Democratic caucuses and primaries

angrysoba said:
I notice a few headlines are trying to play up the “jokingly”, and explain that it’s a John Wayne quote. That’s Biden! Always at the cutting edge of popular culture. That’s what makes him the most electable candidate.
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I've heard that claim, but can't seem to find any reference to Wayne ever actually saying that. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to make sense. "Dogface" was a term frequently used to describe WW2 infantry. But "pony soldier" refers to US cavalry, particularly post Civil War. It seems to be mixing terminology in a way that wouldn't actually make sense for an actual John Wayne movie, unless you're mixing together multiple John Wayne movies.
 
Ziggurat said:
I've heard that claim, but can't seem to find any reference to Wayne ever actually saying that. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to make sense. "Dogface" was a term frequently used to describe WW2 infantry. But "pony soldier" refers to US cavalry, particularly post Civil War. It seems to be mixing terminology in a way that wouldn't actually make sense for an actual John Wayne movie, unless you're mixing together multiple John Wayne movies.
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Supposedly it's a quote from a John Wayne movie, but the character who said it was played by someone else. An Indian chief called Wayne's character that. But even that, it seems hard to pin down an exact source for the quote:

https://slate.com/culture/2020/02/joe-biden-dog-faced-pony-soldier-john-wayne-tyrone-power.html

Later, Biden’s spokespeople said the line was taken from a scene in a John Wayne movie in which a Native American chief refers to Wayne as a “lying, dog-faced pony soldier.” Biden has used the phrase, and attributed it to a John Wayne movie, in the past; at a 2018 campaign event for Heidi Heitkamp, Biden said the following about Heitkamp’s opponent Kevin Cramer:

As my brother who loves to use lines from movies, from John Wayne movies, there’s a line in a movie, a John Wayne movie where an Indian chief turns to John Wayne and says, “This is a lying, dog-faced pony soldier.”
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But they couldn't find a movie that exactly matches that description.
By far, the most common question raised by Biden’s use of the phrase in New Hampshire has been, “What the hell is Joe Biden thinking calling a young woman ‘dog-faced’?” But running a close second is “Is there really a movie in which someone calls John Wayne a ‘lying, dog-faced pony soldier’?” The answer is a resounding “Maybe”: Wayne appeared in 180 movies over 50 years, and who knows what they called him in all of them? But it seems at least as likely that Biden is thinking of a different film: Pony Soldier, a 1952 western from director Joseph M. Newman starring Tyrone Power as a member of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. “Pony Soldier,” in the context of the film, is a Native American nickname for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and although no one calls Power a “lying, dog-faced pony soldier,” a chief does say, “The pony soldier speaks with a tongue of the snake that rattles,” which isn’t far off:

Is that the scene—filtered through Joe Biden’s memory of his brother’s memory of an old Western—that inspired Joe Biden to call a young woman at one of his events a “lying, dog-faced pony soldier” nearly 70 years later? We may never know, but one thing is certain: For Democrats who want to nominate a presidential candidate with a vast library of half-remembered old Westerns floating around in their brains, there’s only one choice.
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Puppycow said:
Supposedly it's a quote from a John Wayne movie, but the character who said it was played by someone else. An Indian chief called Wayne's character that. But even that, it seems hard to pin down an exact source for the quote:

https://slate.com/culture/2020/02/joe-biden-dog-faced-pony-soldier-john-wayne-tyrone-power.html

But they couldn't find a movie that exactly matches that description.
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'He also told Mayor Pete to 'Stay gold Ponyboy', but the former mayor didn't get the reference because that movie came out when Buttigieg wasn't yet a year old.'
 
This is why I love our media.

When a candidate says, "I will cut your taxes and we'll shrink the national debt," it's boring and not worth checking up on. However, if someone says "lying dog-faced pony soldier", but says he was quoting John Wayne, now THAT is worth investigating!


Pssst. His real name was Marion. So there!


When I saw the headline, I assumed that Biden had simply lost it. He had gone wacko. Then I actually watched the clip, and it seemed more like he was making some sort of joke that only he understood. It was still a little weird, and it fit with some of his other quirks, but it isn't a scandal.

However, I do think he's done. I watched the rest of the speech, and it was, indeed, a bit weird. It was kind of rambling. It was unfocused. And he seems a bit out of it in general. "Lying dog-faced pony soldier" wasn't some horrible, nasty, attack on the woman who asked the question, but it was an obscure reference pulled out of thin air, and showed a lack of connection with the actual moment. I think his campaign is over. Oh, it might continue officially, perhaps for months, but I think his chances of being elected are negligible. Sorry, Joe. You're too old. Don't feel bad. Most people never make it to Vice President, but you aren't going any farther.
 
Meadmaker said:
"Lying dog-faced pony soldier" wasn't some horrible, nasty, attack on the woman who asked the question, but it was an obscure reference pulled out of thin air, and showed a lack of connection with the actual moment.
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That’s a bunch of malarkey. Biden is the bees’ knees.
 
d4m10n said:
Anyone have any interesting predictions about NH? I'm thinking Sanders cleans up.
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Sanders will win more NH delegates than any other candidate.

A majority of NH voters will vote for candidates that are not Sanders.
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
It looks like the Iowa numbers will never be correct, but at least this time we will know they aren't correct.



Linky.

But the Iowa Dems are going to be releasing these as the "correct results" on Monday.
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Caucus are run by humans. Humans often suck at following directions and doing math.

With 1,700 precinct caucuses I would expect to find a fair number of mistakes and inconsistencies. Some of these would result in the delegate allocation to the county convention being off but probably not by more than one. The cumulative effect of all the errors is unlikely to have shifted the results at the national delegate level.
 
Tsukasa Buddha said:
It looks like the Iowa numbers will never be correct, but at least this time we will know they aren't correct.



Linky.

But the Iowa Dems are going to be releasing these as the "correct results" on Monday.
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Noooooooooooooooooooo!!!

Seriously, let's move on. Or talk about it for the next ten days. Who cares?
 
Meadmaker said:
This is why I love our media.

When a candidate says, "I will cut your taxes and we'll shrink the national debt," it's boring and not worth checking up on. However, if someone says "lying dog-faced pony soldier", but says he was quoting John Wayne, now THAT is worth investigating!


Pssst. His real name was Marion. So there!


When I saw the headline, I assumed that Biden had simply lost it. He had gone wacko. Then I actually watched the clip, and it seemed more like he was making some sort of joke that only he understood. It was still a little weird, and it fit with some of his other quirks, but it isn't a scandal.

However, I do think he's done. I watched the rest of the speech, and it was, indeed, a bit weird. It was kind of rambling. It was unfocused. And he seems a bit out of it in general. "Lying dog-faced pony soldier" wasn't some horrible, nasty, attack on the woman who asked the question, but it was an obscure reference pulled out of thin air, and showed a lack of connection with the actual moment. I think his campaign is over. Oh, it might continue officially, perhaps for months, but I think his chances of being elected are negligible. Sorry, Joe. You're too old. Don't feel bad. Most people never make it to Vice President, but you aren't going any farther.
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I think when you need a campaign spokesman to try to translate your words into contemporary English, and still no one can agree what you meant, you are out of touch.

As eminently electable as people keep saying Biden is, he has some serious communication issues when his deep cut references to the 1950s are expected to be understood by People in their twenties.
 
Meadmaker said:
This is why I love our media.

When a candidate says, "I will cut your taxes and we'll shrink the national debt," it's boring and not worth checking up on. However, if someone says "lying dog-faced pony soldier", but says he was quoting John Wayne, now THAT is worth investigating!


Pssst. His real name was Marion. So there!


When I saw the headline, I assumed that Biden had simply lost it. He had gone wacko. Then I actually watched the clip, and it seemed more like he was making some sort of joke that only he understood. It was still a little weird, and it fit with some of his other quirks, but it isn't a scandal.

However, I do think he's done. I watched the rest of the speech, and it was, indeed, a bit weird. It was kind of rambling. It was unfocused. And he seems a bit out of it in general. "Lying dog-faced pony soldier" wasn't some horrible, nasty, attack on the woman who asked the question, but it was an obscure reference pulled out of thin air, and showed a lack of connection with the actual moment. I think his campaign is over. Oh, it might continue officially, perhaps for months, but I think his chances of being elected are negligible. Sorry, Joe. You're too old. Don't feel bad. Most people never make it to Vice President, but you aren't going any farther.
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I don't know if he's done. But it seems like he's going through the motions. There doesn't seem to be the energy and passion required.
 
Kestrel said:
Sanders will win more NH delegates than any other candidate.

A majority of NH voters will vote for candidates that are not Sanders.
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That sounds about right to me, based on recent polling. Looks like the moderate left-of-center vote is being split amongst at least three candidates.

If Biden underperforms again, he won't have the media frenzy around caucus process to bail him out this time around.

If Buttigieg overperforms again, he may surge enough nationwide to make Nevada more interesting.
 
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Tsukasa Buddha said:
It looks like the Iowa numbers will never be correct, but at least this time we will know they aren't correct.



Linky.

But the Iowa Dems are going to be releasing these as the "correct results" on Monday.
Click to expand...

Another good reason to ditch caucuses. This failure has nothing to do with a crappy app.

The underlying difficulty of a caucus is that it requires a large number of volunteers to run the various precincts and assumes that these all of these people will understand the rules, administer them correctly, and make accurate counts and calculations.
 
SuburbanTurkey said:
Another good reason to ditch caucuses. This failure has nothing to do with a crappy app.

The underlying difficulty of a caucus is that it requires a large number of volunteers to run the various precincts and assumes that these all of these people will understand the rules, administer them correctly, and make accurate counts and calculations.
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It really doesn't. I've been involved in holding an running caucuses in Washington State for 20 years. They are in fact easy to run. One can argue that they aren't as democratic as primaries. But the worst argument against them is that they are somehow too difficult.
 
acbytesla said:
One can argue that they aren't as democratic as primaries.
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Not really, because in order to do so, you have to come up with a clear definition of "democratic," and that just isn't possible.

Martin Gardner used to write a lot about this. In a multi-person run off, there is no inherently "correct" way to select the winner
 
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