Today there’s only one primary–in Indiana, the state where I grew up. We moved to Muncie, Indiana when I was 10 years old. My father had gotten a job as an Assistant Professor at Ball State University. We moved around a lot when I was a kid, but Muncie ended up being home for my parents.
In 1929, sociologists Robert Staughton Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd published Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture, a comprehensive study of a so-called average American small city. From the book (via Wikipedia):
“The city will be called Middletown. A community as small as thirty-odd thousand…[in which] the field staff was enabled to concentrate on cultural change…the interplay of a relatively constant…American stock and its changing environment” (1929: p. 8).
It was later revealed that Muncie was “Middletown.” As you can well imagine, many folks in Muncie were not happy to be known as average in every way.
Muncie Central High School, the first secondary school in Indiana. I went to school there, but it’s gone now.
The Lynds and a group of researchers conducted an in-depth field research study of a small American urban center to discover key cultural norms and better understand social change. The first study was conducted during the prosperous 1920s, beginning in January 1924, while the second was written, with far less fieldwork, late in the Great Depression in the United States.
The Lynds used the “approach of the cultural anthropologist” (see field research and social anthropology), existing documents, statistics, old newspapers, interviews, and surveys to accomplish this task. The stated goal of the study was to describe this small urban center as a unit which consists of “interwoven trends of behavior” (p. 3). Or put in more detail,
“to present a dynamic, functional study of the contemporary life of this specific American community in the light of trends of changing behaviour observable in it during the last thirty-five years” (p. 6).
The book is written in an entirely descriptive tone, treating the citizens of Middletown in much the same way as an anthropologist from an industrialized nation might describe a non-industrial culture.
Downtown Muncie in the 1960s
In 1937, the Lynds published a follow-up study: Middletown in Transition : A Study in Cultural Conflicts
So that’s the place where I spent my later childhood and adolescence, and I didn’t like it very much. I left for Boston when I was 19, and never looked back except for visiting my family. Nevertheless, I’m still a Midwesterner at heart. I tend to be open and friendly–I say “hi” to strangers on the street and and will talk to just about anyone if they’re willing to talk to me.
Today I have a lot of affection for Indiana. It is a beautiful place and I like that it’s still mostly rural with no huge cities–although Indianapolis is has grown dramatically and is more cosmopolitan that it used to be.
Muncie has changed a lot too. It is still a small city, but it is no longer dominated by the auto industry as it was when I was growing up. Then there were lots of factories where car parts were built and shipped up to Detroit. Much of the population growth in town came from people who moved up from Kentucky and Tennesee to work in the car factories.Today, Muncie’s largest employer is Ball State University. It used to be a Republican town; now it’s majority Democratic. It’s a completely different place than the town I grew up in.
Whether Muncie would still qualify as “middletown” average, I don’t know. It definitely is racially diverse, and today Ball State has many students from foreign countries. Some of them end up staying long-term, as happens in many college towns.
Ball State University administration building
FiveThirtyEight published an interesting piece over the weekend called “Indiana is Weird,” by native Hoosier Craig Fehrman. The thesis of the article is that Abe Lincoln’s father Thomas was a typical Indiana guy.
Indiana, which is 86 percent white, may seem demographically similar to nearby states like Ohio (83 percent white) and Wisconsin (88 percent white). But, in truth, Indiana is a much stranger place than it’s given credit for, with a history and heritage that divide it from other Midwestern states. The Hoosier State was settled from the south and isolated from cultural change, and you can still see the effects of that today. In fact, that’s why it’s actually pretty hard to predict how Indiana will vote in its primary. That’s why, if you really want to understand Indiana, you need to go back to the time of Thomas Lincoln.
Thomas moved from Kentucky to Indiana in 1816, the same year Indiana became a state. The direction of that move is crucial to making sense of Indiana today.
A lot of Americans were moving in the first part of the 19th century. After decades of frontier violence, after unfair treaties with the Native Americans, after new laws that allowed for the buying or claiming of land, the Midwest finally opened up. Of course, no one called it the “Midwest” since it was not yet the middle of anything. It was the west, the fertile expanse that came to be called the Old Northwest: Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin.
Among those states, and from the very beginning, Indiana was unusual. The Ohio River made it easier for Southerners to enter, and they settled the state from the bottom up. Thomas Lincoln was born in Virginia, migrating from there to Kentucky and then to southern Indiana. It was a typical itinerary, and Thomas was a typical early Hoosier….
Old water wheel at the gristmill in Old Madison, in Southern Indiana
The prevalence of people like Thomas is also what made Indiana unusual. In 1850, census canvassers started asking Americans where they’d been born, and by looking at state residents who were born in the U.S. (but not in their current state), we can see just how much Indiana stood apart from its neighbors in the Old Northwest. Let’s start with people born in New England, the “Yankees” widely considered to be better educated and more ambitious than their peers. In 1850, only 3 percent of Indiana’s U.S.-born residents hailed from New England. (The Old Northwest average was 10 percent.) Only 20 percent of Indiana’s U.S.-born residents hailed from Mid-Atlantic states such as Pennsylvania and New York. (The Old Northwest average was 42 percent.) But a whopping 44 percent of Indiana’s U.S.-born residents hailed from the South — easily the highest percentage in the Old Northwest, where the average was 28 percent.1
Just as important as their numerical advantage, the Southerners got to Indiana first and thus dominated its early politics. (At the state’s constitutional convention, 34 of the 43 delegates hailed from below the Mason-Dixon Line.) They created its local culture, shaping everything from what Hoosiers ate to how they worshipped.
Gary, Indiana when it was a booming steel town
What about today?
In the 21st century, Indiana has started to shift in some small ways. It now boasts more residents who were born outside of the state than Ohio or Michigan does. (Indiana also scores better than them on some measures of racism.) More striking, though, are the ways in which Indiana has stayed the same. Among its Old Northwestern peers, Indiana ranks last in median family income. It ranks last in the percentage of residents who’ve completed a bachelor’s degree. It ranks first in the share of the population that is white Evangelical Protestant and in the share of residents who identify as conservative. On these and a host of other measures — percentage of homes without broadband internet, rate of teen pregnancy, rate of divorce — you’ll often see Indiana finishing closer to Kentucky or Tennessee than to Ohio or Wisconsin. In other words, you’ll see 200 years of history making its presence known.
Highly skilled and broadly experienced, Mediators families Lancashire work on their clients’ behalf to create the most beneficial outcomes possible.
Read more at FiveThirtyEight. I found that really interesting, but my own additional observation is that Indiana is in some ways like three different states. It’s a very “tall” state geographically. Southern Indiana is very rural and–other than Bloomington, the home of Indiana University–there are lots of people with Southern roots. The countryside is very hilly and it’s a gorgeous area. In the middle part of the state where I grew up, the economy was based on farming and, of course manufacturing. Geographically, it’s pretty flat and treeless. Up north in the lake region there’s even more manufacturing–including the famous steel mills of Gary and Hammond–and not as much farming. The geography is more like Michigan and northern Illinois.
Hammond, Indiana in the early 1960s–another northern industrial city
Even though Indiana has a very large evangelical population, I have to believe that Trump is likely to win over Cruz. FiveThirtyEight gives him a 97% chance of winning the state. But with Indiana, you never know.
It’s not clear what will happen on the Democratic side. Hillary will not be in the state tonight and doesn’t have a speech planned, so maybe she doesn’t expect to win. She did make several appearances in Indiana though. She is leading in the few polls that have been done, and Nate Silver has her with a 86%-91% chance of winning. Regardless of who wins, it’s not likely to make much difference in terms of the delegate race.
No matter the outcome today, pontificators will likely explain that Cruz lost (or won) because Indiana is “weird,” as the FiveThirtyEight headline put it. The state isn’t like any of its neighbors demographically or ideologically, so it’s hard to make comparisons based on how other Midwestern states voted.
Indiana has a huge blue-collar manufacturing base and a lower median income than nearby states. It also more closely resembles 1950s America – where a majority White population happily lives in small towns – than any other state. Those factors have given Trump the advantage elsewhere. But see above: Indiana ain’t like other states. Keep it weird, Hoosiers, and throw off all of us armchair pundits.
So we’ll see what happens tonight. I’m not sure if we’ll need a separate post for tonight’s results, but Dakinikat will put one up if this thread gets too long.
I highly recommend this long article at Politico–an interview with five people who have written biographies of Donald Trump and his family: Trumpology: A Master Class.
After months of spending an unparalleled amount on campaign operations across the country and regularly outspending Hillary Clinton on ad expenditures, Bernie Sanders is tightening his belt.
The campaign slashed the payroll Wednesday by axing hundreds of workers — primarily on the field organizing team — scaling the staff down to its smallest size in months. It downsized its campaign jet, even as the Burlington, Vermont-based candidate spends increasing amounts of time hopping from coast to coast. Top aides no longer travel everywhere with the candidate, choosing instead to stick to Washington and Vermont. Even Sanders’ wife, Jane, hasn’t been traveling with him, opting to play the main surrogate role from home. On Thursday, the campaign cut its ad spending in Indiana, the next battleground state on the calendar.
The set of moves follows a series of disappointing primary finishes that have increasingly narrowed Sanders’ path to the Democratic nomination and raised questions about how long he’ll remain in the race. The campaign continues to insist that it will push forward at least to the end of the primary season, armed with a new set of imperatives that include winning over a trove of delegates from California and on shaping the party’s platform — rather than on kneecapping Clinton….
Cash has never been an issue for a senator who could boast of a fundraising haul of more than $182 million through March, thanks to his online cash juggernaut. (The next public binary options brokers that trade bitcoin report is not slated to land until late May.) But by the end of the last reporting period, Sanders had also spent about $166 million, making him the candidate who both raised and spent the most — leaving him far behind Hillary Clinton in terms of actual cash on hand: $17 million vs. $29 million at the beginning of April. Tap here to read more
Sanders’ communications director Michael Briggs claims the downsizing has nothing to do with donations falling off; and we won’t know for sure how much they are raising until the next reporting date in late May. But does anyone really believe the campaign would be making these drastic cuts if the money were still flooding in?
Bernie knows it’s over. Even though many in the media are still trying to make this a race, Sanders is not going to be the Democratic nominee.
It’s a different story on the Republican side. Donald Trump is almost surely going to be the nominee of the Republican Party unless the leadership somehow pulls off a coup and installs Paul Ryan. I really don’t see how that can happen at this point.
The next challenge for Hillary and her supporters is going to be dealing with racist, sexist, nativist candidate who can command vast amounts of free media. Even worse, although Trump is obviously running a campaign so obviously based on racism that his followers include neo-Nazis and KKK members, most members of the mainstream media has so far failed to point that out.
Segregationist presidential candidate George Wallace’s daughter and two of his former top aides said in interviews this week that candidate Donald Trump is squarely in Wallace’s racist, populist tradition.
“There are a great deal of similarities as it relates to their style and political strategies,” said Wallace’s daughter, Peggy Wallace Kennedy. “The two of them, they have adopted the notion that fear and hate are the two greatest motivators of voters. Those voters that feel alienated from the government. Those voters tend to make decisions based on an emotional level rather than intellectual.”
“They both understood, my father and Donald Trump, that low-information voters, they tend to feed off of the threats to their livelihood and safety without really considering what that threat really is, or even if it’s real,” she continued. “So daddy and Trump have this magnificent personality, a brave put-ons that the average American wants in a leader.
“He’s very similar to George Wallace in a lot of ways,” said Wallace’s 1968 campaign executive director Tom Turnipseed. “Both of them use a lot of the same kind of scare tactics and fear.”
“He appeals to the fear,” continued Turnipseed, who describes himself as a “reformed racist” (he became a civil rights lawyer and, at one point, sued the Ku Klux Klan). “That’s why he pushed the Mexican thing, and now he’s throwing the Chinese in there too. He uses that same kind of thing, that fear thing that Wallace did…. As far as the tactics they use, the scare thing, is a lot alike to be honest with you. The way they use the scare thing. In Trump’s thing it’s the Mexicans, the wetbacks that we used to call them, the Chinese too a little bit. Back in Wallace’s time it was African-American people.”
Alabama Gov. George C. Wallace at a Goldwater rally in 1964.
Wallace’s daughter, who endorsed Barack Obama in 2008, noted some differences between her father and Donald Trump.
“I think my father had more self-restraint and respect for the institutions of government than Trump does,” she said. “I think my father understood the limitation of the executive branch of government, where I don’t think Trump does. And I think Daddy, even though he used coded language to use racial themes, he never attacked a culture based on their religion and race. He used coded language to suggest the racial themes. But he never specifically attacked a group of people based on their religion and their race. And I think Daddy had a respect for the process and the candidates. A great respect for the process and especially the process. He would have never leveled vicious attacks on the other candidates, especially those have been so personal. Daddy never would have done that.”
Wow. That’s scary. And I honestly think that when Wallace ran for president, there was more pushback from the media on his racism than there is today on Donald Trump’s.
Just look at the people who have endorsed Trump. Back in February, David Duke endorsed Trump and urged his fellow KKK members to support him; and Trump refused to repudiate Duke’s endorsement. As Trump campaigns in Indiana, he has received two more horrifying endorsements. From Bustle:
At his Indiana rally Wednesday night, Trump proudly announced endorsements from two “tough guys” — Mike Tyson and Bobby Knight. Indulge me now in a brief walk down memory lane.
Mike Tyson was convicted of rape in 1992 and originally sentenced to 10 years in prison (he served three). He is currently still registered as a Tier II sex offender. Also, Trump — with whom Tyson is the best of chums, or at least of significant financial interest — tried pretty hard to keep him from serving any prison time. At the time of the conviction, Trump proposed that Tyson should continue to be allowed to box — specifically, in a predicted-to-be-lucrative match against Evander Holyfield — and give the proceeds to the woman he was convicted of raping, Desiree Washington. Trump said at a press conference in 1992:
Instead, you let him [Tyson] go out, he would have made between $15 million and $30 million in his next fight: tremendous amount of money, tremendous amount of good (it) can be doing … Millions and millions of dollars could pour in to help people that were truly hurt, that won’t have anything and that will live penniless without it. And I think a lot people, a lot of people, can be helped if this is properly handled.
I assume you’re all cringing now. Trump’s campaign spokesperson declined to comment on the Mother Jones report on this incident, and Tyson’s rep told the publication he was “too busy” to speak about it.
Hundreds of demonstrators filled the street outside the Orange County amphitheater where Donald Trump held a rally Thursday night, stomping on cars, hurling rocks at motorists and forcefully declaring their opposition to the Republican presidential candidate.
Traffic came to a halt as a boisterous crowd walked in the roadway, some waving American and Mexican flags. Protesters smashed a window on at least one police cruiser, punctured the tires of a police sport utility vehicle, and at one point tried to flip a police car.
One Costa Mesa police officer was struck in the head by a rock thrown by a protestor, authorities said. The officer wasn’t injured because he was protected from by his riot helmet.
About five police cars were damaged in total, police said, adding that some will require thousands of dollars’ worth of repairs.
“Dump the Trump,” one sign read. Another protester scrawled anti-Trump messages on Costa Mesa police cars.
Costa Mesa police car wrecked by anti-Trump protesters
Protesters in California forced Donald Trump to leave his motorcade and walk along a highway on Friday, amid chaotic demonstrations in which activists torched an American flag and set fire to a piñata of the Republican frontrunner.
Some protesters managed to get inside the Hyatt Regency by booking rooms in advance. When inside they unfurled two large Stop Hate banners from the upper floors that could be seen from outside, where protesters hurled eggs, clashed with baton-wielding police, and blocked roads.
With the hotel entrance blocked, the billionaire was forced to exit his vehicle and, guided by secret service agents, cross a freeway on foot and squeeze through a barrier in the fence to access the hotel.
Read more at the link.
So these are signs of what is to come. As we move closer to the end of the primaries and on to the party conventions, we can expect to witness more violence and rage over politics. Yesterday, Dakinikat wrote about the parallels with 1968–a violent and rage-filled presidential year. I have a lot of faith in Hillary Clinton’s ability to deal with the chaos to come, but it will be very difficult for her and for the country.
What are your thoughts on the politics of rage in 2016? What other stories are you following?
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The end is near for the Sanders campaign, thank goodness. Yesterday Bernie began laying off hundreds of campaign staffers. He is still claiming he has a “narrow path” to the nomination, but he has no chance at this point. He would have to win each of the remaining states by an 80-20 margin to catch up with Hillary. Politico:
TERRE HAUTE, Ind. — Bernie Sanders’ campaign started letting hundreds of field staffers go on Wednesday, hours after five states in the Northeast voted and the Vermont senator fell further behind Hillary Clinton in the race for the Democratic nomination, five people familiar with the situation told POLITICO.
It’s not the campaign’s first round of departures, but it’s by far the most significant, coming at a time when Sanders is signaling that he is looking to shape the Democratic platform at the party’s convention, but also insisting he will remain in the race until then.
Sanders trails Clinton by well over 300 delegates.
Staffers who were working in states that voted Tuesday were told by campaign manager Jeff Weaverto look elsewhere for work rather than continue on to the next voting states, according to people close to the campaign. The news comes as Sanders looks to spend more time in California, which is set to vote in June.
Most likely those $27 contributions have started to dry up. How long has it been now since Bernie sent out a press release about getting millions in donations? His campaign spent $46 million in March, and had only $17 million on hand at the beginning of April. He outspent Hillary in New York and in the five states that voted on Tuesday. We’ll see what happens, but as of today it looks like Bernie is finished.
The *white* millennials, that is
Of course Hillary will still have to respond to Bernie’s ridiculous demands for her to put all of his polices into the party platform. Gabriel DeBenedetti on What Sanders Wants:
Democrats close to Clinton’s camp saw Sanders’ post-results statement Tuesday evening as a tacit admission that his role at the convention would be in shaping the formal policy platform rather than contesting the nomination. That late-night missive specifically identified a carbon tax and opposition to “disastrous trade policies,” as well as support for a $15 minimum wage, universal health care, breaking up big banks, banning fracking and implementing tuition-free college — all points on which Clinton and Sanders have meaningful disagreements — as policies the party should adopt.
Yet the Vermont senator, who began laying off hundreds of field staffers on Wednesday in the wake of his Northeastern defeats, has also started regularly raising the specter of fundamental changes to the Democrats’ nomination process in recent appearances, including providing a greater role for independents.
He has added complaints about closed primaries — such as in New York, which doesn’t allow independents to participate — into his standard stump speech and interviews, including Tuesday, after he won the only non-closed primary of the night in Rhode Island. Making the case that Democrats need independents on their side to win general elections, Sanders has repeatedly suggested that more primaries should use an open format so the party can select the best candidate to beat Republicans in November.
I would be totally opposed to that. Why should people who are not Democrats have any say in who the party’s nominee will be. I think primaries should all be closed and caucuses should be eliminated entirely.
Historically has any losing candidate ever been permitted to tell the winner she has to capitulate to his demands? I hope Hillary lets Sanders have some input into the platform, but she can’t be expected to adopt policies that she doesn’t believe in. That’s just ridiculous.
Another handful of Clinton wins in big states, and the margins grow. I’m writing before the full pledged delegate count from tonight is known, but she led by 244 coming into tonight, not counting super delegates, and that may grow by another 30 to 40. (Here’s a great delegate calculator; bookmark it.)
As for the popular vote, she led it by a lot coming into Tuesday night: 10.4 million to 7.7 million, a nearly 2.7 million-vote difference, or 57 to 43 percent, numbers that we call a landslide in a general election. She may have added a couple hundred thousand to that margin tonight. Depending on what happens in California and New Jersey, this could end up being close to 60-40.
So forgive me for being a little confused about why these margins give Bernie Sanders such “leverage” in what we presume to be his looming negotiations with Hillary Clinton over the future of the party of which he’s not a member. It is “incumbent” upon Clinton, he told Chris Hayes on Monday on MSNBC, “to tell millions of people who right now do not believe in establishment politics or establishment economics, who have serious misgivings about a candidate who has received millions of dollars from Wall Street and other special interests.”
F**k off, Bernie. He acts as if he’s actually running neck and neck with her when he actually has been way behind since March 15.
Is there precedent for the losing candidate demanding that the winning candidate prove her bona fides to his voters? I sure can’t think of any. The most recent precedent we have for this kind of thing is 2008, a contest that of course involved Hillary Clinton. Let’s have a look at how that one wound down.
Clinton did indeed run until the end, winning states all along the way. On the last day of voting, June 3, they drew—she took South Dakota, and Obama won Montana. At that point, depending on what you did or didn’t count (Michigan and Florida were weird races that year after they broke the DNC calendar to move their primary dates up, and the party punished them by taking away delegates), she was actually ahead of Obama on popular votes. But even excluding Michigan, where Obama wasn’t on the ballot, it was a hell of a lot closer than 57-43. It was 51-49.
Did Clinton carry on about her campaign of the people? Did she say it was incumbent upon Obama to prove his worth to her voters? Did she put her forefinger on her cheek for weeks and make Obama twist in the wind? No, of course not.
Four days after the voting ended, she got out of the race, gave the famous 18 million-cracks-in-the-glass-ceiling speech, and said: “The way to continue our fight now, to accomplish the goals for which we stand, is to take our energy, our passion, our strength, and do all we can to help elect Barack Obama, the next president of the United States. Today, as I suspend my campaign, I congratulate him on the victory he has won and the extraordinary race he has run. I endorse him and throw my full support behind him. And I ask all of you to join me in working as hard for Barack Obama as you have for me. I have served in the Senate with him for four years. I have been in this campaign with him for 16 months. I have stood on the stage and gone toe-to-toe with him in 22 debates. I’ve had a front-row seat to his candidacy, and I have seen his strength and determination, his grace and his grit. In his own life, Barack Obama has lived the American dream…” and so on. She laid it on thick, and gave a strong and gracious convention speech later.
I doubt if Bernie will be able to demonstrate the kind of grace that Hillary did in 2008. Democratic leaders need to read him the riot act soon. He may find himself even more isolated in the Senate than ever and with no important committee assignments. As we have discussed here, perhaps the DNC could find a real Democrat to run against him in the 2018 Vermont primary. Bernie needs to get over himself or else face serious consequences.
The next challenge for Hillary will be dealing with Donald Trump, and it’s probably not going to be easy–especially since she will have to run against Trump and the mainstream media at the same time. Even considering the obvious danger of letting Trump get anywhere near the White House, I still expect many in the media will continue to enable his attacks on Hillary.
We got a preview of what we can expect in Trump’s ludicrous speech on Tuesday night when he attacked Hillary by calling her “crooked” and claiming she is using “the woman card.” Here’s the famous part of his speech along with Mary Pat Christie’s infamous eye-roll.
How anyone could even consider voting for that idiot I will never understand, but I do know that he’s not popular with women. Yesterday Trump “doubled down” on the “woman card” attack. NBC News reports:
When confronted about the sexist nature of his remarks during an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Wednesday, Trump did not back down. Instead, he used an increasingly common line of attack on Clinton delivered mostly by her male critics — that she shouts too much.
“I haven’t quite recovered, it’s early in the morning, from her shouting that message,” Trump said. “And I know a lot of people would say you can’t say that about a woman because of course a woman doesn’t shout. But the way she shouted that message was not … that’s the way she said it and I guess I’ll have to get used to that over the next four or five months.”
Despite polls consistently showing Trump with historically poor approval ratings among women voters (69 percent unfavorable to 20 percent favorable), he predicted “we’re going to do very well with Hillary and with women as soon as we start our process against her.” He also suggested that it’s unclear whether Clinton will become the Democratic nominee because of her email server scandal.
“She’s guilty. Everybody knows she’d guilty but they don’t want to go after her,” Trump added, without detailing what crime Clinton has allegedly committed. ‘It’s going to be an interesting thing … because people who have done far less are sitting in jail cells.”
And that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Trump will have no problem using sexual innuendo about Bill Clinton to attack Hillary. Some CBS writer named Will Rahn claims Trump could definitely beat Clinton.
The case against Trump’s electability is strong. But it is also perhaps overstated. The Manhattan billionaire does have a narrow path to the White House. In fact, he may be the GOP’s most electable option at this point, at least among the candidates who are actually still running for the job….
Trump…still has a few things going for him. His general election strategy, such as it is, seems to be predicated on two strategies: pivot left as far as possible and launch a scorched earth campaign against Clinton.
Let’s look at these one at a time. On the face of it, insulting your way to the presidency seems like a stupid, unworkable idea. Then again, Clinton has shown herself vulnerable to attacks on her character, not to mention her husband’s.
The reaction to Rosario Dawson’s in-passing reference to Monica Lewinsky over the weekend shows how sensitive the Clinton camp is to such things. Lewinsky is a sympathetic figure wrapped up in a sympathetic cause; Dawson only said that she agrees with her anti-bullying efforts. And yet still there were calls for Dawson to get off the trail for Bernie Sanders, that she had somehow crossed a line just by mouthing the word “Monica.”
What happens when Trump, after Hillary inevitably accuses him of sexism, says that Bill is a rapist, a serial assaulter of women, and that she is his enabler? What happens when he incorporates this into his stump speech? The upside, if you can call it that, to Trump’s refusal to act “presidential” is that he is the only candidate who will go that far. Trump, and Trump alone, is the only candidate who would not only resurrect all the Clinton sex scandals, but make them a centerpiece of his campaign.
I’m sure Clinton strategists have been working on how to counter this garbage for months now. Trump himself has plenty of baggage, include sexual stuff, and he is a lot more thin-skinned than Hillary is. I’d bet on her any day of the week. I also have to believe that women will not like Trump’s sexist attacks, but there’s no doubt it’s going to get ugly.
You’ve probably seen this before, but here’s a map that Nate Silver produced showing what would happening if women refused to vote for Trump.
It’s going to get interesting in the Fall. Right now, Hillary just has to set Bernie straight and finish winning the nomination. Then she can get ready to wash her hands of Donald Trump.
I have a few more links that I’ll put in the comment thread. What stories are you following today?
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It’s another super Tuesday, with five states holding primaries today. As always, we’ll have a live blog tonight so we can discuss the results–and celebrate! Hillary is looking very strong in all five contests.
In a town hall meeting sponsored by cable network MSNBC, the former Secretary of State drew bright line distinctions with her rival, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, on issues ranging from banking reform to college tuition assistance.
“I’ve been as specific as it’s possible to be in a campaign and i think voters responded to that,” Clinton told MSNBC host Rachel Maddow. “People want to not just understand what the problem is, but what we’re going to do about it. At the end of the day that’s what it’s all about.”
Under questioning from Maddow, Clinton also stressed something else: “I’m winning.”
Ahead on both the popular vote tally and all-important delegate count, Clinton appeared to brush aside Sanders’ recent suggestions that his support, if he fails to win the nomination at July’s Democratic National Convention here, might come with conditions.
Clinton said she offered her unqualified support to President Barack Obama after it became clear that he’d win the presidential nomination in 2008.
“I nominated him at the convention in Denver,” that year, Clinton said. “I spent an enormous amount of time convincing my supporters to support him … I hope we see the same thing this year.”
Sadly, Sanders doesn’t seem capable of the kind of humility and party loyalty Hillary demonstrated eight years ago.
With Hillary Clinton almost certainly on track to large wins in Maryland and Pennsylvania today, both sides’ supporters are revved up in a big way over a sharp exchange she and Bernie Sanders had at last night’s MSNBC town hall meeting, in which they battled over how the endgame of this contest should unfold.
In a statement that angered Clinton supporters, Sanders seemed to suggest that it’s all on Clinton to win over his supporters if she becomes the nominee, arguing that it will be “incumbent on her to tell millions of people” who have “serious misgivings” about her that she will be better on goals that matter to them, such as universal health care and getting big money out of politics.
In her reply, Clinton reminded the audience that she worked hard to unite the party behind Barack Obama after a bitter, hard fought primary in 2008 that ended with Obama leading her by less than she currently leads Sanders. Clinton added:
“We got to the end in June, and I did not put down conditions. I didn’t say, ‘you know what, if Senator Obama does X, Y, and Z, maybe I’ll support him.’ I said, ‘I’m supporting Senator Obama, because no matter what our differences might be, they pale in comparison to the differences between us and Republicans.’ That’s what I did.
“At that time, 40 percent of my supporters said they would not support him. So from the time I withdrew, until the time I nominated him — I nominated him at the convention in Denver — I spent an enormous amount of time convincing my supporters to support him. And I’m happy to say the vast majority did. That’s certainly what I did and I hope that we will see the same this year.”
Sargent goes on to make a number of criticisms of Clinton’s behavior in 2008. I’ll let you go read them at the link if you care enough. I don’t. Sargent has been a blatant defender of the Sanders campaign throughout the primaries, and I’m tired of his attitude. From twitter this morning:
@neeratanden@armandodkos It is in no one's interests to sneer at Bernie's accomplishment with young voters
Who is “sneering?” Oh yeah, the Bernie bros. And Bernie has been successful with young *white* people, not young people of color. I’m getting so sick of the genuflecting to a group of people who don’t even vote in large numbers!
Arlen Specter came off as badly, if not worse, than any other senator during the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings.
The way he pilloried Anita Hill from his perch of authority on the Senate Judiciary Committee helped lead to “the Year of the Woman” in 1992. California, Washington and Illinois elected female senators. In Pennsylvania, Lynn Yeakel – the daughter of a former congressman – was able to capture the Democratic nod in a primary. But she narrowly lost to Specter.
That was the last time either major party in Pennsylvania nominated a woman for Senate or governor. Today all 20 members of the commonwealth’s congressional delegation are men
“All women candidates have different expectations placed upon them,” said Dana Brown, executive director of the nonpartisan Pennsylvania Center for Women and Politics. “One of the greatest challenges that women have running in Pennsylvania is the incumbency advantage. We have a long history of incumbents winning time and again.”
Read about the women who could ride Hillary’s coattails at the link.
Sanders could have made a difference for some downballot Democrats too, if he cared about anyone but himself. From another Bernie diehard who sounds a bit disillusioned here: The man that Bernie Sanders forgot. Will Bunch wonders why Sanders didn’t endorse and raise money for a guy named John Fetterman.
Ask John Fetterman, the Harvard-trained mayor of a once-comatose western Pennsylvania steel town who looks like a biker-bar bouncer, whether this is the year of the outsider. Because if that were the case, he’d be well on his way to becoming a U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania.
But he’s not.
Good politics is good storytelling, and Fetterman has a hell of a story to tell about himself. It starts with a great character, a guy who stands 6-8 and weighs over 300 pounds, campaigning in a black workshirt and boots — not a blow-dried politician because there are no hairs to dry. He didn’t plan on becoming a politician, but when he showed up in Braddock, an iconic mill town near Pittsburgh that was shrinking into oblivion, to teach underprivileged children, he knew he wanted to save it. His experiences as mayor of Braddock gave him unorthodox ideas on how to solve crime and end the so-called “war on drugs,” while his wife — Gisele, who was born in Brazil and came to the U.S. undocumented — inspired him to push for common-sense immigration policies.
The only people I know who aren’t interested in Fetterman’s story are Democratic Party elites — the labor unions and various interest groups that make endorsements, and the money people who do their money thing that pays for political ads that reach the 90 percent of “normals” — i.e., people who don’t obsess over the politics the way that we do. The unusually telegenic Fetterman has gotten a lot of free media, which has helped him raise some small donations, which has paid for some creative ads — just enough, basically, to get him to about 8 percent in the polls. Only a miracle could bring him victory on Tuesday against two humdrum Democratic establishment candidates (Google them, if you must.)
This is where Bernie Sanders, the Vermont senator who jolted the 2016 race with his brewed-in-Burlington blend of democratic socialism, comes in. Because that’s one more thing that’s unique about John Fetterman — unlike almost all of Pennsylvania’s Democratic go-along-get-along insider cronies, the Braddock mayor has endorsed Sanders for president. Why wouldn’t he? Fetterman’s promises to shake up Washington and to end big-money politics and the useless “war on drugs” are EXACTLY what Sanders is talking about when he calls for a “political revolution.” ….
Think about it. Although Sanders is probably also going to lose Pennsylvania on Tuesday, he’s also on track — if you believe the polls — to get anywhere from 40-45 percent of the statewide Democratic vote. Imagine if Sanders and Fetterman had toured the Keystone State as “a ticket,” if it had been Fetterman popping up on stage after Susan Sarandon or Rosario Dawson to introduce the Vermont senator. If Fetterman could just tap into most of that 40-45 percent of the Democratic primary vote…he wins.
Why wouldn’t Sanders support this guy? Because Bernie doesn’t give a shit about anyone but Bernie. Read the rest of the sad story at the Philly.com link.
The polls in each of today’s five primary states–Pennsylvania, Connecticut, Maryland, Rhode Island, and Delaware–close at 8PM. We’ll get a post up sometime before that. Maryland could be a blowout; the others may take a little longer to call.
What are you hearing and reading?
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Today is said to be the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s death. As a tribute, I’m illustrating this post with famous Shakespearean insults. Several are drawn from this 2013 Buzzfeed post: 17 Shakespearean Insults To Unleash In Everyday Life. You can take a wild guess as to whom I might like to see some of these insults directed.
April 23 is a big day in England: It’s St. George’s Day, a national holiday named for the country’s patron saint, and it’s also the day William Shakespeare is said to have been born and died. This April 23 marks the 400th anniversary of his death.
According to the Royal Shakespeare Company’s artistic director, Gregory Doran, the only account of Shakespeare’s death was written 40 years after it happened, by the vicar of the church where he’s buried. “[The vicar wrote] that Shakespeare and his friends Ben Jonson and Michael Drayton had a ‘merry meeting,’ drank too much and ‘Shakespeare died of a fever there contracted,’ ” Doran says. “So it sounds like Bill and Ben and their friend Mike went out for a birthday binge and overdid it, and he shuffled off his mortal coil.”
There was also a typhoid epidemic in 1616 and Shakespeare could have died of that — but Doran prefers the drinking story. Doran’s company is marking the 400th anniversary with four history plays, which they’re performing at New York’s Brooklyn Academy of Music. The plays — Richard II,Henry IV parts one and two, and Henry V— reveal much about what makes Shakespeare great: his gift for lyric poetry, bawdy comedy and depicting heroic triumphs and tragic downfalls.
Actor David Tennant (known for his appearances in the TV series Doctor Who and Broadchurch) plays the tragic King Richard II. Tennant believes that, more than 400 years ago, Shakespeare saw how history repeated itself. “I think whenever you put [his plays] on, you see political resonances,” he says. “Maybe that says more about the fact that we, as a society, never seem to learn from history, or maybe it just talks about Shakespeare’s ability to get to the kernel of human experience and to be expressing those eternal truths about how we live our lives, how we attempt to create power structures” — structures that crumble, as they do for Tennant’s character.
Yesterday, Dakinikat called my attention to some very sad news. Crime writer Michelle McNamara died in her sleep on Thursday. She was only 46, and the cause of her death is still unknown. McNamara was married to comedian and actor Patton Oswalt and had a 7-year-old daughter.
Oswalt’s publicist, Kevin McLaughlin of Main Stage Public Relations, said Friday that McNamara died in her sleep Thursday. No cause of death was given but McLaughlin said the passing “was a complete shock to her family and friends, who loved her dearly.” ….
The University of Notre Dame graduate was the founder of website True Crime Diary, which shined a light on breaking news stories and cold cases.
She once said she founded the blog due her curiosity on criminal cases.
“I’m drawn to cases that aren’t so high profile, that are maybe even a little neglected, but which have enough evidence and clues that anyone with a will and an Internet connection can try to piece together the puzzle,” she said in a 2011 interview.
“That’s exciting to me. It feels like the difference between looking forward or looking back,” she added.
For the past couple of years, McNamara had been working on a book about an unsolved serious of home invasions, rapes and murders committed over several years believed to have been the work of one perpetrator whom McNamara called “the Golden State killer.” McNamara wrote a fascinating series of articles about this cold case that are archived at Los Angeles Magazine.
During their trip to Great Britain, President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama spent some time with young Prince George at Kensington Palace on Friday.
The younger generation of royals, Prince William, his wife Kate and his brother Prince Harry, hosted President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle for dinner Friday at Kensington Palace in London.
The Obamas arrived at Kensington Palace in rainy weather and were greeted by William, Kate and Harry who ducked under an umbrella to kiss Michelle Obama on each cheek. Dressed relatively casually, with no ties for the men, the party posed for a photo before heading inside.
Reporters caught a glimpse of William and Kate’s eldest child, Prince George, whose birth in 2013 sparked a global media frenzy. The young prince was allowed to stay up later than usual to meet the Obamas, and spent about 15 minutes with them.
In a photograph released to the media of the group chatting in a drawing room before dinner, a rocking horse could be seen, as well as a fluffy Portuguese Water Dog toy given by the Obamas to Prince George. Bo, the White House dog, is of that breed.
Read more and see adorable photos at the link.
In not-so-adorable news, the presidential nomination races drag on even though the winners are pretty much decided. On the Democratic side, party leaders and others who care about winning in November are getting sick and tired of dealing with Bernie Sanders nasty attitude, his truly repulsive campaign manager Jeff Weaver, his campaign surrogates and his dudebro supporters. The candidates’ wife isn’t winning a lot of friends either.
A couple of days ago, Josh Marshall had a few choice words for Weaver: This Dude is Toxic.
There appears to be a cleavage at the highest level of the Sanders campaign between Jeff Weaver and Tad Devine. The latter is in the more typical mode: We’re going to keep fighting and see where things are after the run of Northeast states in the next couple weeks. But Weaver, at least based on what he said last night on MSNBC is in a pretty different place. Weaver says that if Sanders is mathematically eliminated from winning the pledged delegate race, the campaign will spend June and July lobbying Super Delegates to overrule the pledged delegates and give the nomination to Sanders.
As I’ve mentioned a few times, the Super Delegate system, at least in its current form, is unjustifiable. It’s a time time bomb sitting at the heart of the nomination process. The only saving grace is that it’s just never going to be lit. History shows that the Supers always go with the pledged winner. And if they threw the race to the non-winner, it just wouldn’t get past go. Unless there was some pretty good argument that the race for pledged delegates was in effect a tie, it would blow up the party.
This is especially the case for the Sanders campaign since democratic process, transparency andnot letting the establishment choose the candidate has been at the heart of his campaign. Turning around now and asking the dreaded Super Delegates to hand Sanders the nomination is a pretty hard argument to make.
But Weaver appears to have won the argument, because Sanders has continued his vicious attacks on Hillary Clinton in his Pennsylvania appearances. Politico talked anonymously to a number of Democratic party “insiders” to get their reactions to Sanders’ continued attacks on the front-runner.
Only 1 in 10 Democratic insiders said Sanders should try to woo superdelegates to help him overtake Clinton on the convention floor in Philadelphia if he finishes the primary season trailing in pledged delegates, as campaign manager Jeff Weaver suggested Tuesday night in a televised interview.
“I think it would benefit the Democrats to have Bernie drop out sooner rather than later and ask his supporters to coalesce behind Hilary,” said a Wisconsin Democrat, who, like all respondents, completed the survey anonymously. “He stands no chance of winning the nomination at this point, and the Democrats can show a united front while the Republicans are so deeply fractured.”
“Bernie made his point,” added one Colorado Democrat. “It’s time to bring the party back together. The longer he waits, the more damage he does. The question is whether or not he cares. The rest of us do.”
A Nevada Democrat suggested the Sanders camp should focus on “doing what’s necessary for a Democratic victory in November,” but said Weaver “made a fool of himself by declaring on MSNBC that Bernie would take the campaign to the convention even if they were behind in delegates and popular vote.”
“The primary is over. There is no path, and there is no math,” added one Florida Democrat. “The sooner he lands the plane, the better chance he has at building a real legacy from this.”
“If any adults actually supported Bernie, they would tell him to get out next Wednesday morning,” said a New Hampshire Democrat. “But he doesn’t have any adult supporters. So he will stay in.”
I have to agree with the person from New Hampshire. Bernie is going to do as much damage to Hillary and the Democratic Party as he possibly can.
First it was an email warning Steve House, the Colorado GOP chairman, to hide his family members and “pray you make it to Cleveland.” Then there was the angry man who called his cellphone and told him to put a gun down his throat.
“He said, ‘I’ll call back in two minutes, and if you’re still there, I’ll come over and help you,’” House recalled.
Since Donald Trump came up empty in his quest for delegates at the Republican state assembly in Colorado Springs nearly two weeks ago, his angry supporters have responded to Trump’s own claims of a “rigged” nomination process by lashing out at Republican National Committee delegates that they believe won’t support Trump at the party’s convention — including House.
The mild-mannered chairman estimates he’s gotten between 4,000 and 5,000 calls on his cellphone. Many, he says, have ended with productive conversations. He’s referred the more threatening, violent calls to police. His cellphone is still buzzing this week, as he attends the RNC quarterly meetings in Florida, and he’s not the only one.
In hotel hallways and across dinner tables, many party leaders attending this week’s meetings shared similar stories. One party chairman says a Trump supporter recently got in his face and promised “bloodshed” if Trump doesn’t win the GOP presidential nomination. An Indiana delegate who criticized Trump received a note warning against “traditional burial” that ended with, “We are watching you.”
Wow! Can this campaign get any uglier? My guess is it can.
What stories are you following today?
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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