Chris Cillizza has a lot of difficulty understanding why Bernie Sanders didn’t want to talk about the damn emails. This explains a lot, actually.
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BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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So Bernie was wrong to run a clean campaign? Well, in one sense, that’s true. If one is ethically challenged and beleives that winning is the only thing, that makes sense.
Now here come the Hillary trolls to bash Baernie and his supporters … 1 2 3
Try this: it is possible to prefer one candidate without loathing the other. Not part of your frame of reference, of course, but eminently possible. I prefer Sanders but will have no regrets voting for Clinton in November.
And I prefer Clinton but would have no regrets voting for Sanders.
Very true. So when Edwards ran against David Duke, we shouldn’t have loathed either candidate, much less both?
Sometimes neither candidate is loathsome, sometimes both are.
This election is going to be pretty much Duke-Edwards.
Bernie Sanders made the right choice in ignoring the email issue of Hillary’s. He for the most part stuck to pushing the issues he is concerned about. I would say doing so attracted supporters. Maybe other politicians will learn from his example in the near future.
I for one do not care to see mud slinging. I am more interested in where the politician running stands on issues.
I like mud slinging. I don’t want a politician with clean hands, I want a politician who does everything possible to implement policies–the right policies–even if that requires rolling in muck. And I suspect that it nearly always does.
Though to give Sanders the benefit of the doubt, maybe he just calculated that staying ‘clean’ on this issue was a better strategic move.
Because the email issue exists so obviously within a right-wing framework, opening up his campaign on this issue would have been a massive strategic blunder.
This.
Sanders just does not allow himself to be hijacked. He has a message, and he won’t allow himself to pulled into the weeds. I think he gets that the time on TV is valuable, and he won’t waste it.
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I’m not a Sanders backer, but I agree 100% with this. I would have liked him less if he made the email thing an issue.
But Colin Powell and Condi Rice did it too!!! That’s an excuse I often hear. Do people realize how silly they sound spouting that? When you refuse to hold elites accountable, it makes a mockery of the rule of law. Hell, I remember when liberal blogs made a big stink about the whole Dubya WH and their use/destruction of official emails. Anyway, I;m glad Bernie didn’t touch it. His message would have gotten lost in the media bullcrap otherwise. Granted, they tried to ignore him to a great extent but you can’t ignore him when he’s winning states.
The issue that people are trying to raise with Condi and Colin is IOKIYAR. That is a legitimate point. The issue now is having a consistent cybersecurity practice at the highest levels of government and a serious policy of recording what is the raw material for historical research. Cooking the books assists folly in the future.
My general impression is that Cillizza isn’t this dumb. Am I wrong about that? If Sanders had focused on scandal mongering his positives would have sunk, and it’s his high positives that have been the rocket fuel for his campaign.
I really don’t know what gave you that impression. Cillizza is dumber than a box of hammers.
There is so much that is wrong with Cilizza’s analysis.
1. The email issue needs to be taken in the context of what it is, which Cilizza doesn’t do. And that is more complicated than it appears.
The first thing is that it is about politician wanting hide certain messages from historical view. Ever since Watergate, Presidents and other politicians what to separate candor from the historical record and retain the political spin. To cite a more recent instace, the Bush administration was routing some official business emails through the Republican National Committee or otherwise making official and political communication intermixed so that they could claim a political party exemption or a private exemption from FOIA now and National Archives later.
The second is that it is about Hillary Clinton’s resistance to becoming computer literate on phone and computer platforms, and in operating with the cumbersome cybersecurity guidelines that all the worker bees in the government must deal with — even though the information she handles is much more sensitive than is the case for people who have been punished severely for computer security lapses.
The third is that because of the media’s attitude twenty years ago, the Clinton assert a right to a private life like any other citizen. Some things should be absolutely off limits to the media.
2. Cilizza ignores how the email issue is being used by the Republicans. The Republican strategy is pretty transparent and a hedge against Hillary Clinton succeeding in being elected President. It depends on Republican majorities in both houses of Congress and on enough scared Democrats to join them to actually convict a Clinton in an impeachment trial.
Trey Gowdy’s whole purpose since he was appointed to run the Benghazi committee was to set the stage for another Clinton impeachment. That set-up depends on convincing the public that Hillary Clinton ought to be impeached and removed from office. With Benghazi as a non-issue, the rules changed for high political officials and what the Bush administration and Colin Powell did was no longer acceptable on trust or moderation of partisanship in the Congress. I wonder if Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi feel like chumps for not pursuing Cheney for outing Valerie Plame Wilson, one of the issues that brought up their hiding certain emails at the RNC?
To their great delight, Republicans got some traction on the email issue as the media tried to get their horse race on. That is where Sanders’s first answer to the email question came in.
3. Cilizza does not understand the logic of Sanders’s campaign. Sanders sees the emails as a Republican “bright shiny object” like Benghazi to divert from substantive discussion of policy. He has been harsh on his policy differences with Clinton, which Clinton or her communications operation have spun as personal attacks. (The same logic as their riposte to Sanders not wanting a bank lobbyist co-chairing the platform committee.) Some of Sanders’s surrogates either do not understand the strategy or are tasked to make the personal attacks. Few of Sanders’s supporters show that they understand the “it’s the policy issues” focus of the campaign.
Using the emails as an attack will opt in to the Republican “bright shiny object” strategy and avoid making Donald Trump the “bright shiny object” of the general election. There is no clearer evidence than this that Sanders does not want to enable Trump, even at the cost of the nomination. Nor does he want to enable the story that progressives only seek to elect Republicans. Progressives in fact seek progressive policies but have been maneuvered into be a kept constituency whose fear drives the lesser-of-two-evils framing of two non-progressive candidates. The Sanders challenge is an attempt to undo that lesser-of-two-evils pattern that faces progressive voters. Cillizza understand none of the complications that face a candidate who does this, especially none for a candidate who finally gets substantial traction despite a media blackout.
For the Sanders campaign, taking issue with the email issue is a self-defeating appearance of advantage. That’s why those who aren’t exactly in his corner are advising him to do that. For those analysts who can only think in cynical “winning is the only thing” terms, it isn’t and this country is the worse for thinking that it is.
thanks for this post, Tarheel
Me too.
On item 1, this came over the Twitter FWIW:
Wikileaks tweeted this with the text: Is this email the FBI’s star exhibit against Hillary Clinton (“H”)?
My reading is that in a time-pressure situation this is a relatively reasonable solution to the situation from the standpoint of security when no one is storing messages long-term for cross-referencing by source and destination. Someone would have to have a particular fascination for the content of the particular fax in question to break it.
If that’s the “there” there, it is materially minor and infinitely spinnable. A nothingburger that is easily sold as a Whopper.
Me, three.
And what you said….” Progressives in fact seek progressive policies but have been maneuvered into be a kept constituency whose fear drives the lesser-of-two-evils framing of two non-progressive candidates.”
Sounds to me liked u nailed this one pretty good.
Does Cilizza’s list of particulars re. the “damn emails” have anything to do with the governing of this Nation or the needs and concerns of Americans? Of course not. Another low quality person.
A claim I’ve heard about the salience of the issue of Hillary’s private server is that it may have increased the odds that her correspondence was hacked by outsiders. Given the antiquity of the State Department email system and its poor support, it’s pretty damn hard to make that claim stick.
The “rules don’t apply to them” attitude he mentions is hardly unique to the Clintons. (Since Hillary has promised to put Bill in charge of the economy, we can consider them collectively.) But the “post-legal America”* they perfectly embody has everything to do with the governing of the nation.
* http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175398/engelhardt_welcome_to
The primary criticism I’ve seen falls into three camps:
3.The site was private and personal but was receiving government documents of a sensitive nature.
4. She thought she was not obligated to follow the rules everyone else in her department was obligated to follow by law or executive order.
Hillary Clinton’s actions are not similar to Chelsea Manning’s, in scale, type or intent.
And I continue to quarrel with the claim that the Secretary of State’s emails were more exposed to hackers by her private server than they were thru the State Department servers.
That people are criticizing Hillary on these isues does not make those criticisms true, or define the criticisms as offered in good faith. And, where we might come into agreement with Hillary that she should have made different decisions on her email use, it doesn’t rise to the level of disqualifying her for the Presidency.
These actions, paired with other views I have of Clinton, does rise to the level of my unwillingness to vote for her in the primary. It won’t prevent me from supporting Hillary’s general election campaign and from pushing her campaign and policy planks to be as good as they need to be.
a lot.
But what?
About whom?
Sanders? Clinton? Cillizza?
I vote the last!
It always seemed to me that Bernie probably thought, but didn’t add to the “every one is tired of hearing about your damn emails” statement, the further thought – “And everyone thinks it’s too damn bad you were too damn paranoid and put the security of your official damn communications in danger. “
I know it’s what I thought and one of the reasons I’m concerned about how to check such tendencies in another Clinton administration.
Apparently the server was shut down a couple of times because they had indications (or thought they did) that someone was trying to hack it. Not even that was enough to convince anyone to stop the practice.
I think Bernie simply doesn’t want to risk landing a blow that could be fatal in the general election unless he is sure he will win the primary, which would be foolish as he was always a very long shot. Hitting Hilary on the issues is not fatal, because on most issues, she comes up as lesser evil to a majority (perhaps not a huge one) of the public. Come October, Hillary will want to talk issues too, Plus it’s a good opportunity to make Donald look stupid. Bernie’s issue attacks are not ones the Republicans can duplicate, save perhaps on trade, but there Trump is starkly at odds with the party elite, or so he says, so an attempt to craft a message opens the wound. There is also that Trump is clearly taking entitlement reform off the table, which is why Ryan won’t endorse him. I think Clinton not so stupid as to put it on the table, at least not as a candidate.
If Clinton is so smart, why did she act so stupidly? So she wanted a private life. I do too. I have three lines of email communication which are completely separate and have no IT knowledge. What she in effect did, was privatize her public life as SoS instead of keeping her private life distinctly separate. Who was denying her her email privacy? What was she thinking? She does not say. She was computer ‘illiterate’ or some such shit. She had to have a Blackberry because Barry and Dick had one. Well a very smart person could have learned what she needed to know about electronic communications in a day-long tutorial. And any unforeseen problems could have easily been solved by the knowledgable people working for the department. The whole line that the IT people there, and the system, were so damn dumb and deficient that the problems were beyond their scope reminds me of slurs to discredit government. Her secretiveness makes her suspect. I don’t think she wanted to sell US secrets to enemies on the moon or to overturn the government. But I and many others suspect she was hiding something. What could that be? Why else would she not automatically turn over public documents to the government when she left office. Why? Let her answer that. The suspicion is of course that she used her office to gain funds for her family’s foundations(s). Why have the Clintons been surrounded by scandal since day one? Because their always being persecuted by conspiracists: right! And now she’ll pull the poor little me act. look how nasty they are, again I’m a victim, from my cattle futures to my emails they won’t leave me to have my private life (which, incidentally, I gladly exhibit for public consumption when it suits me). I congratulate Bernie Sanders for not going there. He is smart and honest and knows that making a point about the emails would have let loose the knives of the Clinton crew on him. And he must know more about this than we do. Why did she do it? Let her give a convincing answer. Otherwise I can not consider her as smart as she like to present herself. A public servant is obliged to give public account of themselves. Or is that an outdated notion. The idea of Hillary Clinton as a public servant cracks me up. ‘I like Ike’ keeps going through my head, maybe if she remembered that too she’d get some common rather than lawyerly sense.
You write:
“A public servant is obliged to give public account of themselves. Or is that an outdated notion.”
In the Permanent Government view, the “outdated notion” is that its members are public servants. They are not. They are servants of the .01%…servants aspiring to join the crew that really runs things, in the Clintons’ case.
Once that idea is understood, so are her actions. She was burying hustle attempts. Bet on it.
AG
That is the most succinct statement of your thesis that you have ever given.
Yes Arthur,’ The idea of Hillary Clinton as a public servant cracks me up.’ I know she does not view herself as such, that’s why I wrote that, you seemed to have missed the gist: Clinton as anyone’s servant, stop killing me.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/may/30/bernie-sanders-targets-hillary-clinton-over-email-/
We’ll see if the FBI agrees.
Fortunately for Clinton, the Obama Justice Department wouldn’t indict her even if there was publicly available videotape of her laughingly handing a folder stamped TOP SECRET to Kim Jong-Un in exchange for a bulging canvas sack with a dollar sign on it.
Can the Obama Justice Department restrain the Republican FBI Director and the ghost of J. Edgar Hoover that haunts the agency culture?
If my understanding is correct, it’s like Law & Order. The FBI are the detectives investigating crimes and the Justice Department is the district attorneys prosecuting the offenders.
So we have Hillary cooling her heels in the interrogation room while Briscoe confers with Kincaid on the other side of the one-way mirror. The most Lenny can do is explain how pieces of evidence A, B, and C make him like her for the perp. Then it’s up to Claire to order, “Read her her rights.”
Extending the analogy further, the Obama administration will then be the Mayor’s office that pressures Adam Schiff into ordering Jack McCoy to drop the case.
Is the jurisdiction DC or, as in other classification cases, Northern Virginia (the CIA’s own court)?
Just be aware that the Trump campaign is distributing this YouTube of CNN coverage on May 26 of the email issue, in which Carl Bernstein reports on how worried “the White House” is about the election and how the email issue looks more serious that they were told.
Corey Lewandowski, YouTube: Top Democrat officials are TERRIFIED that Hillary campaign IS IN FREEFALL! – Carl Bernstein
It suffers from the “anonymous sources” issue, but too many in the media read that Carl Bernstein is (1) a White House back channel to the public, and (2) a Hillary supporter. I am not convince that either of those framing assumptions are true as I have not kept up with Carl Bernstein’s coverage since he seemed to more of a channel of the Village to the public.
Nonetheless, the fact that even progressive pro-Sanders bloggers are sounding this as a warning is at a minimum worth paying attention to. The FBI is in no way obligated to Obama not to prosecute, and if the Whitewater/Clenis investigation is any precedent will go out of their way to advantage Republican scandal-mongers.
I remain pessimistic about this election and the over-confidence the establishment Democrats continue to show.
In addition, the Judicial Watch cases are proceeding, and the judge, having had the Clinton side deal with him repeatedly in bad faith, is not going to cut it any slack. The fact that there is an independent effort, completely outside the Administration’s control, pursuing the server mess, also makes it riskier for the DoJ to do nothing if Judicial Watch exposes damning documents.
(http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2016/06/gaius-publius-bernstein-the-white-house-is-terrified-the-clin
ton-campaign-is-in-freefall.html)
So a self-defined progressive is counting on the always dependable Judicial Watch to help play out their preferred scenario. More evidence that we have the equivalent of our own TEA Party on the left.
Nice straw-man you have constructed there.
I know exactly what Judicial Watch is.
And, knowing who Judicial Watch is, knowing their extremely poor track record, you are openly rooting for them to succeed in destroying the campaign of the almost certain Democratic Party POTUS nominee. You may claim otherwise, but you express disapproval with Clinton’s responses to JW’s extremely bad-faith pestering. You even appear to presume there is something damning in Hillary’s emails.
I know, I know, you’re warning us, not rooting for an outcome which severely wounds Hillary.
Riiiiiiiigghhttt…
You’re interfering in a rebranding.
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That is a quote from the link. That is why I posted the link–for attribution.
You get this one from your crystal ball or your nether regions?
Too bad for you this is still her fault for being so secretive that she couldn’t follow the rules of the state department on this one. Even if she isn’t found to be criminally liable, she still was the one that created this situation.
It worked on Bill. Why not on Hillary? What is different in the media and political climate this time around? Someone in the Clinton camp should have seen this one coming. Republicans have 25 years experience getting the public hungry for nothingburgers, with the media’s assistance.
Donald Trump is splitting the white vote in ways we’ve never seen before
By Scott Clement
May 31 at 12:24 PM
The potential for the 2016 election to widen America’s racial voting chasm even further is nothing new. But Washington Post-ABC News polls have also identified a related dynamic: White Americans are splintering along education and gender lines at rates not seen in at least three decades.
These contours are well-known among political watchers; whites without four-year college degrees and men tend to be more Republican than women and college grads. But while these cleavages are seen across elections, it’s easy to forget that the gaps are typically not all that large — at least in comparison to this year.
Take 2012. Mitt Romney won 61 percent of non-college whites compared with 56 percent of white college grads. The gap was nearly identical between white men and white women, 62 and 56 percent.
Now, according to the latest Post-ABC poll released last week: Donald Trump received 65 percent support among white registered voters without a four-year college degree, compared with 46 percent among white college graduates, a 19-point gap. If the margin holds, it would easily be the largest education gap among whites in presidential elections since 1980.
Less educated and white does not make an electoral majority in 2016…
That being said:
White non-college = 65% Trump 25% Clinton.
Truly shocking.