CNN: Bernie Sanders draws sharp contrasts between himself and Joe Biden

[crazytown]

CNN, April 29, 2019
https://www.cnn.com/2019/04/29/politics/bernie-sanders-joe-biden-contrasts-cnntv/index.html

Bernie Sanders draws sharp contrasts between himself and Joe Biden

Washington(CNN) Sen. Bernie Sanders compared his record with Joe Biden's on trade and foreign policy on Monday, attempting to draw sharp contrasts between himself and the former vice president as the two lead the Democratic presidential pack.

When asked by CNN's Anderson Cooper if Sanders was concerned about Biden's endorsement from the International Association of Fire Fighters, the Vermont independent said, "I'm running against, I think, 19 other people, so I'm concerned about everybody," with a laugh -- before setting out a brief history of their political disagreements.

"But I think when people take a look at my record versus Vice President Biden's record -- I helped lead the fight against (North American Free Trade Agreement); he voted for NAFTA," Sanders said on "Anderson Cooper 360."

"I helped lead the fight against (permanent normal trade relations) with China; he voted for it. I strongly opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership; he supported it. I voted against the war in Iraq; he voted for it."

(snip) "I like Joe Biden. Joe is a friend of mine," Sanders said, adding, "I think what we need to do with all of the candidates, have a issue-oriented campaign, not personal attacks."

[JI7]

1. most Democrats support these trade agreements

[crazytown]

5. The more important question for me is

what did the politicians who supported trade liberalisation do as the heartland turned to rust. It’s fine for the general economy to benefit of trade agreements but those who carried the cost were left high and dry. Can you nominate a bill Joe Biden sponsored to give assistance to the Midwest to help them bear the burden of change?

(I’m not saying there wasn’t one, but I don’t remember it)

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

8. Nope, but can cite to you Bernie's fight against the TPP, which was in the people's best interest.

Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[crazytown]

16. Crickets

What happened to the heartland was wrong! The expression ‘rust belt’ should be a badge of shame for all Americans.

The GOP has the lion share of responsibility and have consistently blocked Democrats efforts to rebuild the nation’s infrastructure. But where were the Dem campaigns for special assistance to the communities hardest hit by trade liberalisation? When did Joe stand up for them?

We all watched them rust. So sad. Too bad.

[ucrdem]

27. Yes -- 70% of Dems supported TPP in Sept. 2016, 60% of Americans overall

including 58 % of Republicans, and that was after Hillary had expressed reservations:

https://www.thechicagocouncil.org/press-release/poll-majorities-americans-support-tpp-say-trade-good-us-economy

ETA: Better source

[Uncle Joe]

2. Kicked and recommended.

Thanks for the thread crazytown.

[WeekiWater]

3. I supported the direction Biden was going with the TPP.

One more reason for me to have Biden over Sanders. Thanks for the reminder.

[Cha]

4. Uh huh..

Link to tweet

BS takes himself down with non-answers like this..

Bernie has a rough time at She the People conference

https://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1287&pid=86745

No.. we're not "nervous", BS.

I like VP Joe Biden's Message of Unity.

[comradebillyboy]

6. More trade generaters more wealth. NAFTA is a good thing

TPP would have been a real benefit to the US. I really don't like Bernie's protectionist economics. A relic of the 1920s era poor economic thinking.

[crazytown]

7. As I said above

what did the politicians who supported trade liberalisation do as the heartland turned to rust. It’s fine for the general economy to benefit of trade agreements but those who carried the cost were left high and dry. Can you nominate a bill Joe Biden sponsored which gave assistance to the Midwest to help them bear the burden of change?

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

9. No, I can't, sorry... but I refer you to Bernie's fight against the TPP to help people.

Bernie & Elizabeth 2020!!!
Welcome to the revolution!!!

[Blue_true]

18. Can you nominate a bill that Bernie backed to help that region?

Look, whether we like it or not global trade is a real thing. In global trade there are trade off. If we keep insisting that cars we want to sell to China or Vietnam or Europe only get built on the Midwest, we are going to lose big and the car industry there is going to die. But if we realize that we are best at making some components of cars but not assembling them and we focus on becoming stronger where we are strong along with developing new industries, then we continue to have an important role in the worldwide auto industry. Bernie NEVER talks about the role of robots on jobs. Why is that? Detroit (using a name for the nationwide auto industry) has built record numbers of cars, but employment has continued to drop due to the role of robots in that process. Bernie seems stuck in an era when manual labor was a big part of car building, those days are long gone and won't be coming back. We need a nominee that is in step with modern realities.

[crazytown]

20. This is not about Bernie

I only care about him as much as his campaign cripples other candidates and hurts the Democratic Party. What he said about Joe is news: it’s his line of attack and I posted it. I am not against trade liberalisation. I am against leaving those communities hardest hit to fend for themselves.

What annoys me about is how VP Biden is being presented as the saviour of the Democratic Party and the nation with scant regard to who the candidate actually is. Some of his stances like tough on crime will serve him well in the GE, others will not.

[Blue_true]

25. The fact is some communities will either be left behind or the people in them

will move to where there is economic vitality. There are ways that we can keep some places alive and even have them thrive, but that will take a change in mindset of local leaders and investment from the Federal government and state governments. One area is software development. Today much of that work gets sent out of country because the cost of locating a new engineer into Silicon Valley, LA, Seattle, Boston and increasingly Northern Virginia has become prohibitive. But, if we educated people in West Virginia or rural Misdouri or Tennessee to program and create code and use modern communications to link them with offices in the hightech hotbeds, we can keep jobs that are now leaving country in the USA, but local leaders in those places are more concerned about prayer in school and regulating a woman's reproductive choices than they are with buikding an economy of the future for their regions.

[crazytown]

28. When I read "left behind'

I think of ‘the rapture’. Government needs to lead, not pickup the pieces.

[Blue_true]

44. If you look. In places that are dying, leaders there are busy fighting battles of the past.

And that shows up in results.

[George II]

11. He's against trade pacts and he's against immigration ("they'll take our jobs") Yes.....

....this isn't the 1920s nor is this the 1960s or 1970s. This is a global economy now. Sadly the farmers of the Midwest are suffering because of new "protectionist" policies.

[crazytown]

17. Protectionism doesn't work. Never has.

A factory, a business, a farm is like a living thing. One minute it’s alive, the next it’s dead. The challenge is to bring new life, new investment to those communities who bore the greatest burden of change.

That’s the promise. The reality is that immense suffering in the heartland fell on deaf ears. Joe Biden represented Delaware, not Pennsylvania, he had other priorities.

[Blue_true]

19. The reality is that manual labor is not remotely as important as it was in

1960, 1970, 1990 or even 2010. We don't need someone that is stuck with the image of a wage earner taking a lunch pail to work and muscling his way through the day's work. Even farming in changing, companies (like Birdseye) are perfecting tower farms, where one acre produced what 15 acres used to produce, with a tiny fraction of the labor. Those are the realities, we are not going to make them go away by putting blinders over our eyes.

[crazytown]

21. That's right

and in 1960, 1970, 1990 and 2010 the impact of change did not fall evenly over the nation but was localised in particular communities who suffered immensely.

[Blue_true]

24. My take?

Some towns and even small cities will have to vanish. Not every place can be saved, but some struggling areas now can be made to flourish. But what we need are leaders with a vision for the future, not ones stuck on a labor model of the past.

[crazytown]

26. Two quotes

Last edited Tue Apr 30, 2019, 07:21 PM - Edit history (1)

Mario Cuomo

The Republicans believe that the wagon train will not make it to the frontier unless some of the old, some of the young, some of the weak are left behind by the side of the trail. "The strong" -- "The strong," they tell us, "will inherit the land."

We Democrats believe in something else. We democrats believe that we can make it all the way with the whole family intact, and we have more than once.

Pete Buttigieg

We need to make sure ... as a party that we don't come to be viewed as the defenders of a system that is letting people down. And we wouldn't be here if the economic and political system hadn't failed people. ...

The system needs to be changed profoundly. I guess that's my point. We can't just nibble around the edges and expect people to be happy with us. Now, I've got a slightly different account than my competitors do about how best to do it, but the fundamental lesson is that our economic and political system has been letting people down I would say for my entire lifetime.

[Blue_true]

47. I was not talking about leaving anyone behind.

But there will be cases when small towns will vanish as people get moved to better situations, that move could be a few miles of many miles, but the government should help. But having said that, if a slackjawed dude wants to live in the wilderness and don't like living around city folk, what can we do about that, what should we do about that? There are rural people that hate progress, should we force them to move to a better life, or should we just provide them decent benefits and leave them in their messed up world?

[crazytown]

51. Have you ever visited one of those small dying towns?

Even if you know nothing about their history, or anything about the people, there are things that can make you tear up. A town that’s been around for 100 years, survived the Great Depression, WWII, the struggle for civil rights, put in the PCs in the 80s then the cell phone towers and is now a museum.

[Blue_true]

57. So we should bring back every place that was around for 100 years.

The town that my Mom was born in vanished. It had been around for close to 130 years, but it outlived it's usefulness as places down the road grew and sucked out people. That happens, my Mom's birthplace had a history, but times moved on.

[crazytown]

58. Hey. I didn't say that.

I was just conveying to you what it can be like walking around one of those places. Some towns die and death is usually the saddest thing around for us mortals. I’m not making a policy prescription here, only sharing observations.

[George II]

10. I don't think there's any argument that there is a sharp contrast between the two.

"I think what we need to do with all of the candidates, have a issue-oriented campaign, not personal attacks."

[crazytown]

13. Those are the same two faced assurances that were given in 2016.

Make a pronouncement then, then let your surrogates go feral. By their deeds you shall know them.

[George II]

14. That's what I was implying, "I don't need to make personal attacks, that's what I hired....

all those staffers for."

[AlexSFCA]

12. both NAFTA and TPP are good for US economy

they are not equally good for each job category but it’s a net positive for US middle class. TPP, in particular, address copyrights in China and other regions that could bring billions to the US economy. China is now taking leadership over trade in that region and its economic pace will dramatically accelerate. They are the net winner not us by withdrawing from TPP. Sanders views of economy are incredibly simplistic. I don’t think he fully understand stock market and how it needs to be improved.

[crazytown]

15. The TPP had as much to do with countering China's trade offensive,

Last edited Tue Apr 30, 2019, 12:05 AM - Edit history (1)

Chinas push has no protections for workers rights, the environment or intellectual property. Since Trump was elected China has been running riot, sucking in all and sundry to the ‘Belt and Road’ initiative. Workers rights, environment protections, intellectual property all MIA.

[Blue_true]

23. The crane falling in Seattle is a good example.

If that had been a Chinese city, the crane would have been removed the day that it fell and another would be brought in the next day. Here job sites get shut down and detailed investigations done.

[Blue_true]

22. He also does not understand the impact of robots on jobs.

Burying our heads in the sand will only lead to us being shutout and weakened worldwide. Trump's tariffs have caused production to leave and it will never be coming back. The argument Bernie is presenting seems to be that we can insist that the world allow us to live at high levels while they get the scraps. Things don't happen that way, we have to innovate our way to a new future, Bernie only remotely touches on that when the cost of college is discussed, but Harris, Insley, Warren, Buttigieg talk about the cost of college and how to innovate our way to the coming future.

[crazytown]

30. Buttigieg (again)

“If you look from 2000 to 2010, for every job that was lost to trade, there were six jobs lost because of automation,” he stated. “The thing we need to realize about automation is it’s all types of industries.”

“The bottom line is our communities have to be figuring out ways to prepare for it now, rather than deal with it after the fact,” he stated. “Right now, we’ve got a lot of jobs in the country and the biggest issue is finding workers who are prepared to take those jobs, but some of the jobs that we’re asking workers to train for may not even be there five years of seven years from now.”

[Blue_true]

43. I dare you. I dare you!!!!!

Post the the words of a politician that has his eyes open and is looking ahead. I dare you. Patriot, if dueling was still allowed, one of us would be in trouble!!

[Demsrule86]

46. And this is why Mayor Pete is not the guy to take the rustbelt...the jobs lost

were sent to Mexico and other low wage countries...they are still made with labor-just not American labor. For example the Cruze (Lordstown Ohio) is now made exclusively in Mexico. And the new GM truck will be too...the Midwest doesn't want to hear the automation BS...jobs are still going overseas in huge numbers and it must stop. Nest he will suggest 'retraining'. That is a curse in these parts.

I went to my credit union website and learned that Janesville GM...former plant is selling bricks from the now defunct plant...it makes me weep...this needs to stop.

[crazytown]

48. Disagree

The challenge is to have businesses make new investments in the United States, but whenever a car maker, steel maker, aerospace constructor invests in new plant, wherever it is, that plant will be more highly automated and require less jobs on the ground.

[Demsrule86]

50. That has nothing to do with the current job losses. And you can disagree all you want...I live in

Ohio and I have seen presses from Delphi shipped to Mexico, the Cruze is made in Mexico now instead of Lordstown. I don't think Mayor Pete realize how condescending his words appear to people like me. And there is a big plant in Indiana right now too go figure. that won't play well there. Every plant hubs was in closed and not due to automation either...cheap wages and jobs shipped overseas.

[BlueFlorida]

29. Sanders is so far out there that it is easy to draw contrasts

[JonLP24]

31. Like one voted for the Iraq war the other didn't

One got a resolution passed through both houses to end US involvement in the war in Yemen and the other is a private citizen. It is easy to draw contrasts.

[ucrdem]

32. Bernie voted to fund the Iraq war on the same day he voted against the IWR:

While it's true he voted against the Iraq War, he also voted in favor of authorizing funds for that war and the one in Afghanistan.

http://www.alternet.org/election-2016/bernie-sanders-troubling-history-supporting-us-military-violence-abroad

[JonLP24]

34. If Bush is going to send them anyways

Might as well send them with money but I also strongly disagree with Bernie Sanders support for the bombing of Yugoslavia. It is why Russian citizens have a negative perception of the United States after the reset at the end of the Cold War.

[JI7]

33. Biden also voted for Gun control while Sanders voted against it

[JonLP24]

36. I agree his record is mixed but he has been stronger in recent years.

Vermont is one of three states (last I checked which was a few years ago) along with Wyoming & Arizona that have the least strict gun laws & Vermont doesn't have have a lot of gun violence. I don't think Wyoming does either but Arizona probably does. I live here and want gun control though doesn't seem to stop criminals for one thing. Mass shootings are a big problem but so is someone with a handgun.

I think Sanders would represent the whole United States on this issue rather than Vermont.

[BlueFlorida]

39. bwahahahahahahahahahaha

If Sanders is so principled and authentic, why make excuses? Either he is for gun control or he is pandering to his electorate - which one is it?

[JonLP24]

40. In recent years he co sponsored strong gun control legislation

He would sign such laws as President.

[BlueFlorida]

41. No worries

He will never be president

[ucrdem]

35. "I like Joe Biden. Joe is a friend of mine" . . .

Allow me to finish the thought: Senator Sanders, you're no Joe Biden.

[crazytown]

38. !

[BlueFlorida]

42. rofl

[sheshe2]

55. Priceless!

[dalton99a]

37. Bernie can do whatever, but whatever you do is always wrong

'cause there can only be one person who is right and it ain't you

[Demsrule86]

45. Sanders looks kind of desperate with this...saw the video...just wow.

That is OK...it won't work. I suppose he is feeling a bit worried what with all those great Biden polls especially the one in New Hampshire.

[Honeycombe8]

49. An issue-oriented campaign sounds good. And other Presidential skills....

like leadership in and out of the country, all the skills and experience that a President needs or will have to learn.

For me...it's who can beat the bum. That's what it boils down to.

[NurseJackie]

52. Biden is a loyal, lifelong, and stalwart DEMOCRAT who supports the DEMOCRATIC PARTY!

CNN: Bernie Sanders draws sharp contrasts between himself and Joe Biden

Biden is a loyal, lifelong, and stalwart DEMOCRAT who supports the DEMOCRATIC PARTY! That's the most obvious distinction and contrast that I can see.

[Sneederbunk]

56. +100

[NurseJackie]

54. So I guess this means that Susan Sarandon won't be supporting Biden?

I voted against the war in Iraq; he voted for it.

So I guess this means that Susan Sarandon won't be supporting Biden?


(Where's your revolution, Susan?)

[Gothmog]

59. From Harry Enten

Link to tweet