election – Page 14 – Lone Candle

Why does Kamala Harris want to be president?

Posted on July 31, 2024July 31, 2024 by Lone Candle

“What Harris’s career has made clear is that she’s more likely to pursue incremental progress than big, ambitious ideas. That’s why if elected, it’s likely that her administration would simply be an extension of the current one rather than a disruption.
On the campaign trail this week, several priorities have come into focus, with the economy and affordability still at the top of the list. Harris continues to talk about prioritizing the middle class, just as Biden did: “Building up the middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” Harris said at her first major campaign rally in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, on Tuesday. “When our middle class is strong, America is strong.”

To support that swath of Americans, improving the care economy — those services that focus on children and the elderly — could be one of the major policy areas she may come to prioritize.

She would zero in on a straightforward policy agenda, said Carmel Martin, who served as the vice president’s domestic policy adviser from 2022 to 2023: a focus on “economic progress while bringing down inflation, expanding access to services that people need — health care being at the front of the line — and protecting reproductive rights.”

Harris has already shown signs of this focus, saying in a campaign address on Monday that she believes “in a future where no child has to grow up in poverty; where every person can buy a home, start a family, and build wealth; and where every person has access to paid family leave and affordable child care.” All of these stances are essentially what Biden has pitched before.

The fact that Harris has shown she’s not a hardened ideologue means that she can be swayed by political headwinds, giving social movements an opportunity to push various agendas.

Some of the country’s most transformational legislation, for example, didn’t come directly from presidents who were ideological hardliners, but rather from presidents who were willing to listen to social movements and public sentiment — as was the case during the Civil Rights Era.”

https://www.vox.com/2024-elections/362619/kamala-harris-president-vision-political-ideology-2024-election

What the Labour Party’s big win in the UK will actually mean

Posted on July 24, 2024July 24, 2024 by Lone Candle

“How exactly Labour plans to accomplish their goals is an open question. Labour doesn’t really have a strong, bold new policy regarding the economy; there isn’t a big, splashy ideological framework.
And on one of the major factors dragging Britain’s economy down — Brexit — Labour plans to negotiate agreements about agriculture and livestock with the EU to bring down food costs, and hopes to make professional services agreements that will help UK professionals work in EU countries. Still, many of the economic pains of Brexit may remain.

And on migration, other than scrapping the Rwanda plan, there’s not too much daylight between Labour and the Tories.

“The current government already has quite a large focus on enforcement,” Ben Brindle, a researcher at the Oxford Migration Observatory, told Vox. Labour’s approach is “still doing many of the things which the current enforcement operation is already doing” to deter irregular migration. And when it comes to migration for students and skilled labor, net migration is likely to go down anyway due to policies already in place, rather than anything Labour is actually doing.

Labour does have proposals on hand to address the housing and transit crises — including by loosening up building restrictions in the immediate term so that new housing, infrastructure, and transit services can actually be built, which could help stimulate the economy.

“We’re using a planning regime that was created in 1948, that is incredibly stringent, and means that we’re just not building things anywhere,” Ansell said. “We have a housing crisis. We have a transportation crisis, and we have a public infrastructure crisis and an energy crisis — it’s all because we can’t build stuff. That gives [Labour] a narrative. It also gives businesses the expectation that actually there’s going to be loads and loads of infrastructure or investment and probably over quite a period of time.”

Ultimately, though, Labour sees building a stable government, especially after the years of uncertainty post-Brexit, as a useful framing — but potentially a part of its mandate. The party’s manifesto is built around the idea that it “can stop the chaos” which has helped exacerbate external problems into national crises when it is in power.”

https://www.vox.com/world-politics/358985/uk-labour-keir-starmer-tories-migration-politics-elections-july-4-rishi-sunak-boris-johnson

It was not undemocratic for the Democrats to dump Joe Biden

Posted on July 23, 2024 by Lone Candle

“the party isn’t avoiding an election, they’re trying to win one, by picking a nominee who (they hope) can win more people’s votes”

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“yes, 15 million people did indeed end up voting in those primaries. But how democratic was that process? Biden won the primaries because he won the inside game. It was party elites who determined the (few) options available to voters. Polls showed the voters would in theory have preferred someone else, but they weren’t offered a realistic opposing candidate.
Furthermore, asserting that the primary result is all that matters, and that taking anything else into account is “undemocratic,” is a very limited and blinkered definition of democracy. After all, those 15 million people are a paltry sum compared to the 150 million people who may vote in the general election — people who, according to polls, overwhelmingly think Biden is too old to serve another term. Many of those people wanted another candidate — shouldn’t their views matter?”

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Another issue is that primary voters did not have the information that Biden would perform so poorly in the debate when they cast their votes.”

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“party elites didn’t push Biden off the ticket in an effort to steal the power of the presidency from him. They abandoned him because they fear he is hurting the party’s electoral chances — that is, because he’s lost support from voters.”

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“maybe it would have been nice if Democrats had had an actual presidential primary process rather than this mess. But that didn’t happen — and, considering the options, party officials abandoning Biden to try and nudge him aside in favor of someone who can win was a reasonable response.”

https://www.vox.com/politics/362062/biden-drop-out-republicans-accuse-democrats-coup