Democrat National Convention - Day One Reflections

Elections are always important, but this year's presidential election may be the most important election of my live time.  The stakes have never been higher and having ceased blogging to listen to all of the prime time speakers last night at the Democrat National Convention, the competing visions for the nation could not be starker.  Donald Trump and the Republicans offer fear, hate, division, discrimination and religious extremism that have become all the more frightening given Russia's apparent attempt to throw the election to Trump by undermining the Democrat Party and Hillary Clinton.  On the Democrat side, the vision is motivated by a desire for unity, tolerance of peoples' differences, and a government that works to protect its citizens and temper the abuses of capitalism. Stated another way, the Democrats do not view some citizens as disposable garbage whereas in Trump's world, the "losers" deserve, with much of what determines whether one is a loser being based on one's skin color, faith, national origin and/or sexual orientation. 

As noted in numerous posts, what I find so incredibly frightening is the inability or refusal of Trump supporters to recognize that Trump's campaign and some of his first promised actions mirror the tactics of Adolph Hitler in the early 1930's.  Trump may not be a new Hitler, but his utilization of hate, fear and division to gain power are beyond troubling and cannot lead to a good ending.  This reality was hit upon by a number of the speakers last night, but perhaps most eloquently by Michelle Obama who made the election a choice about what kind of future do we want to give to our children and grandchildren.  I for one do not want a future where white/heterosexual privilege is revived or a future where a madman like Trump has the nuclear codes in his possession as Elizabeth Warren so rightly pointed out.

As for Bernie Sanders, he sought to heal divisions and made the case to his supporters that a Trump victory was truly something to terrifying to ever allow to happen.  One can only hope that over the coming days of the convention Sanders supporters will realize that staying home on election day or voting for a third party with no chance of victory is not an option and will only serve to put Trump in the White House.  Despite Trump's disingenuous appeals to Sanders supporters, Trump is the antithesis of what Sanders wants for America.  

Last night made me proud to no longer be a Republican and to find myself ready to work all out to insure that Trump is defeated.  While we were watching the speakers last night, the husband made the remark that this election, we need to step things up and do more than we have ever done before.  He's right.  Quite literally the nation's future is on the line and we must make sure that it is not one ruled by Trump and his fellow fear mongers and haters. 

The Bitter Last Days of Bernie's "Revolution"

I have conjectured about Bernie Sanders' bitterness and refusal to accept that Hillary Clinton has defeated him - something abhorrent to his seemingly huge ego - and now a piece in Politico with information sourced from within his campaign confirms some of my thoughts.  Moreover, it appears that Sanders has been extremely "hands on" in running his campaign which is not a bad thing in and of itself.  However, it makes it very difficult for the candidate to blame missteps and nastiness on others.  The piece also suggests that there is strong split in the campaign between some staffers and Sanders as to a rational basis for continuing the campaign now that no path to victory remains.  Here are highlights:

There’s no strategist pulling the strings, and no collection of burn-it-all-down aides egging him on. At the heart of the rage against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the campaign aides closest to him say, is Bernie Sanders.

It was the Vermont senator who personally rewrote his campaign manager’s shorter statement after the chaos at the Nevada state party convention and blamed the political establishment for inciting the violence.

He was the one who made the choice to go after Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz after his wife read him a transcript of her blasting him on television.

He chose the knife fight over calling Clinton unqualified, which aides blame for pulling the bottom out of any hopes they had of winning in New York and their last real chance of turning a losing primary run around.

There are many divisions within the Sanders campaign—between the dead-enders and the work-it-out crowds, between the younger aides who think he got off message while the consultants got rich and obsessed with Beltway-style super delegate math, and between the more experienced staffers who think the kids got way too high on their sense of the difference between a movement and an actual campaign.

But more than any of them, Sanders is himself filled with resentment, on edge, feeling like he gets no respect -- all while holding on in his head to the enticing but remote chance that Clinton may be indicted before the convention.

Convinced as Sanders is that he’s realizing his lifelong dream of being the catalyst for remaking American politics—aides say he takes credit for a Harvard Kennedy School study in April showing young people getting more liberal, and he takes personal offense every time Clinton just dismisses the possibility of picking him as her running mate—his guiding principle under attack has basically boiled down to a feeling that multiple aides sum up as: “Screw me? No, screw you.”

This isn’t about what’s good for the Democratic Party in his mind, but about what he thinks is good for advancing the agenda that he’s been pushing since before he got elected mayor of Burlington.

Sanders owns nearly every major decision, right down to the bills. A conversation with former Iowa Sen. Tom Harkin about getting left in personal debt from his own 1992 presidential campaign has stayed at the top of Sanders’ mind.

Aides say Sanders thinks that progressives who picked Clinton are cynical, power-chasing chickens — like Sen. Sherrod Brown, one of his most consistent allies in the Senate before endorsing Clinton and campaigning hard for her ahead of the Ohio primary. Sanders is so bitter about it that he’d be ready to nix Brown as an acceptable VP choice, if Clinton ever asked his advice on who’d be a good progressive champion.

Every time Sanders got into a knife fight, aides say, they ended up losing. But they could never stop Sanders when he got his back up.

Top Sanders aides admit that it’s been weeks, if not months, since they themselves realized he wasn’t going to win, and they’ve been operating with a Trump’s-got-no-real-shot safety net. They debate whether Sanders’ role in the fall should be a full vote-for-Clinton campaign, or whether he should just campaign hard against Trump without signing up to do much for her directly.

They haven’t been able to get Sanders focused on any of that, or on the real questions about what kind of long term organization to build out of his email list. They know they’ll have their own rally in Philadelphia – outside the the convention hall—but that’s about as far as they’ve gotten.

Losing a campaign is hard, as I know from my own run for office years ago.  But part of Sanders' bitterness may be from the fact that in the last analysis, he has no one to blame but himself.  Whatever he decides to do, being bitter, angry and nasty will not attract sympathy or support over the long haul.  

Hillary Clinton Claims the Democratic Nomination

Having won resounding victories in New Jersey and won New Mexico and South Dakota, and leading 56% to 43% in California with 92% of the vote tallied, Hillary Clinton claimed the Democrat presidential nomination, become the first woman to ever win the nomination for such a high office.    Not surprisingly, Bernie Sanders' enormous ego continues to keep him from admitting that he lost fair and square.  Rather than concede and rally his supporters to Clinton and the need to put a focus on defeating Donald Trump, Sanders is delusionally vowing to fight on.   His refusal to grasp objective reality is to the point where one can wonder whether he is mentally fit for the U.S. Senate, much less the presidency.  A piece in the New York Times looks at Clinton's historic achievement. Here are excerpts:

Hillary Clinton claimed the Democratic presidential nomination on Tuesday night after decisive victories in the New Jersey and New Mexico primaries, and quickly appealed to supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont to unite with her against Donald J. Trump.

But Mr. Sanders refused to yield, insisting that he would continue his campaign and barely acknowledging her achievement.

With the 14-month Democratic race nearing a close, Mrs. Clinton savored the biggest night of her extraordinary journey from lawyer, wife and first lady to senator, secretary of state and, now, the first woman to win a major party’s nomination. At a rally in Brooklyn, she took the stage with her hands clasped over her heart in gratitude, then threw open her arms in joy and savored a long moment as a jubilant crowd waved American flags and chanted “Hillary.”

Reaching for history, Mrs. Clinton pledged to build on the achievements of pioneers like the 19th-century leaders at Seneca Falls, N.Y., who began the fight for women’s rights in America.

“Tonight caps an amazing journey — a long, long journey,” she said, nearly a century after women won the right to vote nationwide. “We all owe so much to those who came before, and tonight belongs to all of you.”

As six states voted on Tuesday, Mr. Sanders’s political lifeline frayed with each loss. He was left hoping for a long-shot victory in the California primary, where Mrs. Clinton held a wide lead, to justify staying in the race and lobbying Democratic officials to support him in a contested convention next month.

President Obama plans to meet with Mr. Sanders at the White House on Thursday at the candidate’s request, an administration spokesman said, adding that Mr. Obama had called both Democratic candidates Tuesday night to congratulate them on “running inspiring campaigns.”

As Mrs. Clinton sought to turn her attention to the general election, Mr. Trump, who had a weekslong head start, was busy reckoning with problems of his own making.

Part of Mr. Sanders’s challenge is that his justifications for continuing his campaign are increasingly thin.

Mrs. Clinton has now won a majority of the 4,051 pledged delegates at stake in the Democratic primaries and caucuses, crossing what Mr. Sanders had long held up as a critical threshold. She also has support from 571 super delegates to Mr. Sanders’s 48; only about 100 uncommitted super delegates remain.

Other campaign advisers said they expected Mr. Sanders to consider his options during his flight from California to Vermont on Wednesday. One recalled that Mrs. Clinton did much the same when she found herself in a similar situation eight years ago.

The resistance of many of Mr. Sanders’s supporters to Mrs. Clinton is likely to soften once Mr. Sanders leaves the race, and especially if he endorses her. But Clinton advisers and allies say they will need his help to bring around the many younger voters and liberals who prefer him.

If Mrs. Clinton is beginning the general election with many Sanders supporters incensed at her, Mr. Trump is in the midst of his own self-made crisis. He is forcing Republicans to confront a painful choice: Embrace his brand of racial politics, one that could taint the party’s image well beyond this election, or abandon their presumptive nominee and hand the White House to the Democrats for another four years.

But Mrs. Clinton’s supporters, pointing both to the threat from Mr. Trump and to her chance at making history, predicted that she would have an easier time bringing her party together than Mr. Trump would his.

The Real Bernie Sanders Is Beginning to Show and It's Looking Ugly

While I have friends who continue to rally to Bernie Sanders, I suspect more and more progressives and Democrats are beginning to see the many for what he is: a self-aggrandizing loose canon who puts his own ego and vanity above all else.  It seems that if Sanders cannot win the Democrat nomination, he's only too happy to go on a campaign of destruction against the Democrat Party and in the process potentially hand the presidency to Donald Trump - a man who is the antithesis of what Sanders claims to support.  Frankly, I have lost all patience and all respect for the man who has become a dangerous gadfly.  As a piece in Politico notes, others are similarly losing patience and want Sanders to end his campaign.  Here are article highlights:

Is the left turning on its darling, Bernie Sanders? On Friday, Netroots titan Markos Moulitsas, namesake of the liberal Daily Kos, dropped a rhetorical bomb on the Bern, blaming the candidate for doing too little to denounce death threats received by the Nevada Democratic Party after Sanders’ state convention delegates complained they had received unfair treatment. “The problem isn't Bernie Sanders' supporters,” Moulitsas wrote. “It's Bernie Sanders himself … [He] refuses to forcefully and unambiguously reject that violence, instead rationalizing and explaining it away with a mix of grievances and outright conspiracy theory.”

What we are seeing, however, is that it’s no longer taboo in liberal circles to attack Sanders as he drags out the nomination process at a time when many are itching to turn their fire on Donald Trump. And if his reputation in the party is being damaged outside his base, that will make it harder for him to extract concessions from Clinton regarding the platform and party nomination rules at the convention.

Through much of the campaign, Sanders wore a progressive halo, making it tricky for Clinton to play classic hardball politics (not that she didn’t try). Even if Democratic voters didn’t believe he was the practical choice, his platform still spoke to the ideological aspirations of many in the party. His supporters heard, “I like Bernie, but…” so much that they turned it into a website providing information designed to assuage unsure voters.

Much of the warm, fuzzy sentiment was based on a perception of Sanders as a non-politician, a man so wedded to his ideals that he would not besmirch them by engaging in petty politics.

But in the months that followed, the Sanders campaign adopted an increasingly harder edge, gradually depriving him of angelic protections. Now, with only six states remaining on the primary calendar, the delegate math harder and harder to ignore, and the Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump short of insurmountable, partisan impulses on the left are kicking in, and patience for squabbles is wearing thin.
 This week another prominent figure in the online progressive community, Talking Points Memo’s Josh Marshall, also blamed Sanders directly for the increased animosity, saying: “The 'burn it down' attitude, the upping the ante … seems to be coming from Sanders himself. Right from the top.” Mother Jones’ Kevin Drum said more in sorrow than in anger this week, “It's sort of painful to see a good person like Bernie turned into such a sullen and resentful man.”

Sanders likely grasps the potential danger of alienating too many progressives. Despite the charges that the toxicity comes “from the top” of the Sanders campaign, Bloomberg News reports that Sanders has personally reached out to fellow senators and given “behind-the-scenes assurances” that he “understands the need for party unity.” . . . . He may believe this is a safe line to walk, remembering the intense yet ephemeral acrimony of the 2008 campaign.

The ideological goals of Sanders and his voters both overlap and compete with the goal of Democratic harmony, complicating his strategic decision-making. But he could try to transcend the binary choice between confrontation and reconciliation. If there’s one thing Sanders can’t stand, is a media distracted by food fights and ignoring matters of substance. . . . Right now, the media is getting a lot of the sport it likes, and Sanders is getting a lot less of what he likes. He might consider delivering a speech on how giving reporters fodder for stories about discord only serves to take the spotlight away from income inequality and corporate influence over democracy – which would be a way to urge better behavior from his supporters without sounding like he’s scolding them.

Because if Bernie wants to own the moral high ground at the convention, he’ll need to return the focus of his campaign to the issues in its final days.

Bernie Sanders Declares War on Reality

America is now faced with the terrifying prospect of Donald Trump as a possible president and what does Bernie Sanders do?  He vows to continue the Democratic nomination fight despite the math that shows he cannot prevail.  The outcome will only be wasted funds better directed at Trump and the GOP and attacks on Hillary Clinton that will only help Trump and the forces of regression and bigotry.  All so that Sanders can satisfy his ego that seemingly rivals that of Trump himself.  A column in the Boston Globe looks at Sanders lack of a grasp on reality and his continued fight against what is now best for the country.  Here are highlights:

Instead of coming to grips with the overwhelming evidence that Democratic primary voters prefer Hillary Clinton be the party’s 2016 presidential nominee, Bernie Sanders continues to create his own political reality — devising new and creative excuses to explain why he’s losing to her and why he should be the party’s standard-bearer in November.

First there was the complaint that Southern, conservative states have their primaries early, which “distorts reality,” because these states won’t support a Democrat in November. This is certainly a compelling assertion from a candidate who has won such red-state stalwarts as Utah, Alaska, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Kansas, Idaho, and Wyoming.

Next the Sanders camp argued that the primary system is unfair because places like New York have a closed primary that doesn’t allow independents to vote. By this logic, it is undemocratic not to allow voters not registered as Democrats to vote in a Democratic primary tasked with choosing the Democratic nominee for president.

For Sanders, it seems, the only fair and equitable manner for choosing a Democratic nominee is one that favors him.

This brings us to the Sanders campaign’s latest “the dog ate my homework” excuse. In what was a bizarre press conference Sunday at the National Press Club in Washington, Sanders took aim at a new target — superdelegates.

[H]e said that this summer’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia will be “contested” because Clinton will not have enough pledged delegates to win on the first ballot.

Clinton needs to get 2,383 out of 4,766 delegates to win the nomination. However, by Sanders’ argument, she should not count superdelegates toward that total (even though Sanders is still including the 715 superdelegates in that 4,766 number). I realize that math is tricky, but if you subtract 715 from 4,766 and divide it in half, Clinton would actually need 2,026 pledged delegates for a majority — a fairly achievable goal for her.

[T]he biggest problem with this argument is that even if they all voted the way that Sanders wants, Clinton would still have a 363-to-147 advantage in superdelegates. Overall that adds up to a more than 500-delegate lead, which makes sense, since Clinton has won the most states and the most votes.

Sanders’ third argument, however, is the real doozy, because to buy it you basically have to ignore everything else he has said about the unfairness of the primary system. According to Sanders, superdelegates shouldn’t actually be guided by the will of the people.

In the realm of illogical, self-serving, hypocritical, intellectually dishonest political arguments, this is practically the gold standard. But with six weeks to go until the last primary, I have great confidence that the Sanders campaign will find some way to top it.

Yes, I have lost all patience with Sanders who, in view, needs to get his head out of his ass.

Bernie Sanders' Legacy

With the math more or less insurmountably against him, Bernie Sander's campaign is struggling to go on after yesterdays drubbing in four out of five states. Indeed, there are reports that he is cutting staff as he tries to find a path forward. So where does that leave Sanders and his supporters?  A piece in te New York Times makes the case that Sanders has set a large part of the agenda for Democrat party going forward. Sanders may have lost the nomination fight, but his ideas and the issues he championed will likely live on.  Here are column highlights: 

At this point, Bernie Sanders is the figurehead of a living idea and a zombie campaign. The issues his campaign has raised are likely to resonate with the progressive left for decades, if not forever, but his path to becoming the Democratic nominee is now narrower than a cat’s hair.

It’s over. He knows it and we know it. The New York Times reported on Wednesday that Sanders “is planning to lay off ‘hundreds’ of campaign staffers across the country and focus much of his remaining effort on winning California.”

And yet he continues to carry the torch and keep the flame alive so that his supporters — or more appropriately, the supporters of the causes he has advanced — have an opportunity to cast protest votes in the few remaining contests. He has gone from leading a revolution to leading a wake.

I think people have mischaracterized the choice being made between Sanders and Clinton. It is not necessarily a clean choice between idealism and pragmatism, between principle and politics, between dynamism and incrementalism — though all those things are at play to some degree. But to me, it is more about where we peg the horizon and how we get from here to there.

The ideals are not in dispute. What’s in dispute is whether our ideals can be reasonably accomplished by a single administration or a generation. Sometimes you have to cut deals to reach ideals. That’s politics.

Now, you could argue that our politics are broken, as Sanders has, and you would be right. Moneyed interests — that of industries and individuals — have far too much influence. Our two-party system is heavily skewed to favor establishment candidates, although Sanders’s success and Donald Trump’s offer strong evidence that the party apparatuses are not inviolable.

What requires less debate is the often-repeated refrain that Sanders’s supporters are the future of the Democratic Party. In state after state, often whether he won it or not, he carried youth vote by wide margins. [

P]art of it is what Harry Enten pointed out on Friday: The Democratic electorate turning out in 2016 has been a lot more liberal than it was in the last competitive Democratic primary, in 2008.”

Enten explained:

It wouldn’t be surprising to see the moderate/conservative portion of the Democratic primary electorate become a minority in the next 10 years. It’s the youngest Democrats who are more to identify as “very liberal.” It could very well be that someone matching Sanders’s ideological outlook will be more successful down the road.

First we have to see what comes of the general election, in a contest that at this point seems to pit Clinton against Trump. Although current polling shows Clinton with an overwhelming edge, making political predictions seven months in advance is a fool’s errand.

[W]hile current polling favors Clinton, history does not. The last time a Democratic president succeeded a multi-term Democratic president was when Harry Truman succeeded Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945.

However the election breaks in November, the Sanders coalition — largely young, liberal and white — will not likely be satisfied. Either Clinton will win, and it will simply feel like a lesser of two evils, a subsuming of a righteous cause into a waffling contrivance; or Clinton will lose, and the Sanders coalition will feel vindicated that the wrong Democratic candidate won the nomination.

Either way, the cause lives. Universal health care becomes no less attractive. Neither does free public college, or campaign finance reform, or a more pacifist foreign policy.

The Democratic Party, for better or worse, is likely to move further toward progressive purity in Sanders’s wake. This may backfire, and encourage a nominating process that pushes otherwise moderate and widely attractive candidates to adopt increasingly extreme policies that make them nearly un-electable, as has happened with the Republican Party.

That, to me, seems to be at least part of the Democratic Party’s future. Whether that is a utopian or dystopian future, only time will tell, but the reckoning is coming. This, I believe, will be a fixture of the Sanders legacy: Drag a center-left party further left — whether one calls that True Left or Extreme Left.

Will Sanders Back Clinton When He Drops Out?

I vented in a prior post about Bernie Sanders supporters who are vowing to stay home on election day rather than vote for Hillary Clinton.  The result of such action, of course, would be the to position the GOP to retake the White House and put in place policies that would be the antithesis of what Sanders claims to support.  Now, a column in the Washington Post argues that Sanders himself will back Hillary after he drops out of the Democrat nomination contest.  If Sanders truly cares more about the causes he has championed rather than his ego, I believe the column is on point. , Here are column highlights:

Eight years ago, I spent an election night in a basement gymnasium in Manhattan, watching Hillary Clinton and her campaign advisers create an alternate reality.

It was June 3, 2008, and Barack Obama had just clinched the Democratic presidential nomination, making official a victory that had seemed inevitable for months. But Terry McAuliffe, then the campaign chairman and emcee of this Clinton “victory” party, recited a list of Clinton’s primary wins and introduced her as “the next president of the United States.”

Clinton, too, made no mention of her defeat, boasting that she had won “more votes than any primary candidate in history.”

Yet four days later, Clinton graciously bowed out of the race. In a concession speech at the National Building Museum in Washington, she said she and her supporters would “do all we can to help elect Barack Obama the next president of the United States.” Some in the hall booed — but Clinton delivered her supporters to Obama in November.

Recalling this serene end to the bitter 2008 Democratic primary battle, I’m not inclined to join in all the hand-wringing about the damage Bernie Sanders is doing to Clinton’s chances in November by remaining in the race.

It doesn’t matter if Sanders continues his candidacy until the last votes are cast in June. What matters is that he quits gracefully, and there should be every expectation he will, for a simple reason: Sanders is not a fool.

Sanders sounded like an extortionist Monday night when he answered a college student’s question about whether he would encourage his supporters to back Clinton if she secured the nomination. He said Clinton would have to earn their support by embracing single-payer health care, free college tuition and a carbon tax — all things Clinton rejected in her (successful) campaign against Sanders. 

But seconds later, the forum’s moderator, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, rephrased the question: “If it’s incumbent on her, what role do you have?” And Sanders gave a very different answer. “I will do everything in my power to make sure that no Republican gets into the White House in this election cycle,” he said.

That’s the crucial point. Sanders wants to exert maximum leverage to the very end to move Clinton toward his populist policies. But he is a practical man, and he certainly doesn’t wish to see a President Trump or President Cruz. This is why there’s no cause for all the fuss over him remaining in the race until he is mathematically eliminated.

Even before Tuesday night’s results from the Northeast, he needed to win 59 percent of remaining delegates, or 71 percent if you include super delegates. That isn’t going to happen.

And so it will happen this time. Sanders, when he quits the race, can justifiably declare victory in moving the debate — and Clinton — in his direction on trade, Wall Street, income inequality, campaign finance and energy. His campaign has exceeded all expectations, and he isn’t about to jeopardize his movement by handing the presidency to Trump.

The Mindless Whining and Tantrums of Sanders Supporters.

I can't cite a lousy night's sleep for my crankiness today when it comes to Bernie Sanders supporters who continue to whine and threaten to sit home if Sanders isn't the 2016 Democrat nominee.  As if staying home on their grumpy asses on election day and by default potentially putting a Republican in the White does anything other than spell a death knell for the policies Sanders supporters claim to support and value.  Is seeing the Supreme Court shifted to the right for a generation, more failed trickle down economics, increased military spending at the expense of social programs, and  even more income inequality really worth proving ones "purity" to the Sanders mantra?  I'm sorry, but I see such behavior as both irrational and an example of cutting off one's nose to spite their face.  A pro-Sanders reader sent me a link to a piece that looks at the idiocy of this mindset as laid out by a Sanders supporter who cannot see that refusing to "learn to love Hillary Clinton" threatens everything the author claims to support.  Here are excerpts:

The moment has arrived. That moment when the establishment’s sniggering apologists tell those damn idealists that it is time to get with the program and settle for the latest shabby party product or risk going home empty-handed. Hear the eternal refrain: Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.

There has been a slew of these strident come to Jesus jeremiads from the usual suspects after former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s win in the New York primary. But the latest sermon on submitting to destiny from former Obama speechwriter Jon Favreau both perfectly encapsulates the mindless DNC Hillary Clinton Campaign talking points, while attempting to provide a how do you do fellow kids credibility because he was part of the 2008 primary fight against Hillary Clinton.

The substance of the screed is as tired as it is tiresome. Favreau makes a number of claims that fail basic scrutiny when he counsels supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders, or “Berniacs” as they are called by The Daily Beast. For instance:

“Maybe you don’t believe that she’s different from the caricature we’ve all helped perpetuate. But she is running a campaign with a policy platform that’s more progressive than her husband’s administration, her 2008 campaign, and—in a few cases—Barack Obama’s administration.”

The problem, of course, is not that Hillary Clinton is not taking progressive positions. The problem is that, given her record, the best analysis of her policy platform is that she is lying about those positions.

Senator Sanders not only offers a progressive platform that he has a well-demonstrated commitment to, but his theory of change is vastly different than former Secretary Clinton’s. Sanders sees change as coming from social movements, such as the Civil Rights Movement he participated in, which uses people power to pressure government officials into making concessions. Clinton claims that she will use her extensive experience in politics and government to personally work the gears of the state apparatus from the inside on behalf of the causes and people she states she cares for.

In summation, for those who genuinely support a progressive platform on domestic and foreign policy, Hillary Clinton is not qualified. Her record shows her approach to domestic policies is to run to the right while throwing up progressive rhetoric to cover her escape, and her foreign policy would be a return to Bush-era belligerence and incompetence.

In other words, no Jon, we won’t learn to love her, though maybe some of us will hold our noses and vote for her in November if she is the nominee to prevent an even worse candidate from taking over the empire. Then again, maybe not.

To quote the author, do Sanders supporters really prefer allowing someone even worse to occupy the White House, nominate Supreme Court appointments and push policies diametrically opposed to what Bernie Sanders supposedly stands for?  Oh, and as for the parallel with the civil rights movement, does the author not recognize that 50 years later, the civil rights battle still is not over.  Wake up to reality!! 

Should Democrats Worry About Their Own Possible Civil War?

Add caption

With the Republican Party in what amounts to an officially declared civil war and its would be standard bearers being more or less all crazy, it would be easier for Democrats to gloat.  However, the reality is that the Democrat Party has its own divisions and truly serious issue of voter apathy, indifference and, in my view out right laziness.  Elections truly matter, yet too many in the Democrat base literally sit on their asses and fail to vote unless a particularly charismatic candidate manages to motivate the.  Worse yet, the party establishment is out of touch with the base in many ways albeit not as horrifically so as in the case of the GOP. In addition, the Democrat establishment has not pandered to hate-filled extremists and Neanderthals as has been the case with the GOP for over 35 years or more.  A piece in Salon looks at the very real issues that the Democrat establishment needs to address (Are you listening Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Hillary?).  Here are excerpts:

Yeah, I know, let’s back up for a minute. I said “post-Bernie landscape.” Deal with it. I’m not going all “I told you so,” even though I did. There really was an opening after New Hampshire, a moment when we all sensed a potential tipping point that could have happened but didn’t quite. That window slammed shut in Nevada and South Carolina and across the South, and I’m not buying the higher-math hypotheses about how Sanders might make inroads with African-American voters in other regions in a way he spectacularly failed to do in the South, and then might win Michigan or Ohio or Florida and push on toward a big victory in New York that flips the race upside down again. I could certainly be wrong, because wrongness is the order of the day in 2016. But I think the next few weeks are about Bernie’s supporters moving through the stages of the Kübler-Ross model and coming to grips with reality, helped along ever so much by uneasy Clintonite gloating.

But here’s the real point: None of that is actually the point. What happens next is far more important. If the Bernie Sanders campaign of 2016 had a purpose, and still has one, it goes far beyond Bernie Sanders. If the question was whether a septuagenarian senator from Vermont who calls himself a socialist could win the Democratic nomination or the presidential election, the answer was always exceedingly likely to be no. We were all startled to discover how possible and even plausible “yes” looked, for a moment there, and in that possibility we caught a glimpse of a possible future. Bernie Sanders was at best a highly imperfect messenger for such possibilities of political revolution and democratic redemption. If you were designing a candidate to be unelectable on a national scale, you could hardly do better than a crotchety old Jewish guy from Brooklyn whose political ideology has not budged since 1963 and who represents the smallest and most liberal state in the nation. (OK, I exaggerate: Wyoming actually has fewer people than Vermont, not to mention a lot fewer NPR listeners.) 

Indeed, the most striking aspect of the Sanders phenomenon is that he came as close as he did, given how poorly suited he was for the role. Let me say it again: Bernie Sanders was never the solution, and Hillary Clinton, much as she has done to earn the ire and mistrust of critics on the left, was never the problem. They are both symptoms or symbols, and in the short run the outcome of their symbolic collision was not in doubt. But the long run, and the collision between the forces behind Clinton and Sanders — that’s an entirely different matter.

As Sanders’ most ‘roid-raged and testosterone-fueled supporters will ultimately admit, Hillary Clinton is vastly preferable as president to any possible Republican, semi-lovable Rust Belt New Ager John Kasich included. If Clinton runs against Trump or Cruz or Rubio, each of whom is a dangerous opponent in a different register, the distinctions are stark and undeniable. She represents what I recently heard Jeb Bush describe as “regular-order democracy,” and look where that got him. Those guys represent pitchforks and screaming and strange things on fire and the most gruesome scenes from “Game of Thrones.” You won’t catch me hauling out the “Coke vs. Pepsi” line from the Ralph Nader era in this particular election. The 2016 choice is more like last week’s Nestea from the back of the fridge versus a foul-smelling mystery beverage that might be diesel fuel or lawn chemicals or sorority-house vomit, but that someone in a Halloween mask has promised will get you really wasted. 

For Hillary Clinton and the political faction she embodies or represents, America is pretty much OK, both in itself and in its relationship to the world, and American politics are mostly OK too. Yeah, the Republicans have gotten really weird and increasingly crazy and some significant tweaks are needed to correct for that: We need to consolidate gains in LGBT rights and push back on women’s reproductive freedom and confront the lingering legacy of racism. We can make guns a little tougher to buy, make college a little more affordable and make sure that working people have slightly more resources and better healthcare. Those are not bad things! Moreover, it’s understandable that to many Democratic voters those sound like realistic and potentially achievable goals, whereas the Sanders agenda of “political revolution” and free stuff for everyone sounds unhinged and impossible.

The problem with all that is not the agenda itself but the reassuring frame of “regular-order democracy” around it, in which such things might actually happen. No such democracy exists, which was and is the fundamental point of the Sanders campaign. You won’t hear Hillary Clinton use the term “oligarchy” to describe the way the United States is governed, as Sanders does in every stump speech. Why should she? She’s one of the oligarchs, or more properly one of their trusted employees. You won’t hear her say that free-market capitalism has utterly failed to improve the lives of ordinary people, or that the neoliberal economic regime of low taxes and government austerity is a disastrous scam that has robbed from the poor and given to the rich. Or that much of this resulted from the deregulation of financial markets carried out by her husband’s administration and a Democratic Congress, as directed by their oligarch overlords.

Hillary Clinton genuinely believes, I suspect, that things are not nearly as bad as hothead Bernie makes them sound, that most of the problems are things a competent and compassionate administrator can fix, and that the Democratic Party hasn’t made any fundamental mistakes. Change a couple of the proper nouns and that is exactly, word for word, what Jeb Bush and Mitt Romney believed too. A similar comeuppance may be on the way. The Democratic establishment is desperately trying to ignore the moment of popular awakening embodied by the Sanders campaign, or to explain it away. Hence we are told that only young white people want single-payer healthcare, tuition-free public universities or a $15 minimum wage. 

 

We’ve heard the arguments from advocates of the Democratic Long March for many years: On some uncertain day that lies just beyond the visible horizon, we will have our permanent demographic majority and we can start nudging the party away from being the Slightly Gayer Republicans and back toward genuine progressive priorities and policies. 

What those people generally don’t explain is who’s going to make that happen in a political party that has deliberately stripped itself of any core ideology or fundamental set of principles (I’m sorry, but “niceness” and “tolerance” do not count), a party that lacks any coherent socioeconomic base and whose voters no longer even pretend to care unless there’s a charismatic presidential candidate at the top of the ticket.  We already know that the devastating GOP sweep of the 2014 midterms, which produced the largest Republican congressional majority since Herbert Hoover was president, resulted from record low turnout and widespread voter apathy.

Party insiders and “activists,” if any can still be found in that demoralized institution, can’t and won’t make any of that possible. It will take a rebel incursion, an invading force of newcomers from outside the Democratic Party and outside politics, to inject the necessary vitality. It will take a new generation who don’t carry the scars of the Cold War and the Reagan era, who are uncontaminated by the party’s ideological decay and free of its defensive assumptions about the nature of political reality.

Hillary Clinton will almost certainly be the 2016 Democratic nominee, and of course our attention will now shift to the historic nature of her candidacy. But the strange curse that has followed Clinton’s entire career refuses to release its grip, and in the year of the Sanders revolution and the Trump garbage fire she feels a little bit like yesterday’s papers. I think that’s a big reason why Clinton supporters seem so angst-ridden; even in victory she’s had the rug pulled out from beneath her once again.

It was the campaign of Bernie Sanders — quixotic, doomed and fighting uphill against enormous odds — that struck genuine terror into the hearts of the political establishment.

Even in apparent defeat, it introduced us to a newly politicized generation and a whole range of unimagined possibilities, and made clear that the Democratic Party fortress is not as well defended as everyone thought. As we have seen so vividly at the other end of the spectrum, a political party that has drifted off its moorings and alienated its base can become a zone of invasion and conquest and heated internal conflict. Such a conflict has been brewing on the left for decades, and now it’s here. As we have also seen, it could get ugly.

Nothing shows the rot within the Democrat establishment more than Debbie Wasserman Schultz supporting pay day lenders who are the equivalent of loan sharks.   In my view, she needs to go as DNC chair.  That said, notwithstanding her flaws, we must make sure Hillary wins the White House in order to save the nation form more GOP insanity.

Hillary Clinton Wins in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Texas and Virginia

With the results in Massachusetts, Minnesota and Colorado still out, Hillary Clinton has racked up decisive wins in a number of states making the path to the nomination far more difficult for Bernie Sanders.  In Virginia, Clinton's victory was by 29 percentage points.  Her wins in some states in the Deep South were even more striking.  Only in his home state of Vermont did Sanders turn in a landslide result.  Politico looks at the results so far.  Here are excerpts:

This is the day Hillary Clinton has longed for.  The former secretary of state, who's struggled in two presidential elections to coalesce the Democratic Party behind her, notched decisive wins across the South Tuesday night on her way to a potentially prohibitive lead in the primary contest against Bernie Sanders. Clinton was announced the winner in Georgia, Virginia, Alabama, Tennessee, Arkansas and Texas as soon as polls closed. Sanders won Oklahoma and his home state of Vermont.

A cheerful Clinton made clear she's already eyeing a general election match up against Donald Trump, who was posting a similarly dominant night on the Republican side.

"We know we’ve got work to do. But that work, that work is not to make American great again," she said to an audience of supporters in Florida, invoking Trump's famous slogan. "We have to make America whole. We have to fill in — fill in what’s been hollowed out."

"The stakes of this election have never been higher. And the rhetoric we’re hearing on the other side has never been lower," she continued.

Sanders delivered a rally-the-troops speech after clinching his home state of Vermont. Saying he stood to rack up hundreds of delegates during the night, he urged his backers to ignore the impending string of statewide defeats and pledged to remain in the race into June.

Clinton's wins in the South were powered by overwhelming support from African-Americans, who helped her deliver a similar drubbing in South Carolina last week. Sanders' inability to make inroads with the black community could ultimately sink his underdog campaign.

Even as polls were closing, Democrats began envisioning Sanders' role in the race after Clinton cuts off his path to the nomination. "He didn’t start off, in my view, thinking he was going to be the Democratic nominee," David Axelrod, a former aide to President Barack Obama, said on CNN. 

Axelrod said Sanders was likely to remain in the race to drive issues he staked his candidacy on, like economic inequality. "He has done that and he will continue to do that."

Sanders' goal was to emerge from Super Tuesday with a viable comeback path. But it's unclear how he envisions proceeding from here. His team has sketched a strategy that involves running up margins in the predominantly white states that have responded better to his message. He's hoping to rattle off wins in the weeks ahead in friendlier territory — Nebraska, Kansas and Maine, which are next on the calendar.

There are signs that Clinton has already turned her attention toward the general election and a potential matchup with Trump, who's poised to have a similarly dominant day on the Republican side. In a potential preview of a campaign against him, Clinton focused her victory speech in South Carolina on countering Trump's message, saying "America has never stopped being great" and that the country could use "more love and kindness."

Whether Clinton gets to maintain her focus on Trump will largely depend on whether she can notch a solid enough delegate lead to put Sanders in the rear view mirror. Though all of the Democratic contests award delegates proportionally — ensuring Sanders won't come away empty-handed — big wins by Clinton would put him in a deep hole in the battle to secure 2,383 delegates and the nomination.

Clinton Can Withstand the GOP’s Attack Machine

As other posts have indicated, the number one question Democrats need to be asking themselves is which candidate can win in November and stand up to what will no doubt be a vicious and lie-filled Republican campaign.  There is too much at risk, especially the Supreme Court, to nominate a candidate that will not win.  A piece in the Boston Globe looks at this issue and makes the case that Hillary Clinton is best equipped to stand up to the GOP's coming assault.  Here are excerpts:

[W]e are still just in the early days of one of the most fascinating, unpredictable presidential elections in generations. But it’s not too soon for Democratic voters to take seriously the fact that this process ultimately serves up a party nominee. A key part of that decision has to be which nominee can best compete with the Republicans to hold the White House?

It’s understandable that so many young people find Bernie Sanders’ message of economic and political fairness appealing. But many of them may not be familiar enough with recent political history to sense the huge risk that Democrats would be taking by nominating Sanders.

We could not only lose the presidency, but also hand over the entire government to an increasingly extreme Republican party. And having Congress, the president, and ultimately the Supreme Court under Republican control would make this a vastly different country.

The stakes are profound: an effective approach to engaging with allies on combatting terrorism; protecting individual rights and liberties; addressing climate change, income inequality, poverty.

Democratic primary voters need to use their heads — as well as their hearts — to pick a nominee who can win. We need to be ready for the kind of campaign that Republicans are sure to wage. 

Having been in the firing line twice — for Governor Mike Dukakis in 1988 and for then-Senator John Kerry in 2004 — I feel obliged to share some lessons.

The day the Democratic nominee becomes obvious, the Republican attack machine will spring into action. Those who have not experienced this at the national level can barely imagine its ferocity. And, too often, these attacks have worked.

We have no way to know whether Sanders can handle such a full-throated and coordinated assault. He has never remotely been tested at the national level. To date, he has campaigned effectively in two small states. Addressing the entire country with an actively engaged and hostile opposition is a very different — and daunting — task.

And make no mistake: A Sanders nomination would offer the GOP a target-rich environment. His self-proclaimed socialism, his support for higher income taxes, his policy toward Iran, and his trillions in proposed new spending are ripe targets for attack — and distortion. Nor will the GOP attack machine limit itself to ruthless and unfair criticisms of Sanders’ policy prescriptions. It will go after the man himself — aiming to make him look weak, un-American, old, and incapable of dealing with a dangerous world.

After years of enduring extreme scrutiny, Hillary Clinton has convinced a majority of Americans that she has the intellect, stature, and temperament to do the job. She has faced up to — and successfully faced down — decades of right-wing assaults, many of them false. She is battle-tested. She doesn’t fold under pressure. Republicans won’t get away with running a “swift-boat” into her candidacy.

Voters clearly want to send a strong message in 2016. The single best way to do that would be to elect our first woman president, a lifelong champion of progressive causes, a fighter who will give as good as she gets. The choice is clear.