Barack Obama changed my life

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Midterms under him were disastrous for Republicans. Just like Democrats under Obama.

Eisenhower was actually pretty unpopular for most of his presidency, it's just that he happened to rebound to being very popular at just the right moment for 1956 allowing that to be a landslide like 1952.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Oh f**k off. Just enjoy your retirement with your billionaire friends.

And this crybaby had the gall to say that Obama meant more to him than he did to me!

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Yeah, BRTD, that's how f**king disappointed I am. And I'm not going to take any lesson on what is worth caring about from a shallow, pretentious hipster for whom politics is just a matter of hanging out with the kool kidz.

You're the one who just openly admitted this has nothing to do with policies and all about giving the middle finger. That's childish as f[inks]. Plus you are now BFFs with jfern and despite your claim thisn't about the primary again, he is making it all about it.

I can understand being disappointed, I can not understand this absurd temper tantrum.

Also love how my degree is "just hanging out with the kool kidz". And do you have any clue on how many hours I've spent on DFL activism or my work with caucuses and conventions? Seriously go f[inks] yourself, you don't know me at all.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

BRTD, just be a nicer person.

Are Tony and jfern being nice people?

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

OK, this is the last post I'm going to make about this masquerade because I need to stop procrastinating and actually start focusing on homework I have to do.

First off, no, I don't hate Perez and he's obviously a big improvement over DWS (something that's ridiculous to celebrate because being not as awful as DWS should be a basic job requirement, not a great victory) and I want to hope he's not completely deluded about continuing this bottom-up organization where consultants with intricate data models make all the decisions and pay no attention to the demands of State parties. God I want to hope they learned the lesson on this at least. I've also never been particularly fond of Ellison and I wasn't expecting he'd bring about a revolution or whatever.

This election matters not because of Perez or Ellison, but because it demonstrates that DNC leaders are paying absolutely zero attention to anything happening outside of Washington. Not even just outside of the Democratic party, or even outside the Democratic elite (friggin Schumer had endorsed Ellison, ffs!) but outside the narrow clique of power brokers that currently controls it, this unholy alliance of Obama and Hillary operatives who ran the 2016 campaign and lost above and beyond our worst fears. The entire party was behind Ellison, including, again, many establishment figures (and those who weren't for him were for Buttigieg). The only ones for Perez were in the aforementioned clique, which represents nothing and no one beyond itself. Now, in any decent party, after running it completely into the ground, such a clique would have had the decency, maybe not to surrender, but to at least leave some room for alternative figures. Ellison wasn't some raging populist outsider, he just represented a wing of the establishment that wanted to reach out to those left out. But apparently even that was too much for the Clinton-Obama hacks.

And yes, it matters, because it means that these people have learned absolutely nothing from 2016, that they think they can keep everything exactly as it was, continue with the same strategy that lost Democrats 1000 State legislature seats and allowed an lying, authoritarian, White-supremacist pandering billionaire to win the White House carrying f**king Michigan and Pennsylvania. They are not interested in changing anything of the strategy, attitudes, culture, and messaging that led to this outcome. America is already great! The Democratic party is already great! Everything is fine! Let's do the same things we did before and you'll see in 2018 the American people will come back to us begging! I'm f**king outraged because they are going to hand this country to the most vile and reactionary right-wing force in the Western world on the strength of the working-class, while fruitlessly courting wealthy White suburbanites. They'll destroy the American left and thus indirectly contribute to the destruction of America.

And yes, I care because this is the country I've chosen to live in - not just for my PhD but, I've always hoped, for my future professional life. It's pretty f**king rich for you, BRTD, you who keep making thread after thread about how great it is to reject the culture you are born into and embrace a new one that fits you better, are now telling me to shut up because I'm "not American". Guess what? This is the culture I've chosen for myself (without renouncing to my roots because, contrary to you, I don't see a contradiction between keeping up traditions and experimenting new things). I might not have a passport or even a Green Card, but I am a person who lives in America, studies in America, talks with Americans, reads American newspapers, eats American food, and is affected by American public policy. Unless you've suddenly become a nativist asshole, you have no business telling me I shouldn't care about US politics.

Well, that's it. Have a nice day.

OK, so as I explained elsewhere, I care about symbolism as much as I care about preserving tradition and heritage. I focus on results, and absolutely nothing else (seriously ask anyone who's ever worked with me.) So getting that bent out of shape over something purely symbolic is clearly not going to jive or work with my mindset well.

The main reasons for you getting so upset is a HUGE extrapolation, and actually overestimates the amount of influence those hacks have ever had when most of the type of politics you're talking about is all locally based. The same is also true of the Republican leadership, who still haven't privately embraced Trump. Does that really matter? Not exactly. I mean it's not going to save Trump or the Republicans if they end up being as much as much of a disaster as he has so far and the polls keep swinging as they did, just as nothing could've saved the Republicans from drubbing in George W. Bush's second term. It's a pretty minor annoyance at best and irrelevant to people who actually deal with grassroots activism. The fact that Tom Perez is DNC Chair is not going to be the #1 factor in the 2020 election.

As for the last bit, I got pretty pissed a non-Democrat was literally calling for the party to be "burned to the ground" and you want the complete destruction of MY PARTY, and were sounding exactly like that unsufferable monster jfern. You didn't express disappointment, you want the Democratic Party destroyed. And I have no clue why you would choose this country after Trump, that too defies all logic. Regardless until you become an eligible voter, you're not a Democrat. You don't see me freaking out and screaming about destroying the French Socialists because of Francois Hollande or having anywhere near that level of a meltdown over Jeremy Corbyn, did you? And there's a reason for that.

Also I got rather severely offended by this:

Yeah, BRTD, that's how f**king disappointed I am. And I'm not going to take any lesson on what is worth caring about from a shallow, pretentious hipster for whom politics is just a matter of hanging out with the kool kidz.

If you knew anything about what I do in real life and my actual political and campaign work you'd realize just how insane and absurd that statement was, so seriously, f[inks] you.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Also I can't post it here without breaking the rules supposedly, but you might want to consider that Snowstalker of all people had a response to this that while disappointed was still about a million times more rational, collected and constructive.

(For an example of someone here who actually managed to express extreme disappointment without sounding like a raving lunatic, look at Scott.)

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

Aww, you got offended? Poor little thing. Maybe you should have thought about it before going after me in five different threads simultaneously. Leave me alone and I'll leave you alone.

The point is that you're wrong, and you've implied that you think that long before this, and as I said, it's absurd. And yeah I went after you because you were acting more batsh!t than Snowstalker, which is saying something.