I appreciate that. That's definitely one Trump supporting (and fundraising) billionaire (and his wife), who donated their legal max ($5600 each) to her, but we don't have the benefit of knowing exactly why. My best guess would be this, since Gabbard is one of the more prominent advocates of federal mar1juana legalization and Peltz' contributions seem to be business focused more than ideological or partisan, but he wouldn't respond to Forbes when they asked him. There's not much else to find about it other than links to and scrapes of the Forbes piece. but the piece you attribute makes it difficult to hang guilt by association on her or presume this makes her a secret Republican operative considering: The Forbes piece only names one other contributor, "her other billionaire donor," and that's Jack Dorsey, which is also a surprise and not one of my favorite people, but Dorsey's neither Republican or a Trump supporter -- the other candidate he supported was Yang.
The “DNC”??.... dude the “voters” are currently supporting her at a whopping rate of about 1%. Some states 2% if she’s lucky. Be honest ... you want her to declare independent because you think she’d pull voters from the Dems. However at this point what you don’t realize is that at this point she’s hugged Trump so hard she’d just be pulling votes from him if she declared independent and actually made it on the ballot in many states. Go for it Tulsi... Vote “present” while you are at it.
Really surprised to see Gabbard endorse Biden at this point. It seems as though her strategy all along was to see if she could repeat what Trump did by running against your party to gather a coalition of non-voters/trump voters, but in the end was still party values aligned. It's pretty clear that with Democratic voters, you really don't have this secret coalition that a Republican like Trump could get that Democrats cannot because everyone is already on-board with the policy platform. I think in 2016, Bernie was the Trump of 2016, and already pulled in those voters that Tulsi thought she could get in 2019. Glad to see it though, and hope there's even a small amount of independents that liked her because she presented herself as an outsider who take note that Biden is the responsible choice in November.
I haven't been fully convinced Gabbard was an extremist candidate. I think she was a bit naive about politics in general. This seems more of a pragmatic approach, which I always felt she was in the first place. With the current state of affairs, I believe she realizes its more important to fall in line with the inevitable than to continue to buck the system in protest.
Honestly, at this point she should try to position herself as a breed of "new" republican. I've thought all along that the Trump era was nothing more than a last reflex reaction to the fact that a black man was in the White House, it gave them something to be passionate about. The party as is has been dying for 30 years, only surviving due to the electoral collage, and they are gonna firmly lose control of that too in the next decade or so. Eventually they will have to come to grips with that and move more towards the center with the entire spectrum of US demographics slowly moving left. She will never win anything as a democrat, but she could do some damage as a republican. I think the entire party is gonna be living with the stigma of Trump for a while, something she wouldn't really have, nor did she completely throw the cult leader under the bus. There are a ton of moderates like myself to be won over, but thanks to what I've seen over the last 4 years it will be a cold day in hell before I vote Republican in anything. That entire party needs to be remade.
She is positioning for her future. Credit for sticking with the voters. Interesting she called his son a friend. She would make a great VP. I would laugh if they choose her and he sniffs her hair or something. And then we get to watch him call her sweetie and then watch the DNC flip and act like she isn't a Russian asset after spending months pushing that. This is the reality I want to watch take place because it's just too perfect. However I imagine Biden will choose someone worse like Harris who he'll try to get to play with his leg hair or something. Oh and she can help remind him it's pill time.
I don't get the misinformation about Gabbard's policy positions, but that's the power of narrative. Gabbard's criticism of the internal politics of the Democratic Party or US foreign policy hardly makes her the ideological heir to Pat Buchanan any more than Sanders' advocacy for an expanded welfare state makes him Fidel Castro. She's closer to Sanders than any other candidate. It's not a coincidence she resigned as vice chair of the DNC in 2016 in order to endorse him. By comparison, that's pretty close to Germany's circa 2017 Die Linke. Biden, O'rourke, Buttigieg, and Klobuchar are a lot closer to Trump in actual policy than Tulsi Gabbard is. If voters actually voted based on candidate's positions, Sanders and Gabbard supporters would be pivoting to Howie Hawkins, not to Trump or Biden. But hey, by the same metric, Marriane Williamson is probably more of an actual libertarian than LP candidate Arvin Vohra, and Elizabeth Warren has a better claim to being a "centrist" than any other major candidate that participated in the race. The Political Compass isn't perfect. I think its main weakness is that it doesn't account for single issue voters properly which are harder by its methodology to chart, but it's a better standard (by both media and political scientists) for comparing political ideologies than anything else in common use. If you are new to it you might be challenged by some cognitive dissonance (I admit I was years ago) but I recommend taking the test and referring to the FAQ if you're triggered by it or the results.
Everybody who said she was a Russian bot, who'd flip republican and work at fox news can lick the balls and suck the dick. Dumbasses.
"Tulsi Gabbard Says the DNC Didn't Even Ask Her To Speak": https://reason.com/2020/08/20/tulsi-gabbard-says-the-dnc-didnt-even-ask-her-to-speak/ Tulsi Gabbard Says the DNC Didn't Even Ask Her To Speak "I was not invited to participate in any way." ROBBY SOAVE | 8.20.2020 9:52 PM (Sam Wolfe/REUTERS/Newscom) Rep. Tulsi Gabbard (D–Hawaii) won two pledged delegates during the 2020 Democratic presidential primaries and stayed in the race longer than Sen. Kamala Harris (D–Calif.), Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D–Mass.), former South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and Sen. Amy Klobuchar (D–Minn.). By centering her campaign on a powerful criticism of interventionist foreign policy—a critique that appealed to libertarians, the left, and even many Trump voters—Gabbard was virtually the only presidential aspirant to court people outside the Democratic Party's current base. But don't expect to hear from her during the last night of the Democratic National Convention: According to Gabbard, the DNC did not even ask her to participate in its programming. As The Week's Matthew Walther noted, Gabbard was the only candidate to be denied a speaking slot despite winning delegates, which is quite the slight. "It is strange to think that only four years ago Gabbard was still considered a rising star in the Democratic Party," wrote Walther. "At the DNC in 2016, it was Gabbard who was chosen to nominate Sen. Bernie Sanders as the official second-place finisher in the delegate tally, the role taken on Tuesday night by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. These days Gabbard is a pariah in her party." Gabbard is not seeking reelection to her House seat. That's a shame. Independent thinking is likely to be in short supply when the 117th Congress is seated.
