Posted: April 26, 2016 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because |
Hillary in Philadelphia, April 25, 2016
Good Morning!!
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.
From Penn.live, a recap of the highlight from Hillary’s MSNBC town hall last night: ‘I’m winning’: Hillary Clinton makes her closing argument to Pennsylvania.
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.
Hillary in 2008
https://twitter.com/davidplouffe/status/724777386672152577
Bernie last night:
https://twitter.com/AlanKestrel750/status/724783744759025664
Bernie diehard Greg Sargent actually deigned to write about Hillary’s response to Bernie’s nastiness: Clinton just sharply rebuked Sanders. She made some good points.
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:
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!
From the Daily 202 at the WaPo: he Daily 202: Down-ballot women hope to ride the Hillary Clinton train in today’s Acela Primary.
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.
Hillary and Bill will be in Indiana this afternoon, and the last I heard she’ll hold her victory rally in Philadelphia tonight.
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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Posted: April 23, 2016 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because |
Happy Weekend!!
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.
NPR: Shakespeare Saw ‘360 Degrees Of Humanity,’ And That’s Why He Endures.
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.
A few more links to check out:
CBC News: Shakespeare’s 400th: celebrating the Bard 4 centuries after his death.
The New Yorker: Encounters With Shakespeare.
The Independent: William Shakespeare 400th anniversary: The Bard’s works on screen – the hits and the misses.
The Guardian: Shakespeare’s last act: a torrent of twisted fantasies.
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.
From The New York Daily News: Writer Michelle McNamara, wife of Patton Oswalt, dies at 46.
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.
NBC News: Prince George Stays Up Past His Bedtime to Greet Obama.
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.
Insiders to Bernie: Don’t take the fight to Philly. A few choice excerpts:
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.
I admit I haven’t been paying a lot of attention to the Republican race, but this Politico headline stopped me in my tracks this morning: Delegates face death threats from Trump supporters.
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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Posted: April 21, 2016 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bernie Sanders, Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, New York primary |
Good Morning!!
Following Hillary’s thrashing of Bernie in New York, the media is finally waking up to the fact that she is just about guaranteed to be the Democratic presidential nominee and most likely will become President of the U.S. next January.
What shock for the poor pundits! How did this happen while they were so busy ooohing and ahhing over Bernie’s giant rallies and the “enthusiasm” of all those white millennials for his shouting and finger-wagging? Why didn’t all the crowds, the $27 “grass roots” donations, the yard signs, and on-line bullying turn into votes for “the Bern?”
The cultists say it’s “voter suppression,” but other commentators are taking a page from Richard Nixon–it must be a “silent majority.” Here’s Michelle Goldberg at Slate yesterday:
Until Tuesday night, I had assumed that my neighborhood, Cobble Hill, Brooklyn, was overwhelmingly supporting Bernie Sanders. Sanders bumper stickers and T-shirts outnumbered those for Hillary Clinton by what seemed like 20 to 1. A couple of times, I thought about putting my baby daughter in a Clinton onesie—whatever my hesitations about Clinton’s candidacy, I love the idea of my girl’s first image of an American president being female. But I always hesitated, not wanting to invite playground harangues from local dads about Goldman Sachs and the Fed.
When I looked up Cobble Hill on the nifty New York Times tool providing neighborhood-by-neighborhood results, however, it turned out that Clinton won the immediate area around my apartment by 59.4 percent. A block over, she won by 72.5 percent. She won all around me. A lot of Clinton supporters, evidently, have been keeping quiet about their allegiances.
There are a couple of explanations for this. Sanders fans seem to be more enthusiastic, though it takes a certain amount of enthusiasm to vote in a primary at all. Registered independents couldn’t vote in New York’s closed primary, particularly given the absurd, undemocratic October deadline for switching parties. But I think there might be something else at work as well: an optical illusion that the candidate with the most white male support had the most support, period. I had let myself mistake the loudest people for The People.
I’m not trying to deny that the Sanders coalition is diverse or to erase the many passionate women and men of color who supported him. But the fact remains that according to exit polls, Clinton won every racial and gender demographic except white men. And somehow, I’d become convinced that, in my own backyard, their preferences were far more widespread than they really are.
Brooklyn is full of a certain kind of archetypal Sanders voter—young, hip, highly educated, and ideological. But in Brooklyn as a whole, Hillary Clinton beat native son Bernie Sanders by 20 percent. The borough was with her, even if it didn’t always feel like it.
It’s not that Clinton voters aren’t enthusiastic, it’s just that they aren’t as loud and obnoxious at Bernie supporters. And of course, they voted. How many people at Bernie’s huge rallies were from out of state or not registered as Democrats? Probably plenty.
Froma Harrop at The National Memo on “The Liberal Silent Majority.”
A few days before Bernie Sanders lost badly in the New York primary, 27,000 souls filled Washington Square Park, many wildly cheering him on. The political media consensus interpreted the scene as evidence of surging support for the senator from Vermont….
The numbers at Washington Square were dwarfed by the battalions of working-class New Yorkers juggling two children and three jobs. These mostly Clinton voters were unable to attend any rally.
This last group is the subject here. It is the silent liberal majority.
Richard Nixon popularized the term “silent majority” in 1969. He was referring to the Middle Americans appalled by the Vietnam-era protests and associated social chaos. They didn’t demonstrate, and the so-called media elite ignored them.
Today’s liberal version of the silent majority is heavy with minorities and older people. Its members tend to be more socially conservative than those on the hard left and believe President Obama is a good leader.
Harrop points out that many reporters fall into the Sanders demographics.
Many political reporters belong to the white gentry that has fueled the Sanders phenomenon. Nothing wrong with that, as long as they know where they’re coming from. But some don’t seem to know about the vast galaxies of Democratic voters beyond the university and hipster ZIP codes.
In so many races — including those of the other party — reporters confine themselves to carefully staged political events and a few interviews with conveniently placed participants. From the atmospherics, they deduce the level of support for a particular candidate.
Trevor LaFauci noticed all this back on March 31: “The Silent Majority: How Hillary Clinton’s “Enthusiasm Gap” is a Complete Media Fabrication.
As our country heads toward the second half of the primary season as well as the general election, the national media is doing its best to gauge the level of excitement for each of the remaining five campaigns. From rallies to political donations to online polling, our friends in the media are attempting to quantify the unquantifiable level of excitement that each campaign is generating. By using this immeasurable measure, the media feels it can then interpret its result to create an overall narrative for how each campaign is doing. Clearly the campaign with most excitement is the one where the people are excited for their candidate and are going to go all out for him and her. This campaign will be the one with all the momentum moving forward while those campaigns with less excitement are likely to fall flat as we approach the conventions.
But let us take a moment to examine this theory, particular with the Democratic primary. Based on all the metrics listed above, it should be clear that Bernie Sanders is the candidate whose campaign is engulfed in enthusiasm. His rabid army of supporters have flocked to his rallies, producing crowds of upwards of 30,000 people, causing many venues to overflow. He raised nearly $44 million last month and now has amassed over 6 million contributions and growing. His loyal followers frequent online polls and exuberantly declare Sanders the winner of each and every Democratic debate or town hall performance….All this combined with victories in five out of the last six states and it would appear that the enthusiasm and momentum are clearly on the side of Bernie Sanders.
Especially when you compare his campaign to that of Hillary Clinton. Clinton’s rallies are never raucous, overflowing events. In fact, her most recent rally was held at the Apollo Theater, a venue that seats a mere 1,500 people. Clinton raised $13 million less than Bernie Sanders last month and she only recently amassed her one-millionth campaign contribution in mid-March. She often loses online polls by 60+ points after debates regardless of how well either her supporters or the media say she fared. Her national lead in the polls has all but vanished and after having won five consecutive primaries on March 15th, she has only won a single one since. Based on all this, there would appear to be a distinct lack of enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton’s campaign at this point in time.
But appearances can be deceiving, especially appearances falsely created by our mainstream media.
Read the rest at the link.
On Tuesday night, Sanders abandoned his campaign press corps in Pennsylvania and flew back to Burlington, Vermont to rest and reassess his situation. MSNBC’s Alex Seitz-Wald asks “Where does Sanders go from here?”
With the Democratic presidential nomination now further out of reach after his drubbing in New York on Tuesday, the Vermont senator faces the difficult question about what comes next. Does he set a do-whatever-it-takes course to wrest the nomination from rival Hillary Clinton? Or does he return to the message campaign, as his long-shot White House bid started out to be?
The Sanders campaign poured itself into New York, throwing a hail mary pass to try to change the delegate math while they could. They spent $5.6 million (twice what Hillary Clinton did), made 3 million phone calls in the final weekend alone, and organized the biggest rallies of a campaign defined by big rallies.
But in the end Sanders came up short – not just of winning, but of the delegate target allies had aimed to hit, which might set them up for a path through California, the campaign’s final hope.
Now, with the nomination even further out of reach, Sanders faces the difficult question about what comes next. Does he set a do-whatever-it-takes course to actually win the Democratic nomination? Or does he return to the message campaign his long-shot White House bid was originally seen as?
Seitz-Wald talked to people at Democracy For America and Move On, which support Bernie; and although they don’t explicitly say so, their representatives apparently were not happy with Sanders’ focus on attacking Clinton and complaining about the election process. Read all about it at the link. It’s an interesting article.
Even The Nation now admits that “Bernie Sanders is Not Going to Be President of the United States,” but they say he should still keep running.
At The New York Times, Lara M. Brown, a political science professor at George Washington University, says that Bernie Sanders should drop out because he has already achieved his purpose of pushing the Democratic Party to the left and helped Clinton become a better candidate because of the competition.
At The New Yorker, John Cassidy, another reporter who has been very sympathetic to Sanders asks “What Will Bernie Sanders and His Supporters Learn from New York?”
We’ll probably see more of these kinds of reevaluations by journalists over the next couple of days. It should be interesting to see whether the messages coming out of the Sanders campaign will be modified.
It’s already clear that there’s a difference of opinion between campaign manager Jeff Weaver and senior adviser Tad Devine about going to the convention and trying to flip superdelegates. Sanders himself has suddenly announced that he will remain a Democrat for life. What brought that on? It should be an interesting day in politics.
What stories are you following?
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Posted: April 7, 2016 | Author: bostonboomer | Filed under: just because |
Good Afternoon!!
Desperation has set in at Camp Bernie. Let’s count the ways.
First there was his disastrous interview with The New York Daily News, in which he demonstrated that he has no idea how to enact the policies he has been campaigning on for the past year, like breaking up the banks, prosecuting Wall Street criminals, continuing the drone war, and dealing with the Israel-Palestine conflict.
Then there was his insane response to Hillary Clinton’s criticism of the lack of preparation he demonstrated in that interview. In an interview on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Clinton said that Sanders’ poor performance showed a lack of preparation. Clinton:
“I think the interview raised a lot of really serious questions,” she said. “He’s been talking for more than a year about doing things he obviously hadn’t really studied or understood.”
“I think what he has been saying about the core issue of his whole campaign doesn’t seem to be rooted in an understanding of either the law or the practical ways you get something done,” she added. “The core of his campaign has been breaking up the banks, and it didn’t seem in reading his answers that he would understand exactly how that would work under Dodd-Frank.”
“You can’t really help people if you don’t know how to do what you are campaigning (for) and saying you want to do,” she added. “I think he hasn’t done his homework.”
Note that Clinton did not say that Sanders is unqualified to be president, as the WaPo fact-checker wrote today. She simply noted that obvious–that he didn’t come to the interview prepared to answer questions about his own policies. But at a rally in Philadelphia yesterday, Sanders claimed that she had said he was unqualified; and he went on to baldly state that Hillary Clinton, a former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State who has been working to advance the goals of the Democratic Party for 40 years, is not “qualified” for the job is she running to win. MSNBC’s Danny Freeman:
Less than 24 hours after Sanders’ big win in Wisconsin, the senator from Vermont hammered Clinton for not being “qualified” to be president.
“Now the other day, I think, Secretary Clinton appeared to be getting a little bit nervous,” began Sanders in front of thousands at Philadelphia’s Temple University Wednesday night.
“And she has been saying lately that she thinks that I am, quote unquote not qualified to be president,” he said as the raucous crowd booed.
“Well let me just say in response, to Secretary Clinton, I don’t’ believe that she is qualified if she is…through her Super PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special interest funds,” Sanders declared.
He went on to list a number of traits disqualifying someone from being president all directed squarely at Clinton — with the crowd cheering enthusiastically after each bullet point:
“I don’t think that you are qualified if you get 15 million dollars from Wall Street through your Super PAC,” said Sanders. “I don’t think you are qualified if you have voted for the disastrous war in Iraq. I don’t think you are qualified if you’ve supported virtually every disastrous trade agreement, which has cost us millions of decent paying jobs.”
He even blamed Clinton for the “Panama Papers.”
“I don’t think that you are qualified if you supported the Panama Free Trade Agreement! Something I very strongly opposed and which, as all of you know has allowed corporations and wealthy people all over the world to avoid paying their taxes to their countries,” Sanders concluded.
In the immediate aftermath of his remarks, it remained unclear exactly when he believes Clinton called him “not qualified” to be president.
On Twitter, a number of Clinton staffers and supporters called on Sanders to withdraw his vicious and false attack. Instead, he doubled down, sending out an email in which he expanded on his claims.
Here’s the problem: how can Sanders ever endorse Clinton now that he has said she is “unqualified?” Why would Clinton want him to campaign for her now? It’s also difficult to see how Sanders thinks this attack on Clinton will help him in the New York primary. Frankly, it looks like Bernie is just an angry guy who can’t control his emotions very well. Many voters would see that as disqualifying in a candidate for the presidency.
Bernie’s campaign manager Jeff Weaver was also busy attacking Hillary yesterday. Rebecca Traister has an excellent piece about it: The Sanders Campaign’s Sexist New Argument: Hillary Tries Too Hard.
On Tuesday night, following Bernie Sanders’s big win in the Wisconsin primary, his campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, understandably jazzed in the midst of a victory lap, said a really stupid sexist thing about Hillary Clinton.
When CNN’s Jake Tapper asked him about the increasingly aggressive rhetoric between Sanders and Hillary Clinton, Weaver averred that his campaign was prepared to play hardball. He then sounded a warning to the former secretary of State and her supporters, suggesting that they not get too critical of Sanders or his supporters. “Don’t destroy the Democratic Party to satisfy the secretary’s ambitions to become president of the United States,” Weaver said.
It was a small comment, in every sense. A throwaway bit of nastiness coming from a campaign manager in the late stages of a long and hotly contested primary battle. But the line, which overtly cast Clinton’s political ambition as a destructive force and framed her famous drive and tenacity as unappealing, malevolent traits, played on long-standing assumptions about how ambition — a quality that is required for powerful men and admired in them — looks far less attractive on their female counterparts, and especially on their female competitors.
Weaver’s language made explicit a message that has, in more inchoate form, been churning through the Sanders campaign’s messaging in recent weeks. As Sanders’s staffers spin the story of how they got to this point in the race — with a candidate whose success has been unexpected and thrilling, especially with young Democrats and independents, but who has failed to win over voters of color and older voters, and remains badly behind his tough opponent by nearly every metric — they seem to have been working on a new framing of Hillary, one that relies on old biases about how we prefer women to conduct themselves and how little we like those who flout those preferences.
Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager.
As if Hillary is the one who is trying to blow up the Democratic Party when Sanders has never even been a Democrat and refuses to support other Democrats running for office this year. Please go read the whole thing. There’s much more about the sexist attacks on Hillary from the men who work for Bernie.
This morning Bernie was still at it, once again “doubling down” on his attacks on Hillary. Politico:
Bernie Sanders went after the media for “political gossip” Thursday before he doubled down on his sharp comments Wednesday night in which he questioned whether Hillary Clinton was qualified for the presidency.
“Any questions on the needs of the middle class of America before we get to political gossip?” Sanders asked following a brief news conference on trade in Philadelphia. “All right, now where’s your political gossip? OK, what do you got?”
The following question focused on the Vermont senator’s forceful rhetoric against Clinton at a rally on Wednesday. Sanders explained that he took issue with a Washington Post report on Clinton with a headline that said “Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president.”
I guess he didn’t read the article under the headline, which nowhere quotes Hillary as saying that. Maybe Bernie thinks she wrote the headline?
“If Secretary Clinton thinks that just because I’m from a small state in Vermont and we’re gonna come here to New York and go to Pennsylvania and they’re gonna beat us up and they’re gonna go after us in some kind of really uncalled for way, that we’re not gonna fight back, well we got another — you know, they can guess again because that’s not the case,” Sanders said. “This campaign will fight back.”
Sanders again called into question whether Clinton has the pedigree to win the White House on Thursday, invoking her vote for the Iraq War, support of trade deals and campaign donations from Wall Street and special interests.
Um . . . Bernie? Hillary never said you were unqualified. This guy is really losing it.
Now I want to touch on another issue that is going to hurt Sanders badly in New York and other Eastern states that have primaries coming up. In a little noted part of his Daily News interview, Sanders showed a stunning lack of compassion and lack of empathy for the relatives of the children and teachers who were murdered at Sandy Hook. From the Interview:
Daily News: There’s a case currently waiting to be ruled on in Connecticut. The victims of the Sandy Hook massacre are looking to have the right to sue for damages the manufacturers of the weapons. Do you think that that is something that should be expanded?
Sanders: Do I think the victims of a crime with a gun should be able to sue the manufacturer, is that your question?
Daily News: Correct.
Sanders: No, I don’t.
Daily News: Let me ask you. I know we’re short on time. Two quick questions. Your website talks about…
Sanders: No, let me just…I’m sorry. In the same sense that if you’re a gun dealer and you sell me a gun and I go out and I kill him [gestures to someone in room]…. Do I think that that gun dealer should be sued for selling me a legal product that he misused? [Shakes head no.] But I do believe that gun manufacturers and gun dealers should be able to be sued when they should know that guns are going into the hands of wrong people. So if somebody walks in and says, “I’d like 10,000 rounds of ammunition,” you know, well, you might be suspicious about that. So I think there are grounds for those suits, but not if you sell me a legal product.
Bushmaster AR-15, the gun used in the Sandy Hook Massacre.
It wasn’t just Hillary attacking Bernie for this yesterday.
The Week: Daughter of murdered Sandy Hook principal slams Bernie Sanders over gun policy.
On Tuesday evening, Erica Smegielski, the daughter of Sandy Hook’s principal who was killed in the shooting, tweeted the Daily News link, writing, “Shame on you @BernieSanders try living one hour in our lives.” Smegielski added in a second tweet, “I hope @BernieSanders really #feelsthebern of this one. His judgment is despicable.”
And from prominent Connecticut Democrats:
Connecticut Gov. Dan Malloy said the public doesn’t need “apologists for the NRA.”
“He is just wrong,” Malloy, criticizing Sanders, told The News. “He is dead wrong on guns. He had an opportunity to educate the people of Vermont about guns. Vermont is small enough that he could have gone house to house to educate people about guns.”
Connecticut Sen. Chris Murphy took to Twitter to shoot down Sanders’ gun stance, saying the presidential candidate is out of line.
“For Sanders to say that the Sandy Hook families should be barred from court, even if the weapon was negligently made, is wrong,” Murphy tweeted.
“Bernie is a friend, but this is really bad. Dems can’t nominate a candidate who supports gun manufacturer immunity.
From Katherine Speller at Bustle: Bernie Sanders ‘NYDN’ Interview Just Reminded Everyone Why He May Not Be That Progressive. The article has a good summary of the Sandy Hook case background.
According to court documents obtained by Bustle, the Sandy Hook case argues that the AR-15 — the weapon used in the Sandy Hook shooting that killed 26 people (20 of them small children) — is a military assault weapon capable of delivering 30 rounds in 10 seconds and penetrating body armor, designed to “deliver maximum carnage with extreme efficiency.” The complaint argues that Bushmaster and its parent company, Remington, were perfectly aware that “as a consequence of selling AR-15s to the civilian market, individuals unfit to operate these weapons gain access to them.” The complaint also argues that the companies’ marketing toward “military wannabes” and partnerships with games like Call of Duty show a disregard for the very real dangers of these weapons being commercially available.
Plaintiffs Mark and Jackie Barden — whose seven-year-old son Daniel was killed at Sandy Hook — criticized Sanders’ stance on their lawsuit earlier this year in an op-ed for The Washington Post. The Bardens said that Sanders understanding of the litigation was “simplistic and wrong,” and called for a more thoughtful approach from the senator to this particular breed of corporate responsibility:
… History has shown us, time and again, that it is innocent civilians in malls and movie theaters, and children in their classrooms, who have been made to bow down to the singular power of a gunman wielding an AR-15.
This is not a theoretical dispute. The last thing our sweet little Daniel would have seen in his short, beautiful life was the long barrel of a ferocious rifle designed to kill the enemy in war. The last thing Daniel’s tender little body would have felt were bullets expelled from that AR-15 traveling at greater than 3,000 feet per second — a speed designed to pierce body armor in the war zones of Fallujah.
Sanders has spent decades tirelessly advocating for greater corporate responsibility, which is why we cannot fathom his support of companies that recklessly market and profit from the sale of combat weapons to civilians and then shrug their shoulders when the next tragedy occurs, leaving ordinary families and communities to pick up the pieces.
If the Sandy Hook parents are able to see this case in court, it would be a major moment for critics of the 2005 Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (PLCCA), which made it pretty much impossible to go after gun manufacturers and distributors for negligence. Sanders helped to pass this law, and yet he has since pledged to help repeal it. However, separately condemning assault weapons while refusing to support the victims of those weapons in their fight for injunctive action leaves a bad taste in my mouth. Arguing that increasing accountability for manufacturers will somehow end the gun industry only adds to that concern.
When Hillary suggested he should apologize to the Sandy Hook relatives, Bernie said she should apologize to the victims of the Iraq war! Isn’t it funny how he seldom criticizes the Bush administration about the war they started and prosecuted?
I have more to say about disastrous effects of of Bernie Sanders’ gun policies, and I will write about it in my Saturday post.
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Posted: March 22, 2016 | Author: dakinikat | Filed under: just because |
Good Evening!
We’ve got primaries and caucuses to discuss this evening! The election has gone West big time as states up and down the nation’s Rocky Mountains take to the voting booth. Dynamics here may be different than the nation’s east coast and the south. These states have populations of Native Americans and Hispanics as well as many white people. Additionally, they’re home to many of the Nation’s National Parks and natural resources. What’s in store for tonight?
On March 22, three states and one territory will hold nominating contests in the 2016 presidential election.
Arizona will hold a primary for both Republicans and Democrats, Idaho will hold Democratic caucuses, Utah will hold both Republican and Democratic caucuses and American Samoa will hold Republican caucuses.
Both Trump and Clinton are expected to boost their leads from the previous primaries. This particular primaries may not provide windfalls for any one, but should continue the trend.
Eager to move beyond a divisive primary season, Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton seek to pad their delegate lead over their underdog rivals as the 2016 race for the White House moves West on Tuesday.
Arizona and Utah feature contests for both parties, while Idaho Democrats also hold presidential caucuses. Trump and Clinton hope to strengthen their leads in delegates that decide the nominations, as Democrat Bernie Sanders and Republicans Ted Cruz and John Kasich struggle to reverse the sense of inevitability taking hold around both party front-runners.
“I have more votes than anybody,” Trump charged on the eve of the elections as he courted skeptical Republican officials in Washington. “The people who go against me should embrace me.”
A firm delegate lead in hand, Clinton looked past Sanders ahead of Tuesday’s contests and instead sharpened her general election attacks on Trump. “We need steady hands,” she said, “not a president who says he’s neutral on Monday, pro-Israel on Tuesday and who-knows-what on Wednesday because everything’s negotiable.”
Despite the tough talk, both Trump and Clinton face challenges on Tuesday.
Trump’s brash tone has turned off some Republican voters in Utah, where preference polls suggest Cruz has a chance to claim more than 50 percent of the caucus vote and with it, all of Utah’s 40 delegates. Trump could earn some delegates should Cruz fail to exceed 50 percent, in which case the delegates would be awarded proportionally based on each candidate’s vote total.
Kasich hopes to play spoiler in Utah, a state that prizes civility and religion. A week ago, the Ohio governor claimed a victory in his home state his first and only win of the primary season. Yet Mitt Romney, the GOP’s 2012 presidential nominee, is telling his fellow Utah voters in a recorded phone message that Cruz “is the only Republican candidate who can defeat Donald Trump.”
Here are some of the latest poll results from RCP:
| Race/Topic |
Poll |
Results |
Spread |
| 2016 Republican Presidential Nomination |
CNN/ORC |
Trump 47, Cruz 31, Kasich 17 |
Trump +16 |
| 2016 Democratic Presidential Nomination |
CNN/ORC |
Clinton 51, Sanders 44 |
Clinton +7 |
| 2016 Republican Presidential Nomination |
CBS News/NY Times |
Trump 46, Cruz 26, Kasich 20 |
Trump +20 |
| 2016 Democratic Presidential Nomination |
CBS News/NY Times |
Clinton 50, Sanders 45 |
Clinton +5 |
| Arizona Republican Presidential Primary |
FOX 10/Opinion Savvy |
Trump 46, Cruz 33, Kasich 17 |
Trump +13 |
| Utah Republican Presidential Caucus |
Deseret News/KSL |
Cruz 42, Kasich 13, Trump 21, Rubio 17 |
Cruz +21 |
| Utah Democratic Presidential Caucus |
Deseret News/KSL |
Sanders 52, Clinton 44 |
Sanders +8 |
There are quite a few things to look for tonight.
Mr. Sanders may face a daunting delegate deficit after his defeats on March 15, but he may be on the verge of a wave of successes.
Tuesday begins a series of contests in friendly territory for him. He is a strong favorite in both Utah and Idaho, where he could win by a two-to-one margin or better. A win in Arizona would show his resilience after a weak performance last week. Even if he fails to sweep the three states, he could follow up with strong performances in Hawaii, Washington, Alaska and Wisconsin over the next few weeks.
Of course, Mr. Sanders needs a lot more than a sweep of Western caucuses to erode Mrs. Clinton’s big lead in pledged delegates. But a string of sizable victories could blunt the pressure on him to withdraw from the race and could keep his fund-raising efforts strong as he heads into bigger and more competitive contests in April.
All the results will come in late because, well, it’s the West!!!
Results will be coming in late — very late, in some cases. Arizona is holding primaries, with polls closing at 7 pm local time. Utah is holding caucuses in person and, for Republicans, online; online voting doesn’t end until 11 pm local time.
Here’s what’s expected from the few polls available on those races.
Arizona and Utah, as well as Democrats in Idaho and Republicans in American Samoa, vote Tuesday. Arizona is the biggest prize of the day, with 85 delegates to be awarded in the winner-take-all Republican primary and 85 delegates to be divided proportionally among Democrats. Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are leading their respective parties in the limited Arizona polling. According to HuffPost Pollster’s average, Trump is ahead by a 17 percentage point margin with 37 percent of the vote, followed by Texas Sen. Ted Cruz at 20 percent, and Ohio Gov. John Kasich at 16 percent. But there have only been three polls in the last month, and only one in the last week. On the Democratic side, Clinton leads Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) by 26 points, 58 percent to 24 percent, according to the one poll conducted in the past month.
Utah appears to be Cruz territory – Polls are scarce in Utah, but Cruz is widely expected to win the caucus. The most recent poll, conducted by Republican firm Y2 Analytics, shows Cruz leading with 53 percent. Kasich is in second place with 29 percent and Trump trails with 11 percent. Utah’s 40 delegates for Republicans will be distributed proportionally among the candidates unless one reaches 50 percent, in which case all the delegates will go to the winner.
Sanders is running a close race in Utah and Idaho – A Dan Jones/Deseret News/KSL poll released Monday shows Sanders leading Clinton with 52 to 44 percent in Utah, while a month-old survey from the same pollster shows the two candidates in a close race in Idaho. The 37 delegates up for grabs in Utah and the 27 delegates in Idaho will be distributed proportionally.
So, it’s time to grab your popcorn and curl up for our live blog! I know we have a few voters out there! Let us know what you hear from your state and what your voting day was like!
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