gehringer_2

just as an aside, I wouldn't compare going to interview shows run by people you may not like (Like Pete B to Fox) where you have a chance to reach an audience that you can't by other means, to campaigning with someone - it's a whole different order of magnitude of validation.

speaking of the Times. If anyone has the time (it's a very long read or listen) and access, the Ezra Klein inverview with Marc Lynch and Shibley Telhami (https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/14/opinion/ezra-klein-podcast-lynch-telhami.html) is worth the time to slog through - esp the discussion near the end about Netanyahu's desperation to complete his program before he loses Trump and thus probably US support. Especially if you are old enough to have memory of what Israel was in the days of Golda Mier and Abba Eban, reading this will disabuse you any idea that it's the same place it was then or - even 15 yrs ago for that matter. It seems the only thing either side in the Arab/Israeli conflict can do successfully is further radicalize its enemy to hate it even more - and Israel's current course will be no exception.

What Trump does by comparison is meaningless, GOP and Dem voters have different criteria - it is what it is. You have an ongoing complaint about the radical left, I share some of that, but they are most useful as the stalking horse for the right to campaign against no matter who the mainstream Dems run. I mean, honestly, was Hammoud any more help to Harris than he would have been to Biden?

No comment on McMorrow in partcular, but I can't hold a Dem's position on Biden's run against them - I think Dems of good conscience were in a serious quandry about it. It was completely reasonable to believe if Biden had tried to keep campaigning there would soon have been more video flying around of more episodes that looked like the debate. There was no clear right answer there. I was ambivalent myself, and I think it still would have been the right decision if Harris had been able to connect to people better. To me she had this weakness that when you heard her speaking on video, it was always like she was talking to someone else, not to 'you'. Somehow she didn't connect through the camera like Obama or Trump can. Video 'Charisma' is a weird thing, but it's indispensable.

Garth was playing for the Jays when Cale was born...

he's going to be tested with a lot more breaking stuff, but that's not going to be easy either with a guy who takes a walk as well as McGonigle

a game that sort of encapsulates Trout's career. Great individual performance but it still couldn't pull the Angels over the line.

not sure if 2022 was talking about McG or Rainer but either way I agree I never remember Collins being treated as that much of a deal. IIRC Iorg did get a fair amount of early hype but it was pretty short lived because he never lived up to any of it. they kept pushing him up the system but he never really had a year that merited a promotion anywhere. Rainer already has a better year last year than Iorg ever had.

you and I don't have to, but if TPTB in the Democratic party leadership are not doing the party building to prep for '28, we're in trouble. Maybe my biggest knock on Obama was exactly that once he had his win, he didn't put much effort into making sure he left the DNC stronger than where he found it.

that's why you have to win big enough in the quadrennials to be able to take the 'inevitable' mid-term attrition. 😉

not what I'm saying - of course you make it about Trump if people are moving away from Trump and that's going to work for you. That's what I mean about '28 - after anti-trump do you have a story to tell Iowa, Tx, Fla, even Maine - states that should be flippable but that have failed to flip over several cycles, that can win without an unpopular incumbent there to run against?

LOL - so other party's have done better recently. This thread reminds me of the Wings thread. When you are faced with the need to do better - really better, as in better than the other guy, that's the metric that matters. We just had an example this Sunday of what doing better actually looks like. Skin of the teeth margins gained against some of the worse policy and corruption in 125 years should be embarrassing. Wisconsin looks wonderful, but Wisconsin was always going to be in play. Progress will be winning in places where it's actually a surprise.

what you run on and what the voters are voting about may or may not have anything in common.

If he had a contagion of financial backers bailing, thats all the longer it takes. FWIW, the Politico back story about him said his political roots in CA were shallow - he didn't have a core of in state support to loyal to him to fall back on.

I'm not dismissing it, but the I strongly believe the Dems have been whistling past the graveyard for several cycles about their approval with the wider public. Anti-Trumpism is great to see, but if that is all we are seeing, and right now there is no way to know the difference, it doesn't really represent the Democratic party's ability the take control of the basic political agenda from the right wing, and while that may put a brake on Trump's power in at the end of the year, it doesn't create the conditions for the change needed to prevent another Trump from emerging from one side or the other.

my money would be that Swalwells exit was indeed Gonzales' ticket to getting out himself so his ethics report would not go public.

what McGonigle is doing is probably more sustainable than what Delauter is. He's a 1HR/25-30AB MiBL guy who has hit 5 in his first 50. That's more likely to be noise in the signal than McGonigle's BB/K ratio and OBP, but TBH, neither has that high a probability of continuing the rates they are on now.

OK - yes - all true. So why is that more true on the left than on the right? That's all the take I posted about was trying to get to - the argument is that today's right is more united by a common culture that transcends issue positions - at least to some degree (it may be a toxic culture but that's beside the point!). That used to be truer on the left as well, but today we have all these single issue groups who otherwise don't share any common identity with each other so when their pet issue doesn't win the day across the party, they want to take their ball and go home. So the writer's position was the party could be more successful if it spent more energy trying to establish/identify some kind of common community to be the representative first, of that would help soften the edges on the competing issue agendas within a broad party. It's a little pie in the sky in the sense of how do you do it, but I think the analysis is probably correct that the Dems will continue to have the problem of issue fracturing until they identify - or stumble onto - some broader unifying principles for the membership of the party to coalesce around that go beyond everyone grinding their own axe. Or maybe just wait for their own demagogic leftest.....😟

they might have gotten to 50 last season if they had had Ausar full time.

Chateau Le Moran

Is all hopium until Nov3rd. If they can't swing the Senate to stop more Scotus and Pentagon appointments the country is probably toast. That's the only criteria for 'doing well' that matters.

'Over performed' a pessimistic forecast because of fundamental weakness in so many parts of the country they aren't considered to be on the table? In the Bush admin Gerson coined the phase 'the soft bigotry of low expectations'. Seems to apply. You can't seriously call yourself a governing party if you consider being completely out of power as doing well. Are things looking up, well yes, if they weren't it would be political malpractice of the highest order. Now go win something in DC.

That's why destruction of government documents also has to be crime.

If you want to keep calling not having power wining, go for it. They lost the House in 22, then lost the Senate in 24. Control of no parts of the government on Jan 2025 is zero momentum from the opportunity of having gotten Trump out of the presidency for 4 yrs.

That's sort of my point though - Until '28 every election is still going to be dominated by the Trump/Anti-Trump split, and if the Dems can't win that easily after the disaster that is Trump's 2nd term, then all you can say is that the US general electorate is an irredeemable lost cause and look for some place to emigrate. But when Trump exits the stage, will Democratic strength dissolve again just like it did between 2020 and 2024? I think to a large degree, both parties are ideologically/programmatically exhausted and both are too captured by corporate money. That left the 'mainstream' GOP open to capture by the Trump Cult of Personality in '16. It's just left the Dems arguing with each other whenever they don't have Trump to keep their minds focused.