I almost never agree with First Read’s take on anything, but they’ve basically stolen my piece, so I have no choice but to agree with them on this one:
“In today’s highly polarized political world, this is how you win elections — by motivating your base and by recognizing there are few swing voters left. But it also makes governing harder, especially when the parties are trading electoral victories every two years (with Democrats benefitting from presidential turnouts, and with Republicans benefitting from midterm turnouts). When you have data-driven candidates appealing to win 51% of voters, it means that a president’s job-approval rating is never going to get much higher than that, and it means that bipartisan policy goals (like the TPP free-trade agreement) are the exception rather than the rule.”
“Bottom line: Campaigns don’t engage in persuasion anymore. They simply look for unmotivated like-minded potential voters and find an issue to motivate them. And if someone wins office by not having to persuade a voter who actually swings between the two parties, there isn’t any motivation for said elected official to compromise. This cycle of polarization will continue until someone wins a massive election based on a different premise.”
Hey, maybe they came up with it on their own.
You never know.
Well, it’s good to see that you’re pairing up your latent racism with some delusional narcissism this morning.
Yep, the press bemoaning the inability for No Labels to reign across the land and slick bipartisan cooperation to win out and execute a corporate agenda is clearly something for all of us to partake in. And they never had this thought in their head before they read your little blog.
Hillary Clinton does not represent historical white people. Get this through your head. She is not trusted. She is not particularly popular. She will not be a grand unifier, or some trailblazer who will convince white racists that the Black Party is non-threatening. Democrats are threatening. They replace white people in power, or male people in power, with nonwhites and women. They will keep hiring that way and work for more parity and equity. White racists will keep noticing. This will not be smoothed over. This will not be fixed by Hillary Clinton.
Democratic racists need to understand that advancing minority interests is not feel-goodery. It’s not something white people do for nonwhites. Quite often now, nonwhites can do it for themselves. They are the Democratic voting base. Not academics, not white unionists, not big city lawyers or the bourgeoisie.
Hillary Clinton can’t afford to bitchslap anyone in the Democratic voting base, she has no where to go otherwise. Her administration will be as distanced from white racists as the current one. No daylight, no change in comportment, constituency or message.
And I’m sure certain people will be upset that I’m firing away at Booman like this, but I find the idea of tearing down Hillary for her inability to appeal to confederate whites not just pernicious but downright immoral.
I expect this from the NYT and Fournier and Stan Greenberg, etc. but that is not company anyone should want to find themselves in.
Are we even reading the same article? Because when I read it his points don’t seem to align with any of the assertions you are making. Or maybe I’m just misinterpreting your point. I’ve read it a few times and I am just not connecting the same dots.
Oh, his point is perfectly clear.
If Hillary can’t expand the electorate by winning racist whites (who have made their 21st century opinion on the Democratic Party clear), then the voters should dump her for a True Progressive (to be named later).
He’s saying that her only use is in winning racist voters in Arkansas and Missouri. Unlike racist media members who want to throttle nonwhite political agency and go back to the good ol’ days, I’ll be charitable and say Booman is just being a stone cold ratfucker.
Okay.
You’d think a person could be understood better after 10 years of work.
No, like I said, you made yourself perfectly clear.
If she’s such pure evil, you need to up your game. Enjoy the Sanders candidacy. I’m sure that canard of “class, not race” will prove true one of these days…
Obviously, you care about different things than I do, and for different reasons.
I doubt you have really any idea why I’m arguing what I’m arguing.
I’d say that this is my fault, except that I have explained it all quite well over time.
You would be completely miserable in a universe where Hillary Clinton won a big electoral mandate with both houses and went on to be a successful president signing acres of pent up legislation. Just admit it. This has nothing to do with principles or what’s best for the party. You can’t stand on that leg after “there’s no reason for progressives to support her no matter how much she caters to us to get us to the polls.”
1001 people rushed to comment on that ratfucking NYT piece, and your fixation is the one universally shared by racists and conservatives. Whether they be Joan Walsh or David Frum or the National Review or anybody who’s complained the last eight years that things were getting too black around here. That’s the company you’re keeping on this one, that’s apparently how bad you want to see Hillary fail. As opposed to the party pros who just want to win and win easy, because you know, those are generally good goals to have instead. You know darn well that Obama’s path to office was never narrow or something to be discouraged and yet you’re trying to gin up dissatisfaction anyway. If she can’t win 60% of the country, she’s a failure and we should all vote for Lincoln Chaffee or Captain Kangaroo or whoever.
People are just waiting for her to open up some kind of schism with the president or his most diehard supporters so it wrecks her, and boo hoo, she’s not falling for it. Trying to bait her into running as a unity candidate for the bubbas and sabotage everything. She’s running for Obama’s third term, and everyone is just going to have to readjust.
I believe part of Boo’s argument is that she’s potentially reducing an already small chance of winning back both Houses — I think the Senate’s around 80% sure, but the HoR is maybe a tenth of that — by a focus on just the Obama states from ’08 and ’12, HRC may be reducing the chance of doing anything about GOP domination of Congress.
Shorter — think ‘coattails’.
That’s your failure, right there.
I would be very happy with that scenario. Super happy.
That would be pretty much the culmination of all I’ve worked for. A Democratic landslide in a presidential election is what I want, one that will transform this country every bit as much as ’72 would have without Watergate.
The race issue has been with us since the beginning of our country but after the civil rights movement things were toned down a bit. It was still there but at least a dog whistle was required in polite society. That all changed with a black family in the White House allowing race to become center stage as a wedge issue. Democrats are to blame for putting “those people” in office. Hell will freeze over before any minds will ever change. Painting the Democrats as the party of “those people” is perfect because it keeps the focus on race, the wedge issue du jour.
Fox News didn’t take long to call out Hillary’s call for automatic voter registration as race baiting to shore up her base of the “those people”. Is the call for automatic voter registration real or shameless race baiting? Since Hillary gives no specifics, how would this work? How could an automated registration system find the eligible voters and which locally controlled district should they be registered? Social Security could say if someone is here legally to work but not if someone is eligible to vote or establish a current address besides Social Security was never intended to be a national ID card. We could try as Oregon to use the driver license but the driver license is issued to a lot of people not eligible to vote and what about the many urban people who don’t drive? Hillary goes on to call out Republicans by name for supporting voter ID claiming its voter suppression. I’m glad she did that but it has nothing to do with her proposal for automatic voter registration. Would nationwide early voting be an unfunded federal mandate for local controlled elections or just the federal portion? Hillary the corporatist is not going to light the fire of progressive revolution with these proposals.
The problem is uncontrolled capitalism is destroying the middle class. When people get pushed far enough they will revolt. When they do revolt race based politics will mean nothing. Bernie is like bringing the Occupy Movement into politics, out of streets and into the voting booth. You want “a Democratic landslide in a presidential election … that will transform this country every bit as much as ’72 would have without Watergate? ” This is it.
I’ll be blunt.
First Read and their ilk DON’T GIVE A PHUCK about governing.
This is absolute and utter pablum.
That is the difference between you and them, because YOU care about competent governing.
IF they cared about governing, they would be pointing out how the GOP hasn’t been interested in it.
They would point out that the GOP has been committing ECONOMIC TREASON against this country since January 20, 2009.
I’ll say again what I said down below.
You are talking about Hillary appealing to White Working Class voters who continue to vote against their own economic self-interest.
they do it over and over and over again, falling for whatever shiny object the GOP throws their way so that they can continue to cling to the Whiteness.
I’ll ask again…
HOw come the Black Working Class gets it?
The Latino Working Class…
The Asian Working Class…
The Native American Working Class….
But, the White working class continues to fall for any shiny object thrown their way.
I’ll give my example again….
For Hillary Clinton to do what you and now, First Read, want her to do..
She’d have to go into a place like Kentucky…
” Do you love your Kynect?”
When they scream yes…
She replies:
” Then you should love Obamacare….because without Obamacare…you could never have Kynect.”
THAT is the type of honesty that Clinton would have to bring to the table with these people.
Remember, Allison Grimes, tried the bullshyt, of being a Clinton Democrat, all the while not setting folks, who have among the top 3 State Obamacare Success Stories…..straight.
They wanna cling to the Whiteness….
And, I continue to say phuck ’em.
The last two paragraphs of your piece are why I read your work and don’t bother with First Read. Or as Digby coined, “Intellectual spinach”.
How a Democratic presidential candidate campaigns doesn’t matter in the slightest, because Republicans never, ever acknowledge the legitimacy of a Democratic president, and the mainstream press never calls out GOP intransigence as disloyalty to our system of governance.
OT:I don’t have any words.
Only one question.
would three BLACK 20somethings been awarded a MILITARY CONTRACT?
…………………
How These Stoner Kids Landed a $300 Million Pentagon Arms Contract
“Arms and the Dudes” exposes the sordid underbelly of the military’s weapons trade.
Mon Jun. 8, 2015 6:00 AM EDT
In early 2007, three stoner twentysomethings won a Defense Department contract to supply the Afghan military with $300 million worth of ammunition. “The dudes,” as they came to be known–a ninth-grade dropout, a masseur, and a low-level pot dealer, all with little or no experience but plenty of nerve–had begun bidding on Pentagon arms contracts and winning out over massive international conglomerates. The Afghan contract wasn’t their first, but it was by far their largest. They would have to source thousands of tons of mortar rounds, grenades, rockets, and 100 million rounds of AK-47 ammunition and deliver all of it to Kabul at a particularly fraught time for the Afghan war effort.
To fill the order, though, the dudes secretly repackaged millions of rounds of decades-old, surplus Chinese ammo–illegal under the contract terms–before shipping them to Afghanistan. It was all going fine until they got caught by Pentagon investigators and wound up with their mugshots spread across the front page of the New York Times.
Their story is detailed in Guy Lawson’s new book, Arms and the Dudes, a wildly entertaining saga with dual narratives. The first involves blackmail, criminals, hustlers, corrupt government officials, and three kids in way over their heads. The other, and for Lawson more important, side of the story, concerns how the Pentagon came to use private contractors like the dudes as proxies–and eventual fall guys–to secure weapons from gray market arms dealers, the only people who could supply what it needed.
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/05/b00k-arms-dudes-guy-lawson-pentagon-contracting
Again, this may the the right way to win, from the standpoints of craft and of efficiency; but the symbolism of it is unacceptable, because it would ratify the narrative of irreconcilability. We are irreconcilable, but it’s 100% their fault, and we must do everything we can to ensure that that is clear to history (which is the only remaining audience).
When ‘that one’ got elected, the wimpy appeal to conservative lames strategy was no longer effective. The dem party has the O brand now. It’s time to cut your losses and accept this reality. Hillary did. Now, if you want a majority you have to get rid of the consultants and the incompetents that run the the DNC and DCCC. It looks like Madame Secretary is taking that into her own hands. Like I said earlier, there’s no sense in getting stressed out over a campaign that doesn’t even get serious until the end of the year.
I think the President is in fact slowly persuading millions. He has allowed the GOP to get so far and so dogmatically to the right, that a lot of GOP-ish voters are flat out uncomfortable and contemplating HRC.
I’m so naive I even think he’s moving the dial at the local/state level.
I’m always struck by Perlstein’s observation that in 1964, the Dems were a behemoth with unquestioned hegemony. And then it wasn’t.
I’m getting convinced that the same is true of the GOP — they’re on the run at long last. I just hope that, when cornered and faced with their own destruction, they don’t reach for a war to bail themselves out. I’m still not sure Americans are up to resisting the call to arms…