US Democratic Senator Mark Kelly has said he will “seriously consider” running for president in 2028 as he battles the Trump administration over a video in which he urged military personnel to refuse illegal orders.
The Arizona senator, who was accused of “seditious behaviour” by Donald Trump over the November clip, said he and his wife, Gabrielle Giffords, received “many” death threats after the president’s comments.
“We get them on a weekly basis now,” he told BBC Newsnight. “We had to get security to protect us 24 hours a day.”
Asked if he was considering a White House run, the retired Navy captain said he was considering it “because we’re in some seriously challenging times”.
I hear you, and I understand, but also in that same pragmatic vein, we stand at a crossroads where without a coalition with the left we have no path forward. The right can’t seem to articulate any kind of clear concept of what would bring them on board except hurting more people. The left at least has the advantage of expressing a clear set of demands, none of which are particularly objectionable. Difficult, yes, possibly unachievable in a time frame that would satisfy them, but not objectively evil, which is more than I can say for the voting base of the right at this point. We have a choice to try to win back the left, or to try to make ourselves attractive to those who are at this point actively voting for fascism and potentially for mass genocide. Are we not being just as obstinate with our insistence on political centrism that we too are allowing the right to engage in atrocity after atrocity?
I’m not advocating voting for candidates who “can win the general election” in primaries. Vote for social democrats there and let the general election fall where it must. The more social democrats we get in the party, the stronger their influence will be and that is how we drag the party to the left. But when it comes to the general, the most milquetoast corporatist democrat is better than right-wing outright fascism.
Only if you only care about the short term. And then short term thinking is what has got us to this point.
Short term we risk losing democracy. Which is a long term problem.
How’s that short term thinking working out for you?
Have you lost the thread here? Do I need to pull a few quotes for context? My whole argument is that we can’t afford to sacrifice an election to a Trump or his ilk in the hopes of teaching democrats a lesson they aren’t going to get and won’t matter anyway once no one gets to vote for anything.
If OP’s thinking prevailed and that’s why Kamala lost (which I don’t believe is the case) then it would be the strategic thinking and the willingness to sacrifice people now for some imagined gains in the future that would be to blame.
In your opinion. An opinion you’re no more willing to budge on than the leftist is willing to compromise their position that any further concession to the right is tantamount to endorsing their atrocities. That someone willing to “reach across the aisle” at this point is doing little more than consenting to crimes committed in their name. The leftist and the liberal are standing equally on their beliefs and their principles, and both are just as unwilling to compromise. Can you truly say either one is more responsible for dividing the opposition to the fascists than the other? If you truly believe that voting for anyone but Trump is worth whatever price it takes, then you also believe there’s no harm in endorsing a more left leaning candidate no? Unless you truly believe more Democrats are willing to permit crimes against humanity than there are leftists willing to find an acceptable compromise. If that’s the case, the United States of America has already fallen too far to save.
That is implicit in what I said. I don’t endorse Newsome or Kelly. I love what I’m seeing out of Kat Abughazaleh in Illinois, but I can’t vote for her. I’m a hopeful pragmatist.
As for the rest, we are doing irreparable harm to our people and others. That’s not a price I’m willing to pay. It’s a price that I fear might harm us all for decades or longer if Trump chooses to do autocracy.
Then for all our sakes, let’s hope someone comes to the presidential run with a position we can all accept even if we don’t all love everything about them and let’s hope the midterms go well to at least stanch the bleeding right now.