14
votes
Joe Biden's campaign has released an ad attacking Pete Buttigieg's record and experience
Link information
This data is scraped automatically and may be incorrect.
- Title
- Pete's Record | Joe Biden For President
- Authors
- Joe Biden
- Duration
- 1:39
- Published
- Feb 8 2020
To me, this seems like the type of thing we shouldn't be giving attention to.
I'd prefer not to need to moderate political content or try to come up with some kind of rules about what's "high-quality enough" to post, but I feel like the political content (and multiple of the associated discussions) lately has started sliding into outrage-y stuff that has very little value outside of trying to get people worked up over some minor event. There's still a very long time before this election and I'm sure it's only going to keep getting worse.
I think there are two ways of looking at this post. On one hand, yes, it is outrage-y, and some of the comments here are not particularly constructive. On the other, as several of the comments point out, it seems to represent a significant departure from the way candidates have campaigned in the race thus far: thus far, there have been very few personal attacks on fellow candidates, and with the effects on Warren when she went along with an attack in the slightest and most hesitant of ways, it seemed like voters were ready to punish candidates who went that route. Now Biden has jumped into full-on personal attacks. It also seems like a large change of strategy and target on Biden's part, from already fighting the general election and Trump, or competing in a long race of ideas against Sanders, to directly attacking an immediate threat in early races. To that end, the ad is very surprising, and merits discussion.
The title is not conducive to constructive discussion. I also think that a post to an analysis arguing why this ad indicates something important would have been far better than a post to the ad directly. But there does seem to be a constructive discussion to be had about the ad and its wider implications and relevance.
For example: if Biden is focusing on direct and aggressive attacks against Buttigieg, that suggests that even in his campaign's opinion, Sanders is now the frontrunner.
My gut agrees with you 100%, but my head is saying that the link is an original source event and thus potentially high quality if the terms of discussion are stated appropriately.
As /u/hungariantoast mentioned, it's the poster's responsibility to advise potential readers about why they think the post merits attention, discussion, or disputation.
I understand that you're tired of policing partisan tribal spats that have sucked energy out of the whole site. However, I don't think material like this should be avoided altogether. An even worse scenario would be posting about events like this via professional political commentators' think-pieces that smuggle in bargeloads of bias. Just tossing other people's argumentative positions around without meaningful context is an invitation to fights, even as the Biden ad did on its own.
There's been a trend lately to post bald topics (just the source), sometimes with provocative or inaccurate titles, and that low-effort posting needs to be addressed publicly.
Edit: on review, this post looks like I'm arguing for false objectivity in setting up the terms of discussion. That's not quite correct, but I'm not sure yet how to parse it more precisely.
But every political candidate is going to make attacks ads against other political candidates. It's business as usual for election campaigns. Should every single political attack ad from every election around the world be posted to Tildes? If not, where and how should we draw the line between those that should and those that shouldn't?
I share your concern, and that's why I recommended that any such posting have appropriate terms for discussion. /u/NaraVara placed this particular entry in context as the first negative ad among the Democratic candidates so far, but didn't pose a particular question or frame for shared commentary. I think that open-endedness can lead to things running off the rails quickly.
And no, of course it's not appropriate to barrage Tildes with content that everyone will find a surfeit of by the time the election rolls around. That's more low-effort and noisy than posting every AP or Reuters press release. It's a common project to locate material which is, according the Tildes Content philosophy, not shallow. Further, it's basic consideration for the other site participants not to monopolize the feed with political material from one's own nation.
Edit: Even if one's own nation is run by a loon with nuclear weapons, and removing him from office is very important.
I agree. If this had been a discussion post about political attack ads in general, with this ad as just one example, it would be fine. But simply linking the ad with little context isn't appropriate.
I also would not like to see a series of discussion posts, each discussing one particular political ad.
From my point of view, Tildes is already monopolised with political material from one nation. If non-USicans started posting political material from other countries, we'd just be balancing things out. :P
We're a bit stuck with US political content bias right now based on how globally important it is to eject Donald Trump and the Republican Party from office. The magnitude of our climate impacts, militarism, and financial precarity are meaningful risks to everyone here - including, I'm sorry to say, Australians.
You're certainly welcome to contribute other material as you see fit, and I've tried to post useful information from Russia, China, and elsewhere where I've had access to it.
I actually hold back. I could post dozens of articles about Australian politics (and I would minimise posts from the www.smh.com.au website, to keep you happy). We've had all sorts of scandals and outrages here recently, from overseas holidays to forced handshakes to sports rorts to leadership challenges. There's plenty of material to share!
But most of it is inconsequential. It's here today, gone tomorrow, like most political activity. It's just background noise. Much of it doesn't matter in the long run. Most politics is "a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing". Political attack ads are just more of the same. They're a dime a dozen. They're not newsworthy, they're not worthy of discussion. They're just noise.
If we're going to talk about something here, it should be something of consequence. Like an impeachment. Or a candidate dropping out of the primaries. But political attack ads are a dime a dozen. They're throwaway items. They don't matter.
What's putting people (okay, me) off is the continual incitement to participate in the narcissism of small differences.
The "energy" which you find appealing consists of more heat than light for my taste. I'm not out to persuade anyone about the meritorious valor of my chosen champion candidate anymore. I'm not a sports fan, I'm not that interested in who's winning or losing moment to moment, and cheering or booing here doesn't make me feel good. I find it creepy, distressing, distracting, and annoying when allegedly progressive people personalize their allegiances in the same ways as Trump supporters, and start fights about those allegiances here. I'm happy to talk about praxis, but I've had enough experience with people arguing just to win at arguing that I hate seeing the signs of it here.
That's where I stand on moderating political discussion.
So their criticism is basically that the mayor of a city of ~700,000* has less influence on national policy than the vice president?
edit:
*300,000
I think the idea is something along the lines that Buttigeig doesn't have much of a record at all, not just on national policy but in total. If all you can point to are successes while being mayor of a small* city for eight years (there's only 100k or so inside the city, and only 310k in the metro area; you're really stretching things to say he's in charge of a city of 700k people, which would be the entire statistical area that includes a lot of land he isn't mayor of--Mishawaka in particular) ...
I think it's a perfectly valid point to say that eight years of being major of a small city might not be enough to prepare you for the scale of what's involved at the national level. Maybe it isn't the most important thing for everyone's vote (we're all bad at scale), but surely it's important to enough people to be worth commenting on.
I think the difference there is that Obama was not campaigning on his record or experience, whereas to some extent, it seems like Buttigieg is.
And, just as importantly, Biden is campaigning on his own record too.
He did have experience as a Senator prior, though, and he won in actually challenging areas for Democrats (downstate Illinois) on top of it.
And one thing we did learn from Obama’s term is that his lack of leadership experience and independent contacts in DC definitely did hamper his early Presidency. He got plenty of bad advice in those days that led to him making some big blunders. If he had a do-over I think he would have approached foreign policy very differently and not deferred nearly as much to the “blob.” He also would have been better positioned to play hardball with the Senate instead of letting Joe Lieberman walk all over him, focused more on organizing the Occupy movement instead of letting the astroturfed Tea Party claim a monopoly in popular sentiment because he was too deferential to the finance industry, and been better able to get his political appointees through.
Now back in 2008 Obama was the only “hey, how about we campaign on actually doing stuff for a change?” candidate we had. So it’s likely that the progressive disappointment Obama is about on par with the enthusiastic centrists we might have gotten instead. But this time around, we have plenty of better options that don’t require us to settle for a bland centrist who looks like he stepped out of an early 1990s template for a politician.
True, people had that criticism of Obama. But it is valid to criticize a political candidate based on their lack of experience; it's not some baseless argument. And the argument has different merit in each case. Obama was in the senate for 4 years. To put it in perspective, I think Buttigieg is probably now qualified to run for US Congress, as Obama was in 2004.
Yep, and even Obama had more track record than Buttigeig, with 7 years in the state legislature and then another 4 in the US Senate.
Fixed, thanks
To be clear, I do think Buttigeig's lack of experience is a legitimate point of concern. The framing of the ad, however, seems fallacious, as I don't think you can really make a valid comparison between the accomplishments of the vice president and a small town mayor.
Yeah, and the tonal difference between the music choices between each segment was also a little much for me. It's also worth noting that not all of the "accomplishments" being said of Pete were all that great. The last two "accomplishments" in particular are notable reasons why people of color may be a bit reluctant to hop on Team Buttigieg, rather than things that Pete himself has claimed pride in doing. So even on that front, I don't see these as true comparisons. These are a list of Biden's proudest accomplishments, as well as two things a generic small city mayor could be proud of and a couple things they may not be so proud of.
Yeah this whole ad just struck me as non-sequitur.
I think the battle going on right now is for the position of the moderate candidate, not for the nominee. Sanders is comparatively unimportant for moderate candidates right now: if Biden or Buttigieg isn't able to decisively defeat the other and consolidate the moderate vote, they have no chance of even starting to compete against Sanders. If one of them does, then they'll be able to compete against Sanders over the rest of the primary, where there will be fewer candidates and far more delegates to pick up. As soon as Warren started faltering, Sanders was never going to be defeated early on.
For Buttigieg, Iowa was a victory because he didn't really need to compete with Sanders: he just needed to establish himself as the moderate alternative to Biden. He did that, and probably significantly lessened the chances of every other moderate candidate, but now he needs to hold onto it, and firmly defeat Biden.
For Biden, Buttigieg is the immediate threat, not Sanders. He was most likely planning on a long, mostly two-candidate race on ideological lines against either Sanders or Warren. Now he's fighting to even be seen as a strong candidate, and in order to do that, he needs to stop Buttigieg, not Sanders.
And if neither of them can consolidate the moderate vote before later, larger states, then Bloomberg is going to be there to replace them in the battle to establish the race as Sanders vs. X.
This basically is a very close parallel to the 2016 Republican primary. Biden is like Jeb Bush. Him being there keeps others from rising even though nobody actually likes him. Buttigieg is like Marco Rubio. He’s young and handsome and talks like you ran a 1,000 anodyne political speeches through a machine. You’ve got Klobuchar who, like Chris Christie, has been around for a while and done some stuff and is, on paper, one of the more qualified people on there but nobody listens because reasons. Then you got Warren who, like Ted Cruz, is basically the policy leader/pioneer of their movement but people don’t vote for them for random reasons. Ted because he’s a loathesome toad and Warren because she’s “not likable” (read: a woman).
Any of them alone probably would have beaten Trump, the leader of the populist insurgency, but because there are so many of them, nobody coalesces anything because none of their competitors will drop out.
Isn't it "business as usual" for political candidates to make attack ads against other political candidates? What's newsworthy about this one?
It’s basically the first full out attack ad of this campaign season. The lack of bloodthirst among the front runners has been remarked on previously, particularly the Joe Biden camp. This marks transitioning from a “presumed front runner” campaign strategy (like Hillary Clinton ran in 2016) to one where Biden plans to throw down with the rest of them.
I still don't see the point of posting this particular political attack ad.
Here in Australia, with 6 states, 2 territories, and 1 federation, all on different electoral cycles, we're having an election here every 6 months or so (on average). We've got three elections coming up later this year: one in August and two in October. And New Zealand is having an election campaign all this year as well, leading up to their election in September.
Is it okay for me to post all the political attack ads from those various election campaigns?
I think a Presidential election is probably quite a bit more newsworthy than any subsidiary one. Certain landmark ads, like Clinton’s “3 AM” ad in the 2008 primary, Lyndon Johnson’s “Daisy” ad, or Bush’s “Willie Horton” one all ended up becoming a part of American political history because they shifted the media narrative so strongly.
So we should restrict ourselves to just country-level elections? Fine. There are a lot of democracies out there. Let's start posting political attack ads from all around the world.
And, when this ad by Joe Biden's team becomes part of American political history, it will become worthy of discussion. Until then, it's just political noise. It's "sound and fury, signifying nothing".
I wouldn’t be opposed. My wife works in democracy promotion, so we follow a lot of political campaigns internationally in my house.
The historicity of a political ad depends on how prominently and frequently it’s being discussed. Political advertizing is very meta that way.
Ah-hah! I see your little game now. You're trying to make this ad historically significant! :D
(<.<)
(>.>)
To be honest though, I did notice it getting traction amidst several not-super-political groups I follow, which partly informed my read in its newsworthiness.
I am serious about following campaigns throughout the world though. The problem, of course, is that most of the really salient bits of media aren’t in English or aren’t put through channels that people outside the country in question would follow.
So far this campaign, whisper campaigns and troll-baiting aside, the candidates themselves have been treating each other with kid gloves. This is the first truly negative ad hit I’ve seen and it’s pretty vicious.
Posting it mostly because I anticipate it’s going to generate some heat in the media.
Just FYI, you linked his channel URL, not the ad... so please let me know if I edited the correct link in.
Ah my bad. Yeah that’s the link I meant to put in.
Frankly, I feel this ad has nothing on the insanely savage attack ad on Ariz senator Martha McSally from the Lincoln Project 😳
This is so laughably childish and insecure, that I have to wonder, why won't Biden fire people who made this.
I'm not sure he'd see anything wrong with it, he seems very out of touch and borderline senile.
Someone will make a Bernie v Biden edit of this video soon.