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RE: My Jeremy Corbyn T-shirt arrived just in time.
Best of luck to you guys out there. Nice to see an actual proper Labor candidate, rather than neoliberal New Labor. Hopefully New Deal Democrats will take things back from New Democrats over here in 2020 too.
literally the first worthy (mainstream) party leader in my lifetime, and I'm 43.
Democrats have only nominated one worthy party leader in my lifetime, and he lost :-/. Michael Dukakis in '88 was the last nominee before the party became the friendlier face of Ayn Rand.
I don't know so much about American politics but I do kind of remember him, he lost to Bush1, wasn't it because of a last minute scandal?
He wasn't amazing, he was more conservative than most of his predecessors, but far, far less so than Clinton and Gore. But he came very close to winning, was leading the polls for a while, and still maintains the lowest unfavorability rating in decades, which is worth noting, because the US has elected nothing but right wingers since '68 (Well, and Carter, but he only won because of the Nixon scandal and lost his reelection)
There were two scandals that sunk him, both crime policy related. The first was a criminal from his home state was out on a furlough program and went on a crime spree, and they ran relentless ads based on it. Dukakis didn't sign the furlough program, but it was his home state and he didn't oppose it, so it hurt him. The US crime rate was the record high of all time, and it made him look soft on crime when Americans wanted to militarize the police.
The second was that he showed up to the second debate sick with the flu and badly messed up a few questions. An interviewer asked him a pretty nasty question about a theoretical rape and murder of his wife, and his answer of still opposing capital punishment was seen as academic and cold and people thought it made him look soulless. And again, weak on crime.
This may be the moment he lost the election:
aah yes that's it, I saw that interview on a documentary
Honestly he was right though, though his delivery could have been better. The death penalty isn't shown to deter crime, it was a pretty nasty question, and ultimately, the rabid police militarization that took place in the next two decades was a disaster and vindicated a lot of his positions. We've made a lot of big mistakes in the past couple decades and shot down a lot of the people trying to right us.