[The excerpt below is from a much longer article I wrote on the 2016 election which is not yet published. This segment is about the relationship between Roger Stone, Randy Credico and Donald Trump. Randy Credico is an interesting character as I hope you’ll discover below. If you know about him at all, it’s probably because Roger Stone revealed to Congress last year that Credico was his conduit to Julian Assange. Credico denies this, but I recommend that you read the following before you make any effort to decide who is telling the truth. This bit is not about Julian Assange or the hacking of the the DNC and John Podesta. It’s about how Stone met Trump and how Credico met Stone. And it’s about who influenced these characters and taught them the dark arts of political ratfucking. It’s also about how Credico conned Bernie Sanders supporters in one of the most brazen acts of fraud I’ve ever encountered in presidential politics. Citations are footnoted at the bottom. Enjoy.]
The story of the 2016 election is in many ways a story of curious and unexpected networks that came together to divide and undermine the left. In March 2011, when Donald Trump began floating the idea that he might run for president, he made appearances on Good Morning America and The View where he introduced his theory that President Obama may have faked his birth certificate.[1] For people like myself who grew up in the New York media market, this wasn’t what we expected from Trump. If he had any obvious political leanings at all, they tended toward the Democrats (“I think Bill Clinton is terrific. I think he’s done an amazing job,” Trump told Larry King during a Dec. 27, 1997, appearance on CNN).[2] Of course, in 2000, he had formed an exploratory committee to seek the presidential nomination of the Reform Party, but he spent his time accusing Pat Buchanan of being a “Hitler-lover” rather than winning over the support of people like David Duke.[3] The Trump I knew was more at home on Howard Stern’s radio program rating the hotness of chicks than he was among the social conservatives of the Republican Party or mucking about in the fever swamps of far-right conspiracy programs.
Beneath the surface, though, Trump had connections that help explain how he came to launch a demagogic political career based on the racist and transparently inane theory that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and therefore ineligible to serve as our president.
First among them was Trump’s long relationship with the lawyer Roy Cohn. Cohn is most famous for his role as chief counsel to Sen. Joseph McCarthy. In that role, he led the aggressive and unethical red-baiting Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations until the U.S. Army pushed back and he was forced to resign in August 1954. In private practice Cohn represented prominent New Yorkers like la cosa nostra crime boss Carlo Gambino, Francis Cardinal Spellman and Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, but was frequently at odds with the law. Over the years, he won four separate acquittals on charges varying from conspiracy, securities fraud, bribery, and obstruction of justice before finally being disbarred in 1986 as he was dying of HIV. [4] What Cohn learned from McCarthy was the value of being dramatic and the utility of exaggerated claims and accusations. He passed these lessons along to Donald Trump.
According to Trump, he first met Roy Cohn in a members-only Midtown establishment called Le Club. It was 1973, and the government was accusing the Trumps of discriminatory housing practices. He asked Cohn, “The government has just filed suit against our company saying that we discriminated against blacks. What do you think I should do?” Cohn advised him to “Tell them to go to hell and fight the thing in court and let them prove you discriminated.”
The Trumps retained Cohn to represent them and Donald became his student. According to author Sam Roberts, it was from Cohn that Trump learned his now familiar three-part strategy for handling litigation which he has now transferred to political combat: 1. Never settle, never surrender. 2. Counter-attack, counter-sue immediately. 3. No matter what happens, no matter how deeply into the muck you get, claim victory and never admit defeat.[5]
In 1979, Roger Stone was responsible for running Ronald Reagan’s campaign for president in New Jersey, New York and Connecticut. He’d gained a reputation for political dirty tricks from his time working with Chuck ‘Tex’ Colson as a volunteer at Nixon’s Committee to Re-Elect the President. Perhaps it was his brush with the Watergate scandal that gave him the credentials to gain an audience with Cohn. Stone knew Cohn was close with Trump and he sought him out to win an introduction.
When Stone arrived at Cohn’s townhouse, he discovered him in his bathrobe meeting with Anthony ‘Fat Tony’ Salerno of the Genovese crime family. In 1988, Salerno was convicted for allocating contracts and obtaining payoffs in the concrete construction of sixteen Manhattan buildings, including Trump Plaza.[6] After some chit-chat, Cohn agreed to introduce Stone to Trump. Later on, Stone and Cohn teamed up rather successfully to gather dirt on Walter Mondale’s running mate Geraldine Ferraro. In 1986, Stone listed Cohn along with Richard Nixon and the dethroned Nazi-sympathizing Duke of Windsor as his biggest idols.[7]
According to Stone, at their initial meeting, Donald sent him to his father Fred in Coney Island where a deal was struck. “True to his word, I got $200,000. The checks came in $1,000 denominations, the maximum donation you could give. All of these checks were written to ‘Reagan For President.’ It was not illegal—it was bundling. Check trading.”
Stone was not initially impressed with Donald Trump, at least if Christine Seymour can be believed. Seymour was a graduate of St. Lawrence University who landed a job with Roy Cohn as a switchboard operator. With Cohn’s blessing, she had the privilege and responsibility of eavesdropping on and recording calls from clients like Fat Tony Salerno as well as luminaries like Gloria Vanderbilt and First Lady Nancy Reagan. Seymour wrote in her notebooks “Roger did not like Donald Trump or his new house, told me they were losers, but if Roy used them, he would, too.”[8]
Nonetheless, the relationship between Stone and Trump grew. In 1987, Stone first urged Trump to run for president. But it was in 2000 when he used Trump in a bit of jujitsu to sabotage the Reform Party and smooth the way for the election of George W. Bush. As detailed in the Netflix documentary Get Me Roger Stone, this was accomplished by first convincing Pat Buchanan to run for the nomination before enlisting Trump to savage him from the left.[9]
Stone says that Trump told him he would run for president in 2016 on New Year’s Day 2013. And when Trump made his formal announcement in Trump Tower in 2015, Stone was enlisted to serve as a top adviser. His formal role with the campaign didn’t last long, however, due to disagreements with Corey Lewandowski.[10] From that point forward, Stone would do his work for Trump where is he is most comfortable, in the shadows.
If there was an alter-ego to Roy Cohn, it might have been William Kunstler. Cohn got his position with Senator McCarthy on the recommendation of FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover who hated Martin Luther King Jr. so fervently that he tried to blackmail him into committing suicide. Kunstler represented King as an attorney during his fight to desegregate Georgia.[11] He also represented the victims of COINTELPRO on the countercultural left, including Stokely Carmichael and the infamous Seattle Seven. Contrarian by nature, Kunstler seemed to get a kick out of defending the least defensible and most hated criminal suspects. He defended Colin Ferguson, the Long Island railroad shooter. He defended suspects in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. While Cohn was known for representing the Gambino and Genovese crime families, Kunstler went to court on behalf of the competing Bananno crime family. Politically, Kuntsler was far to the left, and he was best known for his opposition to racism, injustice and the draconian Rockefeller drug laws of New York state.
Randy Credico met William Kuntsler when his then girlfriend Joey Heatherton of The Happy Hooker Goes to Washington fame ran into legal problems. A stand-up comedian who once appeared on The Tonight Show and displeased Johnny Carson’s by comparing UN ambassador Jeanne Kirkpatrick to Eva Braun, Credico was attracted to the iconoclastic lawyer and came under his sway.[12][13] In particular, he adopted Kuntsler’s anti-drug war ideology as his own, and after Kuntsler died Credico headed the William Moses Kunstler Fund for Racial Justice for twelve years. He stepped down to run a quixotic primary campaign against incumbent and now Senate Minority Leader, Chuck Schumer. He got 0.6 percent of the vote. When he ran for mayor against Bill de Blasio in 2013 on the Tax Wall Street ballot line, he did worse, earning a meager 654 votes.[14]
He was somewhat more successful as an activist against our nation’s drug laws than he was as a politician. He was instrumental, for example, in bringing national media attention to the Tulia, Texas scandal in which ten percent of the black population of the town was arrested on drug charges solely on the testimony of a single undercover officer.
Credico used a perch at the historically pacifist and far-left WBAI radio station in New York to promote his ideas, among which was the strong belief that Bill Clinton was a monster for enacting The Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994. Another belief of his was that the surveillance state has grown far too powerful and that whistleblowers like Chelsea Manning, Edward Snowden, and Julian Assange are heroes.
Randy Credico met Roger Stone while both were working on the 2002 New York gubernatorial campaign of Tom Golisano.[15] Golisano is the founder of Paychex, a payroll and human resources business, and a former co-owner of the Buffalo Sabres who is well known for his philanthropy for people with disabilities. In 2017, the Forbes 400 listed him as the 264th wealthiest person in America. He founded the Independence Party of New York and 2002 was his third and final run for governor. Stone was his campaign manager and his motivation was less to help Gilasano than it was to exact revenge on sitting Governor George Pataki. As Greg Sargent reported for The Observer at the time, Stone was severely embarrassed and “enraged by the fact that a state commission controlled by the Governor ruled that he had set up an unlawful lobbying front group for Donald Trump.”[16]
Credico was presumably no fan of George Pataki, but his interest in the campaign had nothing to do with Donald Trump. He and Stone bonded over their mutual loathing of the Rockefeller drug laws. An October 14th, 2002 piece in the New York Times explained how Stone was using Gilasano’s money not only to savage Pataki but to push for repeal.
Staking out a far more sweeping position on the Rockefeller drug laws than either of his opponents in the race for governor, Tom Golisano will call today for the laws’ repeal, his campaign aides said.
Mr. Golisano, the Independence Party candidate, has said as much before, with little fanfare. But now, he will back up his statement by broadcasting commercials that accuse Gov. George E. Pataki of offering a Rockefeller plan that is ”not real reform.”
Campaign aides would not say exactly how much Mr. Golisano, who has already spent nearly $40 million on his bid for the governorship, will spend on the new ad campaign. But, Roger Stone, Mr. Golisano’s campaign adviser, said, ”Everyone will know his position by the end of the week.”
”Tom Golisano is the most conservative candidate in this race, and he is acknowledging that the Rockefeller laws are harsh, ineffective and expensive,” Mr. Stone said, noting that more than $700 million is spent yearly to incarcerate drug offenders. ”We are hopeful that his position will give others now the cover they need to get these laws repealed.”[17]
On May 26th, 2015, Bernie Sanders officially announced his candidacy for president at Waterfront Park in Burlington, Vermont. After watching Sanders campaign for a while, Randy Credico was unimpressed. In one Facebook post on July 9th, he compared Sanders unfavorably to Giacomo Matteoti, “The Italians had a real socialist, a man willing to fight and give up his life against the onset of fascism. We have Bernie Sanders, a man willing to stand up in support of U.S. imperialism.” In another entry the same day, he posted a picture of a Jim Crow era sign reading “We serve white’s only, no Spanish of Mexicans” alongside the words: “Sign outside Bernie Sanders rally.” In a third post, he said he had checked out the crowd at a Sanders rally and it was “whiter than the bleachers at Fenway Park.” Finally, also on the 9th, Credico approvingly linked to an article by Glen Ford of the Black Agenda Report headlined: Rand Paul Makes More Sense than the Democrats’ “Left” Champion.
In the introduction to the piece, Ford wrote:
The whole world knows that the United States and its closest allies created the ISIS-al Qaida juggernaut in Syria, Iraq, Libya and proliferating points elsewhere in the Muslim world. Russian President Vladimir Putin knows it, and has now begun to denounce the crime against civilization on the world stage. Rand Paul knows it, and has made the fact central to his campaign for the U.S. presidency.
Muammar Gaddafi prophesized correctly that NATO’s transformation into a jihadist air force would turn Libya into “another Somalia” – a vortex of Salafist chaos that would destabilize the entire region. “We came, we saw, he died,” cackled Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who yearns to bring the same ghoulish statecraft to the Oval Office in 2017. Does any decent person actually consider this banshee a “lesser evil”?
Bernie Sanders does. The Vermont senator promises to endorse Clinton as soon as he drops out of the presidential race – thus nullifying whatever “message” he plans to deliver during the Democratic primary process.[18]
Credico’s opinion of Sanders did not improve throughout the fall of 2015. On September 17th he posted on Facebook that socialist activists were “drugged out” on “Bernie Kool-Aid” that was no different from what Barack Obama had been offering in his campaigns. On October 4th, he made a post with pictures of Bernie Sanders and Eugene Debs, writing, “The man on top (Debs) is a socialist…the man on the bottom is a career political hack posing as one.” On October 5th, in response to Sanders supporting air strikes in Syria (but not a no-fly zone), Credico called him a “career hack snake.”
Credico’s estimation of Bernie Sanders did not improve over the winter holidays. On February 10th, the day after Sanders enjoyed his first victory in the New Hampshire primary, Credico tweeted “Hate to say it but ‘political revolution’ is no more than a repackaged version of ‘Yes, We Can.’”[19]
Sanders success in New Hampshire started a roller-coaster ride and an extended primary season. While Sanders vastly exceeded expectations, by the time the April 19th New York primary rolled around he was in a win-or-go-home situation.
For Sanders’ supporters, the stakes couldn’t have been higher. As part of the get out the vote effort “a super 36 Hour Comedy and Music marathon” was announced on the campaign website. Running from April 17th up until poll closing on the 19th, the event, held at the Commons Café in Brooklyn, featured a list of minor celebrities, stand-up comics and local musical artists. to get out the vote for Bernie Sanders in the New York April 19 primary at the Commons Cafe.
Randy Credico organized the event at Common Café that ran from April 17th to April 19th, serving as the emcee and acting for all the world like the biggest booster of Bernie Sanders in the borough of Brooklyn. His infatuation didn’t last long.
On May 10th, Roger Stone appeared on former Arizona congressman J.D. Hayworth’s NewsMax Prime television program and revealed that Randy Credico was starting a Sanders Supporters for Trump group.[20]
Looking back with the benefit of hindsight, Stone was revealing something of considerable importance. Randy Credico, who had initially considered Bernie Sanders an inadequate socialist and an apologist for U.S. imperialism, was now on the Trump train. How many of the people who traipsed through the Common Café three weeks earlier suspected that the emcee would soon be working to help Trump become the president? They never suspected any such thing because they had no idea that Credico and Stone were friends with a history of ratfucking their political opponents.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama_citizenship_conspiracy_theories#Donald_Trump
[2] http://theweek.com/articles/637675/donald-trumps-decadeslong-obsession-being-president
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Trump_presidential_campaign,_2000
[4] https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/Volume5.pdf
[5] https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/06/donald-trump-roy-cohn-relationship
[6] http://www.nytimes.com/1992/07/29/us/anthony-fat-tony-salerno-80-a-top-crime-boss-dies-in-prison.html
[7] https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/lifestyle/1986/06/16/the-rise-and-gall-of-roger-stone/d8ce308b-7055-4666-860e-378833f46e17/?utm_term=.24811409137c
[8] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/eavesdropping-on-roy-cohn-and-donald-trump?mbid=social_facebook_aud_dev_kw_paid-eavesdropping-on-roy-cohn-and-donald-trump&kwp_0=602775&kwp_4=2127895&kwp_1=888961
[9] https://www.usatoday.com/story/opinion/voices/2017/05/21/roger-stone-donald-trump-documentary/101909014/
[10] https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2017-02-03/roger-stone-trump-told-me-hed-run-on-new-years-day-2013
[11] http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/05/obituaries/william-kunstler-76-dies-lawyer-for-social-outcasts.html
[12] https://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/16/drug-activist-leaves-kunstler-fund-for-senate-bid/
[13] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_Credico
[14] http://www.nytimes.com/projects/elections/2013/general/nyc-mayor/map.html
[15] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Golisano
[16] http://observer.com/2002/11/roger-stones-the-race/
[17] http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/14/nyregion/race-for-governor-drug-laws-golisano-take-airwaves-condemn-rockefeller-laws.html
[18] https://www.blackagendareport.com/rand_paul_makes_more_sense_than_dems_left_champion
[19] https://storify.com/italkyoubored/theory-that-roger-stone-s-go-between-for-wikileaks
[20] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=loq6JDazthw#t=5m09s
Huh, a pretend-leftist singing the praises of Bernie Sanders only insofar as it can be leveraged to damage the Democratic party. A Rand Paul lover who spent the 2016 election working to elect Donald Trump by trying to convince leftier-than-thou purity voters that voting against Clinton was the best way to advance the progressive cause.
Never seen anything like that before. Nope.
But here he’s literally marching at the head of the parade.
You can’t have a parade without a crowd. How influential was “Sanders Supporters for Trump?”
I mean, did this guy have as much effect as (I had to look these names up) Darragh Murphy or Dianne Mantouvalos? Obviously, this is ratfucking while that was, I think, more earnest. But in terms of actual impact, how would you rate this?
I think enough to have moved the election, that’s for sure. The thing is, everything that needed to fall perfectly into place for this to have worked happened. We had a trumped up bullshit scandal from the get-go and the only person who had the right response to it was Bernie Sanders himself and his original answer (he himself later shifted because more “answers” were needed. Should have stuck with his first response). I cheered so loud during the debate when that happened because I was saying it out loud to myself and peers right before he said it (many who would most likely vote for Trump as they were R’s). Then that perfectly trumped up bullshit scandal intermingled with another scandal that involving “email” on behalf of a foreign state, allowing them to marinate together in the fever dreams of the right wing Wurlitzer and main stream press. And now we are discovering to the extent at which this stuff reached people.
To say that this didn’t move anyone is full of shit. Or FB should be worth pennies. Fascist propaganda is dangerous, seductive,
and doubly so with direct targeting through Facebook.
So this was a FB-linked group? I’ve just never heard of them is all, and they sound like the rough equivalent (very rough, given ratfucking) of the PUMAs, who I very much did hear of back in the day. So absolutely, given the advent of microtargeting, or whatever it’s called, this specific thing could be a big deal. Or not! Which is why I’m asking.
“This group” worked with Julian Assange and the Russians to disseminate the stolen Democratic documents and emails and to create a cover story to divert blame from Russians.
I know what you lay out here is but a crumb of the larger picture, but am I off base to have the feeling that there is a significant streak of naivete among on the Democratic side of the ledger when it comes to allowing themselves to be played and manipulated in the way in which it appears in this storyline?
Do Democrats not pay attention at all to the footprints that have been left by these people over the past few decades? Does no one even consider connecting the dots or exercising a basic skepticism of the motives of people who have a conflicted history of apparent allegiances? Or is it just another case of hindsight being 20/20?
It reminds me of the whole Green Party/Ralf Nader vote in 2000.
From my own memory, a lot of Democratic/liberals/etc voters entered that election with a It Doesn’t Matter Both Sides Are The Same! chip on their shoulder. Bush’s campaign made us think we could indulge in a third party fantasy.
By 2016, the progressive vote seemed primed to get caught up infighting over purity wars and the Republican presidential field looked, again, like we could indulge ourselves. So we were yet again an easy mark for this stuff.
Basically, it seems that twice we’ve been burned earnest trying to move the party leftward. And the still to this day general naïve around social media is particularly grating.
The left is able to get easily distracted and not vote or vote 3rd party if they don’t completely agree with the party or a nominee. The right will hate everything about Trump, but still vote for him for the Supreme Court nominations. We no longer keep our eyes on the prize. We don’t realize that some times you have to fight like hell to just tread water and get much less than you would like or you get nothing.
“Stop blackmailing me!”
The infighting was pretty loud in 2008, too, arguably louder. The difference being that we won despite it. I expect it’s just a fact of American electoral politics that a certain percentage of ‘lefties’ are fucking idiots, and a certain percentage of Democratic operatives are fucking incompetent.
And unfortunately the idiots on the left go chasing after purity ponies, away from the Dem candidates, while the idiots on the right trot obediently into the electoral corral the GOP propagandists have set up for them.
Do you think the GOP propagandists do a better job corralling their idiots than our propagandists, or do you think that our idiots aren’t ‘ours’ to the same degree?
Of those two choices, the latter if I had to pick. I mean the right has so much more money and resources. We just have no comparable power on the Left. Liberals don’t understand how much manufactured consent the Mercers, Heartland, Heritage, Koch, and all the rest have on getting their voters in line and weakening ours. Obama and Sanders used many of their RW talking points when taking on Hillary. RW voters are also more inclined to fall in line and appeals to authority. We think that is bullying or “politics” and we can’t be sullied by that. There is an appeal on 10-20% on “our” side to not being “political”, compromising is selling out as opposed to the chance to get something when you might get nothing or actually lose what you have had for decades. Some of those like to think they are edgy, when they’re really just laughably misinformed.
I think the idiots on the left are too wrapped up in their proud individuality (even if they’re all stomping off in the same direction), while the idiots on the right love them some authoritarian dominance, not to mention the yummy fearmongering.
So Obama was right to call us sanctimonious purists? That hit me and all the friends and family who worked both times to elect him as a punch to the gut.
Polls generally show the public supports liberal positions if they aren’t framed as such. The Democrats need to craft a message that reflects that reality and stick to it. What the public doesn’t like are signs of waffling, insincerity and weakness.
Yes!!! Here’s to honesty, honor and morality in politics. Even if movements of that sort don’t win, they drive the conversation in their direction. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are the two most prominent contemporary examples of this.
However…you write:
But…but…but…
Waffling, insincerity and weakness?
Those characteristics are the very markers of about 98% of all the politicians who have ever been elected. The truth of the matter is that the (various) public(s) only like those things if the purveyors thereof have been sold to them as champions of their own interests. Just look at the people in positions of leadership and their followers in the U.S. Congress for all you need to know on that account.
And yes, on some level Barack Obama was right to call us “sanctimonious purists.” In comparison to himself…someone who stands in a long line of “practical politicians”….that is precisely what we are.
He waffled, lied, and compromised his way to power.
Adolph Reed Jr., May 2008 in The Progressive.
Except for #3…”[Obama] can’t beat McCain in November”…Adolph Reed was right on the money. And…if McCain hadn’t fucked up by trying to make Little Miss Alaska vice-preznit, he might quite conceivably have won.
May the gods stand up for “sanctimonious purists.”
Without us the world would be an even worse place.
Bet on it.
AG
–Tom Lehrer
Cf.
Hilarious.
Also too, perfectly illustrative of what ails you (i.e., confirmation-bias-on-steroids affliction; utter lack of critical-reading/thinking-informed discernment; which presumably also explains frequently commenting Counterpunchdrunk.
What you wrote is contradictory.
So when Obama speaks a hard truth as he sees it, you act like a snowflake? Which is it the sincere truth or waffling weakness? If you can’t be consistent why do you expect perfection in dem politicians?
Did you blow off the Democrats when they failed to do everything you hoped? Or did you suck it up and work hard to get as much as you could within the system we’re stuck with, knowing the alternative was way, way worse? If the latter, Obama wasn’t talking about you, and neither am I.
Sorry, but any leftist who ran off to Jill Stein, or refused to vote for the only choice we had with Donald Trump staring us in the face, is indeed a sanctimonious purist. Likewise those who persisted in undermining and attacking the Democrats right up to Election Day. Notice how all the Republicans, even those who’d condemned him, closed ranks behind their disgusting candidate? That’s how you win elections, which is how you get to exercise power to get done as much of the things you hold dear as possible in our sclerotic system.
I didn’t come even close to suggesting that I voted for Jill Stein. Didn’t even toy with the idea nor did my very liberal friends and family members. We all voted for Clinton because the alternative was too awful to behold.
I fault Hillary Clinton for the loss. She didn’t run a good campaign against Barack Obama and her campaign against Trump was no better. Obviously there were some other factors (Comey, Russia, etc.) but she took a lot of groups for granted (African Americans and Hispanics, for example), as well as entire states (Michigan and Wisconsin).
Well, then — given your first paragraph, you are clearly not a sanctimonious purist, and you weren’t among the group being condemned.
Yes, Clinton didn’t run a strong campaign. Yes, she bears a goodly amount of blame for what happened. But Comey, the Foxification of America, and the decades-long campaign of vilification were also responsible, and to pin the blame solely on Clinton is as foolish as absolving her of responsibility.
BTW, I don’t consider anyone who voted for Jill Stein a sanctimonious purist. Not over the issues I support, that’s for certain. She was, after all, at the same table in Russia with Putin and Flynn.
In my county there may have been people who didn’t vote at all. I would need to go into the clerk’s office to compare the total votes cast in 2016 to the number cast in 2012. The 2016 under vote for President was inconsequential.
In 2012 Obama won this rural county by 18 votes. Trump took it by 530. Based on other changes in our community my feeling is that Trump drew angry occasional voters out of the woodwork.
I volunteer for an organization in a nearby county that is over 50% Hispanic. I was told that many didn’t vote because they felt nobody cared about them. Of course, it is now disaster for Hispanics, especially immigrants, DACA, et al. but that is how they felt. Certainly they don’t qualify as sanctimonious purists.
The Washington Post interviewed a black woman who voted but not for President because she was angry that Hillary appeared to take her vote for granted. She now regretted not voting for her. How do we categorize her?
How do we categorize that black woman? The voters who chose not to turn out because they felt neglected and overlooked?
As self-indulgent fools who could not or refused to see how dangerous it was to wallow in a fit of pique in the face of an existential threat to our democracy and all the issues they cared about. Anyone even remotely aware of just how dreadful Trump was and would be (and how could anyone not be aware?) who chose to throw their votes away in a self-pitying huff are just as responsible as all the deplorables who joyfully pulled the lever for 45*. They’re sorry now that the damage they helped bring about is staring them in the face? Too fucking late.
Jill Stein and her voters I agree aren’t purists for the same values we hold dear, but by God are they ever sanctimonious.
Classification; Idiot.
This has been another episode of simple answers to simple questions.
.
We’re usually on the same side of issues, but I was taken aback at your harsh response.
The Hispanic dominant county I spoke of is one of the poorest counties in the country. Anglos have dominated it for over 100 years. The Democratic Party is split between the dominant Anglos and the poorer, less educated and powerful Hispanics.
The new head of the Colorado Democratic Party (a Bernie supporter, I might add), has toured the rural parts of the state holding listening sessions. She has tried to bring together the 2 sides of the Democratic Party
To call uneducated, poor Hispanics “self-indulgent fools” is both harsh and off the mark. These people have been deliberately excluded and made to feel their opinions, needs and votes don’t matter.
I think the same is probably true for many blacks.
If you’re attitude towards them is that they are “self-indulgent fools,” the Democrats are in serious trouble and the future isn’t as bright as we all hope it might be.
I see your point. You’re in a far different milieu than I am, where my experience is, the voters who threw their votes away on Jill Stein, or refused to vote for Clinton out of disdain or demands for purity, are far better insulated — for now — against the consequences of their folly. Their white privilege and socioeconomic status mean they can afford — they think — to treat their vote as a boutique artisanal precious thing to bestow only when their needs and wants have been met and their egos sufficiently stroked.
Harsh? You bet. But if you were in the Boston area, you’d know what people mean when they speak of the People’s Republic of Cambridge. I had a bellyful of their shortsighted self-indulgent crap during the election.
You write:
Yes.
The Democrats are in serious trouble and the future isnot “…as bright as we all hope it might be.”
Yes.
Precisely.
Thank you…
AG
The difference is there was a much stronger headwind for the Democratic Party in 2008 than in 2000 or 2016, The average Dem voter has no idea how much harder it is to win the Presidency 3 times in a row as opposed to winning it against an unpopular President or with the power of incumbency. Too many Democrats got too complacent with the moderate progress of a B. Clinton or Obama. Then a small percentage get all bent out of shape because, they were not able to accomplish as much as LBJ or FDR,
I must of have heard “Trump/Bush can’t win a dozen times. “There were numerous times that I could not get smug lefties to understand that yes in fact Trump or Bush could win. They just refused to accept that possibility, and they could bother not to vote or vote for Nader or Stein.
Do you include the Hillary Clinton campaign in your “smug lefty” catchall denunciation? She and her campaign were so certain she had the election wrapped up that she never bothered to campaign in my state (Colorado) outside of the center of the urban Front Range, primarily the Denver metro area. Her support here was dropping like a stone in the last month and she could well have lost the state if the election had been held a few weeks later.
She and her campaign didn’t take to heart her primary losses in Michigan and Wisconsin, 2 states I know well, and failed to campaign in their smaller cities. We were not all that shocked that she lost both based on what we were hearing from friends who live in those states.
Her message was wonky, complicated and mushy compared to the Bernie’s more spare and inspiring one. Speaking of, he spent as much or more time campaigning for her in Colorado than she spent here herself.
In the general election, Clinton never bothered to come to Wisconsin at all. And she lost here by only 23,000 votes. I suppose that’s the fault of the left though as well, just like everything else is.
So what was the problem with Russ Vida?
If I had to give you one word, it would be “complacency.” Feingold underestimated the ability of the Republicans to get out the vote — they have a powerful machine, much moreso than the Democrats. And he believed too much in the polls that through summer and early fall showed him well ahead of Johnson.
If Feingold had wanted to win he would have had to have mounted a ferocious ground game in Milwaukee and Dane (Madison) Counties to offset the votes he’d lose elsewhere in the state. But I live in Milwaukee County and I can tell you that the campaign he put on here was tepid at best. And when we would go out and knock on doors in support of him, we’d get, “Feingold? Feingold who??”.
This is how Democrats have always won here, at least back in the days when they were winning. But much of the progressive infrastructure here is broken, and that goes all they way back to the (Democratic) Gov. Doyle administration (2002-2010).
SATSQ-No
I am not following your kitchen sink critique of the Clinton campaign. Resources and candidate time is limited. She won Colorado, so any more time she spent there would have been wasted energy and resources. She did better than Russ Feingold in Wisconsin, and I was under the impression that he spent quite some time campaigning in Wisconsin. In hindsight, she obviously should have spent more time or done something different in the rust belt states to win them. Unfortunately, the she just didn’t try meme doesn’t work for Pennsylvania, because she spent so much time and money in the state. It still wasn’t enough. Your solution was she should have devoted more time and money in Colorado so she could make sure she didn’t lose a non existent election on Nov. 29th? Please point where I misunderstood your brilliant insight.
She was pulled in many directions bygroups like the Congressional Black Caucus(CBC) to campaign in reaches like Georgia and longshot pipe dreams like South Carolina. In addition, Latino and immigration groups wanted her to campaign in places like Texas and Arizona. The polling was difficult and made more so by the actions of Comey in the closing weeks. The last weekend they wanted me to go to Pennsylvania, because they knew they were in trouble according to last minute polling. Too many liberal groups and leaders frolicked and played in 2016, when they should have been much more focused and active. The Obama’s were doing their Fred and Ginger routine, so Barack couldn’t be bothered to make a tough decision in terms of Russian interference. When he finally did, he allowed himself to get played by Mcconnell and the Republicans, just like he did with SC nomination. I can’t imagine FDR doing the same in 1941 or Madison in 1812. I especially can’t imagine them getting away with as little criticism like Obama has. Obama was in vacation mode the last 18 months or so in my estimation.
However, people like Booman that were precinct captains and very involved in a slam dunk campaign like 2008 were busy writing naval gazing pieces about volvos in Bucks Co. When they weren’t wasting our time with that drivel,they were chastising the campaign for not capitulating more to the Sanders campaign and voters, and writing mash notes to Michelle Obama to run again. He was not alone as most of the left like Rude Pundit, Atrios, etc. were phoning it in or AWOL in 2016. Digby was the only one that had her hair on fire in terms of the Trump threat. I have no idea how much you contributed, if it is the dreck I have read here since May 2016, obviously not much.
If she was so smug and assured of winning she failed at that as well. She brought out Gore to campaign in Florida and warn about complacency. As did most of her spokespeople including Bernie. Sanders did a pretty good job of campaigning for her in the Fall, and they may not have used him as well as he could have been deployed in stated like Michigan and Wisconsin. However, his failure to prepare his voters and supporters for his almost certain eventual defeat in the primaries created too much dissolution and rebellion. After New York he needed to reign the irrational hopes and start laying the groundwork for transferring his voters to Clinton and the rest of the Democratic Party. Instead he went on a reunion tour for weeks after the California primary and made Clinton grovel for his support. She didn’t need that headache at the time and into the convention.
Clinton was not perfect, but neither were her husband, Obama, Kerry, or Gore. However, Bill and Barrack were running while unpopular Republicans occupied the WH during recessions. As well the country had WH fatigue for the party in power. This time the Democrats were disadvantaged by that impulse. Unless we are ok with winning with once in a generation politicians like Obama and Bill with once a decade favorable conditions, perhaps we should just forget this office. We don’t seem to have the party and individual discipline necessary to capture it unless we have a Goldilocks moment with people like you holding us hostage to irrational demands and flawed solutions. We can afford it when we are going to win by 10 pts, so instead we win by 7-8. When we are going to win by less than 5 pts, it becomes much more dicier, and the potential for the EC to go tits up is off the charts. I have no idea why this basic concept is so difficult for so many to wrap their heads around.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with fighting about the direction of the party in the primary. That’s what it’s for! It’s the dipshits that carry the battle into the general election that need to get their shit together.
You write:
Riiiiiight…
Speaking of dipshits!!! The DNC’s sub rosa campaign against Bernie Sanders in the primaries was a dipshit sandwich with a side of sheer corruption. Fighting about the direction of the party is one thing, but when that direction is itself being “directed” by the very corporate forces that have tanked this country (and the so-called “Democratic Party”) for well over 20 years?
It is nothing sort of criminal!!!
And you, sir or madam, with your little ratings hustle? You are just a minuscule version of that criminality.
It should be at the very least “interesting” to you regarding how that turned out in 2016, eh?
But it’s not.
You…in true “As above, so below” style…continue to repeat the mistakes of your masters.
Sad but true.
But…the truth goes marching on despite your connivances.
Bet on it.
Have a nice day.
AG
This is excellent reporting, Martin. Thank you.