When we correct her idiocy, is that mansplaining?

Then there’s this aspect of her campaign: Wu wants to hoard Massachusetts taxes as a bargaining tactic against conservative states that attempt to defund public health care initiatives. “Something that I do believe is that Massachusetts spends so much and gets so many more federal dollars taken from us than are invested here. When it comes to appropriations in Congress, I would like to see us work harder to keep more of that money here in Massachusetts,” she said, eliding her website’s stated platform of using tax money as a bargaining chip. “Because Massachusetts pays so much more into the federal government than we get back, we are in a powerful negotiating position. States that destroy cost-saving measures like the Affordable Care Act should expect to clean up their messes with their own tax dollars,” Wu’s platform reads. It’s an oddly menacing theory — punish people who receive federal money to strongarm their lawmakers — and one that misunderstands how budget negotiations and tax collection and distribution work. Legislators do not have the ability to make bespoke changes to federal spending allocations as part of their iterative negotiating tactics. State taxes are allocated in each state, and federal taxes are collected at the individual level and not controlled by individual legislators. That this is one of her three tentpole platforms is unsettling, and obvious ammo for critics who say Wu is unprepared to hold office.

I followed up with Wu to ask her to explain that platform again. She backtracked on the proposal significantly, noting that she had to find a message that would appeal to the 8th District’s traditionally socially conservative voters as well as its newer progressive inhabitants. “We’re rethinking how we talk about this issue,” she wrote me in an email. “What we’re going to do is turn this messaging into a kind of positive, rather than make the core message taking money from red states.”

Wu said that she still thinks Massachusetts deserves more federal money, but did not explain how exactly she would accomplish rearranging the federal budget.

Poorly considered tweeting and a lack of political experience certainly worked for Donald Trump, but Wu is trying to attract the opposite of Trump’s fan base, and the oddness of one of her flagship proposals coupled with a frequently quirky public persona is, I suspect, going to make her campaign more difficult.

Here was an unconventional candidate, focused on cybersecurity and online harassment, issues often overlooked and misunderstood by traditional politicians, announcing herself as ready and willing to bring an updated approach to the legislative process. Yet I was perturbed by the fact that she’d promote a three-pronged platform with one prong that fundamentally misunderstands the system it’s trying to reimagine. And the excuse of doing so to appeal to conservative constituents suggests ideological flexibility but not common sense — are conservative constituents so uninformed that they wouldn’t realize the plan won’t work?

I was discombobulated when I arrived in Boston, but even more so by the time Wu dropped me off at my hotel. This was partly because we could not find her car, and called an Uber to drive us around in the rain until Wu could remember where she parked it. She chatted amiably with the driver and I looked out at the rain and wished I was with someone who knew where they were going. That unmoored feeling extended beyond that incident.

“Because Massachusetts pays so much more into the federal government than we get back, we are in a powerful negotiating position. States that destroy cost-saving measures like the Affordable Care Act should expect to clean up their messes with their own tax dollars,”

How can a platform be a pole?

How can a platform be a pole?

This sounds like the rhetoric used by the loons arguing for a secession of California and other blue, usually coastal, states.

Except this time the secession talks are brought on by a perception of diluted political power at the federal level, and not slavery expanding into the new territories.

"Thieving Jew Bernie shouldn't downplay losing the Deep South, those are African-American voters!"
"Let's secede because Mississippi sucks"

I wonder the correlation between #Bluexit morons and thinking that the South seceded because of slavery expansion, not because Lincoln won on an abolitionist platform without carrying a single Southern state.