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.
Lazy Saturday Reads
Posted: June 18, 2016 Filed under: Afternoon Reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton 28 Comments
Lazy Way, Stephen LaPierre
Good Afternoon!!
I’m feeling particularly lazy today–mostly I just don’t want to read any news. I’d rather be reading a novel, a true crime book, or maybe a biography. But I’ve been forcing myself to surf around to see what’s going on, and here’s what I’ve come up with.
The primaries are over, but Bernie Sanders is still hanging around like party guest who won’t leave even after everyone else has gone home and the party-givers have done the dishes and are dying to get some sleep.
Tommy Christopher on Bernie’s Thursday podcast to his supporters: Bernie Sanders Flips Off Black Voters On His Way Out the Door.
Bernie Sanders is going to delay getting into the fight against Donald Trump so that he can get a few good ideas, a few iffy ideas, and a few bad ideas into the Democratic Party platform, a document that is about as useful as a roll of Charmin, but considerably less soothing to the skin. Just for good measure, he wants to get rid of Superdelegates and open up the primaries, which will work out great for Bernie Sanders from a year ago, but which will suck the first time Democrats have to run a primary against an incumbent Republican president, and Republican voters decide to vote in Democratic primaries just to mess with us. Brilliant, but none of which required him to continue to slight Hillary Clinton, except he might make Susan Sarandon and her purse dog mad.
Those Lazy Days of Summer, Jan Matson
Instead, Bernie will wait until he’s good and ready to make a half-assed endorsement of Hillary Clinton that will succeed only in winning a news cycle or two for Donald Trump, as he and the media rehash every attack he’s made against her, and every painstaking yank of the pliers it took to extract said half-assed endorsement.
But there’s something even more revealing about Bernie’s speech to supporters, because wrapped around those relevant 107 seconds was about 22 other minutes of Bernie boilerplate that neatly laid out his priorities. Throughout this campaign, Bernie and his supporters have continually insisted that if black voters would only stop and listen and give him a chance, they’d be dazzled by his down-ness and abandon their habitual support for Hillary….
Black people got tacked onto a few lists of other things, and some lines about failing schools and criminal justice reform. Or to put it another way, what black voters could expect from a Rand Paul speech. Not a syllable about ending police brutality or racial profiling, nothing about the Voting Rights Act or any other Republican schemes to disenfranchise black voters, and those are just the easy ones. Fifty-six seconds out of 23 minutes, and none of the bullet points he rushed up onto his website when #BlackLivesMatter protesters hassled him almost a year ago. Yeah, black voters had Bernie all wrong, didn’t they?
Watch Sanders’ almost-nonexistent thoughts on the Black vote at Mediaite.
More commentary on Bernie’s remarks from Matthew Yglesias: One sentence from Bernie Sanders’s speech last night that really enrages Democratic leaders.
As you can probably guess, most Democratic Party insiders were really hoping Bernie Sanders would formally drop out of the race this week and offer Hillary Clinton a fulsome endorsement. But they also recognize that he’s stopped attacking her, is promising to work against Donald Trump, and has basically accepted that the race is over — so if he wants to fade away slowly, they are happy to live with that.
The aspect of Sanders’s speech that really set them off last night was something entirely different. Not the fact that Sanders said he wanted his supporters to continue to influence the direction of the party but the specific way he characterized this direction:
I also look forward to working with Secretary Clinton to transform the Democratic Party so that it becomes a party of working people and young people, and not just wealthy campaign contributors: a party that has the courage to take on Wall Street, the pharmaceutical industry, the fossil fuel industry and the other powerful special interests that dominate our political and economic life.
It’s incredibly frustrating for people who’ve been working in mainstream Democratic Party politics to hear their party described as something other than a party for “working people.” Clinton won the votes of millions of working-class Americans, primarily people of color, throughout the 2016 primaries; and in the 2012, 2008, 2004, and 2000 election cycles there’s been a pronounced tendency for lower-income voters to back the Democratic candidate and higher-income ones to back the Republican.
Similarly, it comes as a shock to people who participated in the passage of the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill (or the White House’s series of later anti-bank regulatory actions) or who’ve worked to uphold the Obama administration’s Clean Power Plant rule that they apparently lack the courage to stand up to Wall Street and fossil fuel interests.
It’s one thing to disagree with people about policy substance or political tactics. But something Sanders has done throughout his campaign and very pointedly did here is straightforwardly challenge the good faith of the vast majority of his colleagues in Democratic Party politics. It’s worked pretty well for him on the stump, but it doesn’t win you a lot of friends. And to be honest, it’s simply wrong — you can raise a lot of objections to Obama’s approach to Wall Street or climate change, but the fact is that the financial services industry and the fossil fuel industries have been fighting him every step of the way.
Barney Frank was right. Bernie Sanders alienates his natural allies, whether deliberately or because he’s simply a terrible politician.
Lazy Hazy Days of Summer, Claire Beadon Carnell
From Slate: Bernie Sanders Officially Announces He Will Run for President Forever.
on Thursday, the Vermont senator announced he had an announcement to make. It’s been a long campaign, and Hillary Clinton bested him on every conceivable metric—albeit narrowly in some—other than the party-liquefying convention nuclear option to which Sanders doesn’t have the codes anyway. So, on Thursday night, the Vermont senator gathered friends, loved ones, and supporters around the country to huddle around a live video feed to humbly announce: He’s still running for president.
To be fair, Sanders hinted that soon he will be done and his “role” will change in a “very short period of time,” but he notably stopped well short of even remotely ending his campaign or endorsing Hillary Clinton.
Frankly, I doubt if he’ll ever endorse her, and I just don’t care. I don’t want him to campaign for her; I just want him to disappear.
One more by Sahil Kapur at Bloomberg: Sanders’ Long Refusal to Endorse Clinton Hurts His Leverage.
Even with his path to the Democratic presidential nomination rapidly disappearing, Bernie Sanders couldn’t bring himself to publicly accept defeat. Along the way, he overplayed his hand and squandered the political capital he’ll need to force policy and procedural reforms on the Democratic Party, according to allies and party strategists.
“We’re already way past the maximum point of leverage that he and his movement built up. It’s definitely dissipating every day,” said Joe Trippi, a Democratic strategist and veteran of presidential campaigns.
Trippi put the high point of Sanders’ clout at April 9, after he won seven straight contests ending with Wyoming. But he lost seven of the last nine contests, walloped by 58 points in the District of Columbia, which held the final primary of the season on Tuesday. Hillary Clinton already had locked up the nomination with a decisive victory in California a week earlier, and some of the highest-profile Sanders supporters—including Senator Jeff Merkley, Representative Raul Grijalva, and the liberal activist group MoveOn—are now lining up behind her.
Read the rest at the link.
While Bernie continues to wallow in sour grapes, Hillary Clinton has been very busy defining Donald Trump for the folks who are just beginning to pay attention.
Lazy Summer, Mitch Caster
FirstPost.com: Hillary Clinton brings out ads to give Donald Trump “rude awakening.”
Hillary Clinton and her Democratic allies have invested at least $41 million in commercials in crucial states such as Ohio, Florida and Nevada over the next six weeks, a series of summer broadsides against her Republican opponent. Those messages will be echoed by hundreds of Clinton workers in those same states and amplified by President Barack Obama and other top Democrats.
Trump has made few preparations for contending with that sort of well-oiled political machine. His campaign has no advertising plans and is just now hiring employees in important states. Republican leaders are far from agreement on how best to talk to voters about the polarising billionaire, or if they will at all. And Trump is running out of time: Early voting starts in Iowa in just three and a half months.
“It’s political malpractice,” said Mitch Stewart, Obama’s 2012 battleground states director and a Clinton backer. “He’s in for a rude awakening. This isn’t a national vote contest where you can be on cable news every day and dominate coverage. This is literally going state by state and coming up with a plan in each.”
Clinton’s large June and July ad buy comes as a reward for her near-constant fundraising. In May, she raised $27 million in primary election money that must be used before she accepts her party’s nomination at the convention in late July.
Trump is playing catch up. He did not begin raising money in earnest until 25 May, having largely financed his primary bid through personal loans to his campaign.
Clinton’s latest spots, highlighting her past advocacy for children, are an attempt to reintroduce the returning presidential candidate — she lost the 2008 Democratic primary to Obama — to general election voters. Her campaign is spending about $23 million on ads by the convention, according to advertising tracker Kantar Media’s CMAG.
But those voters are also hearing from Priorities USA, a super political action committee financed by millions of dollars from Clinton’s staunchest supporters. The goal of those that $18.7 million batch of ads: cast Trump as a con-man and bully unprepared to be commander in chief.
Key West, Thomas Kinkade
As I wrote on Thursday, it’s beginning to look like Trump isn’t making even a halfhearted attempt to run for president. He seems to be focusing on deep red and deep blue states and ignoring the swing states he would have to win in order to have any hope of beating Hillary. He spent yesterday in Texas.
Yesterday the AP learned that the Trump campaign has only 30 paid staffers on the ground nationwide.
His campaign roiled by infighting and Republican revolt, Donald Trump is working to address a battleground state staffing shortage that highlights his reliance on a skeptical GOP establishment.
The New York billionaire has slowly begun to add paid staff in a handful of swing states — Wisconsin and Iowa, among them — even as campaign officials concede the presumptive presidential nominee has little desire or capacity to construct the kind of massive national operation that has come to define modern-day White House campaigns. Trump plans instead to depend upon the national Republican Party to lead state-based efforts on his behalf, while Democrat Hillary Clinton has had an army of staff dedicated specifically to her campaign in general election battlegrounds for months.
“It would be disingenuous and wrongheaded to take a playbook that has been used over and over again,” said Trump senior aide Karen Giorno, in charge of an 11-state Southeastern bloc including battlegrounds Florida, North Carolina and Virginia. “We are creating the playbook.
The unconventional approach reflects Trump’s disdain for traditional Republican campaign practices and inclination to implement businesslike decision-making. It also carries substantial risk.If, for instance, Trump is lagging Clinton badly in polls come early fall, there is nothing to stop the RNC from cutting its losses and focusing instead on saving Republican control of the Senate or other competitive contests also on the ballot this November. Beth Myers, who managed 2012 presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s campaign, said White House candidates have unique needs that a broader-brush approach cannot always meet.
“We are creating the playbook.” Unbelievable.
What stories are you following today?
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.
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!
Sunday Reads
Posted: June 5, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections | Tags: Bernie Sanders, Dead Enders for Bernie, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Pride, Racism, Sexism 73 Comments
Good Afternoon!
The U.S. Virgin Islands gave Hillary Clinton all of their seven delegates and one super delegate for the Democratic Convention. Clinton should have the nomination sewed up by Tuesday after the New Jersey polls close. The lead over Senator Bernie Sanders was commanding. Remember, we will be there with a live blog on Tuesday night watching Herstory be made. Be sure to join us!!
Hillary Clinton scored a sweeping win in the U.S. Virgin Islands on Saturday, picking up all seven pledged delegates at stake as she inched tantalizingly close to the Democratic nomination.
She is now just 60 delegates short of the 2,383 needed to advance to the November general election.
The party said Clinton won 84.2 percent of the vote, while Bernie Sanders earned 12.2 percent. Under Democratic National Committee rules, a candidate must win at least 15 percent of the vote to be eligible to receive delegates.
The gadfly senator continues to display narcissism and should be disabused of his grandiose idea that the majority of voters, Democrats, or super Delegates consider him fit for office. The press is finally beginning to describe him as delusional but
continues to provide him with a public platform given that his supporters are showing up at events where violence and intimidation eventually occur. Among the many things Sanders appears completely devoid of knowledge is the idea of a “contested convention”.
Bernie Sanders urged news organizations on Saturday to hold off on declaring a victor in the Democratic presidential race following Tuesday’s primaries and vowed to soldier on to the party’s convention in July.
Sanders comments come as his rival, Hillary Clinton, is poised to effectively clinch the nomination following the close of the polls Tuesday in California, New Jersey, and four other states.
But the Vermont senator insisted that the delegate count is fluid. And he expressed confidence that he could persuade some “super delegates”— the party leaders who are not locked into voting for a particular candidate — to peel away from Clinton in the “six long weeks” before Democrats gather in Philadelphia.
“Now, I have heard reports that Secretary Clinton has said it’s all going to be over on Tuesday night. I have heard reports that the media, after the New Jersey results come in, are going to declare that it is all over. That simply is not accurate,” Sanders said at a news conference here.
Sanders then added, with emphasis, that the “Democratic National Convention will be a contested convention.”
He is the very definition of a sad, old man these days. Sanders truly needs to think about how he will be remembered, if at all, in the future and what kind of legacy he thinks he’ll be leaving with his brief foray into the national spotlight.
Clinton appeared on “This Week” this morning . I’m linking to the full transcript here in case you missed it. Clinton is clearly focused on the Republican nominee.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Your supporters have been pretty fired up in the last couple of days as you’ve been taking it to Donald Trump and you also step it up, using words like “demagogue” and “dictator.”
Have you concluded that the best way to beat Donald Trump is to be a bit more like him?
CLINTON: No, not at all. I laid out in my speech in San Diego the crux of my concerns and my case against him on foreign policy and national security.
And a lot of what he says plays into what I consider to be a very divisive and dangerous view of the world. And I think it’s important that we call it for what it is.
STEPHANOPOULOS: You’ve also said that he’s temperamentally unfit to be president and, in that speech, you said you’re going to leave it to the psychiatrists to explain his affection for tyrants.
Are you suggesting that he’s mentally unstable?
CLINTON: Well, no, I’m suggesting exactly what I said, that he’s temperamentally unfit. He doesn’t really have ideas. He makes bizarre rants and engages in personal feuds and outright lies.
He does apparently seem to have very thin skin and I think that those kinds of attributes, that temperament, is ill-suited for someone to be our president and commander in chief.
And he’s already, as I recited in my San Diego speech, on record on so many issues that run counter to what Democrats, Republicans alike over many decades have thought was in America’s interests in accordance with our values.
And that, to me, is cause for concern.
STEPHANOPOULOS: What’s the biggest danger coming from his temperament?
CLINTON: I think he engages in so much scapegoating and finger-pointing and he is someone who doesn’t tell the truth. He doesn’t seem to be bothered by the constant inherent contradictions.
I said that he had said that he would not mind having other countries have nuclear weapons, including Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia. He said he didn’t. A lot of news outlets, of course, easily pulled up the video of him saying all of that.
His unpredictability, his putting everything in highly personal terms has rattled — and that’s the word President Obama used — has rattled our closest allies, has caused a lot of serious concern around the world, because people are not used to seeing anyone, a Republican or a Democrat, running for president, who is so loose with the truth, so divisive and so dismissive of very legitimate concerns about safety, security, our values and who we are as a nation.
STEPHANOPOULOS: As you know, he said several times over the last few days that he thinks you should be going to jail over the e-mail issues and on “Face the Nation” he’s just given an interview to John Dickerson, where he said he would look at this when he becomes president. Listen.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
TRUMP: I would have my attorney general look at it because everyone knows that she’s guilty. Now I would say this, she’s guilty but I would let my attorney general make that determination. Maybe they would disagree.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
STEPHANOPOULOS: Your response?
CLINTON: Well, it’s a typical Trumpism. And I don’t have any response, you know; when he attacks me, I am not going to respond.
But I think it is in keeping with his very vicious public attack against the judge, the federal judge, who is hearing the case against so-called Trump University, a judge who has an impeccable record as a prosecutor, who actually spent, as I’m told, nearly a year in hiding because of threats from criminal drug cartels against his life, who was appointed first by the Republican governor of California, Governor Schwarzenegger, then appointed by a Democratic president, President Obama, because of his extraordinary legal record.
And what Trump is doing is trying to divert attention from the very serious fraud charges against Trump University, that have basically been confirmed by some of the highest officials who worked with him.
So this is typical. He does have that thin skin and, you know, Judge Cureil is as American as I am and certainly as American as Donald Trump is. And Trump’s continuing ethnic slurs and rants against everyone, including a distinguished federal judge, I think makes my point rather conclusively.
Trump continues to insult every one while trying to pander. This week we learn that the women working for his campaign earn less than than the men.
Donald Trump has paid men on his campaign staff one-third more than women, while Hillary Clinton has compensated men and women equally, according to a Globe analysis of payroll data for both campaigns.
Trump’s campaign staff is also far less diverse than that of his likely Democratic opponent. Only about 9 percent of his team are minorities, compared with nearly a third of Clinton’s staff.
The Globe analyzed the payroll for both campaigns for April, the most recent month with publicly available data. The snapshot provides clues as to how the aspiring Oval Office occupants might fill a White House team, and to what extent they include people with diverse viewpoints in the inner workings of their organizations.In an election that is already focused on gender — including Clinton’s quest to be the first female president and Trump’s accusations she is playing the “woman card’’ — the payroll differences stand out.
This story slays me. It’s probably one of the most typical Trump moves we’ve seen to date in the election. Trump used a picture of a random black family to show that he does have support from the African American community. The family is incensed.
At a Friday afternoon rally in California, Trump sought to highlight his support from minorities.
“Look at my African-American over there,” he shouted.
He seems to have made things worse, with many noting that his phrasing implied ownership over the man.
One of the major hurdles for Donald Trump to win the presidency is his deep unpopularity among non-white voters. A recent survey found Trump is viewed unfavorably by 86% of black voters and 75% of Latinos.
Trump’s comments about the African American man came after reiterating his belief that a federal judge should be disqualified from presiding over the Trump University fraud case because of his “Mexican heritage.” (The judge was born in Indiana.)
This morning on Twitter, Trump was back at it, highlighting the support of an African-American family.
The father has made it clear that the family does not support Trump.
Speaking to BuzzFeed News, the parents in the photo — Eddie and Vanessa Perry — said they are not Trump supporters. They aren’t endorsing or publicly supporting anyone. Eddie Perry called Trump’s use of the photo “misleading” and “political propaganda.”
Clearly, Trump has gotten away with so many lies and he is such a disturbed person that he thinks he can do anything and get a way with it.
I’d like to point out the artist of the next few pictures who takes pictures of candidates and turns them into clowns. They’re pretty funny. Will Espada has done a great job with all the Republican candidates. Go take a gander at the others.
So, I wanted to end with another Hillary story. This is about Hillary and the Pride movement. Clinton has written a think piece for CNN on her policies and hopes for the community.
So the stakes in this election are high. And even if we do prevail against the open bigotry of Donald Trump, we’ll still have our work cut out for us.We need to pass the Equality Act, to ensure full federal equality for LGBT Americans.We need to continue to fight discrimination at all levels of government and in all 50 states, as I did at the State Department, where we strengthened the department’s policies on anti-discrimination, worked with global advocates and other stakeholders in encouraging countries to decriminalize same-sex relationships and supported policies that extended benefits and additional protections to LGBT individuals.And we need to tackle the intersectional pressures that make life even harder for many of our fellow human beings. In particular, acts of violence against transgender women of color continue to be reported at an alarming rate. It’s an emergency, and we need to treat it like one.This issue is important to me. As secretary of state, I fought to make it possible for transgender Americans to have their true identities reflected on their passports.And as president, I’ll fight for the rights of transgender people, because no one should be harmed or mistreated for being who they are.Not long ago, I met a mom from New York named Jodie Patterson. Her youngest child, Penelope, was uncomfortable early on acting, dressing or being treated like a girl. “I don’t feel like a boy,” Penelope said. “I am a boy.”So Jodie let him be who he knew he was. Today, he’s a happy little boy named Penel who loves soccer and karate. But Penel’s mom worries about his future. She dreads how he will handle puberty, and whether kids in school will be kind or cruel. And she wonders how he will find his place in the world, when there’s so much hostility toward people like him.Kids like Penel are why all of us do what we do. They are why we fight for an America where every child is supported and loved for who they are, and nothing stands in the way of what they can become.
Today, I celebrate the fact we will have our first woman candidate for President on a major party ticket within a few days. Tomorrow, it will be up to each one of us to see that President Hillary Clinton becomes a reality and that Donald Trump is sent back to the Trust Fund Farm.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today? Remember, this is an open thread!!!
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