Truer words were never spoken:
A top Republican National Committee staffer fired back Tuesday at presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, saying it’s not the committee’s fault that Trump’s campaign staffers and his children don’t understand the rules.
Sean Spicer, an RNC spokesman, said on CNN the delegate allocation rules in Colorado and every other state were filed with the national committee back in October and made available to every GOP campaign.
“If you’re a campaign and you don’t understand the process that’s going on, then that’s bad on the staff. That’s bad on the campaign,” he said. “Running for office entails putting together a campaign that understands the process. There’s nothing rigged.”
Spicer continued: “I understand that people sometimes don’t like the process or may not understand it, but that doesn’t mean it’s not fair and open and transparent.”
Apparently, a couple of Trump’s children couldn’t even understand how to register themselves to vote in the New York primary.
Look, I understand the sentiment that the system is rotten and the game is rigged. I do. But I don’t take people seriously who seek power but have no real idea how power works. If you want to be the nominee of the Republican or the Democratic Party, you need to figure out how that can be done. And, if you’re an outsider who is running with a message that the gatekeepers are all a bunch of losers and morons, or that they’re all corrupted by money, then you’ll need a plan for winning the people you’ve insulted over to your side.
Let me remind you to take a look at the list of Republicans that Donald Trump has insulted just on Twitter. I won’t deny that Trump’s insult-dog comedy routine contributed to his electoral successes, but it’s biting him in the ass now that he’s losing delegates who should rightfully be in his corner.
Bernie Sanders ought to have understood that he needed to work very hard on introducing himself to southern black voters, but that’s only half of his problem. The other half is that the superdelegates are overwhelmingly opposed to his candidacy. He needed a plan to prevent that from happening.
We can argue about how possible it ever was for either of these candidates to win over more establishment support, but they both thought they could overcome the lack of it by going straight to the people. Trump may still pull this out, maybe, but he’s acting awfully surprised to discover that his delegates can be stolen from him for the simple reason that delegates don’t like him. A savvy adviser would have told him about this likelihood last summer, and maybe he could have been a little more selective in his insults and a little more solicitous of establishment support.
Obviously, Sanders is running an outsider campaign built on criticizing those who are flourishing in our current political system, but he’s also running to be the leader of a party (and all that party’s infrastructure and organizations), and there has to be a better middle ground that allows you to challenge entrenched power without totally alienating it. Even if there wasn’t a way to be successful in gathering more institutional support, I would have liked to see him make the effort.
So far, I’ve been focusing on a straightforward strategy for winning a major party nomination as an outsider and challenger of the status quo, which is difficult enough. But imagine if one of these two outsiders actually won the presidency. They’d both have a lot of repair work to do with an establishment that they’d have to govern.
I really do understand the appeal of declaring the whole system rotten and just going after it in a populist appeal for root-and-branch change. But I think it’s a bit of a sucker’s game to hitch yourself to that kind of wagon if you don’t get the sense that the challengers really understand how power works, how to seize it, and what to do with it if you get it.
I want a progressive challenger who is pragmatic and ruthless enough to navigate our rotten system and then have the leadership abilities to lead it once they’ve taken control of it.
I never got the sense that Sanders was that guy, or even close to that guy.
So, yeah, I’ve been grumpy as hell about my choices for a year now.
We all admire people who take principled positions and are pragmatic and ruthless and accept accountability for their actions. No wonder the cynical are always talking about unicorns.
Well, I have the guy I want right now in the White House, and he ain’t a unicorn. He did it.
He did it then he did an about face and went republican-lite. That was good for him. How much has their net worth increased in the last seven years? And you got some dough out of it too, including your gig at the Washington Monthly. I don’t begrudge you. I’m glad for you. But it didn’t stop my two grandsons from becoming gypsies like their maternal great-grandfather who was one of millions of young men riding the rails, searching for jobs, living in hobo jungles.
I believed he was to the Left of Hillary, the more fool I. In a way, I’m glad Bernie is going to lose. I won’t have to endure the pain of his inevitable sell out.
Difficult as it is to see, BHO is to the left of HRC. Not by much, but in a few instances. Pulling back from DOMA and fueling the war in Syria, moving forward on reconciliation with Cuba and Iran, and a tone that is less belligerent.
The problem is that where he and HRC are similar, the problems have worsened in eight years either by commission or omission.
I agree with you. Obama is marginally to the left of Clinton, and there are definitely things he did that I agree with. I think his strategy vis Syria was not too bad, and I think Clinton would’ve been likely to go into Syria with guns blazing and attempting to bomb them back to glass.
So yeah, Bamz is marginally more left but still snuggled firmly in bed with Wall ST and the PTB.
Clinton will most definitely swing us further right. After all, she’s a Goldwater Republican and has never ever changed. And she thinks getting Kudos from Uber War Criminal in Chief, Henry the K is a badge of honor. I mean? Need I say more.
Ugh. We’re so screwed bc the R Team will keep shrieking and screaming about what a complete Commie Liberal Socialist Clinton is, and she’ll happily use that as an excuse to push things rightward and be even more of a War Hawk than she already is.
Ick. Shudder. We’re so screwed. But I’ll be adjured here and elsewhere about how very ungrateful I am. Now I must go and eat my mushy peas.
“Goldwater Republican”? And “progressives” wonder why no one takes them seriously.
This is a perfect example of the “progressive” mindset. “Progressives” loved Obama until he actually tried to govern. In other words, when he (gasp!) bargained with others to achieve his goals. Nothing makes “progressives” kick someone to the curb faster than when that someone actually attempts to accomplish something.
Two things will happen should Sanders get the presidency: One, he will stick to his “progressive” guns, suffer approval ratings sinking faster than rocks in a pond, and get summarily tossed out of office after four years of doing exactly fuck-all. Or, two, he will actually try to get something done, and “progressives” will brand him “Republican-lite” and turn up their noses as they decamp for more ideologically pure precincts where they may whine loudly and self-satisfiedly.
I vote for “one”, myself. Sanders has never shown the ability to play with others, nor an interest in getting anything done in his life.
You may want to take a look at this article from The Atlantic. It contradicts your statement: “Sanders has never shown the ability to play with others, nor an interest in getting anything done in his life.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/07/bernie-sanders-is-a-loud-stubborn-socialist-repu
blicans-like-him-anyway/450597/
If Sanders can break the demographic gridlock preventing the Democratic Party from capturing Congress — a gridlock that ‘serious’ Dems like Clinton and Obama and BooMan take as a given — by engaging Millenials and poorer voters he’ll have done more than enough.
I only started supporting Sanders when it became clear to me that a social democrat was our only chance of avoiding several cycles of Congressional gridlock. If Hillary Clinton showed any promise of winning Congress under her own power (which, given her weak general election polls, favorability numbers, and dismal showing with Millenials she doesn’t) I’d be in her camp. As it is, though, her pragmatism and ‘getting shit done’ is just a marketing gimmick used to convince Democrats that they aren’t just mortgaging their future for a few months — yes, months — of immediate relief.
Do the polls show that Democrats could re-take the House if Trump or Cruz are nominated? I believe it will take a 7%+ margin to accomplish this. Sanders has activated millenials, no doubt, but there are no signs of a revolution. His message was a better fit for the 2008 cycle rather than in an improving economy.
Without a landslide that delivers the House a President Sanders would be rendered mostly ineffective while resorting to executive action. I don’t think he’ll be as effective as Obama in achieving policy wins while working with a Republican house. Republicans would have no incentive to work with him and every incentive to continue their strategy of the Obama years in an effort to make him a one-term President and destroy the appeal of democratic socialism. He doesn’t seeem to me to be ruthless enough to win or play the long game well enough.
His biggest accomplishment will be setting the stage for whoever’s next as I’m sure it will be someone far closer to him ideologically.
We don’t need a revolution. We just need to reforge the Obama Coalition. 7% is quite doable, especially with the GOP doing a lot of the work. I don’t really expect Clinton to be able to do this unless the GOP simultaneously nominates Cruz and Trump doesn’t run third party, because her numbers with Millenials are terrible and we don’t get 7% without a GOP fuck-up unless the Democratic nominee engages Gen-Y.
I don’t expect any miracles out of Sanders. I’m not expecting a transitioning to social democracy in two administrations. What I do expect him to do is break the Congressional logjam under his own power.
Yes, you never heard Hillary say she was a Goldwater Girl? You must have been in diapers then. And you are still flinging poo.
She was a teenager, and changed to Democrats before she graduated college. Elizabeth Warren, on the other hand, was a Republican until her mid-40s. And this relates to today how exactly?
jsrtheta’s denial of the Hillary – Goldwater connection.
See the youtube below — she wasn’t a teen when she declared that she remained proud to have been a Goldwater Girl. If she’s proud of that, why do her fans get so bent out of shape when some bring it up as a criticism of her and her political roots.
Weak attack…
No, progressives loved Obama until it was clear he was a centrist and had no real desire to make any massive changes. Hope and change indeed. And he didn’t bargain, he gave away the store. Until recently he seemed more worried about what the GOP would say than how the people who voted for him would react. Progressives “kicked” him to the curb because he was going back on what he claimed he was about on the stump:
Having a transparent administration – set records for being the worst administration in terms of transparency
Rolling back the security/surveillance state of Bush – embraced and expanded those policies
Helping people deal with the fall-out of the financial collapse – bailed out the banks and buried the people
I could go on but the point is this wasn’t him trying to get things done, this was him being a DNC centrist and not rocking the boat.
I do think Sanders can play with others and has accomplishments he can be proud of. This last sentence just seems like projection to me…
” he gave away the store.”
Please remind me, I can’t remember what you would be referring to.
My opening bid: deporting millions of Latinos for no immediate or long-term political reason. That’s a pretty big sell-out right there.
The Boston Globe ran a parody post about a Donald Trump Presidency rounding up record numbers of people and sending them out of the country. It’s like: ‘do you not know that Obama already contemptuously shattered deportation records’?
We’ve been deporting people, and not just Latinos, who migrate here illegally for decades. Unless we decide to adopt an open borders policy then you should accept that this will continue even in a Sanders Presidency. I do not recall that Sanders has proposed getting rid of our border checkpoints and the Border Patrol.
The absolute # and proportions of deported illegal immigrants have waaaay shot up. W. Bush and Obama contemptuously outclass every other post-McKinley President on this score. Even the third-place winner, Bill Clinton, is a distant third (though still conspicuously higher than fourth place).
Like, can we acknowledge that even if the % of illegal immigrants is indeed higher than it has been in a century and even if you don’t believe in open borders, Obama went way, waaaay overboard when viewed in historical context?
My hope is that Sanders will regress to the proportions and absolute #s of Carter, H.W. Bush, and Reagan. That’d be a huge demographic improvement.
Yet, in this historical telling, DAPA/DACA and other groundbreaking things President Obama and Democratic Congressional Caucuses have done, and have attempted to do, are not worth mentioning.
The Presidents who nominated the Federal judges who have made hateful, regressive rulings which turn back worthwhile and sensible legislation and Administration orders? Nah, avoid that subject, that gets in the way of our righteous Both Siderism. Which Party was entirely responsible for the gutting of the Voting Rights Act and subsequent racially biased voter suppression efforts in dozens of States? A pattern emerges.
You’ll most likely respond with “who cares?” Well, if we can’t help ourselves and others differentiate between Parties, their platforms and actions, then we’re major creators of the midterm turnout problem.
Okay? That doesn’t exactly negate the point that President Obama has engaged in sell-outs. You’re just saying that the GOP would’ve stuck in three knives instead of one. Yes, I acknowledge that. I acknowledged in another subthread that Obama has been trivially better than any post-Carter President. That still does not negate the existence of sell-outs.
Not only has Obama not stuck three knives in the back of any coalition group, he’s brought almost all of them heaping helpings of red meat, politically and policy-wise.
This is the crux of what I’m talking about. We need to report the full record. We’re actively helping the wingnuts and billionaires when we report the negatives, even shading or distorting the facts to do so sometimes, while leaving the positives entirely unreported.
Some people really do believe the President has done nothing to help and much to hurt them and the people they care about. Many at the Frog Pond are helping them develop and harden that false belief.
Okay, here are some examples:
If you want I can give more examples…
1 & 2 really pissed me off at the time. I was with Robert Reich and Bill Black, Marcy Kaptur and the rest and on that. But not sure what he could have done. But it was already in the works before he even took office. he was up against the most powerful players in the universe. If there really were options, I’d have to agree with you. I tried talking about it here, Booman’s not interested in financial issues.
To sum up, I am probably no more happy with the way things are in this country than you are. It’s just that (a) I know that they could have been a lot worse, and (b) I do not attribute the problems to Obama anywhere near as much as you do.
By the way, I remember there were people back in 2008 saying that if we somehow did elect a black president, racism would get worse. They were right; on the other hand, it certainly brought a lot of stuff that had been hiding under rocks out into the open. Would you have preferred that he’s not been elected?
HER words, not ours. One time that she sounded sincere — and I do like to take those that sound sincere at their word:
I only get music from the utube. Nice to hear HRC’s Goldwater statements in her own words. Also, how do you embed utubes? Thanks.
Below the title, there’s an arrow and “Share,” click on Share. That will bring up three words: Share, Embed, and Email. Click on Embed. Then you’ll see a box below those three words with a highlighted long code that begins with a left arrow followed by iframe width= (can’t type out what it looks like because Scoop reads that as instructions) Copy (Ctrl C) that code and paste (Ctrl V) it to wherever you want to embed the video.
On occasion the automatic highlighting of the long code turns off, when it does, I start over with Share and then Embed and then Ctrl C (copy). This is far easier to do than embedding pictures which I’ve given up on.
Thanks for the instructions. So HRC says this new brand of Republicanism is reactionary, but Goldwater was not? What does she think Goldwater was? HRC is either distorting facts again/lying/ or she doesn’t know the concepts of certain political philosophies.
rewriting/ protecting her narrative; she was a Goldwater Girl
I don’t. Of course I didn’t/don’t support the drone wars, USG actions in Libya and Syria, TPP, charter schools, not just a pass for the Wall St crooks but embracing them, NSA spying on Americans, use of the espionage act for whistleblowers, economic policies that further increase income/wealth inequality, and inaction on climate change. But that’s just me.
I could address this to any of the responders to my comment, so don’t take this as targeted at you alone, but I think you are all just inconceivable jaundiced.
And ungrateful.
And unrealistic.
Please explain why we who hold this view are “ungrateful”.
Please explain why we who hold this view are “unrealistic”.
Maybe it’s just my reading of your response, but your tone comes across like someone who is talking to misbehaving children.
I was trying to be polite.
I think you failed. I also notice you provided nothing to back up your statements.
People framed photos of FDR and hung them alongside Jesus back in the day. Catholics did the same for JFK. I would expect some AA are doing it now. All spontaneous, however.
This.
I’ve gotten into online fights with a few far lefty friends recently who decry Hillary as a “centrist”. I tell them, “Well, according to metrics of voting records, Clinton’s record is slightly to the left of Obama’s. You don’t consider him a centrist, do you?” Whereupon they tell me that Obama is a centrist.
“You know,” I answer, “there’s a difference between ‘Not as left as you’d like him to be’ and ‘a centrist’. There’s also a difference between an aggressive progressive and a cautious one. And Obama is too cautious for many people’s tastes, and I have some sympathy for that viewpoint. But that too does not make him a centrist.
This depends on your frame of reference. I think there are two major approaches.
ONE: Many Democrats (and virtually all Republicans) measure Obama against the Republicans, and see him as extremely liberal (or indeed, Marxist!). Others try to measure him within the Republican-Democrat spectrum, and see him as emphatically liberal. Others try to calculate his position within the Democratic Party, and see him as mainstream liberal, certainly to the left of ‘centrist.’
TWO: Others think that the party system is so broken in the US–so beholden to money, maybe, or to a toxic political culture, or with its ass hanging out the wrong Overton window–that it can’t measure anything intelligibly. Those people might gauge Obama’s political position according to some political philosophy or principle, and come to a different conclusion. Or they might measure him against ‘liberal party’ leaders in countries with similar-ish political cultures–Canada, the UK, whatever–and not find a good fit for him to the left of ‘centrist.’
The people in the first camp think that the people in the second are naive loons. Of course you have to measure American politicians in an American context! This is the only country, and the only political spectrum, that we have!
The people in the second camp think that the people in the first are small-minded and parochial. Of course there’s a wider context than our hidebound and reactionary political culture! Open your eyes and look beyond your own little borders!
They also conflate social liberalism with economic and do a lot of handwaving over the differences.
Nope. Liberalism is a three-legged stool: economic good for all, equality under the law, and national defense is just that and no more. Moving backwards from the achievements of the past on any of the three is a regressive, thwarting any moves forward on any of them is a conservative, and preserving what has been achieved in each of those areas and moving forward in light of current knowledge/awareness is a liberal. Neoliberal economics is regressive, locking up more people for use of marijuana is regressive, supporting non-defensive use of the US military is regressive, and charter schools is regressive. Cutting the capital gains tax was regressive. Once the gay community identified same-sex marriage as a question of equality, thwarting it was conservative.
We can applaud Obama/Biden for pulling back from thwarting the efforts for same sex marriage but when they did, it hardly qualified as being liberal.
For years I have wondered why in the heck one has to constantly defend being liberal/progressive. It’s almost become a “dirty” word, not to be spoken by “decent and upstanding” persons. L/P is rooted in our Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and various religions. Forms of altruism are rooted in our species for survival. It just gets old, sometimes. I’m not saying L/P’s are “goody two shoes”, but decent intentions are there and we try.
Liberalism became a dirty word to me after supposedly left-of-center Dems claimed that we had to overlook Hillary Clinton’s the only true progressive in the race and plutocratic grifting, neoconservatism, neoliberalism, and divisive campaign bigotry (race in 2008, age in 2016) because she’s our only hope after a series of Democratic missteps and black swans.
I mean, if Hillary Clinton is a liberal and most Democrats think that, then why should I disagree? I mean, would other famous liberals like Sam Rayburn disagree with her influence-peddling? Would JFK disagree with her warhawkery? Or Truman with her advocacy of massive police state expansion? Shit, LBJ won his first Senate election by race-baiting an open segregationist.
Is just that – an assumption not really based on anything other than some progressives expected Obama to make same sex marriage a priority day 1 of his administration. I think the way the Obama administration has handled LGBT rights is instructive on his governing philosophy – a philosophy many progressives don’t have patience for so they see him as a sell out.
Seems to me he is an institutionalist at heart meaning in most matters, domestic especially, he wants to go through the proper channels to affect change. That is why he didn’t suspend DADT policies via executive order. Instead he got buy-in by the military and then once they said it won’t be a problem ended the law. That is also why he didn’t pursue a legislative solution for same sex marriage. He wanted it to “ratified” by the courts. So instead his administration simply stopped defending DOMA in court and then started writing briefs in support of ending it.
You really did miss the points in my comment. As a principle of equality, same-sex marriage was well on its way to becoming legal in the US by 1/09. Perhaps because it doesn’t impact me, I had no expectations that it would be a priority for Obama on day one or his last day in office, but his 2008 platform did call for the repeal of DOMA. As POTUS, he could have chosen not to have his administration defending it, and thus thwarting liberal efforts, for two years.
Had long would it have taken for the US military to buy-in to integration? When an institution clings to outdated and wrong policies, it’s up to the person ultimately in charge to order that it be changed. Truman got it right.
And no, Obama isn’t an “institutionalist.” The US Justice Dept and SEC (institutions) were fully capable of going after the WS institutional crooks.
He conducted a survey. Gave the executive order (because segregation in the military wasn’t law) in 1948, and then phased it in which took until 1954.
Obama conducted a survey with the branches and tasked them with conducting a study, got their stamp that ending DADT wasn’t going to cause mass chaos, then pushed for the law to be passed. Within a short time after that DADT was a thing of the past.
Do dislike being dragged into an argument when I’d never made an issue out of how a person handled a specific issue. You brought of DADT to make your point and I don’t happen to agree with that. Truman chose a bold course (and in 1948 racial integration was a far more intractable issue/problem than sexual orientation was in 2009) and Obama chose the “hey guys, find a way to cut it out.” If it gets the job done expeditiously, I don’t much care what approach a person takes; it’s the “getting the job done expeditiously” and successfully and not the methods used to achieve it that gets scored because the optimal means will vary over time and over issues.
Which puts you squarely in one of those two approaches.
No it doesn’t because your two camps are based on current divisions and not based on timeless principles.
Oh, I see. The fact that you judge politicians by a political principle means that you’re not part of the group of people who judge politicians by a political principle. Because you understand that words only ever have one definition, and principles mean precisely what it says on the stone tablets.
I stand corrected.
No kidding. But, leaving aside the positive impact that Bernie has had in terms of pushing the dialogue in this race, let’s just talk about competence.
In 2012, Bernie called Obama weak and said he should be primaried, but he has now shown that he barely comes up to Obama’s ankle as the leader of a national primary campaign. His biggest error was not putting his troops through an “Obama Camp” style induction, and consequently they don’t feel responsible for guiding or smacking down an obnoxious minority of Sanders supporters who make their candidate look bad: “John Lewis and Elizabeth Warren are sell outs!” “Black voters are low information, but I’m not, even though I couldn’t figure out how to register in the NY primary on time and now I’m reduced to railing at other voters and super delegates,” etc., etc.)
If Bernie is such a bad ass revolutionary, shouldn’t he have studied how Obama won? Shouldn’t he have had the self-knowledge to recognize his weakness with people of color, and wouldn’t he have done a serious listening tour with people of color who HAVE to make up the coalition for any revolution in this country?
Instead he was foolish enough to say things like Clinton was “pandering to the black vote” by bear-hugging Obama, which is pretty much like saying “I have nothing for African Americans who love Obama.” He rallies mostly whites from other neighborhoods to the overwhelmingly minority South Bronx without:
– ANY South Bronx speakers
-ANY mention of Justice Sotomayor
-ANY homage to the neighborhood’s rich organizing history that put a stop to landlords burning down local housing, while his clueless supporters carry signs and post “The South Bronx is Berning.”
Obama was asked how he would govern in 2008 and he responded by saying “watch how I run my campaign.” Yes. And I’ve watched how Bernie has run his campaign and I can say I would not trust him to run anything on a national scale, let alone a “revolution.”
Hmm, that does tend to sharpen the fact of pent up demand that existed independent of Sanders, though, doesn’t it?
This is really good. I would like to comment on this;
” he have done a serious listening tour with people of color who HAVE to make up the coalition for any revolution in this country?”
The idea might not be to exactly exclude them from input on the ‘revolution’, but to make the ‘revolution’ color blind….with the result of leaving people of color in the same position they are now….behind whites.
It’s really the same as when republicans say ‘colorblind society is our goal’ or ‘all lives matter’. We all know what they mean.
Of course expecting Sanders to lead some ‘revolution’ is a joke anyway. He’s a life long politician. He’s not going to kill the golden goose that he benefits from.
.
You don’t sound obnoxious at all.
First off, the “barely comes up to Obama’s ankle” comment is laughable. Please state what metrics you are using. Second, the “Obama Camp”, as you call it, was a failure. There were just as many people who supported Obama in 2008 that were just as obnoxious and off message as the Sanders or Clinton supporters of this cycle. This idea that somehow his campaign didn’t have such issues is fiction.
Why should Sanders study how Obama ran? Obama was was/is a DNC centrist. I give credit that Obama was a great orator and communicator; each person saw what they wanted in his speeches. It was only after he won the election that these same people that were full of “hope and change” realized that most of it was, if not outright BS, much less than stated. I do agree he has made missteps, but so did Obama. So what?
You may think Sanders statements were wrong; I think they were accurate. Many of her, and her husband’s actions, have done nothing to help most African Americans. She has built up a massive following within that community, but it doesn’t mean that Clinton couldn’t be selling them a bill of goods she has no intention of implementing, and it doesn’t preclude them from voting against their own interests. People do this all the time under the right circumstances.
Yes I watched how Obama ran his campaign; it bears no resemblance to how he ran his administration.
We agree on almost nothing, so that’s clear, but my point is Obama won, and yes, Camp Obama and Obama the community organizer’s attention to organizing detail REALLY helped.
Sanders is losing, and will lose, and I think there are concrete things he could have done that would have made him much more dangerous to Clinton, and they’re not rocket science. The fact that he didn’t avail himself of these tools and didn’t have a coherent plan for engaging people of color does not make his message not important. It just means he engaged in political malpractice and he and his supporters are paying for it.
You can say that Sanders statements are “accurate,” and I won’t even bother engaging you in an argument about that, because if 93% of the African American MLK generation from South Carolina vote for Clinton, it means Sanders failed.
There are lots of “accurate” things you can say, but that’s not the same as organizing the coalition you need and winning.
But that isn’t what you said. Now you are just moving the goalposts. If you had made this statement initially, I would have agreed with you.
He MAY lose. I’m glad you see live a life with such certainty. Of course there are things could have done which would have helped. That is true even when you win. What I find amusing is for all the reasons you lay our for Sanders losing, you don’t mention any of the issue he had no control over. How was Sanders expected to change the DNC narrative that this is “Hillary’s Moment”? How is he to address or counter Clinton’s backdoor deals to secure super delegates? I could go on: the point is even with his mistakes, this would be a dead heat if not a lead for him if he wasn’t taking on so many vested interests of the DNC. Obama didn’t have to face this. And if you are going to accuse him of political malpractice, shouldn’t you also level the same claim against Clinton for all of her unforced errors that have made her look worse than she did before? She has done this four times now and she still is making these types of mistakes? Scary.
It might mean that; but it might mean that Clinton was better at telling them what they wanted to hear. If the option is to be honest or to pander to voters, I’d rather go with the former and lose.
But you haven’t laid out how she organized a coalition. If anything, she has shown she wasn’t ready for any real competition and expected this to be a coronation, as did most of the DNC. I’m not seeing a coalition being built, I’m seeing a system being bought. But if that is okay with you, then I guess we really don’t have anything to discuss.
When someone comes up with a decent explanation of how Bernie could have solved his problem with African Americans I will listen carefully.
I haven’t read one yet.
In one sense Bernie is vastly superior to Obama. Obama was actually far more reliant on big dollar donations than Sanders is.
That may well be Bernie’s lasting legacy – he has created a model not dependent on big money and yet capable of matching large donor campaigns dollar for dollar.
Of course to you I am sure this is nothing.
But that looks pretty fucking competent to me.
I agree. It’s like everybody’s bitching because, in hindsight, they think Bernie ought to have been Superman. Sure he could have done some things better, but a lot of that is Monday morning quarterbacking.
Sanders started his campaign something like ten months ago. Hillary, about 20 years ago.
He’s fighting the most powerful forces in the country, and actually, in the world. The Pope gets it, he’s doing the same.
When Bernie started, nobody thought he had the chance of a snowball in hell.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Why don’t people look at what he has done, and is doing, instead of what he hasn’t done? Because they haven’t got their pony? It’s not so easy to get your pony these days.
Because they didn’t think he would amount to anything.
So they feel the need to minimize.
Because they didn’t fight, and others have.
And those of us that have fought, that have done more than type on some keyboard have felt and been a part of something significant.
And the bystanders can see it. So they feel the need to piss on the activist. It justifies their cynicism. They feel that they are superior, smarter, more knowing.
Those fools! Making phone calls. Canvassing. Going door to door.
But they don’t matter a good goddam. They change nothing, touch no one. They are not part of something bigger than themselves, they are too egotistical for that. They type away…
That’s about the size of it.
People who say it cannot be done should get out of the way of those who are actually doing it.
No. What justifies my cynicism is that a lot of Sanders supporters didn’t knock on doors, make phone calls, canvas, etc. Many (not all) seemed to think he could or would win with Facebook likes and memes of him scowling during the debates.
If more of those folks had done the legwork instead, he might not be losing by 2,000,000+ votes.
In all honesty I have to say you have no fucking idea what you are talking about.
But then I have been part of the organization and you haven’t.
good to see your comments on this thread. from what you wrote about Bernie in Burlington, sounds like he’s plenty pragmatic and focused [I’d use that term instead of ruthless – if a public figure is motivated by compassion and ethics, why expect them to be ruthless? how about dedicated and focused]
I’m in my 70’s so my frame of reference goes back farther than most people’s. Both Hillary and Barack are way to the right of many Democrats of yore and not even as liberal as some Republicans, back in the day when there were liberal Republicans.
Thank you for saying that. Illinois had Everett Dirksen and Chuck Percy. Other states had the equivalent. A little knowledge of political history puts things in perspective.
IIRC, Dirksen was “Mr. Conservative” Of course a 1950’s conservative could well be today’s liberal.
Percy was always considered a liberal republican, byt Dirksen actually did more things for the little guy. in that, Percy foreshadowed today’s liberal and their contempt for the white working class.
My grand father was liberal Republican politician.
I have not been able to explain to his grandson how that phrase ever existed.
Try this guy: Robert LaFollette (1855-1925), Republican governor of Wisconsin. He was impressive. Far cry from Scottie Walker and Ron Johnson.
“As governor, La Follette championed numerous progressive reforms, including the first workers’ compensation system, railroad rate reform, direct legislation, municipal home rule, open government, the minimum wage, non-partisan elections, the open primary system, direct election of U.S. Senators, women’s suffrage, and progressive taxation.”
As senator, “He opposed the prosecution of Eugene V. Debs and other opponents of the war and played a key role in initiating the investigation of the Teapot Dome Scandal during the Harding Administration.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_M._La_Follette_Sr.
Yes, and the corollary to that is, Bernie Sanders is not radical at all. He’s mainstream.
I’m not that much younger than you, so I have the same reference point.
I even got my “free stuff” B.A. at Brooklyn College, same as Bernie — and that was normal, where I come from.
I’m old enough to know that the plutocrats TOOK THAT AWAY from us, along with lots of other stuff — we’re not asking for FREE STUFF, just give us back what we already had.
By today’s political standards, Abraham Lincoln would be considered a flaming, wild-eyed radical. At least Bernie Sanders is just considered a regular radical. The powers to be want us to dance the Limbo. I’m not young enough for that anymore.
Chubby Checker says “How low can you go” from the song The Limbo Rock.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XgCHOrF5ryY
Sorry don’t know how to embed Utube. It’s a good song.
Color me jaundiced, ungrateful and unrealistic, then. I’ve certainly been called worse.
I believe in pushing from the real left (which is pretty rare anywhere in the USA). If I just capitulate – which for ME, it IS capitulation – and say: all is well… well then I get what I deserve.
I don’t believe that I – and many other Americans – got what we “deserved” with Obama. Obama did absolute bupkiss about Wall St – he flaunted his ties with his pals there and sent his attack monkey, Rahm, to tell us to STFU and stop being so f*cking r*t*rded. No, I’ll never EVER forget that, nor will I just write it off as “that’s the way it goes in reality.”
Nonetheless, JMHO, of course.
Calling us sanctimonious purists really ticked me off as well.
One could say that of the abolitionists, suffragists, anti-Vietnam war demonstrators and the entire civil rights movement (black, LGBT et al.).
I am reminded of the nihilistic Tory humor of Life of Brian’s skit, The People’s Front of Judea
Sad that there isn’t really a current counterpart to Monty Python…
…he said hoping someone would point him in the direction of modern day version.
I guess it’s time to punch a hippie. Seems to be popular with some people right now.
When it starts getting about the money, the knives come out.
Some of us are just older and therefore, have had the experience of living under New Deal economic policies and saw additional implementations in accordance with those principles. $1.60/hour in 1968 wasn’t much, but one could live on it and a better paying job wasn’t an impossible dream. That $1.60 was worth 50% more than the current federal minimum wage (using the CPI calculation which is a very rough estimate of apples to apples — a house or apartment that rented for $75 in ’68 couldn’t be had today for less than twice the CPI inflated price).
I haven’t been unrealistic or ungrateful since I was fourteen, and it takes a lot of chutzpah to tell those who earn $7.25/hour with no realistic hope for better while those at the top of the income distribution ladder have seen their incomes soar since 2008 to “STFU and eat your peas.”
Since we are older, many of us had the experience of having grandparents who lived BEFORE the New Deal. Spending some time with these ancients was very informative. Then one can see the similarities of pre-New Deal and life starting with Reagan. Not a nice picture and rather scary.
Except there were lots of jobs. People worked very hard but there were lots of jobs, stable communities, good public education, and therefore hope.
Other parts of the country may have been different, but in Chicago, few workers worked for minimum wage. IIRC, the stockyards were union (maybe that’s why they were moved from Chicago), Ford had a plant on the South Side (UAW of course), AT&T Western Electric was CWA, IH was UAW, there were steel plants on the South Side (USW, USW was also in Continental Can’s plants). The booming television industry was not union but management staved off union drives by offering competitive pay and benefits including profit sharing (very big at Motorola). The main thing those execs wanted was the ability fire at will, the culture that sucked the blood out of workers for executive bonuses was not yet in place. CEO’s (mostly called “Presidents” then) made 40 or 50 times the average worker’s pay not 1,000 times.
No, it wasn’t Heaven on Earth. Sidney Poiter’s A Raisin In The Sun, was pretty accurate, in fact, Hollywood prettied up. But a black man could make decent money killing cows, as did multiple waves of non-English speaking immigrants. Dirty work, but so is selling crack to kids.
What changed? The unions supported the Democratic party but the Democrats, post-McGovern, deserted the unions.
Also EVERYTHING in construction was union, plumbers, carpenters, electricians, concrete workers, EVERYTHING. A construction job was considered a plum job where you could make enough money in nine months to be able to loaf for the Winter (no quick set cement in those days).
I’m sure that the millions of refugees from Miami and Houston in 30 years would agree with your assessment that they’re just ungrateful and unrealistic.
Look: the Obama administration, while certainly better than any post-Carter one, still massively failed on at least three aspects.
1.) The Democratic Party is a rump. Despite all of the crowing that ‘demographics are destiny’, we’re looking at unbreakable gridlock for at least four years, minimum. We’re being driven out of Congress and the statehouses and that situation is only going to get worse in 2018 and more-than-likely 2022.
2.) Because of point 1, it has made the danger of herrenvolk authoritarianism (or fascism for the non-pedantic) a lot more tangible. Despite the HRC wing salivating over how easily she beats Trump, we should not feel comfortable at all at the possibility of a full fascist sweep of government. We are seriously only one scandal or economic crisis away from a much-more-radicalized Republican government being in near-total control of the country. And it’s due to Obama’s (and Clinton’s) dithering about with neoliberalism and even outright austerity.
3.) Because of points 1 and 2, our country and planet are going to face a huge ecological crisis. Even if an Obama administration wouldn’t have averted it, we still spun our wheels in place for 8 years and we’re predicted to spin it for an additional 6 years, minimum. And probably even longer. The situation is so bleak, that I have seriously contemplated throwing the election to an open fascist and trying to counterattack in 2018 and 2020. Yes, the climate situation is so fucking bad that the additional damage a Trump can do with full access to government levers only adds moderately more pain.
Personally, I think you’ve just affected a ‘fuck your cities and climate; I got to bask in the warm glow of a not-short-term-fuckup Presidency for 16 years. Y’all Millenials have fun with your underwater Baton Rouge’. That kind of nihilism is much more despicable than mere ingratitude.
Deathtongue, you have stated this much better than I could have.
This is the base of my frustration; we are told that we need to be patient, that we need to work within the party to make changes happen. We don’t have the time.
It’s one of the times I’m glad I don’t have kids. I don’t envy those who are younger than me.
No, and people like me were at fault, not raising the kids to be tough and ruthless like us and our parents (the Depression/WW II generation). We had a vision of Beaver Cleaver childhood and while we knew it was a fantasy, we thought it might come true and kids should live in that world. Instead, we should have been harsh and demanding, raising them to be self-reliant and competitive as our parents raised us.
All true, but I don’t see what Obama could have done about any of that other than what he did. The republicans were dedicated to preventing him from doing anything, and he still did a lot.
He started with a Democratic Congress and squandered it by trying to be nice to Republicans. He saved traitor Joe Lieberman from expulsion from the caucus and even worked to save his committee chairmanship, only to be stabbed in the back. Apparently he never read The Scorpion And The Frog.
Joe Lieberman gave new meaning to the word “prick”, but I’m not sure you’re remembering it right.
Lieberman had them over a barrel. They needed every vote in the Senate.
Here’s a good summary of the tale by Wonkette.
http://wonkette.com/406847/joe-lieberman-likes-obama-now
Lieberman was so smart, he outsmarted himself. If you recall the sequel to the story, he soon found himself with a lot more time ot spend with his family.
Obama could have:
1.) Put the ACA on the backburner and have gone all-out with the economic stimulus. A poor recovery is a big (though not only) reason why 2010, 2012, and 2014 were as disastrous/disappointing as they were.
2.) Told the Republicans to fuck off with the debt ceiling debacle, thus juicing the country with hundreds of billions more dollars.
2.) Not have deported as many people as he did during his Presidency. Those people and their children will be needed in the medium-term to demographically break the logjam.
4.) Not have given Clinton’s career a shot in the arm by appointing her Secretary of State. This is more of a hindsight problem (since it wasn’t as apparent in 2008 as it is now) but right now she’s doing pretty damn poorly with Millenials and Gen-Xers and their support will be absolutely necessary towards breaking the demographic logjam in a reasonable timeframe.
5.) Not pulling a Darth Vader on the DNC after 2014. There’s no reason why that election should’ve been even more disastrous than 2010. We can discuss why the Democratic Party performed so poorly in that year (despite many partisans swearing up and down that there’s a recovery and unemployment was less than 6% and…) and what’s needed to fix it but something definitely needed to be done — especially since the problem seemed demographic and the problem looks to be repeating itself in 2018 and 2022.
And? Was getting the ACA worth getting our ass kicked super-hard in 2010 by not prioritizing economics which not only set up the great gerrymander of 2012 but also sets up the GOP for a Gerrymander through 2016 and probably 2020?
As in, the GOP threatens not to raise the debt ceiling, Obama has a great big belly laugh at their empty threat, then if they actually go through with it then invoke the 14th Amendment/trillion dollar platinum coin. The MSM would’ve hated it and would’ve mau-maued the Democrats on this for a couple of months, but no one gives a fuck what they would think on this issue.
Who gives a fuck about proportions or whether it was historically unusual? I’m talking about building the long-term health of the Democratic Party. And this was an area that clearly caused harm.
But even if you want to talk about raw proportions, that still doesn’t make Obama look good. This is true even if you only count ‘deportations at the border’, which is about a third of cases. He comes in second place only to George W. Bush of 1900+ Presidents. Incidentally, Bill Clinton is third. We’ll see what the rest of 2016 brings; he’s still got a shot of breaking that record by proportion.
Intentional or no, it was still a fuck-up. Like the Roosevelt and Truman administrations not putting the screws to leaded gasoline or the McGovern commission pushing carbohydrates. Not as bad of a fuck-up as the other things on the list, but it’s still exhibit D in my argument of ‘Obama wasn’t actually all that good for the long-term health of the Democratic Party’.
I can overlook 2010. I think it’s a pathetic excuse since other Presidents were able to have good midterms despite bad economic conditions, but I’ll overlook it.
However, there was no excuse for the even worse 2014. The economy was in better shape and we had a much firmer grasp of the demographic composition of the Obama Coalition. That points to a structural problem rather than a ‘waaaa, we can’t control the economy, what do you expect for us to do???’ 2014 should’ve been the year that the DNC pulled out all of the stops, and as leader of the Democratic Party if Obama didn’t think that they were on the right track then he should’ve publicly whupped their ass.
Either Obama is uninterested in beating the DNC into shape or he’s unable to do so. Either way, as by far the most influential and nationally popular Democrat, it was on his head.
If you were writing a novel, that might be a good plot line. It has nothing to do with reality. You just describe what he would have had to do to make it turn out with rainbows and lolly pops.
The fact that there were actual historical circumstance that made those outcomes unlikely to impossible doesn’t bother you at all.
And you accuse me of rewriting history?
Of all of the points, the one I most wish I could agree with you on was appointing Hillary SoS. As I said, I didn’t like that at the time and now that I understand a lot better some of the stuff she did, I like it even less. But the thing is, Obama neither like nor trusted the Clintons. So his reasons were obviously complex.
But apparently Rahm Emanuel had a lot to do with it, and that already gives pause.
Interesting that John Kerry’s been, in my opinion, a far better SoS than Hillary ever was.
It’s interesting to read this now:
http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/52428/
Like what?
What was the historical circumstance that prevented Obama from putting the ACA on hold and using all of the cred he had to spend on that legislation on the economy instead? What was the historical circumstance that prevented him from tearing the DNC a new one after 2010 and especially 2014? What was the historical circumstance that prevented him from going ‘ha ha, platinum coin time. You don’t like it, take my ass to court’? What was the historical circumstance that prevented him from telling the USCIS and DHS to take five on immigration — or just doing blanket amnesty for that matter?
Were we living on the same planet at that time?
Yes. As a Marxist gnostic Christian who was formerly a Republican, Navy Nuke, and ‘guess I’m a Prodestint’ Christian, I don’t accept conventional wisdom — especially political conventional wisdom — at face value. I will often demand explanations even for things that seem like common sense or obvious folkways.
Those are sincere questions. What, other than the respect of norms or some vague MSM pandering, stopped the Democratic Party by way of Obama from doing those things?
Well, for a start, the fact that you don’t recognize these norms doesn’t mean nobody else does. And it also doesn’t mean that you’ve attained some exalted level of wisdom, like that thing from Siddhartha — “accept no teaching!” I wasn’t being facetious when I said you might as well write a novel. To me, it’s fictional thinking. You have a good imagination, might as well put it to use. I see no reason to think it would be a very good novel, but at least you’d be applying your mind in the appropriate sphere.
The main issue isn’t whether some “common sense” or “obvious folkways” is true or not. That’s a problem for the philosophers and scientists to deal with. The main issue is the difference between speculative and pragmatic (action-oriented) thought. When you’re dealing with day to day issues in the world, you are in the world of action. You have your lights to guide you, yes, but you have to deal with realities as they are, as stupid as they may seem, or may actually be.
I’m glad you replied, because I wanted to say, I didn’t mean that “what planet” remark as an insult. It was just a sincere mark of frustration. I couldn’t answer your question because I literally don’t know where to start.
I don’t do well with antinomians. I long ago realized that antonomianism is a luxury I, and really the world, can’t afford.
http://tasteusa.blogspot.com/p/tasteusa.html
In all fairness to Pres. Obama, I think he had to operate in conjunction with the Clinton tenacles everywhere. He was the new kid on the block and while Senator, he was not in D.C. long enough to build his own “following.” The Clintons had to be disturbed that Obama beat Hillary in the primary and they are sore losers. Hillary has been eyeing the Presidency for years and remember “2 for the price of 1.” Simultaneously, Obama had to deal with the recalcitrant Repubs. He was also constrained by other factors. I’m not excusing him for everything by any means, but the Repubs bobby-trapped the place on the way out, too. I know this primary season has been more of an eye opener for me than 2008. Maybe I’m just older and wiser. LOL
Yes. Not to put too fine a point on it, I think it was, in large part, a big bone to mollify the Big Dog from spending the next four years trying to undermine Obama’s administration. The fact that Rahm, very much a Clinton acolyte, was in on it fits that scenario.
IMHO, people tend to identify and support those who are of a similar age. They see “things” through their glasses. It’s difficult not to do so. The older one gets, the more groups one can identify with because he/she has been there at one time or another.
It’s pretty clear in the aftermath of the recent articles on Syria that that there was in fact a pretty big difference between Obama’s and Clinton’s world view on foreign policy.
He did what? Please explain to me how he did anything to change the system and not just keep the status quo going. There are very, very few issues on which things are better now then before Obama took office.
Obama did just enough not to be considered a horrible president. He did get some good things passed/enacted. But he also continued some of the most horrible policies of the Bush administration, let almost all of those responsible for destroying the economy go unpunished, restored the banks but not the people, etc. So if he is your idea of a guy who “did it” I have no problem seeing why you bash Sanders so much.
To hear you talk, it’s almost as if the Republicans didn’t exist. But they did, and still do. They’ve been slowly destroying themselves — all too slowly. And Obama has done whatever he could to help that process along.
First they take the House, then they take the Senate. Then they take the majority of state houses. Now they are fighting madly for the chance to take the Presidency. Strange way to destroy yourself.
Tehy’re dying. Just not fast enough.
Like the sun, they have to get bigger before they explode? Well, that means they have at least four more years of life because the Presidency (perhaps), super-majority in the Senate, and several governors and state governments are within their reach for at least that long.
And if they ever manage the executive and the Senate again, bye-bye liberal SC. They DO know how to wield power.
What liberal SC? The one that gave us Citizen’s United and Gore v Florida?
I think he meant, Bye bye PROSPECT of a liberal SC. (Unless by SC he meant “South Carolina” — also not very liberal.)
No, I mean even if Dems manage to get a 5/4 majority, they simply court pack by adding 2 of their choice. If that takes nuking the SC filibuster, they do it. Are people still underestimating the lengths they will go to?
Hardly; have you noticed the difference in what Obama has accomplished in the past year or so versus the previous years?
He could have done more than he did, he made the choice not to. The GOP was a factor, but Obama was at times his own worst enemy.
Do you know anything about the dynamics of the modern presidency. The first four years, reelection is like the sword of Damocles. The second four years you can do a lot with a helpful congress, but that’s the very opposite of what he has. You can do a lot more at the end because you no longer give a fuck. To say the GOP was “a factor” is just ludicrous. They were committed to nothing else than destroying his presidency. They didn’t and never have regarded him as the legitimate president, which is tantamount to rebellion and treason.
This is an interesting re-imagining of history. Obama had a brief window when the Democratic party had control of the Senate, yet what I saw during this period was Obama bending over backwards to work with the GOP, which made it clear it had no intention of working with him on anything. Yet he persisted in this course of action – for years.
So while you lay out a great justification for the lack of any progress, you really fail to back it up with the facts as they occurred. And I’m not interested in excuses for why he really couldn’t push for much of his agenda until now. Because now it is too late.
Better he tried when he had more time.
Here’s the answer to your first point :
“Can you spell filibuster”? can you spell “Blue Dog”?
As to your second point, this is, I admit, a widespread perception. All he was doing was making it LOOK like he was bending over backwards. It didn’t do any good, and it didn’t make any difference. That’s because nothing would have done any good. But what he did do, was, he captured the moral high ground, and led the Republicans into the trap they’re in today. He did this again and again.
What did he give away? Nothing.
But you probably don’t even think they are in a trap today.
I’m sure the people getting back their overtime wonder why it took so long…7 yrs to get an executive rule change from Bush overturned by a new executive rule change.
Charismatic and a nice guy. Still neoliberal.
This.
A hundred fucking times this.
I’d give my IRA and every spare moment to have that guy for another eight years over either of these two buffoons, let alone any of the sociopaths on the other side.
Let me guess; you’re going to hit the life expectancy for your demographic in less than 20 years?
I’d rather not have 8 more years of Obama and inaction on economic equality and climate change again. Some of us are going to have to deal with an underwater Florida for thirty-plus years — and we won’t have the luxury of expiring a few months before shit really hits the fan.
I’m 32, slick. How ’bout you?
Few years younger. I’m genuinely baffled that anyone under the age of 50 can view Obama’s administration and the major long-term undermining actions of the administration (Democratic Party being rendered a Congressional and state-level rump, deportation of millions of potential votes we will sorely need, austerity fallout from the debt ceiling crisis, inaction on climate change) as anything other than watching the species slowly march towards doom.
Obama didn’t even set up the Democratic Party for future success. Both in the short-term — see, Republican state house lock — or long-term — see, millions of deportations –. So, again, unless you’re shuffling off this mortal coil soon I don’t know how you can view the administration in any other terms other than borrowing the last bit of money from your whole life insurance to partially pay off your loan shark and get a couple years’ relief. Great deal if you’re planning on defaulting on your loan by dying soon, nooooot so much if you still don’t have a plan to extricate yourself from your debt bind.
You’re baffled because I suspect you’re a kid with no understanding of demography, history, economics, poli sci or the inherent small-c conservatism of the American system.
Have a look at the exit polls from 2012, have a look at the dysfunctional shitshow the GOP is becoming, think it through a bit, note the trends and see if you think Obama didn’t set the Dems up for future success.
The man got health care reform. He got banking reform. Unemployment’s at 5% and wages, which have been rising in real terms for a while now (at admittedly shit rates), are finally starting to accelerate. We have two kick-ass SCOTUS justices. He held off the full force of austerity the GOP wanted to fuck us with by being willing to hit the gas playing chicken on the debt ceiling fight. He fucking bankrupted the coal industry.
He made peace with Cuba and Iran, and is on the verge of the collapse of ISIS without sending a whole shitload of troops into harm’s way.
He saved the American auto companies and the UAW, and has them in the best shape they’ve been in since the ’90s.
He stopped a second fucking Great Depression.
And he also did all this while being black.
If he goaded the Germans into a fight behind the scenes and then nuked them, he’d be Roosevelt.
There’s plenty to criticize Obama on, particularly on the security state. But mostly I see a lot of babbling. And while your babbling will undoubtedly impress many in the blogosphere, it doesn’t impress anybody with an IQ above room temperature.
And demeaning the man’s accomplishments certainly doesn’t make any Dem more likely to vote for the guy who primary accomplishment is renaming fucking post offices.
That’s comical.
1.) Obama deported millions of potential future voters that the Democratic Party will need in the medium-term. That’s actively sabotaging the Democratic Party. You might make some kind of argument that it was the right thing to do, but from a pure Machivellian ‘let’s win some goddamn elections and put herrenvolk authoritarian to bed soon’ perspective, it was the height of foolhardiness.
2.) Exit polls from 2012??? What exit polls were you reading? Yes, Obama increasing his share of the racial minority vote from 60% to 70% with Asians and Latinos, increasing black turnout to record heights, while only slightly slipping with non-Millenial whites would bode for weal… if it weren’t for the fact that Obama lost a big chunk of Millenials.
Obama lost 11% of white Millenials and 14% of black male Millenials going from 2008-2012. The Latino and Asian vote barely budged despite it increasing hugely with older voters. While black turnout increased a whopping 4% as a whole, it still dropped by 5% among black Millenials <30 years old.
You can’t sustain a multi-racial party for more than a couple of cycles by tanking with Millenials. That number isn’t in crisis-mode yet, but that’s not setting up for long-term success. The Democratic Party can passively break gridlock with demographics, but only if they don’t do worse. If HRC drops down to Kerry, or worse, Gore numbers with the youth then smothering the GOP even with demographic growth gets delayed by a couple or even several cycles.
3.) Even beyond that, the Democratic Party under Obama got a bloody nose in Congress and completely destroyed in the statehouses. As another poster put it: We’re not set up for success — The White House is our last stand. Even in eras where the majority parties were demographically stronger than the Obama coalition such as the pre-New Deal Republicans and post-New Deal/pre-Reagan Democrats, the minority party winning didn’t completely reverse the course of the country set by the majority. That’s because the nominal majority party had the courts, Congress, and statehouses as a backup.
The Obama-era Democratic party doesn’t have these back-ups. If HRC gets a surprise indictment or health problem, the Republican Party will literally be politically stronger despite their demographic problems than they were at any post-Hoover era. They’re already strong enough to wield a comfortable gerrymandered majority despite the Democratic Party winning more votes. And considering that Presidential and Congressional election demographics are pretty damn asymmetrical, expect the Republican Party to tighten the Gerrymander in 2020 and make the situation worse.
So, yeah. Obama did not set up the Party for long-term success if you look at any branch of American government other than the higher courts and executive branch. The Obama formula, for whatever reason, also doesn’t look to be improving on that formula anytime soon short of relying on black swans. The only hope that the Democratic Party has in the near-term is that Obama’s successor manages to restrain herself with her warhawkery and that the GOP allows Trump to helm the nomination.
You lost me in your third paragraph.
Obamacare is not popular.
Real median income is lower than in 1999. Corporate profits are near record highs, and the share of the economy that goes to labor has not been lower in 80 years.
People have far less economic security than they have ever had.
Things are not OK. People do NOT think the economy is fine – because they have to live in it.
So you can say he averted disaster – and I agree.
But beyond that: nope. Economic inequality has increased under Obama.
Another problem is the low interest rates older people are getting on their CD’s that they plan to use for assisted living arrangements. Getting .5% is big stuff. This has been going on since 2009. If one lives long enough, they’re going to get old and need some arrangements. Trust me.
http://money.usnews.com/money/blogs/my-money/2012/05/23/the-death-of-the-certificate-of-deposit-will
-cd-rates-ever-rebound
Sigh. Not even sure how to respond to this.
When one of your points moves into an alternate dimension that involves nuking the Germans and being Roosevelt…for no apparent reason…how can anything you say be taken seriously?
I literally discounted every point you made (good or bad) as soon as I read this.
The blahblahblah for your email address makes sense now…
you’re just embarrassing yourself.
And without more detail, you are as well.
Provide me some details; I might even agree with you.
I also find it odd you appear to be defending this poster who acts much like a troll.
“baffled that anyone under the age of 50 can view Obama’s administration and the major long-term undermining actions of the administration as anything other than watching the species slowly march towards doom.”
Well I’m over the age of 50, but maybe you’ll listen to me anyway. It all depends what you mean by “Obama’s administration.” If you mean the period of time that he’s been president, I can’t disagree with you. If you mean that Obama led the march to doom, no, he didn’t.
To me that pretty much sums up the difference between Obama and Hillary. He wasn’t leading it, he just couldn’t stop it, but I am sure that without him it would have been worse. (For example, thanks to him we had more economic stimulus than any other country. He couldn’t get any more than he got.) That doesn’t sound very exciting, but the fact is, most of the blame belongs to the GOP, and their fellow-travelers in the Democratic Party. It’s so obvious, nobody wants to accept it.
Hillary, on the other hand, would get right in step with the march and pretend she wasn’t.
I’m sure that the literal tens of millions of coastal refugees will be comforted by that reasoning. ‘Obama’s administration only took five steps instead of eight steps towards ecological doom — and it would’ve been even fewer if it weren’t for those gorram Republicans!’
Even if we do buy into that premise that Obama did all that he could to avert doomsday, that still doesn’t excuse setting up the Democratic Party towards a path of short-term and medium-term fuck-ups. There’s a reason why so many entries on the ‘worst Presidents EVER’ lists appear suspiciously sandwiched between Polk and Grant.
The sorry truth is that they are screwed and its probably far too late to prevent the inevitable. At this point I’m far more concerned about inlanders. I just don’t see that enough Americans give enough of a shit about climate change to prevent future disaster. That’s something I’m not optimistic about whereas I do believe we’ll make progress in other areas.
You do know that 40% of American live near the coast, right? That’s one fuck-huge sunken cost you’re handwaving. And I remain extremely pessimistic about the ability to affect any kind of meaningful social change in the kind of environment where we’re permanently evacuating New York City and San Diego and have to find homes for millions of new people — inlanders or no.
I do.. and I think they are all screwed. I do not have faith in the American people or our government to act in such a manner that will prevent catastrophic climate change here. My point about inlanders was meant to be facetious. We’re just as screwed as the coastals, just a bit slower.
If you get your way, you’ll see your folly when you’re 52 and there will be far fewer resources left to work with to change things back around where they are today and even today wouldn’t be good enough for what you and others really want and need.
Thanks, Mom. I’ll keep your platitude in mind when the time doesn’t come.
Drew J Jones either apparently thinks that climate change is just going to go away, that the consequences won’t be so bad, or that a pro-fracking neoliberal incrementalist who’s not projected to have a friendly Congress is going to make a major positive difference.
The time will come if we remain on the course that we’re on. You’d have to be downright foolish to think otherwise.
German industry will be holding all the patents for renewable grid technology, not the US.
Damn you’re condescending.
I felt a bit bad about my earlier post, but not now.
You’re going to hate your future…
“Some of us are going to have to deal with an underwater Florida for thirty-plus years — and we won’t have the luxury of expiring a few months before shit really hits the fan. “
True Story, I heard this when I was a grad student:
A very prominent physicist (I’ve forgotten who, but he was a biggie) wrote a letter to the President signed by a lot of physicists. Many nuclear factors ( fusion cross-sections) were unknown and tentatively calculated. There was a chance, estimated around 10%, that Castle Bravo (google it) exploding in the Bikini lagoon would ignite a thermonuclear reaction in the seawater that would turn the entire Pacific Ocean into a huge hydrogen bomb that would split the earth like a melon and destroy all life. The Army (and probably Edward Teller) said that was nonsense. The President OK’d the test. Luckily, the prominent physicist was wrong but so were the consensus physicists. The bomb was much more powerful than predicted, showing they only had rough idea of the cross sections and the minority physicists could well have been right.
The moral? Politicians will do as they damn well please and ignore doom saying by even prominent scientists. If you live in Florida, break out your scuba gear, because nothing will be done until a seawall is needed for downtown DC. And even then Republicans will be saying that it’s a problem best handled by private industry.
….it’s a problem best handled by private industry
And there will be a standard tax from every citizen for 99 yrs. Failure to meet agreed minimums will trigger organ donation clause.
just kidding…
Voice the reason that Edward Teller would have poo pooed the idea a thermo nuclear blast could cause the hydrogen in the sea water to go thermo-nuclear.
The reason is simple, in very controlled conditions they had never been able to get simple hydrogen atoms to under go fusion, like it does in the sun or any other star.
Never, in very controlled conditions where the fuel was pure hydrogen in plasma state, not bound up with a much larger oxygen atom as in sea water. The oceans do not have the hydrogen fuel both pure enough and concentrated enough to produce fusion.
All fusion reactions on earth require either deuterium or tritium.
Deuterium is hydrogen with one neutron and occurs in nature, even sea water. To wit;
Tritium does not exist in nature on earth. All the tritium that ever has exist on earth was made by humans. Mostly by bombarding Lithium-deuterium (LiD) with neutrons. It has a half life of 10 years.
Since no tritium existed and deuterium existed in far too small amounts to allow any continuous chain reaction of fusion to consume the hydrogen of the oceans into a planet destroying catastrophe.
I have a small amount of experience from my time in the service, and a layman’s knowledge of the processes involved. I can understand why Teller held the views he did.
PS: if Castle Bravo was going to set off the oceans,
Ivy Mike would have already done so, (google it)
Both were full fusion reactions about 190 miles apart in the Marshall Islands.
Ivy Mike on Enewetak Atoll on November 1, 1952
Castle Bravo at Bikini Atoll on March 1, 1954
Teller had very good reasons for his views no serious threat of the entire planets destruction at the time of the test.
The point was that the science was NOT clear at that time. It’s clear NOW, but not back then. Yes, proton-proton fusion is much more difficult than thought (lower cross section).
You may be right about it being Ivy Mike. It was told to us as “the first H-bomb test in water”. I looked up the date to see who was president, thought it was Harry Truman, Eisenhower was the President at the time of the test, but the letter could have been written several years earlier, so I’m unsure. November 1952 was definitely Truman.
clear enough for those who built it, to feel certain they were right, which they were.
“I have a small amount of experience from my time in the service, and a layman’s knowledge of the processes involved.” I respect that, but remind you that I was a physics graduate student at University of Maryland when I heard this. And a classmate was working on magnetic containment.
so
Got a better idea on how that could have been done? Short of spending decades plotting one’s presidential bid and buying off the competition. But that would have led to Sanders being no better than the other DEMs because he too would have been bought off.
Sanders is only in the race because the DEM party has become so corrupted that nobody dared to challenge Ms. Inevitable who has a long record of getting big things wrong. Ordinary liberals haven’t heard an authentic liberal voice that can articulate and properly frame the issues in so long that they mistake the Clintons and their rightwing policies for liberals. Molly Ivins didn’t, but she was smarter and better informed than ordinary DEMs.
Get on down off your high horse. It’s the DEM machine that’s the problem and not Sanders who is doing his best and his best beats the hell out of anything we’ve seen in over fifty years.
ground. She is a strong populist voice but she also has built good relationships with her colleagues. She has campaigned for them. She doesn’t paint the entire party as corrupt.
Warren is not perfect either, however. Her foreign policy stance scares me, she has a mixed record on the environment, and her interactions with GMO firms worry me. So I don’t see her a being the person that would shake up the current system enough to stem the systemic rot we currently have. In any case, by she time she gets a chance to be in such a position, I think it will be too late.
I think she would be awesome if put in charge of finance regulation or economic issues. But beyond that I would have to see a better record than she has shown so far.
She is good on her issue–economy and finance. Pretty conventional Dem otherwise, as far as I have seen.
Agree, but cut her some slack because she hasn’t studied other issues to any extent and hasn’t had a need to do so. Had she been in office in 2002 would she (like HRC) not have read the NIE? Tend to doubt that and combined with her ability to connect dots and reach logical conclusions, seems more likely to me that she wouldn’t have voted for the IWR.
So little legislation is moving, it is hard to evaluate.
To a degree I agree with you, but she has taken some pretty strong foreign policy positions (as an example), which if she didn’t study before taking them, worries me.
Treasury Secretary maybe? Or awesome FED chairman.
Yes, Elizabeth Warren as chair of the Senate Banking Committee with a compatible Democratic chair of the House Banking Committee would be in her best environment. After she gets done what needs to be done there, one might appoint her to some higher office only when the Democratic majority in Congress is not at issue.
Warren has been a politician for all of four years. She’s great, but she wouldn’t be racking up DEM endorsements if she’d jumped into the race against HRC. (If you recall, it wasn’t the DEM party elites that initiated Warren’s run against Scott Brown — Brown was easier for them to work with than Warren.) Hell, DWS just handed a big FU to Warren with DWS’ support for payday lenders.
She would have won African American votes in the South?
Got any evidence for that?
There is a type of liberal most comfortable pissing on other liberals efforts at change.
The idea that the various pundits – none of whom say Bernie doing close to this well – have anything of merit to offer is absurd.
” The other half is that the superdelegates are overwhelmingly opposed to his candidacy. He needed a plan to prevent that from happening. “
He couldn’t have a plan to prevent that because the essence of his campaign is democracy. It’s like saying Lenin should have had a plan to win the Czar over to his side. He’s gate-crashing. WINNING IS NOT EVERYTHING! ETHICS IS EVERYTHING! Otherwise we are just rats fighting over the garbage.
That’s an interesting comment, because Bernie Sanders sure doesn’t behave like someone who set out on a physically and emotionally demanding campaign telling himself “this is all just symbolic; I’m a sacrificial offering.”
Ethics is not everything in politics, just as it is not everything in any social movement. Name your greatest hero who actually won something big for Americans. Did they not step on some toes, caused some resentments, were charged with corruption and other unethical/immoral behavior?
My hero is Martin Luther King. He was charged with all of these things. I’d concede he was guilty of some of them; others would claim he was guilty of all of them. You don’t wield and exercise power without getting people angry. It doesn’t reduce the greatness of the man, or the rightness and success and power and tangible results of the movement he led, not one bit.
Purity doesn’t build a national movement. Never has.
You’re saying MLK sold out to The Man? That he was unethical? Yhat winning personal power was everything to him?
“Look, I understand the sentiment that the system is rotten and the game is rigged.”
Loathe to give credit to Drumpf, especially as he sets up shop three doors down from where I type at this moment, but taking advantage of this prevalent voter sentiment is smart and ruthless. In this case, it’s the Republicans establishment who are holding on to a meaningless set of rules and a flimsy sense of fairness.
Superdelegates what a concept for a party that claims to value each and every vote. The problem is not with Sanders. Anyone care to explain how this concept supports a process of fair and impartial public voting?
I am just a layman, to me it appears a way to stack the votes the way a party elites wants it to go and that is not something I for one supports.
Samantha Bee has a pretty good take on it: https://youtu.be/XtuWiHYmr4U
Huh, didn’t link properly. Let’s try again. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XtuWiHYmr4U
Until the primary of 2016, I didn’t realize that the Republican superdelegates comprise 7% of the total delegates and that these supers have to vote the way the state voted. Dem superdelegates comprise a much larger % and can vote the way that want. I am certainly not endorsing Republicans, but it gave me pause for thought. My bad that I didn’t know.
Have Democratic Party Superdelegates ever exhibited veto control over the pledged delegates at a Party convention? Have they even considered it?
Is is at all probable that this will take place in 2016, or would take place in any future year, under current circumstances?
Who is winning the race for pledged delegates in the Democratic Party primary? Who is extremely likely to take the majority of pledged Delegates in the final tally?
Which campaign is currently seeking to flip Superdelegates in their attempt to overcome the almost certain final outcome of the pledged Delegate race?
Can almost all Superdelegates be made accountable to rank-and-file Democrats thru primary elections if their actions during a POTUS primary was strongly opposed by an organized group of voters in their Districts or States?
Trying to identify the real problem here.
Your reply doesn’t fully address my comment. My point was that the huge number of Democratic superdelegates who do not have to vote the way their state voted, is more undemocratic than the Republican superdelegate situation. Why do we have Democratic as a party label, if we are not being democratic? In terms of a political philosophy, there is a big contradiction.
Thanks for the clarification. Here’s the best explanation I’ve heard:
http://www.npr.org/2016/03/23/471563611/the-mind-boggling-story-of-our-arcane-and-convoluted-primary
-politics
“GROSS: Now, we will talk about a brokered convention and what that would mean, but first I want to talk with you about superdelegates. It turns out you were on the commission that created superdelegates. You’ve served as a superdelegate. You’re still serving as a superdelegate for Hillary Clinton so you know how this process works. Like, what is – why were superdelegates created?
KAMARCK: When the process of nominating candidates moved to – on the Democratic side – moved to a completely open process where anybody who wanted to run for delegate could go to a county convention, bring a lot of friends and run for delegate. When that happened, it was – it had its positive aspects. We really opened up the Democratic Party. But at the highly contested 1980 convention between President Carter and Ted Kennedy, there was a lot of uncertainty and chaos, and one of the things people realized was that the leaders of the party – the governors, the senators and the Congressmen who also run on the same ticket as the presidential nominee were not there. They were not on the floor of the convention helping to lead and shape and discuss the future of the party. So in 1982, the Hunt Commission was formed, and what the Hunt Commission decided was that they needed to get these people back into the convention but under the new rules…
GROSS: In other words, to give party leadership a say in what was going on?
KAMARCK: Yeah, they needed to give the party leaders a say because under the new rules, a member of Congress was not going to go into a district convention and run against his constituents, right? It was just not something politically they were going to do. So in order to get them there, you basically made them automatic delegates to the convention, and in the years since 1984, they have never – and this I think is important – they have never changed the outcome of the public portion of the process. They have always gone along – whoever had the most delegates elected in primaries going into the convention, that’s also where the superdelegates went.
…
GROSS: This is FRESH AIR, and if you’re just joining us, we’re talking about primary politics, which is the title of the new book by my guest Elaine Kamarck. She teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of government.
She’s a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, and she’s been a superdelegate. And she was on the commission that helped create superdelegates in the Democratic Party.”
The whole interview is worthwhile.
Perhaps even more to your point:
“GROSS:…Because of the superdelegates, you can virtually lose a primary in a state but walk away with more delegates.
KAMARCK: Yeah, but that’s kind of unusual. I mean, you’d have to – it has to be a kind of small – first, a small state. It has to be a small but very, very Democratic state, OK? I mean, that’s – that’s kind of a difficult scenario. I’m sure it could happen, but that’s sort of a difficult scenario.
The superdelegates in the Democratic Party are about 12 percent of the convention. In the Republican Party, all the Republican National Committee people are superdelegates. And they’re, I think, 5 or 6 percent of the convention. So the Republicans have superdelegates, too. They’re just smaller – a smaller number.
One of the things to kind of remember is that prior to 1968, every single nominating convention we had was composed of superdelegates. In other words, people got to go to the convention by virtue of their role in some leadership capacity, even if it was, you know, a county chairman.
People got to go to the convention because of their role in the party. And this business of superdelegates is, again, a kind of reflection of the fact that this is a funny system because it’s still a system that in the end is run by the political parties, not by the public.
GROSS: But the candidate convinces a superdelegate to side with them, right? I mean, the…
KAMARCK: Yeah, but remember…
GROSS: They’re not neutral in this.
KAMARCK: No, they’re not. Sometimes they stay neutral to the end. Sometimes they shift. In 2008, Hillary Clinton started out with most of the superdelegates. And as Obama won primaries and picked up public delegates, the superdelegates started to shift to Obama. And in the end, all the superdelegates voted for Obama. So, you know, the superdelegates simply are not bound by their state results. That doesn’t mean that they don’t pay attention to their state results.
I mean, if you’re a member of Congress and one candidate wins your congressional district overwhelmingly, you better have a good reason to go to the convention and vote for the candidate who lost your district ’cause some of your voters are going to say, huh, what are you doing?
GROSS: In 1984, you were Democrat Walter Mondale’s director for delegate selection when he was running. And I’d like you to describe the process for delegate selection. How does that work? How do you become a delegate?
KAMARCK: Well, there’s two different stages. So one – the stage we are in now frankly is the stage where a state decides, either through a caucus system or more usually through a primary system, how they’re going to award delegates to presidential candidates. So when you see these delegate counts now in the newspaper – you know, Trump has so many, Hillary has so many – those are largely numbers without people (laughter) OK? They’re just allocations.
Beginning now, but really intensifying in April, May and June, states will have a variety of different systems. The most common one is that the Republicans and the Democrats will hold a congressional district convention. And people who want to be delegate will file with the party ’cause remember this is a party process. They’ll file with the party and then they will go to the congressional district convention, bring in as many of their friends as they possibly can and there’s another vote which will determine which delegates actually get to go. And then there will be state conventions or state executive committee meetings. And they will elect another group of delegates called at-large delegates. So it’s like – it’s like there’s the – first, there’s the big election, the primary. And then there’s a whole series of small party-run elections that actually elect the people who fill those delegate slots.
GROSS: Does the primary system make any sense to you at all?
KAMARCK: Well (laughter) it does…
GROSS: I mean, seriously, it’s just so arcane and so complicated. I believe very, very few people understand it. We’re not directly voting for a candidate. We don’t know who the delegates are going to be. They’re selected after we’ve voted for a candidate.
KAMARCK: Yes (laughter).
GROSS: You know, it just seems, like, messy, confusing and very indirect.
KAMARCK: Well, it’s because it is a hybrid system, you see? It’s a system that still has the same aspects that it had for over a hundred years here it was a completely – or basically almost completely closed system that was run only by the party. And then after the Democrats reformed their rules between 1968 and 1972, the Democratic reforms were geared towards opening up participation in the party. And what happened then was that lots of states decided to hold primaries, not caucuses, because it was easier and that you would have more participation. And those primaries became binding.
You see, in the old days, you could win a primary and the state party would select delegates committed to somebody else. The classic example there is 1952 when Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee won almost every single primary. He went into the 1952 convention and the delegates selected Adlai Stevenson to be their standardbearer.
That wouldn’t happen today. Nobody would sweep the primaries and then give the convention – the convention turn around and give it to somebody else unless there were kind of extraordinary circumstances. But the system now is a hybrid, which has a lot of aspects of the old-fashioned system. If we were starting from scratch, yeah, we’d probably have a different system (laughter) but this evolves from history.”
I agree with your sentiment. But it is evidently true that neither Trump nor Sanders really took the rules into account. The best you can say is Sanders thought he could ( and still does) entice the SD away. Hell of a way to run a primary nominating process. But the party is a private club and evidently can make up any rules they want. They can cover up this neat little scheme as a way to keep the bad guys out. But 718 SD in a race for 2300 or majority? Wow! No wonder there are so few serious candidates. The elites have succeeded.
IMHO, superdelegates should only get to vote if no candidate has anything near a majority or a consensus candidate doesn’t appear after some large number of ballots. Say we have a five person race and the front runner has 30% and the others split the rest. Can we say a 30% candidate is the people’s choice?
OTOH if one candidate has 45%, the second candidate has 40% and a third has 15%, then the 45% candidate is the People’s choice which should not be overturned, no matter how much the pros hate him/her. And CERTAINLY if one candidate has 52% and a second had 48%, “older and wiser” pols should not overturn the process and crown the loser.
…is pragmatic and ruthless enough to navigate our rotten system and then have the leadership abilities to lead it once they’ve taken control of it.
Hmm, billmon’s twitter feed today discusses just that sort of person (or couple) best described by that phrase, imo.
Don’t think the names will surprise you.
One he should storify.
A response to Tom Hayden’s roll over on his back?
Haven’t read Hayden’s piece, but he was never impressive as a progressive liberal; so, not surprising to me that he could be captured by the Clinton vortex.
Wow.
The number of actually-existing progressive liberals is evidently asymptotically approaching zero…
Fucking SERIOUSLY.
I’ve discovered just this week that Senator Warren doesn’t measure up with many here. A couple of weeks ago, Senator Brown was labeled a real disappointer as well.
I want names from these people. Who makes the cut today? Let me guess, Senator Merkley and Congressmember Gabbard? Hmmm…
OK, let’s hear more…anybody? Citations? Qualifications?
The primaries will soon be over. November will provide clarity. No movement worth its salt rests or stops thinking of fresh ways to gain and exercise power, regardless of electoral results.
Yes, Fucking SERIOUSLY.
I find it amazing that people can’t understand why some posters here find that 90 plus percent of the current politicians in the Democratic party don’t measure up.
I’ve been told too many fucking times “don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good”. We are told to have faith, to believe. Well I don’t on either count. Following such a policy has gotten us to the sorry state of affairs we are currently in. The state of affairs where there is a real possibility that the US will not exist in another 30 years, at least not in any form we would recognize.
That is why I am tired of accepting half measures. It hasn’t worked out, and it never will.
We get Bernie elected President. Then what?
It appears that there are only two of the 538 members of Congress who measure up. President Sanders can’t move his agenda, the movement gets frustrated, and Bernie becomes the latest disappointment and SELLOUT. ‘Bout November 2017, people are talking about how it’s Bernie’s fault that we’re about to get clobbered in the midterms. Not the voters, no. Time to sort through the real heroes to see who we want to primary Bernie’s ass in 2020. Demonstrations in front of the White House.
That’s the picture being painted here.
We need a better plan. Maybe we can discuss it rationally. Irrational plans may seem more responsive to the dire moment, but they won’t work and will lead to disengagement.
Then he moves forward as best he can.
I don’t expect much help initially from the legislative branch. But a lot can be done via executive order, as we are finding out with Obama as he is finally pushing things through and not worrying about what the GOP thinks. So I don’t feel Sanders’ movement will be totally frustrated: if he actually tries for change, does what he can via executive order, and continues to push forward publicly people will still support him and won’t feel he is a sellout. These are things Obama failed to do. Doing this will also take care of the midterms. Do I guarantee this will happen? Of course not. But I will guarantee Clinton will make no attempt to change the status quo.
There is a better plan. But it is immediately dismissed as unicorn farts and rainbows. And the fact that you think such plans are irrational makes it clear you are not ready for a real, rational discussion.
I do not believe a movement that pushed Bernie into the White House fueled on anger/disappointment at nearly every single national politician and institution would be satiated by executive orders. Not if they’ve been promised revolution.
That’s the challenge, a challenge very well observed by the descent of many activists’ belief in President Obama and his Congressional partners, observed keenly on this very thread.
I’ll go further.
any movement based on the above, and fed on distortion and hypocrisy, is doomed to failure. It will simply burn itself up.
But also, those people who sink to their baser instincts are susceptible to grifters and charlatans. You can absolutely see THAT on this site right now.
.
Can you point to the aspects of distortion and hypocrisy that will doom this movement to failure? Another grand statement but no evidence to back it up.
Well, if you are talking about Drumpf supporters I agree with you. But if you think that is what drives Sanders supporters I can see why you are having a hard time understanding where some of us are coming from.
And to be honest, all I see is a lot of people shouting past each other. Myself included.
So why, exactly, are the left-of-center people putting their faith in someone who earned their fortune influence-peddling from organizations that are hurting the country, promoted fracking, is a self-described friend of Kissinger, approved record-breaking arms sales to developing nations, voted to expand the powers of the police state with the PATRIOT Act, and salivated over wars/coups in Iraq, Syria, Libya, and Honduras?
The Democratic Party leadership is already wallowing in liberal hypocrisy with its near-unanimous choice of frontrunner, and you’re worried that Bernie Sanders is building a movement based on distortion and hypocrisy?
Bernie Sanders might become an ineffectual sell-out. Hillary Clinton’s leftist betrayal is certain. Pardon me for wanting to take a chance on likely disillusionment rather than giving into disillusionment early and avoiding the rush.
And you base this on what, exactly? I’m open to this being a flaw in my position but I’ll need more than what you are providing.
Obama is a poor example, as he did nothing I pointed to as a way to satisfy the movement.
The ACA, Dodd-Frank, saving us from a second Great Depression with the largest economic stimulus package in the history of the United States, DAPA/DACA, 196-country agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rejection of Keystone, holding 6-nation talks together to get the Iran nuclear deal, LGBTQ rights, Lily Ledbetter, the restoration of a sane but imperfect foreign policy, much better regulatory agencies (particularly the NLRB), much better Cabinet departments (particularly the Labor Department), getting re-elected under adverse circumstances, rescue of the Judiciary from the Federalist Society stranglehold, all this being accomplished in the face of the most monolithic opposition Caucuses ever, much much more…
…here’s a fresh update and historical comparative discussion from some worthwhile people:
http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2016/03/obamas-legacy
I would add that Obama’s Presidency has left the Republican Party’s Presidential ambitions terrifically broken in 2016, with poor demographic fundamentals for POTUS elections in 2020 and beyond.
Let’s try this one: I am certain I will not get any disagreement here, even from the most demanding among us, that Obama’s record is the best of a President in the last half-century. Yet he is viewed here as having done nothing to satisfy the movement.
Yep, I think that summarizes a problem within the Movement, all right. We can recognize all that remains to be done and recognize all that has been done.
The primary will end soon. Good news.
A lot of hyperventilating, too. As if criticism in certain areas precludes any agreement in others….
In the current political climate, this actually happens fairly often. So no, I don’t think it is hyperventilating.
It is people realizing that time is running out and we no longer have the luxury of taking the slow approach.
Said it before, and I’ll say it again:
Beware populism.
It is not an ideology. It is inherently a vile, us-against-them attitude that latches on to and poisons ideologies.
Whereas taking six figure speaking fees from people you are going to be regulating is the purest form of ideology?
More a function of the institutions and the times than of the personalities and commitments. The frustration from the left who remember when FDR’s policies were lionized and defended as a matter of course has done some serious damage. Several items in particular drive progressive/liberals nuts:
From 2006 to 2010, the word most often used for Democrats in Washington (and it could have been used in state legislatures as well) was “feckless”.
That sense still persists and has become intensified into anger in the past six years.
And to some, the question: Why has so much effort by so many produced so little effect? gets answered by the statement that Democrats have been bought off to “look good trying.”
None of the Democratic primary candidates have distinguished themselves in action as these situations unfolded, with this one exception. Bernie Sanders used the necessity of his vote to get funding for community health centers authorized in the Affordable Care Act. None of the other quid pro quo’s at the last minute amounted to much and most were gimme’s for special interests. Do you understand how much community health centers mean to rural communities and urban and now a number of suburban neighborhoods that are effectively healthcare deserts? Clinton at this point was Secretary of State. Sanders used the fact that the bill stood of failed on his vote, as on every other vote of the Democratic caucus to do something instead of to stop something. An illustration of the art of the possible that was mostly lost to Democrats.
The inordinate focus on the primary wars distracts progressive liberals from asking where the candidates for future elections are going to come from. Putting a quarter of the energy and attention into building the bench would bring more returns in a shorter time than all the revetting of Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders.
I remember this: Bernie Sanders used the necessity of his vote to get funding for community health centers authorized in the Affordable Care Act.
Has been a godsend for poors in states that refused Medicaid expansion.
Good comment until this:
You continue to dismiss how the DNC and DEM elites have squelched the development, accomplishments, and promotion of progressive liberals for decades. Bill Clinton was appalled by Gore’s use of populism in his 2000 campaign because it was contrary to WJC’s administration. It was also a divergence from Gore’s years of being within the DLC fold, but a return to his political roots.
We’ve seen who the Clintons champion for advancement in the DEM party. The Rahms, Wasserman-Shultz, Weiners, Cuomos, etc. That’s the major logjam and it will remain fully functioning if HRC wins. Right now they are actively trying to take out Edwards in MD and Sestak in PA.
The only path to a shorter term reversal is the riveting attention on the DEM primary that could lead to Sanders winning the nomination. In the medium term if Sanders loses, it’s still the only path because all the attention is going to inspire some younger people to run and they might just inspire Sanders supporters to join their effort because the forces against them both intra and inter-party remain huge, but some are going to make it because they’ve seen that it’s not an impossible task.
Absent “glue” there’s nothing little that can be done at the local level. That glue is what have been missing for a very long time and nobody has offered anything like glue when espousing a focus on local elections. Liberals that could and would help don’t have the time, energy, and money to reinvent the wheel all on their own. Something more and larger is required. Too soon to tell if the Sanders campaign can be that something, but everyday he stay in the race and continues to build on what has been accomplished so far is another day closer to keep this movement alive for a few candidates this year and more in the next election cycle.
I’m well aware how the Democratic establishments from the DNC on down through the permanent red state state party establishments has squashed any local movements to change a failing system. Most attempts of change local parties start ad hoc and wilt at the first intra-party fight. Being prepared and going to win precinct-by-losing precinct and county-by-losing county until those precincts and counties start winning because progressive policies deliver now seems more significant than John Aravosis getting exercised that some Bernie support said the words “Democratic whore”. (A fit description of Max Baucus or Kent Conrad to my mind.)
The “glue” problem is a serious one, but those who don’t have time, energy, and money are likely not to want to risk an insurgent run. Getting a way to engage people who are not the attend-three-meetings-a-night sort.
The something more is a wider understanding of how the backside of the system operates and what must be done to change it to allow more change and more accountability.
The money problem is overrated. There are only a few purposes for money and those become necessary mainly for legitimizing and identifying the GOTV local staff for them and turning out more volunteers.
The actual precinct structures, where they exist, are pure fraternity politics in style when there are entrenched people who are doing nothing involved. Dislodging them requires organizing numbers.
It’s funny.
But it’s already happening.
The Sanders campaign people are very different from the Dean people. Everyone I have spoken to (at this point in Iowa, New Hampshire, Mass, VT, and NY) knows this is about the long hall.
Read this.
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/865648816/Utah-activists-rally-for-Bernie-Sanders.html?pg=all
You need an inspiration that only a presidential campaign can provide. And an activist community with the endurance to do the work.
What is interesting is how irrelevant blogsphere is to this group.
Wrong link. This is the right one:
http://www.sltrib.com/home/3706288-155/bernie-backers-targeting-clinton-supporters-in-utah-legislati
ve
It is interesting in all of the conversations I read.
Very few notice one simple fact: the only American politicians with favorables close to 50% are Obama and Sanders.
A curious person might ask why that is, and why Clinton is so disliked.
Nah – lets piss on Bernie some more.
Let’s give the GOP a quarter century to create a narrative about Bernie, and see how he’s doing then.
25 years of screeching about Clinton has certainly convinced the ‘liberals’ here that she must be up to something.
.
This is, incidentally, exactly what I meant by ressentiment. Liberal/leftist anti-Clinton supporters give many, many reasons why they don’t support Hillary Clinton (my biggest one is that she shows no interest or potential in breaking Congressional logjam) but HRC supporters continually tell themselves that many liberals’ low opinion of her stem from attacks popular in the MSM and Republican-verse.
You know, a couple of years ago I used to have a great big belly laugh at how the Republican Party was so ressentiment-poisoned (by way of Palin, by way of the Tea Party, currently by way of Trump) that it was impacting their ability to correctly judge the mettle of their enemies, allies, and skeptics. After seeing that same impulse curdle in the rhetoric of Clinton supporters, I’m not fucking laughing now.
That’s, uhm, NOT actually an argument to vote for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders. Quite the opposite, actually.
I’m continually amazed at how many Democrats hold so much seething resentment — no, ressentiment — about GOP CTs and MSM condescension from that era. Okay, so Clinton is tarnished by unfair attacks from the media and GOP. So what? Why should anyone who isn’t interested in refighting old battles from the 90s support her because of that?
Wow?
You really though Hayden was a Sanders supporter? He is another one of these people who have claimed for months to be a Sanders supporter, until now when for various reasons his campaign is “distasteful / nasty / mean / insert you word of choice here”.
I find the timing of all of these Sanders “supporters” now coming out stating they will be voting for Clinton to be very…interesting. While Sanders still has a hard road ahead, if he is actually able to pull of a victory in NY, Clinton has a serious, serious problem. It seems like all these last minute confessionals are designed to provide a steady drumbeat in the MSM and social media about how Sanders isn’t what he claims – don’t vote for him!
Ratfucking indeed.
It was kinda weird when it came down to his stated reasons. As if Sanders or Clinton were likely to be substantially different on the two subjects. In fact, Sanders is more absolutist on abortion that Hillary–Jewish tradition there, imo. And minorities? What do they have to fear from Sanders? Curious.
He’s one of the evil “old white males”. Three strikes, you know.
My opinion of Tom Hayden isn’t based on anything he’s done or not done in the last year.
Hayden I have little use for. The guy sat in a anti-air craft gun in Hanoi.
But then I have never been part of the Chomsky left.
You point being once he became a politician he was rather forgettable, as opposed to when he was a left/activist?
That makes sense – I didn’t get it at first.
Reuters — Crowd cheers as presidential candidate Sanders drops in on picket line
Billmon’s tweet:
LOL
Please tell me this was satire…
It’s Billmon — but would be difficult not to read as satire regardless of who wrote it.
Billmon is on fire right now – of that there is no doubt.
He was always so long winded in the dkos days – it is kind of funny to see him try to put it all in twitter.
Yet he makes it work.
And where was Hillary? Panhandling a campaign contribution from Verizon execs?
Before 1968, pretty much all delegates were unbound super delegates. That is why nominating conventions existed–to choose the nominee. FDR was chosen on the fourth ballot because he struck a deal with John Nance, House Speaker. If some of the sentiments I’m seeing expressed here are correct, the most impactful president of the twentieth century was apparently the product of corrupt insider dealings. Of course, one could also look at things another way: he was a good politician who knew building alliances and brokering deals–politics–was part of the job.
Wonder what he would have been without Francis Perkins and Eleanor? His dual backbone, imo.
And he not only chose both of those women, but defied his mother in the choice of his wife and had to beg Perkins to join his administration.
And LBJ??? If you ever read Robert Caro…what a snake pit his id was. How DID he overcome that and do the things he did?
Not a progressive, though – not really.
Was a typical bidness Texas Dem for that period. Nothing approaching a neoliberal, however. Have you read Caro?
Nevermind. You are not serious, I see.
Somehow, despite progressives, unbought and un-bossed, being self-evidently right on the issues, and in tune with the vast majority of the American people, in the last 100 years no true progressive has ever been elected President, only a literal handful have ever been elected to the Senate, and maybe enough for two softball teams have been elected to the House.
Must be the false consciousness. The alternative explanation is impossible.
Engels on false consciousness
He’s never serious.
Well, sure, LBJ didn’t engender any unhappiness from the Left during his Presidency. Everybody in the Movement was 1000% happy with all Lyndon’s tremendous legislative and foreign policy accomplishments. If we only had the level of progressive/liberal solidarity in the last year of Obama’s Presidency that we had in the last year of LBJ’s presidency!
LBJ WAS a neocon by present definitions and that is why he got in trouble.
There is a difference.
Or maybe you were just looking for a reaction?
Don’t waste your time debating that person who doesn’t seem to know that LBJ was a New Dealer and responded appropriately to civil rights leaders. He also nominated the great Thurgood Marshall to the SCOTUS. (Now that one makes BHO’s Garland nomination look truly pathetic.)
We could discuss the fact that major health care reform was a major legislative task which had been left not fully accomplished by Presidents and Congresses going back to the Truman Administration, and that President Obama and the 111th busied themselves rescuing us from a second Great Depression, and have helped deliver us to our highly imperfect but stabilized job market of today. There are many other things to reflect upon, such as our imperfect but stabilized foreign policy.
We need to elect more and better leaders as often as possible as long as possible. Mischaracterizing our accomplishments and the motivations of our leaders leads to disengagement leads to depressed turnout. We are as collectively responsible as the Democratic Party for setting the mood and empowerment of the electorate. Talking smack gets us nowhere, and if we managed to elect a President Sanders, the smack talking would deliver Bernie’s Administration into an abyss right away.
“rescuing us ” No, rescuing Wall Street fat cats.
Unemployment rate, June 2009: 9.5%
Unemployment rate, March 2016: 5.0%
Net job gains and losses by month
United States
2008
September 2008 – 432,000 jobs lost
October 2008 – 489,000 jobs lost
November 2008 – 803,000 jobs lost
December 2008 – 661,000 jobs lost
2009
January 2009 – 818,000 jobs lost
February 2009 – 724,000 jobs lost
March 2009 – 799,000 jobs lost
April 2009 – 692,000 jobs lost
May 2009 – 361,000 jobs lost
June 2009 – 482,000 jobs lost
July 2009 – 339,000 jobs lost
August 2009 – 231,000 jobs lost
September 2009 – 199,000 jobs lost
October 2009 – 202,000 jobs lost
November 2009 – 64,000 jobs created
December 2009 – 109,000 jobs lost
2010
January 2010 – 40,000 jobs lost
February 2010 – 35,000 jobs lost
March 2010 – 189,000 jobs created
April 2010 – 239,000 jobs created
May 2010 – 516,000 jobs created
June 2010 – 167,000 jobs lost
July 2010 – 58,000 jobs lost
August 2010 – 51,000 jobs lost
September 2010 – 27,000 jobs lost (According to U.S. Labor Department, 64,000 private sector jobs are added but a net loss of 95,000 jobs are due to government layoffs, mainly census workers)
October 2010 – 220,000 jobs created (Private sector jobs net increase)
November 2010 – 121,000 jobs created
December 2010 – 120,000 jobs created
2011
January 2011 – 110,000 jobs created
February 2011 – 220,000 jobs created
March 2011 – 246,000 jobs created
April 2011 – 251,000 jobs created
May 2011 – 54,000 jobs created
June 2011 – 84,000 jobs created
July 2011 – 96,000 jobs created
August 2011 – 85,000 jobs created
September 2011 – 202,000 jobs created
October 2011 – 112,000 jobs created
November 2011 – 157,000 jobs created
December 2011 – 223,000 jobs created
2012
January 2012 – 275,000 jobs created
February 2012 – 259,000 jobs created
March 2012 – 143,000 jobs created
April 2012 – 68,000 jobs created
May 2012 – 87,000 jobs created
June 2012 – 45,000 jobs created
July 2012 – 181,000 jobs created
August 2012 – 142,000 jobs created
September 2012 – 114,000 jobs created
October 2012 – 225,000 jobs created
November 2012 – 203,000 jobs created
December 2012 – 214,000 jobs created
Would like to see those mythical hires. Everyone knows the unemployment figures are rigged by saying the long term unemployed don’t really want jobs.
OTOH, all the fast food places have signs that they are hiring. But who wants a part time job at $8.25?
The 1099 economy.
This is almost exactly what the craziest right wingnuts say on Fox News and write on Free Republic and broadcast on Hate Talk Radio.
Because it’s a real problem. Getting real sick of all politicians.
Median family income:
2006-01-01 56598
2007-01-01 57357
2008-01-01 55313
2009-01-01 54925
2010-01-01 53507
2011-01-01 52690
2012-01-01 52605
2013-01-01 54462
2014-01-01 53657
https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/data/MEHOINUSA672N.txt
Which Party’s policies are, by far, most responsible for the hollowing out of decent income for all people, working or not?
Additional questions: is President Obama primarily responsible for the undermining of income levels for working people in the two dozen right-to-work States? Which Party dominates in those States? The answers to these questions are partially dispositive to the national results you list here.
We will return to our corners in subsequent responses:
Frog Ponder: OBAMA AND THE DNC ARE RESPONSIBLE FOR TAKING BACK RED STATES!!
Me: We are responsible as well, and when we help people believe The Parties Are The Same, we make our work and the work of the President and DNC much more difficult.
Economic inequality and household debt went up under the Clinton administration, too.
I know that the standard dodge to that is ‘well, if the Democratic Party had more power then it would’ve been able to ward off being undermined by the GOP’. Okay, fair enough, so why are we continuing with a political strategy that enables GOP undermining? We’re not going to have Congress for the next four years and we’re going to fall even deeper in the statehouse hole by 2018.
If the Democratic Party is intentionally going with this strategy because they deeply and truly believe that this is the absolute best that they can do, then they need to communicate and more important act on this shit better. The people saying that we need to prepare for a long trench war against conservatives and corporations are not the Democratic Party elite. At least not if you believe that taking money from Lord Sandwich is incompatible with the message that the Royal Army needs to be battled at all costs.
During the Clinton Administration, both the national unemployment and poverty rates were at their lowest in the last 40 years, and median income also climbed at its highest rates during those decades.
When people are mystified how members of the Democratic coalition could possibly believe that the Clinton years were good for them, these facts are worth considering.
The Clinton YEARS were good for them. That doesn’t mean the Clinton POLICIES were good for them. Clinton was lucky to be elected at the bottom of a generation long economic cycle. It was broken by the rise of new technology. The Clinton policies didn’t destroy that rise, but caused the benefits to accrue to the 1% and Asia. It came home to roost with the bursting of the internet bubble.
I think Clinton can claim credit for the budget surplus, of which about 30% was a result of the ’93 tax increases.
The late 90’s were a product of the Fed (which allowed loose money even when it would have tightened in prior years), the Internet, which created an explosion in jobs, Y2K, which added to the IT boom, and some other factors. As you note, some of this was a cyclical recover, but Clinton helped at the margins I think.
When I ask a Clinton person specifically what did he actually DO to create the boom of the 90’s, I don’t get much reaction.
The problem with Clinton is the policies he pursued blew up after he took office. Financial Deregulation. Welfare Reform. China MFN. None of these had much effect in his term.
Alan Greenspan’s bubbles as much as anything produced that transient prosperity. Unlucky Bush got the tech bust in 2000. Remember the two drops of helicopter money he got to keep the economy from tanking? Even with all the stimulus of the war, Bernanke could not stave off the big one until Bush was out of office.
Both are at fault.
Clinton signed the MFN with China in ’99. Free trade was every bit a Democratic as much as a GOP policy.
https:/research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MANEMP
Manufacturing jobs in the US (in thousands)
2000-01-01 17284
2016-03-01 12291
Welfare reform hammered the aid to the poor.
That was a Clinton policy.
It doubled the number in extreme policy.
https:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2016/02/27/bernie-sanders-is-right-bill-clintons-welfare
-law-doubled-extreme-poverty
Right to work states don’t help, but unionization has been trending down everywhere. This is a result of increased globalization and the threat of offshoring production. Automation has also played a role.
Labor’s share of income was relatively static for decades. Since 2000 it has declined significantly.
http://www.epi.org/publication/the-decline-in-labors-share-of-corporate-income-since-2000-means-535-
billion-less-for-workers/
You want this to be partisan. Obama is miles better than the GOP.
But the systemic cause of income stagnation is a result of policies supported by both parties.
That is just a fact.
Please describe the POSITIVE policies that Hillary Clinton has proposed that are close to the scale of these problems.
Comparative total compensation for each working people is thousands of dollars less in right-to-work States than it is in the other States:
http://www.aflcio.org/Legislation-and-Politics/State-Legislative-Battles/Ongoing-State-Legislative-A
ttacks/Right-to-Work
http://www.epi.org/publication/right-to-work-states-have-lower-wages/
Union membership percentages in right-to-work states are much lower as well:
http://www.bls.gov/news.release,/union2.t05.htm
Membership is not trending up in States which have not chosen to stomp on their workers by passing RTW laws, but membership rates are more stable.
No POTUS candidate is proposing policies which would work at the scale necessary to solve all our problems. A wide gulf stands between the quality of the proposals of the Democratic and Republican candidates, and Sanders’ proposals in whole come closest to the scale.
Union membership has declined more due to the loss of manufacturing jobs that right to work laws, neither are good.
You have essentially admitted that Clinton will not measurably effect the trends causing income stagnation and inequality.
Which is a stunning indictment of her candidacy.
Many manufacturing jobs which have been moved were Union jobs, so yes, that has reduced Union membership. But it’s important to account for the fact that many of these jobs have remained in the U.S.; they’ve just been moved from Union-friendlier States to RTW states, smashing both Union and compensation levels for those same jobs.
Service work has taken a larger place in our job market. There is nothing about these jobs which define them as non-Union jobs. Rotten State laws and hostile NLRB and Labor Department officials, along with large employers willing to spend tons of money to defeat organizing efforts have been major factors in preventing new job sectors from becoming organized as the manufacturing section became from the ’30’s through the ’70’s.
While a half-dozen recalcitrant Senators, including my Senator Feinstein, presided over the death of EFCA in ’09-’10, Obama’s appointees to the Labor Department and NLRB have succeeded in turning them into pro-worker, anti-multinational corporation organizations, despite maximum monkeywrenching by Congressional Republicans and the Republican appointees to SCOTUS.
Re. your last two sentences, fladem, what I wrote does not match your summary of what I wrote. I’ll leave it at that.
Using median averaging is hiding how bad it has gotten for the lower deciles. The enormity of the top ones is shading the average up.
LBJ was the last New Deal Democrat to take office.
He is not by current definition a neo-con.
You think Welfare Reform would have happened under LBJ?
John Foster Dulles type…advocates the assertive promotion of democracy and United States national interest in international affairs including through military means.
I do not conflate neocon with neoliberal.
Though there is a long history of using State for pressing corporate advantage, neocons have generally not been associated with selling off the commons to corporates.
our own commons, that is.
fair enough.
LBJ was a masterful politician. No doubt about it.
Your comment is on the order of rationalizing AA voter disenfranchisement because before 1965 there was no federal means to prevent it. The twentieth century up through 1972 was to increase voter participation in choosing nominees and representatives. Beginning with the 17th Amendment that became effective in 1913. Took decades for the people to decide that they didn’t want nominees chosen in “smoke filled back rooms” by party power brokers.
Were Democratic voters allowed to weigh in on the party choosing to re-institute “super delegates” in 1984? Were they even informed of this change? It only began to become less opaque for DEM voters in general in 2008. And has become clearer this year because the SDs have been more obvious about putting their thumb on the scale. HRC supporters are applauding this rigged system and a lot of DEMs are appalled by it.
Yep. Kinda makes a mockery of the “wasted votes” argument they are so proud of that they are taking before the courts on gerrymandering issue.
About nothing. There is no indication that they will overturn the results of the pledged delegate race (which was first controversy that came up among some Sanders supporters after he resoundingly won NH) nor is there any indication that they will feel beholden to vote for whoever won their state (which is the argument the Sanders team is pushing now yet they gladly accept Grayson’s endersement even though Clinton won Florida).
The way I see it the SD’s are there in case the left has its version of Trump. As little as I support Sanders he isn’t the left’s Trump. Someone like Edwards would have been and had he won the nomination the SDs would have been a godsend.
Ummm what was your problem with Edwards?
And I was proven right when his cheating on his cancer stricken wife broke a couple of days before the 2008 convention. Imagine if he had been the presumed nominee leading by 100 delegates instead of Obama. The SDs would have saved the Democratic party’s backside by swinging the nomination to the second place contender.
I wondered if that was your beef. It was particularly ugly. But I still won’t go thanking the SD. He could not have accepted the nomination with that staring at him, SD or not.
He cheated on his wife while she was fighting cancer and denied the child that resulted from that affair. And this whole story came out right about the time of the convention. If he had been the primary leader, the superdelegates could have made sure he didn’t become the nominee, and we all would have been incredibly grateful.
But Bernie is losing without the SDs as well, which is (if you believe the polling) likely to get worse after the New York primary next week.
So I don’t quite understand the argument that SDs are somehow overriding the popular choice.
The most I have seen is the delegate count is distorted because many media outlets include the SDs in their counts. While that is true, many, including the NYT delegate tracker don’t.
Everything through the lens of corruption, right?
Not a progressive, though. Not really.
I believe the working definition of “progressive” is rather flexible. For example, if the commenter’s preferred candidate is losing, the definition is “I’m a progressive, not you sellouts who are supporting the evil Clintons [or pick your enemy du jour]”. If the commenter’s preferred candidate happens to win office, a few months later, the definition shifts to “I’m a progressive, not that sellout Obama [for example], who hasn’t done all the things I want him to do.”
Right now, at this moment in the primary cycle, the definition of ‘progressive’ seems to be ‘those who agree with me 100%, on every issue, on every politician past and present’. You see this clearly right here on this blog. A certain segment is obviously more comfortable talking only to themselves, reenforcing their purity. Look to the right at the diaries. THOSE are the only ‘true progressive’. Everyone else is a sell out.
Even the person who gives them the forum.
.
The apocryphal story about FDR–which is whom you’re referring to here, right?–is this:
FDR once met with a group of activists who sought his support for legislation. He listened to their arguments for some time and then said, “You’ve convinced me. Now go out and make me do it.” (The Nation, 8/17/09, original source)
Whether FDR fit some definition of “progressive” didn’t really matter.
https:/www.thenation.com/article/we-need-more-protest-make-reform-possible
But it need to make the press…
Well this is surely silly.
The Straw man you create would render every nominee before 1972 a fraud.
reducto absurdum
Once again you don’t speak at all of changing things. Of changing the very ways power is wielded. Do you believe thats not possible?
I prefer someone who can make a new system over one wedded to what we gave. Thats the only way this country can even deal with the challenges of the future imo.
Of course it’s possible. But not as a result of electing any one person, unless that person becomes a dictator. Change on that scale has to come from the bottom. A significant portion of the populace has to decide that things are bad enough that they are willing to actively work to make it different. Has Bernie identified the beginnings of that desire and brought it to birth? We won’t know until after the election. Will his supporters stay involved? Will they keep fighting for what they believe? If they do, they can make the changes we need even if Hillary is president. If they don’t, then Bernie wasn’t going to be able to do it anyway. This is what Bernie himself has been saying from the beginning. Is anyone really listening?
I think this all started with Occupy. It will continue on after the GE, but like Occupy there is no guarantee it goes anywhere. It will depend on leadership from the top. Your argument sounds a little like tails I win and heads you lose.
I was going more for together we win, divided we fail. But the leadership from the top only has to be sane. If we elect Cruz, we’re screwed unless we’re up to an armed rebellion. But either of our Dem nominees can be influenced to do the right thing if the people care enough to push them.
Obama believes strongly in the system, HRC has lived it for decades. And thats leaving aside countless others who will fight to preserve their own power and against change. I strongly believe Bernie would help that change along while HRC would be ambivalent, maybe even hostile–and thats assuming a positive motive for resistance such as seeing it as futile or a distraction.
I agree that Bernie wouldn’t do it alone but the very fact that he’d pulled together enough votes would be a huge signal the country was ready for that change. Even assuming change can come purely from the bottom, will it come in time? Climate change, neoliberalism and automation don’t wait.
Every “change” president we’ve had has been an outsider, pure of politics, shut away from the unclean influence of party power brokers and moneyed interests. Jefferson, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, Wilson, LBJ–all outsiders screaming at the “system.” That’s why we have monuments to guys like William Jennings Bryan displayed prominently in DC and state capitals across the country. It’s why we celebrate and rejoice at being Bull Moosers. Remember when Lincoln stood strongly against supporting railroad interests and FDR stood strong against the industrialists on the eve of World War II?
Change: it only comes when things are pure and there is no politics in politics.
Pretty good. I see why they hired you.
There is a hole in your argument.
Here it is:
“Power” works differently in different system and also differently in the same system at different times. It has consistent similarities throughout all systems. That which is stronger directs…by the application some kind of force if necessary…its subordinates. But how it applies that power…and how it accrues that power as well…varies widely.
Trump in particular knows how to wield power. He only negotiates from a position of power, and then only when he must. Most of the time he appears to use power as a club. He resembles LBJ in that regard. Of course, the levers that must be engaged to use that power are different in this so-called democracy than they are in the business world, but not so different that they cannot be learned by an apt student who hires good teachers. they are different in the military too, but Dwight Eisenhower adapted pretty well. I don’t like most of Trump’s stated policies, but I have no doubt that it would not take him long to learn how to get them operating.
Bernie? I dunno. I really don’t. Both of these men are operating on the correct premise that the levers of power are rancidly corrupt here. Trump gives the impression of being perfectly at home in corrupt worlds and would not try to change the rules so much as bend them to his own uses. Bernie Sanders would probably spend much of his time and power trying to either change the “rules” or at the very least replacing the operators of those rules levers with people who would not use them in a corrupt manner. I favor Sanders in this, because I do not believe that the U.S. can survive much longer in its current state of depravity. Trump would just sink us further and further into the mud of corrupted power.
Neither of us have mentioned Hillary Clinton yet. Not directly, anyway., But you wrote:
How…politic…of you.
I wonder who that could be…
Naaaahhhh…it has to be Hillary Clinton. Right?
This is the same argument that I (Mistakenly, I will admit.) made for her when she was running against Obama. I am now very grateful that he won the nomination because he was initially not very adept at the DC power game and thus managed to do far less damage than would have HRC.
She is certainly “pragmatic and ruthless enough to navigate our rotten system’…hell, she had a hand in setting it up…but as far as having the abilities to lead it once she’s taken control!!!??? She can lead it, alright. Right into more trouble.
Have you taken a good look at that Paul Craig Roberts Counterpunch article I linked on a reply to your Good For Jeff Merkley aticle? You should.
President Killary: Would the World Survive Hillary Clinton?
Here are a few salient paragraphs:
Bought and sold, Booman. Bought and sold numerous times over.
This is your “progressive challenger!!!???”
Please!!!
AG
A little lone AG, but I was happy to see the references to her “war record” and money interests.
Yeah, nothing could go wrong with this.
………..
Pittsburgh Police on alert after armed Donald Trump supporters say they will confront protesters
April 13, 2016
Some Donald Trump supporters appear to be a bit overzealous in the run-up to the Republican Presidential candidate’s visit to Pittsburgh later today.
Yesterday, an open-carry support group posted a message on Reddit saying they would be armed and patrolling outside Trump’s Oakland appearance. The goal was to inhibit potential protesters. Trump is holding a town hall meeting with Fox News’ Sean Hannity inside the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Hall at 5:30 p.m. A screenshot sent to City Paper yesterday afternoon details plans for a group of 50 people to patrol in loops armed with guns around Oakland blocks to stop potential protesters from starting roadblocks. The screenshot has since circulated on social media but appears to have been removed from Reddit.
The posts says “the majority of us will us will be open carrying sidearms and long arms (AR-15 style preferred, but AK’s and such are fine)… This isn’t gonna be a place to mess around!” The post also states that the group plans to meet at the Mazeroski Field at 12:30 p.m. and to use two-way radios to communicate.
I hope Democrats have the sense to avoid the GOP convention. At the rate they’re going, Republicans will not need our help in starting a riot. Let’s just stay home and watch the fireworks.
They’re really Jonesing on the prospect of finally, finally being able to blow away Those People, aren’t they?
I’m thinking that the fact that the Democratic Convention comes after the GOP Convention might be to Democrats’ advantage this year.
Possibly.
Going last is worth about .7 points more than going first.
To some extent this is effected by when the VP choice is named. The ’04 bounce number does not include naming the VP, the others do.
Look, if you want a lesson on how Machiavellian power works, watch Game Of Thrones. Or don’t if you develop attachments to any of the main characters… And as any American who ever watched survivor knows, the best way to win the game is to stab your allies in the back- an art that many of the current crop of “successful” politicians have become very good at.
Bernie Sanders isn’t that guy. He never will try to win by cutting a deal with the Democratic establishment that betrays his stated goals and his years of relatively consistent positions. He won’t win by paying off the Democratic machine. He won’t win by doing favors for the elite moneyed class who think politicians work for them.
And even if he wanted to, the guy is 74 years old. He’s got probably this one election left in him. He doesn’t have time to play the party favor game.
I really don’t think that Bernie Sanders particularly wanted to run for president this year, but he stepped up to the plate because he feared that the progressive goals that he has worked his life to achieve would be pushed even farther away without someone challenging Clinton from the left.
And, you know what, there is another kind of change. The change that comes from the power of ideas. You can make all the jokes you want about unicorns and make-believe land, but truth be told, Bernie has achieved some remarkable things this primary: He has proved that the corrupt campaign finance model that the Democratic party has relied on isn’t just “the way it is if you want to get elected”. He has shown that the social contract that FDR started with the American people is something that Americans want preserved and even expended on. Young people now, by a majority, have a positive view of socialism- and in fact, are calling themselves “democratic socialists” like him. Who would have thought that was going to happen a year ago? He has gotten Hillary Clinton to at least sound like a progressive through most of the primary campaign (aipac speech and a few other moments notwithstanding) even though you know she is just dying to go back to the triangulation game. Why? because she knows that it would be likely that she would loose if she didn’t. Now that is power.
These ideas that Bernie has campaigned on will probably continue to be part of politics after him. I hope to god that candidates for national office will now no longer be afraid to campaign on real, bona fide progressive policies. It has become obvious that huge majorities of Americans want to limit the influence of money in politics. Again, this issue will continue to be raised in future elections. Democrats that want to finance their campaigns by taking Wall Street and corporate money and who oppose reform will most likely have an increasingly tough time getting elected.
Don’t get me wrong- I understand that party politics will always be important, that no politician will be pure and compromise to achieve political goals is usually necessary and that, like it or not, money will continue to play a big role in politics for the foreseeable future. But also, politics isn’t just about favor trading or group identification. It’s about the big ideas, as well.
And that’s really it in a nutshell- the change that Bernie Sanders has brought comes from the issues and ideas he has raised that before him were minimized or even left unsaid by “mainstream” Democratic politicians. His measure of success won’t just be if he can or can’t win the primary, it will be what the issues will be in the future elections and what positions are taken by the candidates running in those elections.
those are fictional tv shows; the only life lesson to take from them is that someone is laughing all the way to the bank
“…The other half is that the super delegates are overwhelmingly opposed to his [Bernie’s] candidacy. He needed a plan to prevent that from happening.”
What do you suggest he do? Should he have gone to Big Money so he could buy off 33 State Democratic organizations but do a better job than Hillary was already doing so he could give Debbie’s DNC a better deal?
“…they both thought they could overcome the lack of it by going straight to the people.”
What a novel idea. I heard they we were trying something like that in some 240 year old experiment in self governance.
“…there has to be a better middle ground that allows you to challenge entrenched power without totally alienating it.”
Bernie presented himself to the base of the real Democratic Party, not the neoliberal Frankenstein monster DLC/Bill/Hillary created. Bernie resonated with that portion of the base (maybe more than half of the entire Democratic Party when all the votes are counted) in an historic fashion. What he represented was a return for the Democratic Party to its FDR New Deal roots rejecting Clinton’s neoliberalism. If democracy had managed to survive and the Democratic Organizations created to support Democrats had remained neutral, it would have been exactly the right choice to challenge the Clinton Dynasty from within. Maybe being an Establishment insider you knew this was a fool’s errand, that the Democratic Party was already too corrupted by Big Money power to ever be reformed. That’s too bad, because I always kind of liked belonging to a Party of the People but that is obviously no more.
Perhaps there is a better way forward, possibly the only way forward. The open rebellion against neoliberalism is not yet really at its peak. What will bring it to its peak is another dose of Hillary neoliberalism with her in a final say role where she can do some real lasting damage. She will likely continue her string of neocon foreign policy disasters and get us in yet another war. We could add anti-war rebellion to the open rebellion against neoliberalism getting enough people together to start a new political party, a modern New Deal style Party of the People. How fitting it will be that all that will be left of the old Democratic Party will be a bunch of old conservatives with no youth and no future.
“I want a progressive challenger who is pragmatic and ruthless enough to navigate our rotten system and then have the leadership abilities to lead it once they’ve taken control of it.”
You have exactly that, but you refuse to see it. It’s not too late; you can still become my hero.
Agreed. Win clean if you can, win dirty if you must. So far as I know, none of our Presidents have been saints.
The problem is that people who bill themselves as Machiavellian pragmatists who can cut the deals and twists the arms in the name of progress… actually can’t really deliver on that.
If what the Democratic Party needs is a hard-eyed realist who can hold the party and country through a time of economic uncertainly, herrenvolk authoritarianism, and projected ecological disaster then why are we on the current course that we’re on? Why are we accepting from our leaders a course of action that won’t get us the House in 2016 and will put us further behind with state houses and Congress in 2018?
Martin, I don’t disagree but I do not know why so many people can’t get their head around a both-and. It is possible for an idealist to play the politics of reality well….rare it might be.
Another thing I don’t understand is why people don’t allow for the intangible to happen. Maybe it arises out of a wisdom within the society we live….that society chooses the candidate it needs. Maybe it arises out of circumstances put upon the candidate himself …. that lead Sanders to learn the game and play it far better than you or others expect.
Sometimes the math and sometimes the reality we work off of can be changed by things outside our ability to quantity or imagine. That’s not much to make predictions upon but it’s where I am until this primary is over. I can get excited about that too.
Many republicans are balking at the edge of the Abyss, now they are close enough to smell the stench emanating from its depths.
It’s a devil-or-the-deep-blue-sea choice for them now, political irrelevance under Mr.K, or balls-to-the-wall racist war-mongering and invitations to extreme civil disobedience symbolised by Trump’s appeal from the gutter to throw away the last thin, frayed threads of (probably simulated) humanity -or reason- still lurking in the party.
They lose either way, especially if Mr.T trumps the competition.
Because they know better than we do how scary Cruz would be!
If Hillary wins it may well be because of all the votes from the Nastier party, who would stand to lose little or nothing by backing her over their own sinister, sleazy offerings.
At least she may hold back from droning Mexico or legislating compulsory Jesus camps, with side trips to the Creationist Museum.
Ruthless is the wrong word. was Nelson Mandela ruthless? no. and I wouldn’t describe Obama as ruthless either. dedicated, focused, other words not occurring to me right now
Oh, he’s ruthless, all right, but in stealthy slow motion. No flashy confrontations and titanic battles in the center of the arena for him; patient, long-horizon, quietly steady maneuvering till his enemy finds itself battered, bloody, and collapsing from self-inflicted wounds.
Like, for example, the GOP.
to me ruthless isn’t the word for Obama, since dict meaning says showing no compassion and he is a compassionate person; he shows no mercy to systems, however