Broadly, anyone who wasn’t Clinton or Biden.
my personal opinion
1) Tulsi Gabbard would have dismantled the you vs me mentality as President (nuskool is a Republican cannabineer is a democrat but we are still at peace and it’s not a problem we think differently)
she is a strong leader and I appreciate her service experience. Although I’m not a Sanders fan, I respect her decision to resign as DNC vice chair in 2016 to support someone who wasn’t Clinton.
2) Andrew Yang has a lot of great ideas - some of the more extreme would be kept in check just by how things work in politics, but I liked his approach to reducing fossil fuels while embracing nuclear energy because it’s the only energy source that could actually replace coal/oil long term on a mass scale for the next 3 decades. His entrepreneur mentality and outsider stance is something I align with. He is also hyper intelligent and The War On Normal People is a great read
^those are the only two I would have voted for over Trump.
3) Cory Booker - likeable, palatable, and more of that you are not my enemy mentality I think we need. I like his work with Rand Paul
4) Gillibrand
Those are just my opinions.
booker and yang, possibly, after both have at least a decade more experience in politics...gabbard? not during this fucking eternity, maybe toward the end of the next eternity...she had a long history of not supporting reproductive rights before she "had an epiphany"...an epiphany that she wasn't going to get elected unless she changed her image.
her father is a Hawaii politician who was and is rabidly anti gay, buying time on a honolulu radio station to bash lgbt people from, and she supported him openly at the time.
Her state Democratic Party LGBT caucus, for instance, openly distrusts her, and
backed her Democratic primary opponent in 2016. When
questioned why the LGBT caucus, which had actually supported her three years earlier, had turned against her, the chairman cited two things. One was her less-than-stellar answers to a questionnaire the LGBT Caucus had sent. The other was a
2015 interview with Ozy, in which she confirmed that her personal views on gay marriage and abortion hadn’t changed, just her view on whether the government should enforce its vision of morality.
she says her experiences in Iraq and Kuwait was life changing for her....but only selectively, apparently
Gabbard’s almost singular focus on the damage these wars inflict domestically, and her comparative lack of focus on the carnage they wreak in the countries under attack, is troubling. It is nationalism in antiwar garb, reinforcing instead of undercutting the toxic rhetoric that treats foreigners as less deserving of dignity than Americans. (Gabbard’s brand of anti-interventionism has even received praise from former KKK grand wizard David Duke, who called for her to be named
secretary of state.)
And it still produces its fair share of bloodshed. Like campaign-era Trump, Gabbard may be against miring the United States in blunderous, short-sighted conflicts that backfire, but she’s more than willing to use America’s military might to go after suspected terrorists around the world (and inevitably kill and maim civilians in the process). In the same Truthout interview, responding to a question about drones, Gabbard said that “there is a place for the use of this technology, as well as smaller, quick-strike special force teams versus tens, if not hundreds of thousands of soldiers occupying space within a country.”
Gabbard would continue the Obama administration’s foreign policy, which itself was a continuation (and in some ways ramping up) of George W. Bush’s foreign policy. She would keep up the drone bombing of seven Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa — perhaps even expand it — while also relying more on special operations forces, which are already raiding, assassinating, and gathering intelligence in
70 percent of the world’s countries.
Drones killed hundreds of civilians over Obama’s eight years, while special operations forces like SEAL Team 6 — which Gabbard specifically name-checked in her positive allusion to the bin Laden raid — are known for their
fair share of brutality. It was “quick-strike special forces” conducting a “strategic precise operation,” to use Gabbard’s term, that a little less than four months ago
killed thirty civilians in a botched raid in Yemen.
Given her support for drones and special ops strikes, it’s not surprising to find that Gabbard never mentions US foreign policy as a catalyst for anti-American sentiment in regions like the Middle East, despite
copious evidence to the contrary.
So what is the cause of terrorism, according to Gabbard? Islam, of course.
Before she became a progressive darling for endorsing Sanders, Gabbard became a conservative darling for relentlessly hawking the idea — later popularized by Trump — that Obama’s foreign policy was failing because he refused to use the term “Islamic extremism,” or some variation of it.
From 2014 onward, Gabbard appeared regularly on Fox News to lambast the Obama administration for avoiding the phrase. In
one interview, she told the host that “the vast majority of terrorist attacks conducted around the world for over the last decade have been conducted by groups who are fueled by this radical Islamic ideology,” a statement that may be
technically true due to the violence and instability plaguing Middle Eastern countries, but is wildly misleading considering that non-Muslims make up the vast, vast majority of terrorist perpetrators in both
Europe and the
United States.
