This is a thread about future democratic politicians. Whats your problem?
Democratic Party Rebuild
- Thread starter the next guy
- Start date
the cac mamba
Veteran
i laughed out loud at his first answer. most over rehearsed, canned answer ive ever heardEdit: his answers were robotic as hellloosen up Andy you aren’t patrolling the halls of Robert e Lee elementary anymore
Outlaw
New Hope For the HaveNotz
Beshear trying to keep his nice guy image intact. When he told Vance maybe he should experience abortion, we all saw what’s hiding underneathi laughed out loud at his first answer. most over rehearsed, canned answer ive ever heard
John Reena
Superstar
He a very inconsiderate person. It’s outrageous how he gets to skirt the rules with the occasional “time out” instead of a permaban.
Pull Up the Roots
Breakfast for dinner.
We already saw this team up happen when our "leaders" got up there and made several pledges with christian nationalists and racists in support of a foreign country.When the “it’s the jeeewwws” Christian Nationalist far right and the “death the the west and IDF” left team up when Shapiro runs and the horseshoe finally connects
Israel is the one thing that congress presidents etc can show true bipartisanship with.We already saw this team up happen when our "leaders" got up there and made several pledges with christian nationalists and racists in support of a foreign country.
GhostoftheMan
Superstar
Is america racist? Yes but acting like Kamala wasn't a lame duck is also revisonist. People for years made jokes how she always said a bunch of nothing.So we still pretending that Kamala lost because of her politics and not the fact America didn’t want to put a black woman in office?
the cac mamba
Veteran
it's insane to act like 2024 was "theirs to lose" in any way, shape or form
no one was happy with post-covid inflation, and the president had just massively betrayed the entire country, by lying that he was fit to serve another term at 82. almost nothing about the biden/harris incumbency was advantageous
so her entire campaign mostly boiled down to "keep trump out of office", and people apparently said "oh yeah? the guy who everything cost half as much under in 2019?
"i don't even see many lessons to learn from 2024, because so much of the scenario was a fluke that will never repeat
What was left of infrastructure and regulatory ftc was good but average american don't care about that shyt. Biden timid support of his promised loan forgiveness and funding two wars didn't help. Not to mention his inability to explain inflation or show much empathy with people struggling on the streets didnt help either. Only thing that was left for biden to run on was trump is bad, and you know how that went. The real lesson that should be learned is americans do not care aboit 1970s coldwar era rhetoric, wasting billions on wars while the average american struggling to pay bills isn't going to cut it. I had normies questioning me why we sending money to Ukraine when they barely can afford rent.it's insane to act like 2024 was "theirs to lose" in any way, shape or form
no one was happy with post-covid inflation, and the president had just massively betrayed the entire country, by lying that he was fit to serve another term at 82. almost nothing about the biden/harris incumbency was advantageous
so her entire campaign mostly boiled down to "keep trump out of office", and people apparently said "oh yeah? the guy who everything cost half as much under in 2019?
i don't even see many lessons to learn from 2024, because so much of the scenario was a fluke that will never repeat
the cac mamba
Veteran
if we're being honest, the same covid that gift wrapped the Democrats 2020, fukked them out of 2024
hard to call it an injustice when it was really just a wash. post-covid inflation was a pure death sentence. if you look at the graphs, it literally exactly coincided with biden taking power if covid never happens, trump probably wins again in 2020, and the Dems clean sweep in 2024
Covid was a gift and a curse, a gift that it got trump out of office, a curse that supply line slowing down didn't really show up until dems took office. With this term though republicans are fukked, things are going to continue getting worse and worse. Healthcare, food, cost of living etc are all going to continue getting my expensive the next 4 years. Not to mention trumps insane immigration policy( which you like) that is going to rise the cost of g&s. I haven't rven mention his terrible tax bill that is going to explode the debt.if we're being honest, the same covid that gift wrapped the Democrats 2020, fukked them out of 2024
if covid never happens, trump probably wins again in 2020, and the Dems clean sweep in 2024
the cac mamba
Veteran
deporting people who come here illegally, and enforcing the border, is federal law. nothing "insane" when obama did it, and nothing "insane" about it now
i'm sorry that progressives support open borders, but that's just your awful position. not the country's. or any other country that issues passports
i would have thought Abbott humiliating liberals, having them beg for money over the burden of only a few busloads, was proof enough
BRUTAL review 
In her new book, Biden’s former press secretary lets Democrats have it
Summarize
Karine Jean-Pierre’s memoir offers a critique of Biden and the Democrats that is outdated, impractical and driven more by personal grievance than policy.
Becca RothfeldOctober 22, 2025
Imagine parting ways with the Democratic Party not because of its unwavering support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he violated international law and waged a bloody campaign against civilians in Gaza; not because of its humiliating failure to mount meaningful opposition to the Trump administration’s assault on just about everything of value in the country; not because it continues to run candidates in their 70s and 80s, one of whom opted to die in office at 90 rather than cede her seat to someone younger; not because of its inability to expand access to health care, or protect immigrants, or tax the wealthy, or really get anything done at all; not because of its politely noncommittal affect and rhetoric of facile uplift, or its members’ tendency to address the public as if they are delivering the keynote at a corporate retreat; not because the Democrats have no political vision, something of a liability for a political party; but rather because of the single sensible — if very belated — thing they have done in recent memory, which was to usher a doddering Joe Biden out of the 2024 presidential race.
These contortions are hard to imagine from anyone but the most devoted apparatchik, which is exactly what Karine Jean-Pierre is. A lifelong Democratic operative who most recently served as President Biden’s press secretary, Jean-Pierre is still smarting from the perceived wounds the administration suffered at the hands of its treacherous party. In her new book, “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines,” she recalls, “I watched Democratic leadership abandon, and in the end betray, a man who’d led our country through a pandemic and a time of historic political turmoil.” Worse, some party leaders had the audacity to question whether Vice President Kamala Harris ought to be Biden’s preordained successor. Calls for an open primary were “an insult to Harris,” Jean-Pierre exclaims — never mind whether the vice president’s coronation was an insult to voters, who might have preferred to be consulted.
Unsurprisingly, “Independent” is a fascinating book for all the wrong reasons. It was dated before it arrived at the printers, perhaps before it was even written; no doubt it will be studied by the historians and anthropologists of the future. Jean-Pierre is an artifact of an age that looks recent on paper but feels prehistoric in practice — the age of pantsuits, the word “empowerment,” the musical “Hamilton,” the cheap therapeutic entreaties to “work on yourself” and “lean in” to various corporate abysses. “Independent” is written in the outmoded register of one of those lawn signs proclaiming that “in this house, we believe kindness is everything,” which have been firmly planted, to no tangible electoral effect, since 2016.
Jean-Pierre is revealingly blinkered. She may represent the future of the Democratic Party, despite her notional disavowal of it. Like many younger Democrats, she came of age in the in-this-house era and made her name by embracing its symbolism and sensibility. Now, she has perhaps been advised by a team of pollsters and PR professionals to distance herself from a party that is rapidly hemorrhaging appeal and support. Yet, like her colleagues in the halls of Congress, she appears to have little authentic understanding of why her erstwhile party’s approval rating has cratered. The approach she opts for in this book — loudly declaring herself an independent in a futile effort to cleanse herself of the taint of her party, all while espousing the same old worldview in the same old tired tone — is one that will surely tempt many of her peers. The silver lining is that she has provided an object lesson in exactly what not to do. The question is whether the Democrats are capable of learning from her example.
Jean-Pierre’s central complaint boils down, more or less, to a vague sense of personal grievance. The Democrats were mean to Biden, her boss; they were mean to her personally, as she outlines in a lengthy diatribe against fellow staffers who leaked unflattering information about her to Politico; and they were mean to Harris, whom they refused to anoint as the nominee without a fight. Jean-Pierre sums up her complaints when she writes that she’s “exasperated with the shady way Democrats do business” — but not, we may presume, with the business itself.
Indeed, at no point in “Independent” does she articulate a serious critique of Democratic policies. Instead, in an unsubtle attempt to elevate her gripes to the status of more principled objections, she peppers the book with platitudes about the need to “tap into out of the box thinking” and reject “an out-of-touch leadership working from an outdated playbook.” It is hard to take these exhortations seriously when Jean-Pierre’s own thinking remains so decidedly in the box, and when her version of in-touch leadership is an 80-something darling of the establishment who can’t make it through a debate after 9 p.m.
Jean-Pierre’s true concern, her only real subject, is the Democrats’ lack of decorum. Instead of endeavoring to convince us that Harris was the best presidential candidate because of her platform or her popularity, Jean-Pierre gestures meekly at demographics and invokes tired dynastic norms. Harris was Biden’s “logical successor”; she was “clearly next in line”; and “bypassing [her] would have been disrespectful to Black women overall.” Never mind the rather central question of whether she was actually electable. “The Democratic Party, my party, didn’t know how to win,” Jean-Pierre laments — just pages after confessing: “I never really believed Harris could win. I’d been in the body of a Black woman all my life.” I wish I were more surprised to learn that a Biden administration insider strongly supported a candidate she didn’t believe could win, in keeping with the Democrats’ favored tactic of prioritizing politesse over victory.
And what, by the way, did Harris propose to do? What was her case for her candidacy, beyond not being Donald Trump? Jean-Pierre says shockingly little about the vice president’s accomplishments, noting only that Harris, as California’s attorney general, “created a program that dramatically shrank recidivism among first-time, non-violent offenders” and, as a U.S. senator, “took apart Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr” during hearings in 2019.
Another reason “Independent” is a relic is that it insists racial representation is an adequate substitute for anti-racist policy. Harris was “owed” the nomination simply because of her racial identity; Biden “showed his respect for Black women by heeding our calls to pick Harris as his vice president” and appointing Black judges. Yet there is no discussion of whether his appointees’ decisions helped or hurt Black communities. The fact of Harris’s race is presumed throughout to be the whole picture, and any analysis of her political commitments is pushed out of the frame.
If politics requires contestation, “Independent” is a determinedly apolitical book. Jean-Pierre’s work as White House press secretary taught her perhaps too well how to deflect messy but necessary debates. She regularly casts around to find technical grounds for ruling out heated conversations: Arguing against an open convention and the democratic deliberation it would have entailed, she points to the precedent that vice presidents have always run when their presidents decline to pursue a second term; in an effort to forestall debate over a politician’s record and vision, she appeals to the candidate’s race.
For her, becoming an independent seems to be less of a strategy than a style. “Independent” is a primer in the rhetorical tactics that have served Democrats so poorly of late, full of squishy and congratulatory therapy-speak. Jean-Pierre reports that she “protected [her] peace” by tuning out much of the 2024 Democratic convention — not a comforting admission from a public official tasked with listening to the citizenry. She praises Harris for instructing her to “take time to focus on you,” advice she has apparently been taking ever since.
Ultimately, she tells her fellow independents, “we’re leaning into our own truth.” Worse, she assures them, “it’s also about self-care.” She could often be mistaken for a motivational instructor in a Soul Cycle class: “I ask you to try, to flex your individuality like a muscle, standing firm in your purpose, holding fast when others push you to just go along.” It is incredible — and emblematic of the Democrats’ total aesthetic and intellectual driftlessness — that someone who writes in such feel-good, thought-repelling clichés was hired to communicate with the nation from its highest podium.
And yet this thin style is all she has. Jean-Pierre certainly does not have a theory of what independents can achieve at the ballot box or on the ground. She muses vaguely that Black women should threaten to vote against the Democratic Party so that it no longer takes their support for granted, but she renders her own threat hollow when she counsels readers to vote for Democratic candidates anyway.
And even if Black women did find themselves in a position to pressure the Democrats to adopt their preferred policies, what policies would those be? The point of accumulating power is to enact a vision, but when the time comes to present one, Jean-Pierre’s words are remarkably wispy. She favors the resuscitation of “a national community rooted in empathy” and promises, vaguely, that “empathy, when put into action, can be powerful enough to beat back exploitative policies and cruel agendas.” Whenever she has a chance to endorse a substantive view, she punts. “Ultimately what each of us needs to do is to think critically for ourselves,” she limply counsels.
“Thinking critically for ourselves” is well and good, but it generally involves coming to actual conclusions. At one point, Jean-Pierre reflects, “It’s not about whether you’re at one extreme of the party or squarely in the middle.” But if it’s not about that — if it’s not about where exactly your beliefs, convictions and commitment lie — then what in the world is it about?
Independent
A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines
In her new book, Biden’s former press secretary lets Democrats have it
Summarize
Karine Jean-Pierre’s memoir offers a critique of Biden and the Democrats that is outdated, impractical and driven more by personal grievance than policy.
Becca RothfeldOctober 22, 2025
Imagine parting ways with the Democratic Party not because of its unwavering support of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as he violated international law and waged a bloody campaign against civilians in Gaza; not because of its humiliating failure to mount meaningful opposition to the Trump administration’s assault on just about everything of value in the country; not because it continues to run candidates in their 70s and 80s, one of whom opted to die in office at 90 rather than cede her seat to someone younger; not because of its inability to expand access to health care, or protect immigrants, or tax the wealthy, or really get anything done at all; not because of its politely noncommittal affect and rhetoric of facile uplift, or its members’ tendency to address the public as if they are delivering the keynote at a corporate retreat; not because the Democrats have no political vision, something of a liability for a political party; but rather because of the single sensible — if very belated — thing they have done in recent memory, which was to usher a doddering Joe Biden out of the 2024 presidential race.
These contortions are hard to imagine from anyone but the most devoted apparatchik, which is exactly what Karine Jean-Pierre is. A lifelong Democratic operative who most recently served as President Biden’s press secretary, Jean-Pierre is still smarting from the perceived wounds the administration suffered at the hands of its treacherous party. In her new book, “Independent: A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines,” she recalls, “I watched Democratic leadership abandon, and in the end betray, a man who’d led our country through a pandemic and a time of historic political turmoil.” Worse, some party leaders had the audacity to question whether Vice President Kamala Harris ought to be Biden’s preordained successor. Calls for an open primary were “an insult to Harris,” Jean-Pierre exclaims — never mind whether the vice president’s coronation was an insult to voters, who might have preferred to be consulted.
Unsurprisingly, “Independent” is a fascinating book for all the wrong reasons. It was dated before it arrived at the printers, perhaps before it was even written; no doubt it will be studied by the historians and anthropologists of the future. Jean-Pierre is an artifact of an age that looks recent on paper but feels prehistoric in practice — the age of pantsuits, the word “empowerment,” the musical “Hamilton,” the cheap therapeutic entreaties to “work on yourself” and “lean in” to various corporate abysses. “Independent” is written in the outmoded register of one of those lawn signs proclaiming that “in this house, we believe kindness is everything,” which have been firmly planted, to no tangible electoral effect, since 2016.
Jean-Pierre is revealingly blinkered. She may represent the future of the Democratic Party, despite her notional disavowal of it. Like many younger Democrats, she came of age in the in-this-house era and made her name by embracing its symbolism and sensibility. Now, she has perhaps been advised by a team of pollsters and PR professionals to distance herself from a party that is rapidly hemorrhaging appeal and support. Yet, like her colleagues in the halls of Congress, she appears to have little authentic understanding of why her erstwhile party’s approval rating has cratered. The approach she opts for in this book — loudly declaring herself an independent in a futile effort to cleanse herself of the taint of her party, all while espousing the same old worldview in the same old tired tone — is one that will surely tempt many of her peers. The silver lining is that she has provided an object lesson in exactly what not to do. The question is whether the Democrats are capable of learning from her example.
Jean-Pierre’s central complaint boils down, more or less, to a vague sense of personal grievance. The Democrats were mean to Biden, her boss; they were mean to her personally, as she outlines in a lengthy diatribe against fellow staffers who leaked unflattering information about her to Politico; and they were mean to Harris, whom they refused to anoint as the nominee without a fight. Jean-Pierre sums up her complaints when she writes that she’s “exasperated with the shady way Democrats do business” — but not, we may presume, with the business itself.
Indeed, at no point in “Independent” does she articulate a serious critique of Democratic policies. Instead, in an unsubtle attempt to elevate her gripes to the status of more principled objections, she peppers the book with platitudes about the need to “tap into out of the box thinking” and reject “an out-of-touch leadership working from an outdated playbook.” It is hard to take these exhortations seriously when Jean-Pierre’s own thinking remains so decidedly in the box, and when her version of in-touch leadership is an 80-something darling of the establishment who can’t make it through a debate after 9 p.m.
Jean-Pierre’s true concern, her only real subject, is the Democrats’ lack of decorum. Instead of endeavoring to convince us that Harris was the best presidential candidate because of her platform or her popularity, Jean-Pierre gestures meekly at demographics and invokes tired dynastic norms. Harris was Biden’s “logical successor”; she was “clearly next in line”; and “bypassing [her] would have been disrespectful to Black women overall.” Never mind the rather central question of whether she was actually electable. “The Democratic Party, my party, didn’t know how to win,” Jean-Pierre laments — just pages after confessing: “I never really believed Harris could win. I’d been in the body of a Black woman all my life.” I wish I were more surprised to learn that a Biden administration insider strongly supported a candidate she didn’t believe could win, in keeping with the Democrats’ favored tactic of prioritizing politesse over victory.
And what, by the way, did Harris propose to do? What was her case for her candidacy, beyond not being Donald Trump? Jean-Pierre says shockingly little about the vice president’s accomplishments, noting only that Harris, as California’s attorney general, “created a program that dramatically shrank recidivism among first-time, non-violent offenders” and, as a U.S. senator, “took apart Trump’s attorney general Bill Barr” during hearings in 2019.
Another reason “Independent” is a relic is that it insists racial representation is an adequate substitute for anti-racist policy. Harris was “owed” the nomination simply because of her racial identity; Biden “showed his respect for Black women by heeding our calls to pick Harris as his vice president” and appointing Black judges. Yet there is no discussion of whether his appointees’ decisions helped or hurt Black communities. The fact of Harris’s race is presumed throughout to be the whole picture, and any analysis of her political commitments is pushed out of the frame.
If politics requires contestation, “Independent” is a determinedly apolitical book. Jean-Pierre’s work as White House press secretary taught her perhaps too well how to deflect messy but necessary debates. She regularly casts around to find technical grounds for ruling out heated conversations: Arguing against an open convention and the democratic deliberation it would have entailed, she points to the precedent that vice presidents have always run when their presidents decline to pursue a second term; in an effort to forestall debate over a politician’s record and vision, she appeals to the candidate’s race.
For her, becoming an independent seems to be less of a strategy than a style. “Independent” is a primer in the rhetorical tactics that have served Democrats so poorly of late, full of squishy and congratulatory therapy-speak. Jean-Pierre reports that she “protected [her] peace” by tuning out much of the 2024 Democratic convention — not a comforting admission from a public official tasked with listening to the citizenry. She praises Harris for instructing her to “take time to focus on you,” advice she has apparently been taking ever since.
Ultimately, she tells her fellow independents, “we’re leaning into our own truth.” Worse, she assures them, “it’s also about self-care.” She could often be mistaken for a motivational instructor in a Soul Cycle class: “I ask you to try, to flex your individuality like a muscle, standing firm in your purpose, holding fast when others push you to just go along.” It is incredible — and emblematic of the Democrats’ total aesthetic and intellectual driftlessness — that someone who writes in such feel-good, thought-repelling clichés was hired to communicate with the nation from its highest podium.
And yet this thin style is all she has. Jean-Pierre certainly does not have a theory of what independents can achieve at the ballot box or on the ground. She muses vaguely that Black women should threaten to vote against the Democratic Party so that it no longer takes their support for granted, but she renders her own threat hollow when she counsels readers to vote for Democratic candidates anyway.
And even if Black women did find themselves in a position to pressure the Democrats to adopt their preferred policies, what policies would those be? The point of accumulating power is to enact a vision, but when the time comes to present one, Jean-Pierre’s words are remarkably wispy. She favors the resuscitation of “a national community rooted in empathy” and promises, vaguely, that “empathy, when put into action, can be powerful enough to beat back exploitative policies and cruel agendas.” Whenever she has a chance to endorse a substantive view, she punts. “Ultimately what each of us needs to do is to think critically for ourselves,” she limply counsels.
“Thinking critically for ourselves” is well and good, but it generally involves coming to actual conclusions. At one point, Jean-Pierre reflects, “It’s not about whether you’re at one extreme of the party or squarely in the middle.” But if it’s not about that — if it’s not about where exactly your beliefs, convictions and commitment lie — then what in the world is it about?
Independent
A Look Inside a Broken White House, Outside the Party Lines