Sanders Plays the Blame Game for His Decline

As the returns stand currently from "Super Tuesday 2.0" it appears that Joe Biden is going to subject Bernie Sanders to near across the board defeats.  It will be interesting to see if the youth vote and new voter surge that Sanders has continually predicted failed to materialize yet again. As noted in a prior post, Sanders is Trump-like in that his misfortunes are never of his own making and a group of conspirators is supposedly lurking in the shadows to cause his demise. A column in the New York Times (which is a must read) looks at this phenomenon while another Times column looks at how Sanders has missed key aspects of the Nordic economies that he says he would emulate.  Here are excerpts from the first piece:

To Senator Bernie Sanders, there is plenty of blame to go around when it comes to his recent reversal of fortune. For everyone but him and his campaign.

The “corporate media” didn’t pay attention to his agenda.  The Democratic Party establishment aligned to block him from winning its presidential nomination.

And the young voters he counted on to power his campaign didn’t come through for him.

Political candidates are not generally given to self-criticism. And as Mr. Sanders has seen his fortunes slide after a 30-point South Carolina loss to former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., followed by Mr. Biden’s unexpected strength across Super Tuesday, he has cited a number of factors that portray him as an aggrieved outsider.

It comes at a time of particular weakness for Mr. Sanders. Through 18 states, his theory of the election has not proven true. The surge of new voters in the Democratic primaries has featured mostly older people, moderate suburbanites and African-Americans disinclined to support his campaign.

Mr. Sanders, his team and his supporters have come up with explanations for his loss of momentum that deflect the responsibility onto others.

So when Pete Buttigieg and Senator Amy Klobuchar dropped out of the race and endorsed Mr. Biden, to the Sanders camp it wasn’t because they’d won next to no support from black voters and run out of money, it was part of an establishment plot. And Senators Cory Booker and Kamala Harris were simply joining the effort to block Mr. Sanders when they backed Mr. Biden this week.

The 2016 campaign established Mr. Sanders as the Democratic Party’s foremost practitioner of grievance politics. Like Donald Trump in that year’s Republican primary, Mr. Sanders tapped into populist anger to upend a major political party.

Now the Sanders campaign says the policies he’s pitching as a democratic socialist — “Medicare for all,” free public college tuition and other proposals — represent an existential threat to powerful operators that have prompted an unusually coordinated effort to block his rise.

Even among those ideologically inclined to back Mr. Sanders, he has engendered little sympathy in recent days. Adam Jentleson, a close ally of Senator Elizabeth Warren’s campaign — who has not been shy about expressing his own grievances about perceived outside forces that limited her campaign — said Mr. Sanders does himself little good in arguing others are responsible for his shortcomings.

“Blame-shifting is pointless because nobody swoops in and hands you the nomination; you have to win it,” Mr. Jentleson said. “The nominee needs to be the leader of the whole party and Bernie’s job was to convince people he could be that.”

An even more telling column is the second one in the Times that looks at how Sanders' ideology and agenda is not at all in keeping with the economics of Nordic nations like Denmark which are highly capitalistic while having a generous social safety net (paid for by strong capitalism and high taxes).  Here are column highlights:

Bernie Sanders often cites Denmark as the kind of country he would like America to be under his ideology of “democratic socialism.” Well, here’s a news flash: Bernie Sanders, with his hostile attitudes toward free trade, free markets and multinational corporations, probably couldn’t get elected to a municipal council in Denmark today. Ironically, Joe Biden, with his more balanced views on trade, corporations and unions, probably could. And therein lies a column.

I can explain this best by starting with a few questions that I’d love to ask Sanders about his democratic socialism, beginning with the most basic one: Senator Sanders, where do you think jobs come from?

To listen to him (and his surrogates) is to listen to someone who seems to believe that the American economic pie just miraculously appeared and exists on its own. He never discusses where that pie came from, how to bake it or how to enlarge it. His only interest is how to redivide it.

Third, Senator Sanders, do you believe the free enterprise system is the best means for growing jobs, the economy and opportunity — or do you believe in more socialist central planning? I ask because I have often heard you praise Scandinavian countries, like Denmark, as exemplars of democratic socialism. Have you ever been to Denmark? It’s democratic but not socialist.

Denmark is actually a hypercompetitive, wide-open, market economy devoted to free trade and expanding globalization, since trade — exports and imports — makes up roughly half of Denmark’s G.D.P.

Indeed, Denmark’s 5.8 million people have produced some of the most globally competitive multinationals in the world, by the names of A.P. Moller-Maersk, Danske Bank, Novo Nordisk, Carlsberg Group, Vestas, Coloplast, the Lego Group and Novozymes. These are the very giant multinationals Sanders constantly rails against.

The Nordic model is an expanded welfare state, which provides a high level of security for its citizens, but it is also a successful market economy with much freedom to pursue your dreams and live your life as you wish.”

It is through these engines of capitalism, free trade, economic openness and globalization that Denmark has managed to become wealthy enough to afford the social safety net that Sanders rightly admires — as do I: access for all to child care, medical and parental leave from work, tuition-free college, a living stipend, universal health care and generous pensions.

But there is nothing free about these services. According to Investopedia, Denmark’s progressive income tax tops out at 55.8 percent, and the average individual pays 45 percent.

In short, Sanders cherry-picks Denmark. He stresses what he loves — all that the Danish state provides — and then he ignores two things: one obvious and important and one less obvious and even more important.

The obvious and important one is the relentlessly entrepreneurial capitalism that generates Denmark’s prosperity and that is celebrated there. The less obvious, but more important, feature of Denmark’s success is the high-trust social compact among its business community, labor unions, social entrepreneurs and government. That’s the real secret of Denmark’s sauce.

Obviously, in a small, largely homogeneous country of 5.8 million people, it is a lot easier to generate that kind of social trust than in a diverse nation of 327 million. But the point is, no one was demonizing others as “corrupt” by the very fact of who they were — whether labor organizer or corporate titan or someone of wealth.

They understood that it was the balancing of all their interests that made Denmark’s economic growth and generous social safety net possible.

This reality is lost on Sanders and his followers.

The Rats Abandoning the U.S.S. Trump Accept No Responsibility

I have always believed that decent and moral people do not knowingly "get in bed" so to speak with immoral people.  Sooner or later the immorality begins to rub off on you and you become perhaps forever tainted by your decision to dismiss immorality, hate and bigotry.  This is a lesson one can witness watching the rats leaving the rudderless Trump/Pence regime who now plead that they should not be blamed for the misogyny that flows in torrents from the White House virtually daily.  A column in the Washington Post looks at the shameless hypocrisy of those resigning from or being forced out of Trump regime positions.  Do not cry for any of these individuals who knew up front that they were making a pact with evil. Here are column excerpts:

One by one they leap — or are pushed — from the foundering USS Trump, each offering a variation of the same plea: Don’t blame me.

Comes now retired Gen. John Kelly, the second of President Trump’s chiefs of staff to be discarded. Days before departing, he paused for a two-hour telephone interview with the Los Angeles Times. It was an extended exercise in self-absolution.

Don’t blame him for Trump’s border-wall obsession. . . . . Don’t blame Kelly for Trump’s fabricated “crisis” at the southern border. . . . Don’t blame him for Trump’s claims that Hispanic immigrants spread violence and drugs.

And don’t blame him for the travel ban or the family separation policies, either. Rather, he, argued, he should be judged for what Trump didn’t do: . . . . Right. And if we judge success by things that didn’t happen, we should also credit Kelly for avoiding a zombie apocalypse.

Kelly served his country honorably for decades. But there’s nothing courageous in announcing, on the way out the door, that he didn’t agree with many awful things Trump did on his watch. There was, once, a good argument that qualified people, by taking administration jobs, could temper Trump’s worst instincts. But it turned out Trump was not to be tempered.

Those who disagreed with the madness had an obligation to resign, or at least to speak out — not to wash their hands of responsibility after the fact.

Don’t blame Rex Tillerson. The ousted secretary of state recently told Bob Schieffer of CBS News he reined in Trump by saying “you can’t do it that way. It violates the law. It violates a treaty.”

Don’t blame Jim Mattis. The former defense secretary waited until resigning to publicly state his disagreements with Trump over NATO, “malign actors” such as Russia and “treating allies with respect.”

Don’t blame Reince Priebus. Trump’s first chief of staff spoke up about Trump’s chaos after he was ousted, telling author Chris Whipple: “Take everything you’ve heard and multiply it by 50.”

Also, don’t blame Omarosa Manigault Newman (she knew Trump was a racist but took a job in his White House anyway) or Michael Cohen (at his sentencing, the president’s former personal lawyer said his “blind loyalty” to Trump led him to “cover up his dirty deeds”) or Stephen K. Bannon (after he departed the White House, the former top strategist suggested Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner and Paul Manafort had engaged in “treasonous” and “unpatriotic” behavior) . . . . The self-absolution extends into the diaspora of Trump apologists. Departing House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) gave a farewell speech denouncing the use of social media to “play on anger” and “on people’s fears.” Departing Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), a Trump cheerleader, gave a farewell speech lamenting the loss of “comity, compromise and mutual respect.” Rep. Mia Love (R-Utah), in defeat, denounced Trump for operating with “no real relationships, just convenient transactions.”

Better late than never? Perhaps. Those taking parting shots are certainly more honorable than those who, with non-disparagement agreements, get paid to defend Trump on the airwaves. The post-employment critics also compare favorably with Mick Mulvaney, who called Trump a “terrible human being” before becoming Trump’s budget director and now acting chief of staff.

But the after-the-fact criticism seems self-serving — a way for Trump enablers to rebuild their reputations and find new jobs. Tucker Carlson, an unstinting Trump booster, used the anonymity of a German-language weekly to put on the record that he questions Trump’s competence, knowledge, self-aggrandizement and personnel choices.

Even Carlson, though, is braver than the anonymous Trump official who wrote the New York Times op-ed about efforts to sabotage Trump from within. How long before the author emerges to claim credit — and perhaps a book contract? Proposed title: Don’t blame me.

RNC Considers Cutting Cash to Trump

Perhaps further disheartened by Donald Trump's rants that "he will not change" and that "he is who he is," the Republican National Committee is reportedly said to be considering cutting off cash support to Trump's campaign and shifting funding to down ticket races threatened by a Trump catastrophe on November 8th.  Along with the possible funding cut, an effort may be under way to set Trump up to take the blame for a GOP disaster.   On the later issue, Trump has certainly inflicted more than enough wounds to himself to give the meme traction.  A piece in Politico looks at the doom and gloom at the RNC despite efforts to put on a positive public face.  Here are excerpts:

Publicly, Republican Party officials continue to stand by Donald Trump. Privately, at the highest levels, party leaders have started talking about cutting off support to Trump in October and redirecting cash to save endangered congressional majorities.

Since the Cleveland convention, top party officials have been quietly making the case to political journalists, donors and GOP operatives that the Republican National Committee has done more to help Trump than it did to support its 2012 nominee Mitt Romney, and that therefore Trump has only himself and his campaign to blame for his precipitous slide in the polls, according to people who have spoken with Republican leadership.

In the words of one person in the room, the message was that the RNC has “all these staffers out there working and knocking on doors, with a data system they believe rivals what Obama build in 2012 — so it’s not their fault.”

Spicer emphasized that RNC chairman Reince Priebus has been working aggressively to coach Trump into being a more disciplined candidate, calling the nominee “five or six times a day,” according to another person present at last week’s closed-door meeting.

According to sources close to Priebus, the chairman has warned that if Trump does not better heed this persistent advice to avoid dustups driven by his rhetoric, the RNC might not be able to help him as much — suggesting that money and ground resources might be diverted.

“Early voting in Ohio starts in a few weeks, there’s a 45-day window for absentee voters, so mid-September would probably be the latest the RNC could redeploy assets and have any real impact,” said an RNC member privately. “The only thing you could change in mid-October would be to shift some TV ads, maybe try to prop up Senate candidates in tough races like [Rob] Portman, [Marco] Rubio and [Pat] Toomey.”

One high-level Republican strategist added: “The party committee has this same job every cycle, to employ limited resources to maximum effect at the ballot box. ... And that means not pouring precious resources into dysfunctional, noncooperative, losing campaigns.”

Within the Trump campaign, there has been suspicion for months that the RNC already has not been as supportive of its nominee as it could — and should — be, according to operatives in and around the campaign. . . . . Other Trump allies in and around the campaign fear that the RNC could use Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton’s widening lead in polls to justify pulling the plug on Trump before he has a chance to even the race. . . . . one fundraiser with knowledge of the party’s high-dollar fundraising efforts said earlier this summer that the message to leery donors was “people can give to the RNC and not to him.”

[T]he RNC’s frustration is at a boiling point after a week of deepening division between the organization’s political and communications staffs and their counterparts on the Trump campaign.

Beyond the candidate’s continued rhetorical carelessness on the stump, his campaign has confounded GOP officials with a travel schedule — more events have been announced in Colorado and Virginia, two swing states that appear to be out of reach, and even deep blue Connecticut — that many believe is a poor use of the candidate’s time.

“He has shown no interest in doing the tough demographic work that’s necessary in campaigns,” one RNC member said. . . . “The senior staff gets it,” that RNC member said, “but the true believers outnumber them.”

After four years spent working toward winning back the White House, the RNC’s shift toward an endgame it didn’t envision — essentially deciding when to concede the White House to focus on saving the Senate and saving face — is a sign of resignation setting in.

My question to the RNC is this: why are you at all surprised that you find yourselves at this point? You have always known that Trump is an undisciplined, lose canon.   All of this should have been seen coming long before the Republican National Convention.  

Quote of the Day: WaPo - Mr. Cuccinelli Has Only Himself to Blame

As noted in this morning posts, the blame game has exploded within the GOP for the Ken Cuccinelli's loss in Tuesday Virginia gubernatorial election.  The Christofascists/Tea Party are blaming the so-called GOP establishment while the establishment types are throwing responsibility for the defeat at the feet of the Christofascists/Tea Party.  Meanwhile, the poor loser, Ken Cuccinelli seems to want to blame anyone but himself.  A main page editorial column in the Washington Post looks at the accusations being lobbed by both sides within the GOP's very small tent.  The opinion piece also zeros in on the man ultimately to blame.  Here is the money quote:

Fundamentally, what caused Tuesday’s Republican wipeout was Mr. Cuccinelli himself and the record he compiled — a clear, consistent right-wing agenda forged over a decade in Richmond.

The Cuccinelli record had nothing to do with job-creation or the state’s economic well-being or alleviating deepening transportation problems, all of which are central to Virginians’ well-being. It was mainly about bashing homosexuals, harassing illegal immigrants, crusading against abortion, denying climate change, flirting with birthers and opposing gun control. A hero to the tea party and a culture warrior of the first rank, Mr. Cuccinelli lost because he was among the most polarizing and provocative figures in Richmond for a decade. That made him the wrong candidate for Virginia.

It goes without saying that the usual far right talking heads will shriek and deny the truth stated in the Washington Post piece, claiming that the Post is a liberal propaganda machine.   But the Post isn't the only outlet placing the blame ultimately on Cuccinelli.  Here are some highlights from The Week written by Matt K. Lewiswho  writes for The Daily Caller which is anything but a liberal mouth piece:

To quote Don Corleone, "Never tell anybody outside the family what you're thinking."

Yet Cuccinelli went out of his way to tell everybody outside the family what he was thinking by literally publishing it. (And this wasn't some sort of touchy-feely, heartwarming biography that campaigns sometimes put out to soften up a candidate before running, either.)

In reviewing the book, Last Line of Defense, Politico touched on a fundamental problem: "Virginia Attorney General Ken Cuccinelli," James Hohmann observed, "has no intention of modulating his uncompromising conservatism to get elected governor. He just needs to explain it better than others have."

The "explain it" part is telling. Why? A maxim in political campaigns is that "if you're explaining, you're losing."

The obvious problem, of course, is that the political environment has changed dramatically in the last few years — especially in the Old Dominion.  It ain't George Allen's Virginia any more.

The cynical part of me hopes that the GOP doesn't get the message that the Christofascists/Tea Party need to be thrown overboard.   Only by further destruction to the GOP will the GOP donor class cease giving money to flawed candidates.  It make take a number of additional election cycles, but ultimately the Christofascists/Tea Party must be sent into permanent political exile if the GOP is to ever regain its role as a responsible national party.

Will the GOP be Made to Pay for the Super Committee Failure?

Most Americans are disgusted with Congress's apparent inability to get the nation's work done. Worse yet, many are - in my view belatedly - grasping the fact that the GOP is putting partisanship gamesmanship ahead of the economic well being of millions of Americans. In their quest to destroy Barack Obama, many in the GOP are more than happy to allow the economy to continue to crash and burn. It's rather sick, but welcome to today's GOP. A piece in The Daily Beast makes the case that the public has figured out who is to blame - especially on the so-called Super Committee failure - and that swing voters are particularly displeased.It would be, of course, sweet justice if the GOP's selling the county out for political gain in fact came back to bite them in the ass big time. Here are some column highlights:

There will be an enduring political price to pay for last week’s pathetic face-plant. And while confidence in the entire institution’s [Congress's] capacity to reason together will continue to decline, polls show that congressional Republicans are taking the brunt of the blame, specifically among swing voters.

Here’s why: all the 2010 talk about dealing with the generational theft of deficits and debt ended up taking a back seat to antitax theology when it mattered most.

To add insult to the injury of this lost opportunity, there was actually broad agreement among the American public about a balanced plan that could have reduced the long-term deficit and debt while sacrificing Republican and Democrat sacred cows. People understand this was a failure of political will produced by the disproportionate influence of special interests.

Dig beneath the surface of Gallup’s new poll showing that 55 percent of Americans blame both parties for the failure of the supercommittee, and you’ll see the remaining breakdown leans decidedly against the GOP . . .

40 percent of independent voters would blame Republicans more for a supercommittee failure, while 24 percent would blame the Democrats. Likewise, 47 percent of self-identified centrists said they would blame the GOP, while 25 percent said the Dems would be most at fault. The key dynamic to watch is the nearly 2-to-1 split when independents and centrists are asked which party is to blame for supercommittee failure.

[T]he real question is why such a split exists on the supercommittee. One answer can be found in the support that existed for the broad outlines of a bipartisan compromise. Keep in mind that two thirds of Americans rarely agree on anything—but CNN polling earlier this month found that 67 percent of Americans supported raising taxes on higher-income Americans and businesses as part of a supercommittee plan to deal with the deficit and debt. Likewise, 66 percent supported major spending cuts to domestic government programs.

In other words, there was ample public support for a grand bargain in addition to the congressional Gang of 150. A not-incidental 54 percent of independents say that they wanted to see more compromise from the supercommittee in pursuit of a deal. The supercommittee failed because of a lack of political will—particularly on the part of Republicans who refused to consider any revenue increases unless they were accompanied by major reductions in the top tax rate or a permanent extension of all the Bush tax cuts.

Republican blame for the supercommittee failure is resonating because it calls into question their commitment to actually dealing with the deficit and the debt. After all, it was not a popular conservative cause when deficits first started to explode during the Bush era. . . . When taxes always trump deficit reduction, fiscal conservatism and fiscal responsibility have been delinked.

[S]wing voters are starting to assign blame in ways that should be both a warning and a wake-up call to congressional Republicans as they look to 2012.

Frankly, I do not see the GOP waking up to reality. Increasingly - even among the few remaining GOP moderates I know - the Party lives in a bubble and takes it directions from the Christian Right (which behaves in anything but a Christian manner) and the oligarchs like the Koch brothers. Massive election losses are the only wake up call that will get the message to sink in.

Unconvincing Black Excuses and Apologists

A number of individuals have offered apologies and/or explanations for the rampant black homophobia displayed in the votes for Proposition 8 and the constitutional amendment initiatives in Florida and Arizona. I'm sorry, but I don't buy them. Bigotry and discrimination is still bigotry and discrimination no matter who is the group doing it and for those who want others to not discriminate against them, the first step ought to be that you practice what you preach. On that count, homophobic blacks have failed miserably - regardless of their history as a people - and I suspect they will sadly learn as time goes by that those who voted decidedly anti-gay have lost a great many allies or potential allies for their community.

*

I may sound harsh, but punch me in the gut, don't in the next breath expect me to turn around and offer a helping hand. Because I will not. In my view, the apologists for homophobic blacks are directing their time and effort in the wrong direction. Many people - including me - are not going to buy the efforts to somehow make black homophobia the fault of whites. The fault lies with the black community and their homophobic churches - many of which milk the black community so that their pastors can live opulently. I will not name names, but I assure you that I could give you a goodly number names of such pastors from black churches right here in the greater Norfolk area.