Revolutions rarely give way to gracious expressions of defeat.
And so, despite the crushing California results that rolled in for him on Tuesday night, despite the insurmountable delegate math and the growing pleas that he end his quest for the White House, Senator Bernie Sanders took to the stage in Santa Monica and basked, bragged and vowed to fight on.
In a speech of striking stubbornness, he ignored the history-making achievement of his Democratic rival, Hillary Clinton, who became the first woman in American history to clinch the presidential nomination of a major political party.
Mr. Sanders waited until 15 minutes into his speech to utter Mrs. Clinton’s name. He referred, almost in passing, to a telephone conversation in which he had congratulated her on her victories. At that, the crowd of more than 3,000 inside an aging airport hangar booed loudly. Mr. Sanders did little to discourage them.
Friday Reads: It Has Been A Historic Week
Posted: June 10, 2016 Filed under: Barack Obama, morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, michelle obama 60 CommentsGood Morning!!
Well, it’s been quite a week in politics.
On Monday, the AP and NBC News separately announced that Hillary Clinton had the requisite number of pledged delegates and super delegates to be the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party–the first woman in history to accomplish this.
On Tuesday, Hillary won more than enough votes to hold a majority of pledged delegates and make it impossible for her opponent to do so. She won primaries in New Jersey, California, New Mexico, and South Dakota. Her opponent won only North Dakota and Montana.
Yesterday, President Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, Vice President Joe Biden, and Senator Elizabeth Warren endorsed Hillary’s campaign for President and vowed to campaign hard for her. Next Wednesday, President Obama will appear with Hillary at an event in Green Bay, Wisconsin. Obama released his endorsement in a video.
The Wall Street Journal: Barack Obama Endorses Hillary Clinton for President.
No sitting U.S. president in recent history has campaigned for his party’s nominee as much as Barack Obama plans to for Hillary Clinton.
Mr. Obama endorsed the presumptive Democratic nominee on Thursday in a video posted on social media. Her campaign also announced plans for a joint appearance with the president next Wednesday in Green Bay, Wis., kicking off a marathon push to retain Democratic control of the White House.
“I’m fired up,” Mr. Obama said in the video, echoing a chant from his 2008 campaign.
The announcements came just 90 minutes after Mrs. Clinton’s primary opponent, Sen. Bernie Sanders, emerged from a White House meeting with Mr. Obama, where the Vermont lawmaker gave his strongest signal yet that he wouldn’t try to block her nomination at the July convention in Philadelphia….
“It means something for him to say she is everything she says she will be, because he was a doubter,” said Julian Zelizer, a professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University, noting that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton were not natural allies.
Mark Mellman, a Democratic polling expert, said that for Mr. Obama, the potential reward is greater than any risk. “The peril for any president is you get too involved and lose and have it tarnish your legacy,” he said. But if Mr. Obama stayed idle and Mrs. Clinton lost, he would take a hit anyway, Mr. Mellman added, and the president’s policy would be at risk, too.
Mr. Trump said last week that Mr. Obama shouldn’t get involved in the race, warning that “if he campaigns, that means I’m allowed to hit him.”
Go ahead and try, Donald.
Vice President Joe Biden and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren quickly threw their public support behind Mrs. Clinton after Mr. Obama’s endorsement. Mr. Biden, in an off-the-cuff comment during a speech Thursday night, said “God willing” the next president will be Mrs. Clinton.
Michelle Obama also said she will campaign for Hillary.
Here’s Warren demolishing Donald Trump yesterday.
The Boston Globe reports: Elizabeth Warren ‘ready to jump in this fight’ for Hillary Clinton.
“I’m ready,” Warren said in an interview with The Globe. “I’m ready to jump in this fight and make sure that Hillary Clinton is the next president of the United States and be sure that Donald Trump gets nowhere near the White House.”
She added: “I’m supporting Hillary Clinton because she’s a fighter, a fighter with guts.” ….
Warren, a champion of the left who passed up a presidential bid of her own, despite the urging of legions of followers, is uniquely positioned to serve as a bridge between the establishment candidacy of Clinton and Sanders supporters, who are being forced to come to terms with the Vermont senator’s loss.
Democrats view the freshman Massachusetts senator as a path of sorts to party unity, which helps explain an upsurge in buzz about Warren as a potential vice presidential pick. Senators and top staff say talking up Warren for vice president is a way to show Sanders and his millions of followers that the party establishment heard them loud and clear.
Warren appeared on the Rachel Maddow show last night to endorse Hillary. Watch or rewatch that appearance at the link.
Last night, Joe Biden warned of the danger of Donald Trump’s attacks on the federal judge who is hearing a case against Trump “university.”
Warren will meet with Clinton this morning, according to James Hohmann of the Washington Post.
Elizabeth Warren and Hillary Clinton will meet privately Friday morning, according to two knowledgeable Democrats.
The sit-down, coming just hours after the Massachusetts senator formally endorsed the presumptive Democratic nominee, will fuel speculation about her prospects as a potential vice presidential pick.
The women have had several conversations over the past month, including one that lasted around half an hour, sources told The Washington Post. The conversations were broad and focused on large topics and issues, rather than the nitty-gritty of the campaign. Their staffs have been engaged in more tactical discussions.
The two women do not have a particularly deep relationship, but that could change as Clinton rallies Democrats around her in the wake of winning the Democratic nomination in recent days. There were three big endorsements that could have meaningfully helped Clinton wrap up the nomination battle: Warren, President Obama and Vice President Biden. Clinton secured all three on Thursday.
Clinton, a Yale-educated lawyer, like Warren, a Harvard Law professor until she was elected in 2012, is a policy wonk at heart. So the two might talk in more detail about how Clinton could embrace pieces of the progressive agenda that allowed Bernie Sanders to win more than 20 states.
Or maybe she could help educate Sanders’ supporters about Hillary’s already very progressive policy proposals and explain that her plan to take on Wall Street is quite a bit stronger than Sanders’ vague ideas about “breaking up the banks.”
Let’s hope we’re close to seeing the back of Bernie Sanders. He held a rally in Washington DC last night, and he plans to compete in the DC primary on Jun 14. I hope by then Democratic leaders will have convinced him to stand down and go back to Vermont. I honestly don’t see how he can campaign for Hillary after he has so poisoned his supporters against her, but maybe I’m wrong. We’ll see.
The Washington Post: How Bernie Sanders’s day in Washington got eclipsed by Democratic unity.
Shortly after Sanders emerged from his meeting with Obama, word got out that the president was going to trumpet an endorsement of his former secretary of state in a video. And then it became clear that Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), a darling of the political left and Sanders’s ideological soulmate, had also chosen Thursday to throw her support behind Clinton.
The theme of the day soon became Democratic unity, drowning out the conversation about what policy changes and other concessions Sanders might exact in exchange for exiting the race….
By the time Sanders arrived on Capitol Hill for a series of afternoon meetings, Clinton’s campaign had released the video of Obama endorsing her, in which he says of Clinton’s pursuit of the presidency : “I don’t think there’s ever been someone so qualified to hold this office.”
After arriving on the Hill, Sanders headed to the suite of Senate Minority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.).
Sitting on a chair across from Reid by a bookshelf, the Democratic presidential hopeful sat silently as reporters asked him about the six states that voted on Tuesday. Sanders had posted victories in only two.
“Okay you guys, we’re not going to take any questions,” Reid said as Sanders stared straight ahead with his hands on his knees. “That’s kind of the deal that I made.”
Gabriel Debenedetti at Politico: The Sanders wind-down begins.
The walls are crumbling, and Bernie Sanders knows it.
Barack Obama made his support for Hillary Clinton official on Thursday. So did Vice President Joe Biden and liberal hero Sen. Elizabeth Warren. The major political groups surrounding Sanders are saying it’s time to unify.
The campaign is rapidly winding down around Sanders, the Senate gadfly-turned-unlikely revolutionary who outperformed everyone’s expectations, and he finally began to acknowledge it Thursday.
“We need real change in this country. And what people also understand is that no president, not Bernie Sanders, not anybody else, can do it alone,” he told roughly 3,000 supporters gathered near Washington’s RFK stadium on a hot evening, returning to his original stump speech about billionaires, the “corrupt campaign finance system,” and “the broken criminal justice system” without once mentioning Clinton or the Democratic Party’s convention….
The signals that he now accepts the fact that he won’t be the party’s nominee were unmistakable.
The courtship letters his campaign had planned to send superdelegates have been put on hold. His go-to argument — that he polls better against Donald Trump than Clinton — has been scrubbed from his public statements. There are mass staff departures, and his digital firm set up a new site to help laid off staffers find their next gig.
Even his Senate relationship rebuilding effort has begun.
It’s a swift denouement for a campaign that had been bleeding money and staff for weeks, hastened by the surprising margin of Sanders’ loss in California on Tuesday night — which his aides hadn’t anticipated partly because they stopped polling in California days earlier due to the cost.
I really hope Sanders can keep his exit dignified.
Meanwhile, Ruby Cramer reports at Buzzfeed: Clinton Looks To Add Young Voters To Her Coalition Against Trump.
On Friday, just three days after securing the Democratic nomination, Clinton launched a new “millennial engagement” program, targeting voters under the age of 35 with three new hires — including one from the Bernie Sanders campaign.
The new team comes together after a long-fought primary against Sanders, the Vermont senator whose campaign was able to peel away students and twenty-somethings in large numbers. Clinton aides, now preparing for a general election against Donald Trump, view young people as a crucial piece of the electorate, building on an existing coalition of women, older voters, and people of color.
The program expands on the Clinton’s campus outreach effort, an endeavor that largely failed in primary states against Sanders. Campaign operatives now hope to widen their reach to voters under the age of 30, while keeping a focus on winning back college-age voters.
Kunoor Ojha, a former Sanders aide set to join the millennial engagement program, is the first member of the senator’s staff to join the Clinton campaign, an aide said.
The campaign plans to send the youth outreach team around the country to “listen directly to millennial voters,” according to a Clinton official. The team of three operatives will also work directly with staffers in battleground states to create local outreach programs and hold “working group” meetings with voters under 35.
Read more details at the link.
What else is happening? Please post your thoughts and links in the comment thread and have a fabulous weekend!
Wednesday Reads: The Aftermath and On To the General Election Campaign
Posted: June 8, 2016 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: 2016 Democratic nomination, 2016 presidential election, Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton 71 CommentsGood Morning!!
I don’t have the energy to write much this morning. I stayed up pretty late to see if California would be called. I also tried to watch Bernie’s speech, but I didn’t make it all the way through. He seemed calmer and somewhat conciliatory, but I couldn’t believe that he didn’t tell his fans to stop booing Hillary or even congratulate her on winning the nomination. I hope he’ll go back to Burlington and think about whether he’d like to maintain some influence in the Senate if he goes back. At least he didn’t burn it all down by yelling about Hillary’s speeches and his other stupid gripes.
I wonder if Bernie saw that his top staffers had thrown him under the bus to Politico before he took the stage? I know everyone has seen it, but I want to record this for posterity: Inside the bitter last days of Bernie’s revolution. It’s kind of like a mini version of Woodward and Bernstein’s The Final Days. Some juicy bits:
Aides say everything was Bernie’s fault.
There’s no strategist pulling the strings, and no collection of burn-it-all-down aides egging him on. At the heart of the rage against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic Party, the campaign aides closest to him say, is Bernie Sanders.
It was the Vermont senator who personally rewrote his campaign manager’s shorter statement after the chaos at the Nevada state party convention and blamed the political establishment for inciting the violence.
He was the one who made the choice to go after Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz after his wife read him a transcript of her blasting him on television.
He chose the knife fight over calling Clinton unqualified, which aides blame for pulling the bottom out of any hopes they had of winning in New York and their last real chance of turning a losing primary run around.
Sanders is hoping Hillary gets indicted over her email server.
Sanders is himself filled with resentment, on edge, feeling like he gets no respect — all while holding on in his head to the enticing but remote chance that Clinton may be indicted before the convention.
Aides didn’t care for Sanders’ response to the chaos in Nevada.
“I don’t know who advised him that this was the right route to take, but we are now actively destroying what Bernie worked so hard to build over the last year just to pick up two fucking delegates in a state he lost,” rapid response director Mike Casca complained to Weaver in an internal campaign email obtained by POLITICO.
“Thank you for your views. I’ll relay them to the senator, as he is driving this train,” Weaver wrote back.
Sanders is every bit as much of a micro-manager as Donald Trump and nearly as nasty. He’ll have to get over himself pretty soon, or his “movement” will be dead and so will his Senate career.
The New York Times: Hillary Clinton Made History, But Bernie Sanders Stubbornly Ignored It.
This is who Bernie is–a nasty, mean, self-centered old man. As Maya Angelou said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.”
Now on to some positive articles.
The Washington Post: Primary wins show Hillary Clinton needs the left less than pro-Sanders liberals think.
California was the biggest delegate prize of 2016 for Democrats. Sanders spent the better part of the past month camped out there. And Clinton beat him by 13 points – or nearly half a million votes.
She won the second most valuable prize available last night, New Jersey, by 26 points. And she defeated Sanders in New Mexico and South Dakota.
The Democratic coalition will ultimately unify behind Clinton – as long as she pays a modicum of respect to Sanders, which she will – because the liberal base does not want Donald Trump to become president. And Clinton benefits enormously from growing concerns among independent voters about the presumptive Republican nominee….
— Once again, Hillary excelled in higher-turnout primaries and bigger states with more delegates while Bernie did best in a lower-turnout caucus with relatively few delegates on the line.Clinton unexpectedly won the South Dakota primary, even as she lost in the North Dakota caucuses. “In caucus states, he’s averaging over 60 percent of the vote. In primaries, he averages just under 43 percent. He’s won 71 percent of caucuses; Clinton has won 72 percent of primaries,”Philip Bump notes.
— Sanders hoped a victory in California and some surprises elsewhere would give him an argument to pull superdelegates away from Clinton. Neither happened. And now he has little justification for continuing his quixotic quest, with the exception of trying to maximize his leverage.
Actually, his leverage will shrink the longer he hangs around. Democratic leaders are getting impatient.
Matthew Yglesias: Many of the factors that helped Hillary beat Bernie will let her crush Trump.
The strategies that worked against Bernie Sanders will work even better against Donald Trump — a candidate who’s very different ideologically, but whose campaign shares many of Sanders’s structural weakness in terms of over-reliance on slogans, mega-rallies, and aggressive white male supporters.
Clinton’s primary campaign focused on policy detail, consultations with a wide array of stakeholders, data, and elite validators. Compared to Sanders’s campaign, Clinton’s was relatively dull. Journalistically, there wasn’t much to say about it. And though lots of people were happy to vote for Clinton, relatively few seemed interested in attending her rallies or sharing her memes.
Yet even as Sanders created the more interesting storyline and drew the bigger crowds, he lost the election. Clinton did it through low-key strengths that happen to be valuable against Trump — oftentimes even more so.Clinton is heading into the general not only with an edge in current polls, but with a campaign — and a candidate — that is dramatically sounder on the fundamentals.
Please go read the whole thing at Vox.
Peter Beinart at The Atlantic: Hillary Clinton’s Remarkable Comeback.
Hillary Clinton has now secured the Democratic nomination for president. Because she was the front-runner, because she represents the establishment, because she has been around forever, we forget how remarkable a story that is.
I’m not talking about her gender. In purely political terms, Clinton’s victory—after losing the Democratic nomination in 2008—constitutes the greatest comeback by a presidential candidate since Richard Nixon won the Republican nomination in 1968, after losing the presidential election of 1960.
Hillary Clinton concedes Democratic nomination to Barack Obama in June 2008
Many forget how devastating Clinton’s 2008 loss was. Over the course of the campaign, her party’s most powerful leaders—people she had worked with for decades—betrayed her. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid sought out Barack Obama and secretly urged him to challenge her. Former Senator Majority Leader Tom Daschle, who according to John Heilemann and Mark Halperin’s Game Change, considered Clinton an “icy prima donna,” did as well. Chuck Schumer publicly endorsed Clinton; as her fellow senator from New York, he had to. But he also privately urged Obama to run. West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller, an old ally from Clinton’s health-care fight, endorsed Obama and said he was doing it for his kids.
Ted Kennedy endorsed Obama publicly, despite being repeatedly begged not to by Bill Clinton. So did Representative Lois Capps, even though Bill had campaigned for her, spoken at her late husband’s funeral, and employed her daughter at the White House. Bill had also employed former Energy Secretary and U.N. Ambassador Bill Richardson. Nonetheless, Richardson—who ran himself in 2008—made a deal to send his supporters to Obama if he failed to meet the delegate threshold at individual Iowa caucus sites. He did so, according to Heilemann and Halperin, despite having promised the Clintons he would not. James Carville dubbed him “Judas.”
That wasn’t even the worst of it. Civil-rights legend John Lewis endorsed Clinton and then rescinded his endorsement to support Obama. Claire McCaskill betrayed the Clintons twice. They had campaigned hard for McCaskill when she sought a Missouri Senate seat in 2006. Then, that fall, she publicly declared that “I don’t want my daughter near” Bill. McCaskill assuaged the Clintons’ fury with an emotional apology to Bill. Then, in January 2008, she became the first female senator to endorse Obama.
Again, please go read the whole thing and remember back to those days and how painful it was. I honestly never thought Hillary would run again after 2008, but she proved me and everyone else wrong. And I’m so very happy that she did.
That’s all I have the energy for this morning. Please share your own thoughts and links in the comment thread, and remember what we have all been through together. Hillary has made our dreams a reality, and I truly believe she will go onto crash through that highest and hardest glass ceiling in November.
Live Blog: Hillary Victory Dance!
Posted: June 7, 2016 Filed under: U.S. Politics | Tags: Democratic nomination, Hillary Clinton, live blog, victory dance 170 Comments
Thanks to ANonOMouse for this graphic.
The big night has arrived, Sky Dancers! Tonight Hillary Clinton will claim the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. She will be the first woman ever to accomplish this feat. It’s a historic achievement, and I hope the media–as well as Senator Sanders–will treat it as such. Here is what Joan Walsh wrote at The Nation yesterday before the AP announcement:
Hillary Clinton needs just 24 more delegates to clinch the Democratic nomination, when the total of delegates she’s won in primaries and caucuses are combined with her superdelegate supporters. Assuming she wins New Jersey on Tuesday night—and she is leading there 64-36 in the latest polls—she will get them, hours before the polls close in California, where she and Senator Bernie Sanders are still locked in a tight race.
As a former Californian, I’ve been ambivalent about rumors that Clinton plans to declare victory after her New Jersey win, reportedly with a big rally in Brooklyn on Tuesday night. An early call by the networks could dampen California turnout. Plus, while I’m a Clinton supporter, I’m concerned about party unity, and I think her campaign should take every opportunity to reach out to Sanders voters.
Then I looked back at what Barack Obama did in 2008, the night he crossed the delegate threshold—like Clinton, with pledged and super delegates. And I looked at the way The New York Times covered it. And I shed my good-girl reservations about an early Clinton declaration of victory. She will win the nomination Tuesday night, no matter what the Sanders campaign says about superdelegates (more on that in a minute.) She will become the first female major-party nominee for the presidency, and she should claim that victory for herself, and for the tens of millions of women who support her. And the media should cover it as the historic event that it is.
Here’s The New York Times story from June 4, 2008. It is headlined “Obama Clinches Nomination; First Black Candidate to Lead a Major Party Ticket.”
Notice that it’s treated as a big, historic occasion; Obama doesn’t share the headline with Clinton. There’s no hedged “Obama claims victory, but Clinton vows to fight on” at the top of the paper of record. The headline and story cover Obama’s proud claim to a historic victory, and it’s treated as a done deal. While it’s true Clinton didn’t concede that night, the next day she scheduled her concession speech in Washington, DC, for the following Saturday. On June 7, 2008—eight years to the day before she will clinch the 2016 nomination—she paid tribute to her voters, those “18 million cracks in the highest and hardest glass ceiling”—and asked them to support Obama.
We’ll find out later tonight if The New York Times is capable of showing the same respect to the first woman “candidate to lead a major party ticket.”
From MSNBC: Hillary Clinton Makes History.
Almost eight years to the day after ending her first presidential bid while celebrating the 18 million cracks her supporters put in the “highest, hardest glass ceiling,” Hillary Clinton took a major step towards breaking through that final barrier Monday evening, and towards becoming the country’s first woman president.
Clinton surpassed the “magic number” of delegates needed to clinch the Democratic Party’s nomination, according to NBC News projections, to become the first woman in America’s 240 year history to be selected as the nominee of a major political party….
“It’s been an incredible journey,” Clinton told reporters Monday in California before she was declared the presumptive nominee. “My supporters are passionate. They are committed. They have voted for me in great numbers across our country for many reasons. But among those reasons is their belief that having a woman president will make a great statement, a historic statement, about what kind of country we are, what we stand for. It’s really emotional.”
The historic nature of Clinton’s candidacy has been an undercurrent throughout her second presidential bid, but rarely at its forefront. That will likely change Tuesday night when Clinton declares victory at a celebratory rally with supporters in Brooklyn.
“It’s a revolution, really,” said Terry O’Neill, the president of the National Organization for Women. “It’s not quite yet the highest, hardest glass ceiling, because that would be the presidency, but it’s just an amazing first.”
I’m sure that Bernie and his bros are going to try their best to ruin this night for us, but I’m not going to pay them any more attention. They can go into the dustbin of history and stay there as far as I’m concerned–unless they want to wholeheartedly join the fight against Donald Trump. I think the majority of them will come around in time.
Meanwhile, I recommend reading this post that Delphyne tweeted earlier. It’s fantastic!
hecatedemeter: Managing Your Feelings Is Not My Job.
One of the almost unconscious (and completely unpaid) jobs that women are doing all the damn time is managing their own behavior in order to manage men’s emotions. We do it so much that we’re often not even aware that we’re doing it. While the Jungian projection is that women are “too emotional” and “let their emotions run away with them,” the fact is that, of course, it’s most men who really can’t manage their own emotions. Margaret Atwood famously said that men are afraid women will laugh at them, while women are afraid that men will kill us. Women must never dress in ways that make it OK for men, who can’t control themselves, to rape us. We must never lean in too hard or we will threaten the men. We must soothe their hurt feelings, let them feel as if they won even when they lost, always be receptive to their desires. Failure = death. I do it all day long, the only woman in the room most of the time, figuring out exactly how to manage the mens’ feelings in order to herd us towards a legal strategy that will actually win the case, while letting this guy think it was all his own idea, letting the other guy imagine that he just won a point, gently dealing with the asshole who always interrupts me.
All women do it and we do it all the damn time. It gets old.
As we’ve edged closer and closer to the moment (sometime within the next 24 hours) when America will, after 240 years, select a woman as the nominee of a major political party, women are being warned not to be, as my grandma would have said, “poor winners.” ….
Above all, we’re being told, don’t gloat. Don’t spike the football, don’t high-five each other, don’t whoop and yell, don’t chest pound, don’t do anything to rub it in. No! Hillary and her supporters must wear ashes and do even more, and more, and more to “reach out” to the Bernie Bros. Otherwise, their delicate feelings will be hurt and they will vote for Trump, or Jill Stein, or just stay home and peruse MRA websites….
But, you know, fuck that shit. I am declaring a 72 hour moratorium on women having to worry about men’s delicate feelings. I’ve waited 60 years. America has waited 240. All 44 of America’s presidents — all 44 of them — have been men. Suffragettes were beaten, spat upon, ridiculed, arrested, imprisoned, hung from their wrists, beaten, force-fed, and terrorized just to win women the right to vote. I’ve shown up every election of my adult life and sent money to, handed out literature for, walked door-to-door for, and voted for one damn man after another. I am going to spike the ever-loving hell out of this football, do a dance in the end zone, fall to my knees and call on Columbia, high-five everyone I know, do the wave, show the English my bum, and then I’m going to open the champagne and really get crazy.
I’ll skip the champagne, but I plan to really enjoy this victory–follow the returns, watch Hillary,s speech, read your comments, and do my own little victory dance. I’ve waited my whole life for this night.
What are you hearing and reading? What’s happening in New Jersey, Delphyne and Joanelle?
Monday Reads: One More Day Until Hillary Clinton Makes History!
Posted: June 6, 2016 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: 2016 presidential election, 2016 presidential nomination, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, highest glass ceiling, Hillary Clinton 121 Comments
Hillary Clinton takes a selfie with supporters at a rally at Sacramento City College, Sunday, June 5, 2016,AP Photo/John Locher)
Good Morning!!
Hillary had a great weekend, winning the Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico primaries by comfortable margins. She now needs only about 30 pledged delegates to reach a majority and clinch the Democratic nomination. That will happen after the votes come in from the New Jersey primary tomorrow night.
As you know, she will give her victory speech tomorrow night from her Brooklyn headquarters. Hillary Clinton will become the first woman ever to win a major party presidential nomination; and when she goes on to beat Donald Trump in November, she will crash through the highest glass ceiling of all–the presidency of the United States of America!
After our dreams were dashed in June 2008, I wondered if there would be another chance for a woman president in my lifetime. Well, here we are, with a very good chance of seeing that happen! I know you are all as excited as I am. I just cannot wait until tomorrow night! I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve wondering if Christmas morning will ever come.
Hillary Clinton concedes Democratic nomination to Barack Obama in June 2008
NBC News: Hillary Clinton Edges Closer to Clinching Nomination After Puerto Rico Win.
Hillary Clinton won the Puerto Rico primary Sunday, edging even closer to the delegate majority she needs to become the presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party.
A total of 60 pledged delegates were at stake in the island primary contest, which comes ahead of Tuesday’s crucial race in California.
Puerto Rico voters faced long lines and confusion over polling stations, many of which had closed since the Democratic primary in 2008. The island is also in the throes of an economic crisis after having accumulated more than $70 billion of outstanding debt.
Gov. Alejandro Padilla endorsed Clinton on Wednesday, calling her the best candidate to help the government out of the fiscal crisis.
Clinton also notched a victory in Saturday’s caucuses in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
She is widely expected to secure the Democratic nomination on Tuesday when Democratic voters in six states, including California, will head to the polls in the last multi-state primary day of the nomination race.
At a rally in Sacramento late Sunday, Clinton underscored the importance of that primary, telling the crowd: “I want to finish strong here in California. It means … it means the world to me.”
https://twitter.com/politicalmiller/status/739820833456132096
The Clinton Campaign’s main job today is to keep superdelegates from putting her over the top until after her speech tomorrow night.
Of course we still have to deal with Old Mr. Nasty, Bernie Sanders; but nothing he does after tomorrow will make any difference. He is going to find himself shunned and ignored if he continues his path of attacking the Democratic nominee. The man is on his last legs. Here’s what he looked like in California yesterday. Not very presidential.
https://twitter.com/word_34/status/739644631789408256
Sanders may also face a serious challenge to his Senate in 2018. Joy Reid at The Daily Beast: Meet Al Giordano, the Man Who Wants to Take Bernie Down.
If Al Giordano challenges Bernie Sanders for his U.S. Senate seat in 2018, he will tick nearly all of the boxes Sanders checked during his surprisingly robust presidential run.
Nearly zero odds of defeating an entrenched Washington politician? Check.
Little chance of Democratic Party support? Double check! A decades-old history of lefty activism that casts him as a hippie-turned-politico? Check, check, and check again.
So why would he do it? Because in Giordano’s view, and that of his social media supporters, Bernie is losing ugly and hurting Democrats’ chances of prevailing against Donald Trump in November.
“I mean, what haven’t they touched?” Giordano asks, peering at me via a 6-by-4 inch Skype window from his home in Mexico City. “What part of the Obama coalition have they not alienated? It’s like they want to erase the coalition.”
A little about Giordano:
Giordano, a bearded, graying, former reporter with the Boston Phoenix alternative weekly, cut his teeth as an anti-nuclear protester in the early 1980s while living in Rowe, a small Massachusetts town bordering Vernon, Vermont. When he wasn’t filing for the Phoenix, he spent his time protesting the twin nuclear power plants on either side of the state border: Yankee Rowe and Vermont Yankee. And he became close friends with the late leftie activist and anarchist Abbie Hoffman. He has spent the last 19 years in Mexico, where he runs an online newsletter, Narco News, and a school that trains journalists to cover social movements. His claim to fame is winning a First Amendment case against the Banco Nacional de México, which sued him, a Mexican reporter and Narco News for libel over a series of stories claiming a bank official was in league with Central American drug cartels.
Giordano recalls being an early Bernie Sanders supporter.
“I did support him when he first ran for [Burlington] mayor,” he says of Sanders. “I did support him when he first ran for Congress, and then the year he won. I supported him as a journalist and got my newspaper to endorse him.” But he says he cooled to Sanders after the Newt Gingrich-led “Republican revolution” takeover of the House in the 1994 midterm elections. Back then, Sanders was still distancing himself from Democrats, including liberal stalwarts like Barney Frank and Steny Hoyer, who were, in Giordano’s words, “giving Gingrich hell.”
Read the rest at the link.
Democrats in Puerto Rico are blaming the Sanders campaign for the long lines at a vastly reduced number of polling places during their primary yesterday.
Puerto Rico Democrats managed to give Hillary a big win anyway. Here’s what one Clinton voter had to say:
Trump News
Republicans are getting very nervous about their presumptive nominee, according to CNN:
Top Republican officials and donors are increasingly worried about the threat Donald Trump’s attack on a judge’s Mexican heritage could pose to their party’s chances in November — and about the GOP’s ability to win Latino votes for many elections to come.
Trump is under fire for repeatedly accusing U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who is overseeing a lawsuit involving Trump University, of bias because of his Mexican heritage. Those concerns intensified Sunday after Trump said he would have the same concerns about the impartiality of a Muslim judge.House and Senate GOP leaders have condemned Trump’s remarks about Curiel, while donors have openly worried that losing Latino voters could doom them in key down-ballot races. Other important party figures, including former Speaker Newt Gingrich, are urging Trump to change his combative, confrontational style before it’s too late.Veteran Republican strategist Rick Wilson warned this weekend that GOP leaders who have endorsed Trump “own his politics.”“You own his politics,” Wilson wrote in a column for Heatstreet, adding later, “You own the racial animus that started out as a bug, became a feature and is now the defining characteristic of his campaign. You own every crazy, vile chunk of word vomit that spews from his mouth.”
The GOP’s deepest fear: A Barry Goldwater effect that could last far longer than Trump’s political aspirations.
Goldwater, the Arizona senator who was the 1964 GOP nominee and a leader of the conservative movement, alienated a generation of African-American voters by opposing the Civil Rights Act — opening the door for Democrats to lock in their support for decades. Republicans fret that Trump could similarly leave a stain with Latino voters.
Of course, Trump is just saying in plain language what Republicans have been dog-whistling for decades. Here’s conservative writer Kathleen Parker: The GOP surrenders to the dark side.
With the surrender of House Speaker Paul Ryan to the Trump crusade, it is fair to wonder what the Republican Party stands for.
Mr. Ryan’s endorsement of Trump, which appeared in an op-ed the speaker wrote for his hometown paper — rather than before a gaggle of reporters and newscasters with his arm draped around Mr. Trump’s shoulders — was a white flag from the establishment opposition.
In his op-ed, Mr. Ryan explained that though he doesn’t support all of Mr. Trump’s ideas (brave!), he’s confident that a President Trump would support the House agenda. Moreover, Mr. Ryan felt that his endorsement was needed to maintain a Republican majority in the House.
In other words, he caved, as most everyone knew he would after a respectable period of resistance.
The party has to stand united, after all. Because, as the Geico guy would remind us, that’s what they do.
Next likely to fall will be evangelical Christian leaders, who are scheduled to meet with Mr. Trump on June 21. The expectation is that Mr. Trump will promise to pick conservative Supreme Court justices who would restore the nation’s social order to a pre-Roe v. Wade, pre-gay-rights version.
If the purportedly devout can accept the ungodly Trump as the nation’s leader, then there really is nothing sacred. But, by God, he’s better than Hillary Clinton, clamors the crowd.
Newt Gingrich objected to Trump’s attacks on a federal judge overseeing a fraud case against Trump “university” and became the latest Trump enemy.
Donald Trump jabbed Newt Gingrich on Monday after the former House Speaker criticized the presumptive GOP nominee for attacking the federal judge overseeing the Trump University lawsuit, saying his critique was “inappropriate.”
Appearing on “Fox and Friends,” Trump said he’d heard Gingrich’s comments about him and “was surprised at Newt. I thought it was inappropriate what he said.”Gingrich, who has drawn scrutiny as a potential vice president pick, joined a chorus of top Republicans rebuking Trump for repeatedly accusing U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel, overseeing a lawsuit involving Trump University, of bias because of his Mexican heritage. Those concerns intensified Sunday after Trump said he would have the same concerns about the impartiality of a Muslim judge.In an interview with the Washington Post, Gingrich said “I don’t know what Trump’s reasoning was, and I don’t care. His description of the judge in terms of his parentage is completely unacceptable.” And on “Fox News Sunday,” he said that it was “one of the worst mistakes Trump has made,” adding: “I think it’s inexcusable.”
The Republicans are not going to be able to control Trump. He’s turning their party into a train wreck, and they deserve it.
So . . . what else is happening? What stories are you following today? Let us know in the comment thread and have a great day!
Tuesday Reads: I’m So Sick of the Tired Media Narrative about Hillary
Posted: May 31, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections, morning reads, The Media SUCKS, U.S. Politics | Tags: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton 94 Comments
Henri Matisse
Good Morning!!
I’m having one of those mornings when I feel completely unsettled and discombobulated about current events. All my life I’ve felt like an “outsider,” because I didn’t see the world in the same ways so many other people did.
As I have gotten older, I’ve realized that I’m far from unique; I know many people have this feeling. But when national and world events get as crazy as they are now, that feeling comes back to me. Why are so many people seemingly brainwashed by cultural memes?
We constantly hear and read that Hillary Clinton is a horrible, terribly flawed person who is constantly “struggling” to overcome her opponents because of her awful “speaking style,” her “inauthentic” personality, her “secrecy”–and that’s just from people who are not over-the-top Clinton haters.
From the Bernie bros and the GOP, we hear that she is practically the Devil incarnate–“cozy” with Wall Street and Walmart, a “criminal,” an “enabler,” and on and on. And yet, Hillary has millions more popular votes in the primaries than either Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump.
Why is it that millions of people have no difficulty seeing Hillary’s “humanity,” her kindness, her love for children, her intelligence, her competence, her basic decency when so many in the media can’t? It seems that once people are part of the media in-crowd, they feel they must adopt certain Clinton stereotypes. Why is it that even wholehearted Clinton supporters like Joan Walsh feel compelled to write in every article that she is a “flawed candidate?” What candidate does not have flaws?
Audrey Hepburn
What got me started on this train of thought–for the umpteenth time–is a long piece by Rebecca Traister in New York Magazine: Hillary Clinton vs.Herself. There’s nothing simple about this candidacy—or candidate. I’ll be honest: I couldn’t even finish reading the article. This whole approach to Hillary–that somehow she is her own worst enemy–has just gotten so tired. I can’t take it anymore. Here’s Traister describing the “problem” with Hillary:
All the epic allusions contribute to the difficulty Clinton has long had in coming across as, simply, a human being. She is uneasy with the press and ungainly on the stump. Catching a glimpse of the “real” her often entails spying something out of the corner of your eye, in a moment when she’s not trying to be, or to sell, “Hillary Clinton.” And in the midst of a presidential campaign, those moments are rare. You could see her, briefly,letting out a bawdy laugh in response to a silly question in the 11th hour of the Benghazi hearings, and there she was, revealed as regular in her damned emails, where she made drinking plans with retiring Maryland senator and deranged emailer Barbara Mikulski. Her inner circle claims to see her — to really see her, and really like her — every day. They say she is so different one-on-one, funny and warm and devastatingly smart. It’s hard for people who know her to comprehend why the rest of America can’t see what they do.
“The rest of America?” Isn’t this really a media problem? About 12 million people have voted for Hillary in the Democratic primaries. Around 18 million voted for her in the 2008 primaries. She was elected twice to the Senate from New York. She is well known and admired around the world. Personally, I have no problem seeing Hillary as likable, even when she gives speeches. She has a beautiful smile and to me her personality comes through in debates, interviews, and speeches. But reporters and writers insist on denying my view of reality.
Far from feeling like I was with an awkward campaigner, I watched her do the work of retail politics — the handshaking and small-talking and remembering of names and details of local sites and issues — like an Olympic athlete. Far from seeing a remote or robotic figure, I observed a woman who had direct, thoughtful, often moving exchanges: with the Wheelers, with home health-care workers and union representatives and young parents. I caught her eyes flash with brief irritation at an MSNBC chyron reading “Bernie Sanders can win” and with maternal annoyance as she chided press aide Nick Merrill for not throwing out his empty water bottle. I saw her break into spontaneous dance with a 2-year-old who had been named after her, Big Hillary stamping her kitten heels and clapping her hands and making “Oooh-ooh-ooh” noises. I heard her proclaim, with unself-conscious joy, from the pulpits of two black churches in Philadelphia, that “this is the day that the Lord has made!” and watched the young campaign staff at her Brooklyn headquarters bounce up and down with the anticipation of getting to shake her hand.
Bob Dylan
Why these observations, the crowd reactions, and the fact that Hillary is winning do not convince Traister that the problem is somewhere else than with her, I cannot explain. And that’s why I couldn’t finish the article. Perhaps I’ll go back and read the rest later on.
A good antidote to the fixed media “narrative” about Hillary can be found at Cannonfire these days. Joseph Cannon has been on a mission to expose Bernie and his bros as well as the media memes about “the Clintons.” Today he exposes one of those wacky Bernie bros who have been writing for Huffington Post and Salon throughout the campaign: Meet Crazy Frank Huguenard, a CLASSIC BernieBro. Huguenard is in the news because he posted a piece at HuffPo that was deleted. In it he claimed that Hillary was about to be indicted.
The case instantly became a cause celebre, widely discussed on the right. The author of that deleted article, Frank Huguenard, has aired his grievances on Breitbart.
“Huffpo has yet to respond to my request for an explanation,” Huguenard tweeted at this Breitbart News reporter Monday morning. “I’ve got my sources, they never asked.”
Huguenard later told Breitbart News, “I want to do another story but my HuffPo account has been temporarily disabled. Not sure what’s happening with them.”
I think I know why the thing was deleted: Huguenard is a liar. He falsely claimed that Hillary is being indicted because an official investigation revealed the Clinton Foundation to be a criminal enterprise.
Here is the actual wording:
James Comey and The FBI will present a recommendation to Loretta Lynch, Attorney General of the Department of Justice, that includes a cogent argument that the Clinton Foundation is an ongoing criminal enterprise engaged in money laundering and soliciting bribes in exchange for political, policy and legislative favors to individuals, corporations and even governments both foreign and domestic.
The truth: There is NO GODDAMNED INVESTIGATION OF THE CLINTON FOUNDATION and thus NO INDICTMENT.
Huguenard has no secret sources. If the DOJ were looking into the Clinton Foundation, would a little-known New Age whackadoodle find out before the New York Times or the AP or the Washington Post? If Huguenard has a source, why didn’t he name that source in his HuffPo piece? Why didn’t he offer a name to Breitbart?
Read the rest at Cannonfire, and while you’re there, check out some of Cannon’s other recent posts. He’s on a roll!
Marlon Brando
California Governor Jerry Brown has endorsed Hillary Clinton in an open letter to California Democratic primary voters. An excerpt:
On Tuesday, June 7, I have decided to cast my vote for Hillary Clinton because I believe this is the only path forward to win the presidency and stop the dangerous candidacy of Donald Trump….
Hillary Clinton has convincingly made the case that she knows how to get things done and has the tenacity and skill to advance the Democratic agenda. Voters have responded by giving her approximately 3 million more votes – and hundreds more delegates – than Sanders. If Clinton were to win only 10 percent of the remaining delegates – wildly improbable – she would still exceed the number needed for the nomination. In other words, Clinton’s lead is insurmountable and Democrats have shown – by millions of votes – that they want her as their nominee….
The stakes couldn’t be higher. Our country faces an existential threat from climate change and the spread of nuclear weapons. A new cold war is on the horizon. This is no time for Democrats to keep fighting each other. The general election has already begun. Hillary Clinton, with her long experience, especially as Secretary of State, has a firm grasp of the issues and will be prepared to lead our country on day one.
Now, a couple of Trump stories:
Georgia O’Keeffe
I love this headline at The Telegraph: Donald Trump is a ‘vulgar, demented, pig demon’ says Hillary Clinton’s ex adviser.
Alec Ross, who was senior aide to Clinton during her term as Secretary of State, was speaking at The Hay Festival in Wales about the industries of the future.
Ross, said that the most open countries would have the greatest success in the coming decades because the biggest emerging markets were big data and genomics. But he warned that America could become a more closed society if Donald Trump was elected president.
“We’re having this struggle very publicly in the United States right now where a vulgar, demented, pig demon named Donald Trump is trying to make the United States a more closed society.
“We’ll be saying, no more brown people, no more Muslims, let’s get women back in the kitchen. Let’s make America great again.
“What he’s talking about is taking emasculated men in their forties, fifties and sixties who are not living the life they hoped for in their teens and twenties and saying, ‘you know what? there are people to blame for this. And we’re going to build a wall and we’re going make America great again.
“At the core of that is the struggle between being an open society and a closed society. And so if you want to know where the trillions of dollars of wealth creation that are going to come with the commercialisation of genomics, and the creation of big data companies, and the AI machine learning companies and all of the industries of the future my overarching line here is it’s going to be the most open societies.
Please go read the rest. It’s great.
Edward Gorey
This is a right wing source, but it answers a question that has puzzled me: Byron York: Why Trump attacked Martinez.
Many observers were mystified when Donald Trump attacked New Mexico Republican Gov. Susana Martinez. But the story was really very simple: Martinez hit Trump, so Trump hit back. Especially now that Trump is the GOP’s presumptive nominee, he attempted to make an example of a Republican who won’t get with the program. It might work, or it might not, but from Trump’s perspective it’s the tactic he used to beat 15 rivals for the GOP nomination.
The Trump-Martinez bewilderment focused on four factors: Martinez is Hispanic, she’s a woman, she’s a Republican (head of the Republican Governors Association), and she’s popular. “I think it sent all the wrong signals,” said Newt Gingrich, who has generally been pro-Trump. “You particularly don’t want to see your candidate who needs to…get stronger with Latinos, and stronger with women, attack a Latina woman Republican governor.” ….
“[Martinez] continues to attack him publicly and privately,” one person in TrumpWorld told me recently. Trump has made a principle of hitting back harder than he is hit. And he has been so effective that many Republicans, elected and not, have decided the smart thing is to refrain from taking on Trump, even if they oppose him.
My guess is the fact that Martinez is a woman who dared to stand up to him had something to do with Trump’s angry response.
What else is happening? What stories are you following today?
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