking that they should have been allowed to win because other candidates were obligated to keep splitting the ticket 8 ways in order to give him an opening. It's ridiculous.
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There were shenanigans around the primaries, but Bernie fundamentally wasn't sunk because of them. He lost because he was a rando with extremely out-there political views from a tiny lily-white state, who didn't resonate with the Democratic Party as a whole. (It bears pointing out that the online activist/college student crowd, although having outsized influence on media, are not at all representative of the Democratic base.)
If elite and donor contempt was enough to sink a candidate in a primary, Trump would never have been able to win his.
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Deal with the devil.
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The job varies. Some people elevate the role. Dick Cheney was powerful. Desantis I think would have been a get shit done VP.
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Is he one of those dark elves that Moldbug talked about?
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2024 Vance resume = 2008 Obama resume.
Which, to be fair, people criticized Obama as inexperienced. But in the end, it was a pretty hollow critique and Obama led competently for 8 years (whatever you think of his politics).
Obama governed horribly -- Obamacare, IRS political targetting, enshrining disparate impact, fast and furious, Benghazi, ISIS, etc etc
Democrats don't think he governed horribly. Obamacare was a generational success for Democratic policy goals and more than makes up for the rest. The biggest problem of the Obama administration is that he left the economy perpetually understimulated, letting the nation languish for years in a sluggish recovery from the great financial crisis and leaving the door open for Trump to adopt a more expansionary fiscal policy and revitalize the economy.
I think the bigger problem was too much stimulus. Rip the band aid off.
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Don’t conflate wicked with impotent. That’s a long list of political accomplishments, even if you think they’re malevolent!
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As someone who voted for him one time and stayed home the second, it didn't feel like he governed horribly. I think subsequent events have revealed extremely serious problems with his tenure, but at the time, in a blue information bubble, he seemed like the best president in quite a while.
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Lighter resume I would agree. Though I would argue that Obama had a previous life. A decade plus as a law professor at UC. Vance’s professional career is just 3 years at big law and then being Thiel’s buddy, calling himself a VC, and investing in Rumble.
Obama you would obviously call an academic lawyer. I don’t think you would call Vance any particular career.
I wouldn't call Obama an academic lawyer (or really much of a lawyer at all--I don't think he's ever really practiced). He doesn't have a PhD, he never published any original research (I think he may have co-authored a couple of law review articles of no significance), and he kept an unusually light course load. He spent relatively little time on campus and apparently did the absolute bare minimum required of him while he was there (from what I can recall, it's been a long time since I looked into this).
He was a charismatic local politician with a part-time adjunct professor job teaching introductory con law. And even that is fairly charitable--I would not be surprised if his TAs did almost all of the work apart from his actual lectures (and sometimes even those), as was the case with both of the "celebrity" professors I've had the displeasure of taking classes with.
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But law professorships are worthless sinecures that do and produce nothing of value. His stint as a community organizer was unironically much more important and impactful.
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I have a much lower opinion of academic lawyers than guys that pal around with Peter Thiel for a living.
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Didn't he underperform in 2022 as well?
No. He was a non incumbent running against a popular congressmen. Can’t compare with an popular incumbent running against a nobody.
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