Monday Reads: Here we go again
Posted: February 29, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections | Tags: Anthony Foxx, Donald Trump, Krewe of Hillary, Louisiana and New Orleans for Hillary, polls Mass, Racism, South Carolina, Super Tuesday 71 Comments
Good Morning!
I had quite the weekend. It was so hectic I managed to miss a wedding because I got the dates totally confused. I’m trying to undo some of my karma this morning and that’s definitely going on the list. I’m so scatter brained these days I don’t even feel like me at times. I had friends in from NYC and lots of Hillary work to do. It’s just been super crazy here.
Most everyone knows that the New Orleans Hillary peeps–including me–have been making phone calls to GOTV. We’ve had all kinds of stuff going on on the ground related to actually getting people to the polls. I’ve not gotten any calls from the other side but several folks showed up for a march around the French Quarter for Bernie. As you probably know, our city is like 60% black. There might have been 100 or so people in the march. I only saw white faces there. This continues to be sadly telling.
However, I can tell you about the time I’ve spent with the Hillary campaign this last few weeks. I’m so proud of the diversity of her supporter base. I was on the phone yesterday and there were two of us aging boomers in the room. Both of us were women. One white. One black. The diversity of the young supporters was amazing and there was a good size group. There were two Asian Americans, a Hispanic, three young black women, a young white woman and a black man. I know that many were from the GLBT community too. They were all millennials, so don’t believe it when they say there are no young people supporting Hillary. She has a rainbow of them right down here in New Orleans. I also spent the evening talking to Dr. Son in law who is a strong Hillary supporter along with Dr. Daughter. As you know, Dr. Daughter had a Japanese Grandmother and Dr. Son-in-law’s family hails from the Bengal region of India. Both are avid Hillary supporters.
BB mentioned the stages of grief. I’m pretty sure folks I know in the Sanders camp are somewhat stuck between denial and anger. The South Carolina primary should’ve been a wake up call for the narrowing path to victory for their candidate. The Team fighting here for Hillary on the ground definitely matches these kinds of numbers.
A bruising, nearly 48-point loss to Hillary Clinton in South Carolina on Saturday night dramatically narrowed the path forward for Bernie Sanders, raising serious doubts about his ability to win the delegates needed to secure the Democratic nomination.
South Carolina will widen Clinton’s delegate lead, which stood at one after her Nevada win on Feb. 20. But more significantly, the contest here demonstrated that the Vermont senator has failed to make any headway at all with African-American voters in the South. Even with 200 paid Sanders staffers on the ground and nearly $2 million in television spending, Clinton swept the black vote by a 5-to-1 ratio, according to exit polls. Among black voters 65 and older, Clinton won by a stunning 96 percent to 3 percent.
“When we stand together, there is no barrier too big to break,” Clinton said at her victory rally in Columbia, where, for the first time on a 2016 election night, she took the stage without Bill or Chelsea Clinton by her side. “Tomorrow, we take this campaign national.”
Now, heading into Super Tuesday, when 11 states will cast ballots on March 1, Sanders will face possibly insurmountable contests in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, Arkansas and Virginia, all states with sizable black populations in which he has not invested as much time or money.
“Delegates determine the presidential nomination, and I don’t see a path for Sanders to get there,” said Jeff Berman, a consultant to the Clinton campaign who ran Barack Obama’s 2008 delegate strategy.
Running through a best-case scenario for Sanders, Clinton operatives said they expect Sanders could win Colorado, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Oklahoma and Vermont — states tailor-made for the democratic socialist because they hold caucuses, are predominantly white, located in New England or have a history of electing progressives.
But even if Sanders manages to pull out significant wins in all five, the delegate math will make it difficult for Sanders to catch up: They represent only one-third of the delegates up for grabs on Tuesday. And the Clinton campaign has invested heavily in states like Colorado and Minnesota in order to limit Sanders’ margins.
Sanders’ operatives said they are looking beyond Super Tuesday, to the friendlier terrain of Kansas, Nebraska and Maine to deliver them wins. But by then, Clinton operatives predicted, it could be too little, too late to close the delegate gap.
BB has been insistent that Mass. will go for Hillary. It seems that recent polls back her up.
Former secretary of state Hillary Clinton holds an eight-point lead over Bernie Sanders in a new poll of Massachusetts Democratic primary voters, suggesting that the Vermont senator needs to attract significant support during the final push to eke out a much-needed win in Tuesday’s Massachusetts presidential primary.
Clinton draws 50 percent of the vote, while Sanders picks up 42 percent and eight percent remain undecided, according to the Suffolk University poll released Sunday. The poll was conducted Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
I expect record turnout to continue with the nation’s Black voters because they know what’s at stake. The dismantling of the Voting Rights Act is a not something trivial. This will not go away. Here in Louisiana and in New Orleans, turning out the Black vote is important. The community is coming together for Hillary as she stands as the symbol and the promise of continuing President Obama’s legacy. This is something not lost on any of us that were active in 2007 and 2008 from either the Clinton or Obama Camps.
As voters in South Carolina’s Democratic primary cast ballots that would ultimately lead to a landslide victory for Hillary Clinton against Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, Clinton deployed surrogates in an attempt to expand that winning strategy to Louisiana.
Former Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter, New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu and Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx stumped for Clinton in Louisiana, hoping to increase turnout among black voters.
That bloc proved key to Clinton’s win in South Carolina. There she picked up 86 percent of the African-American vote, according to ABC News exit polling data.
Nutter was in Baton Rouge Friday (Feb. 26) to host a round table discussion with business leaders before campaigning with Landrieu at Dillard University.
Foxx, who joined the Obama administration in 2013, spent Sunday touring African-American churches in New Orleans.
There’s still one HUGE deal. The Donald and his goosestepping followers really trouble me. There are two things that have popped up that are just beyond the pale. Let’s start with this one: 
Don Trump Jr. said he would happily pay for some of his father’s black critics to leave the United States.
The Republican presidential candidate’s son appeared Monday morning with his brother, Eric Trump, on “Fox and Friends” to discuss the “Super Tuesday” primary elections and the concerted attacks on their father by his GOP rivals.
And then there’s this one. His earpiece made him all confused about not knowing about David Duke and his association with the KKK. This guy blames every one and every thing for his own damned ignorance, I swear!
Donald Trump on Monday blamed a poor earpiece for sparking a misunderstanding over white nationalist David Duke’s support of the GOP presidential front-runner.
“I’m sitting in a house in Florida with a very bad earpiece they gave me,” he told hosts Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie on NBC’s “Today” show.
“I sit down and I have a lousy earpiece provided by them,” Trump continued. “You could hardly hear what [CNN anchor Jake Tapper] was saying.
“What I heard was ‘various groups.’ I have no problem disavowing groups, but I’d at least like to know who they are. It’d be very unfair disavowing a group if they shouldn’t be disavowed.”
Trump waved off questions about Duke during a Sunday morning appearance on CNN’s “State of the Union.” He repeatedly told Tapper he is unaware of the former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard’s background and stances.
The outspoken billionaire on Monday lashed out at CNN for ignoring his multiple rejections of Duke’s support over the weekend.
“I’ve disavowed David Duke all weekend long on Facebook and Twitter, but it’s obviously never enough,” Trump said. “I disavowed David Duke the day before in a major news conference.
Even the ever Trump-fellating Joe Scarborough thought this gaffe was a bit off.
They weren’t hard questions to answer.
“Do you condemn David Duke? And the Ku Klux Klan?”
A simple “yes” would have worked. But on Sunday, Donald Trump swatted away the easy answers and instead feigned ignorance about the KKK and its most infamous Grand Wizard. The Republican frontrunner’s failure to provide what should have been a simple answer has raised even more disturbing questions about the man who is on course to lock down the GOP’s nomination for president.
The first question is why would Trump pretend to be so ignorant of American history that he refused to pass judgment on the Ku Klux Klan before receiving additional information? What kind of facts could possibly mitigate a century of sins committed by a violent hate group whose racist crimes terrorized Americans and placed a shameful blot on this nation’s history?
Why would the same man who claims to have “the world’s greatest memory”say “I don’t know anything about David Duke” just two days after he condemned the former Klansman in a nationally televised press conference? And with that amazing memory, how could Donald Trump have forgotten that he himself refused to run for president as a Reform Party nominee in 2000 because “Klansman” David Duke was a member of that same party?
These are questions that have no good answers for a Republican Party on the verge of nominating a man who sounds more like a Dixiecrat from the 1950s than the kind of nominee the GOP needs four years after losing Hispanics by 44 percent, Asian-Americans by 47 percent, and black Americans by 87 percent.
As I said, ask any black voter in the South and you’ll hear exactly what’s at stake. Women, minorities, and the GLBT community do not want to go back to the kind of American that Trump’s voters represent because we all know what that means. Will the Republican Party really implode? How far can Trump go in the General and what will he say and do once he faces former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton? This is Philip Rucker and Robert Costa writing at WAPO.
The implosion over Donald Trump’s candidacy that Republicans had hoped to avoid arrived so virulently this weekend that many party leaders vowed never to back the billionaire and openly questioned whether the GOP could come together this election year.
At a moment when Republicans had hoped to begin taking on Hillary Clinton — who is seemingly on her way to wrapping up the Democratic nomination — the GOP has instead become consumed by a crisis over its identity and core values that is almost certain to last through the July party convention, if not the rest of the year.
A campaign full of racial overtones and petty, R-rated put-downs grew even uglier Sunday after Trump declined repeatedly in a CNN interview to repudiate the endorsement of him by David Duke, a former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Trump had disavowed Duke at a news conference on Friday, but he stammered when asked about Duke on Sunday.
Marco Rubio, who has been savaging Trump as a “con man” for three days, responded by saying that Trump’s defiance made him “unelectable.” The senator from Florida said at a rally in Northern Virginia, “We cannot be the party that nominates someone who refuses to condemn white supremacists.”
The fracas comes as the presidential race enters a potentially determinative month of balloting, beginning with primaries and caucuses in 11 states on Tuesday. As the campaign-trail rhetoric grew noxious over the weekend, a sense of fatalism fell over the Republican firmament, from elected officials and figureheads to major donors and strategists.
“This is an existential choice,” said former senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota, who is backing Rubio. Asked how the party could unite, Coleman said: “It gets harder every day when you hear things like not disavowing the KKK and David Duke. It’s not getting easier; it’s getting more difficult. . . . I’m hopeful the party won’t destroy itself.”
The choice for voters is not simply one of preference but rather a fundamental one about the direction they want to take the country, with the insurgent Trump promising utter transformation.
“For many Republicans, Trump is more than just a political choice,” said Kevin Madden, a veteran operative who advised 2012 nominee Mitt Romney. “It’s a litmus test for character.”
Madden, like some of his peers, said he could never vote for Trump. If he is the nominee, Madden said, “I’m prepared to write somebody in so that I have a clear conscience.”
More splintering came late Sunday when freshman Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.), who has been a vocal Trump critic, declared on Twitter that if the reality TV star is nominated, he will “look for some 3rd candidate — a conservative option, a Constitutionalist.”
With all Trumps’ issues, I agree with Amanda Marcotte on this one. He’s not less crazy than the Cruz and Rubio boys. I recommend reading her latest just for the linky goodness. She’s documented some pretty unpalatable stuff.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying I like Trump — I hate him with the passion of a thousand burning suns — or that I want him to be president. But yes, I think he should win the Republican nomination. He’s run the best campaign, one that speaks to what Republican voters want to hear, and, by that measure, he deserves to win the nomination, so that Hillary Clinton can wipe the floor with him in November.
This is not a popular opinion, and not just with the establishment Republicans who can’t help acting like the main problem with Trump is he puts his dirty shoes on the couch. The common wisdom in most of the media — conservative, mainstream and liberal — is that a Trump nomination would be a ruinous thing, a blow to both the Republican Party and the political system as we know it. To which I can’t help but say, “So what?”I don’t agree with Trump supporters on, well, almost anything, but I can’t help sharing in the pleasure they take with the way that Trump’s very existence exposes the smarmy two-faced hypocrisy of the modern Republican Party. Modern conservatism is built on a base of protecting men’s dominance over women, white people’s dominance over people of color and rich people’s dominance over everyone else, but it’s generally considered impolite to say so bluntly. Instead, it’s standard for Republicans to pretend that policies obviously designed to screw people over are meant to help. That puts journalists in this terrible situation of having to pretend that Republicans mean well, since it’s generally considered impolitic to call someone a liar.Trump doesn’t play that game, at least not as much, and it is nakedly obvious that this, and not his actual beliefs and policies, is what angers many of his detractors. Take, for instance, Jonah Goldberg of the National Review on Fox News recently, complaining that Trump is “completely overturning what the Republican reset was supposed to be about after 2012, which was this idea that it was going to be a more consistently conservative but more inclusive and nicer toned party.”“And instead it’s going to be a less conservative but meaner toned and less inclusive party,” he added.To which I must again say, “So what?” People who value kindness and inclusivity already have a party. They’re called the Democrats.
I can certainly attest to that down here in the Mississippi River melting pot of America called New Orleans. The line’s in Hillary speech that got the most applause for the night were just about that. Our country is a great country but unless is kind and inclusive of all its peoples, we’re not being the sort’ve of country that’s the shining beacon on a hill.
So, you’re seeing pictures of the folks working for Hillary here in New Orleans. I added one of the Honorable Anthony Foxx for good measure. I see lots of YOUNG people with energy, smiling faces, and enthusiasm!
What’s on your reading and blogging list today? Be sure to holler out about the upcoming primaries in your states! I know we’ve got lots of Sky Dancers out there ready to vote for Hillary this week and this month!!!
Friday Reads: Unintelligible Yelling
Posted: February 26, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections | Tags: Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, President of the United States 34 Comments
Good Afternoon!
I was in sore need of a pick me up last night after wading into the Republican debate for a period of time when this picture showed up on Scott Eric Kaufman’s facebook newsfeed. It came with the following brief message “I’m deaf enough that even when I watch things online, I have the subtitles on, and people, CNN just the won the Internet.”Last night, he posted the same to Salon. He obviously “inspired” this in Esquire by Charles Pierce. It’s obviously a lede worth nabbing since I’m about to do it too albeit I’m giving him full credit and luscious linky goodness.
If you expected to find out about any positions on issues last night watching that debate you would’ve been sorely disappointed. If you like National Geographic specials of monkeys flinging poo, well, this made the monkeys behavior look absolutely rational by comparison. I will borrow Pierce’s bottom line from his piece I attributed above. Unintelligible yelling was a good as description as any one could’ve found for the entire evening’s discourse.
To be honest, there were some moments of clarity. Trump was the only one on stage with anything close to a reasonable position on the question of Israel and Palestine. Kasich gave a reasonable answer to the stupid “religious liberty” question. (“If you’re in the business of selling things, if you’re not going to sell to somebody you don’t agree with, OK, today I’m not going to sell to somebody who’s gay, and tomorrow maybe I won’t sell to somebody who’s divorced. I mean, if you’re in the business of commerce, conduct commerce. That’s my view.”) And, to be completely honest, Trump probably gave the best closing statement of the bunch. But, at that point, those people watching who hadn’t turned away from this intellectual demolition derby that, like me, they were numb and willing to believe almost anything. I felt like I’d stumbled into the ladies garden club from the beginning of The Manchurian Candidate.
There were, of course, no questions about the climate crisis. There, of course, were no questions about gun violence, even though the third mass shooting in a week was occurring at virtually the same time these guys were fighting over who was the biggest crook, con man, liar, and choke artist on the stage. Priorities, gentlemen, please.
(Unintelligible yelling).
You said it, pal. Whoever you are.
I’m not sure that you could find any moments of clarity. Strump defended Planned Parenthood right before he said that the few abortions they do would make him completely defund the outfit. Kasich basically 
said the Supreme Court spoke on Gay Marriage and that you can’t discriminate in the public market even if he still considers religious freedom to be akin to bigotry. Cruz and Rubio were absolutely unhinged proving they could outDonald The Donald. As we know, Cruz is a very smart and dangerous man. Rubio basically just does what he’s told.
Earlier this month, the English version of Der Spiegel had an excellent piece on how “Donald Trump is the Most Dangerous Man on Earth.” That’s probably because he is headed towards the Republican nomination and his closest rivals look completely off the planet by comparison. Hell, Chris Christie just endorsed him this morning. You can read the Rubio attack puppy mode along with Christie labelling him “desperate” at the link. But, back to Spiegel. Germans, as you know, have experienced fascism enough to know it when they see it. They see it.
Donald Trump is the leader of a new, hate-filled authoritarian movement. Nothing would be more harmful to the idea of the West and world peace than if he were to be elected president. George W. Bush’s America would seem like a place of logic and reason in comparison.
Well, there’s your mic drop.
And, there’s even a Nixon connection. You know there had to be. This is their take on the upcoming Clinton/Trump general. I’ve lifted an entire section and the entire article is a very long, well thought out read.
This is evident on a bitter cold January evening in Burlington, Vermont. A line has formed in front of a local theater. Mary Loyer, 44, and her son Tim, 28, are hoping to catch a glimpse of Trump. Tim works as a waiter, Mary is unemployed. They’re supporters of the left-wing democrat Bernie Sanders, a long-time mayor of Burlington. But Mary says something that one hears over and over again on the campaign trail: “If it came down to Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, I don’t know who I’d vote for. But it wouldn’t be Clinton.”
“Hillary is corrupt,” Tim says. “She does what Big Money wants her to do, and she’s a flip-flopper.” Sanders and Trump have more in common than it seems, he adds: “Both of them are the only politicians who say what they think and do what they say.” His mom nods.
For a long time, the Clinton camp fantasized about taking on Trump. The way they saw it, it would be Clinton, an experienced, middle-of-the-road candidate, versus Trump, the radical leader of the old, white guard. Many democratic strategists viewed such a matchup as a unique opportunity. Vice President Joe Biden said if Trump won the Republican nomination, Hillary Clinton would “win in a walk.”
In the meantime, it has become apparent that Clinton can’t even rely on the unconditional support of her own people. For many, she represents a political system that is symbiotically entwined with Big Business. Trump, the big capitalist, however, bills himself as someone who is not for sale. He doesn’t accept big donations and doesn’t owe anyone anything. The fact that he, unlike Clinton, has never held a political office is an advantage in this election campaign.
Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg is one of the few in his party who openly addresses how difficult it could be for Clinton to handle a Trump candidacy. The founder of the progressive think tank “New Democratic Network” believes that the widespread frustration about the status quo within the American electorate and his ability to handle the modern media better than anyone else in the race would make Trump a strong opponent in the general election. “Trump would be a lot harder to defeat than most of us think”, he says. “There were more than a dozend Republican candidates and he basically destroyed all of them. It is unbelievable what he did.”
But many democrats aren’t panicking yet. They’re betting on Clinton’s campaign coming around and gaining momentum once she secures the nomination. At the same time, they are anxious that this could become the dirtiest duel in the history of American presidential campaigns.
If it does, Roger Stone will be the man to blame. The unscrupulousness that has come to define Trump’s campaign is largely Stone’s doing. He learned the tricks of the trade from Richard Nixon in the 1970s, and later helped Ronald Reagan get into the White House. By the end of the 1980s, Stone was already trying to convince his friend Trump to run for president. Almost everything Trump knows about politics and power, he learned from Stone — including the art of manipulation. Stone is considered a master of defamatory rumors.
Stone also helped Trump lay the foundations for his campaign last spring. Then in summer, he was abruptly fired. Trump’s people cited a disagreement between the two, but observers now believe the split could have been staged, a trick.
“I remain an unabashed Trump supporter and Trump enthusiast,” Stone said when reached on the phone last autumn. “I just finally made a decision that I could have a greater impact on the outside. Trump is still a very close friend.” As before, the two talk regularly and Stone obviously gives Trump important advice. And just like old times, Stone spends nearly every evening on TV touting Trump and his “movement.”
Since he is no longer an official member of Trump’s campaign team, Stone has the freedom to be even more ruthless in his derision of Trump’s opponents, without the risk of the mud-slinging coming back to haunt the candidate. Trump biographer D’Antonio describes Stone as “pure evil.” He is a “deeply disgusting person,” someone who doesn’t understand anything but “brute force.”
Stone’s favorite victim is Hillary Clinton. His recently published book, “The Clintons’ War on Women,” is a nasty piece of work. But it could also be seen as a blueprint for Trump’s campaign against Hillary. Without credible proof, Stone claims that Chelsea Clinton is not Bill’s biological daughter and that Bill has fathered at least one son with a black prostitute. Stone calls the former president a serial rapist and Hillary his henchwoman. He also suggests that Hillary has the death of a man who knew about Bill’s escapades on her conscience.
In television interviews, Stone claims Hillary is the “point person in the terror campaign to intimidate and bully women into silence.” That she once waged a “nuts and sluts campaign to discredit Monica Lewinsky to make it her fault that she was seduced by a man three times her age.” He has also stated that “Bill rapes women physically and Hillary rapes them psychologically.” He claims Hillary Clinton “has no right to call herself an advocate for women and girls.” Trump recently released a campaign video with a similar message.
“The Clintons are money-making opportunists and criminals,” Stone says. Their foundation is nothing more than a “luxury travel service to augment the lifestyles of Bill, Hillary and Chelsea Clinton.” People with those kinds of friends and advisers don’t leave much to the imagination as to their character, he says.
This is what worries me as I deal with BernieBots and undecideds. The long, horrible list of lies slung at Hillary has taken root even in folks that should appreciate her contributions and her tribulations. I hate it 
every time a Bernie Bot tells me she’s not trustworthy because she’s taken money for speeches or because she took Bill back or because email server or because, heaven forbid, BENGHAZI! The years and years of Fox News like slander and the relentless battle of some republicans to take her down just gives me the Rubio flop sweat.
No Republican is positioned to beat Trump in the primary. They all should realize that by now some where in the darkest deepest part of their dark hearts. And so, the Trump Mean Machine will take aim direclty at Hillary and a lot of the ammunition will be put there already by Bernie Sanders and friends as well as the 20 something year Republican Crusade. It will be ugly, folks.
Just think, Trump may sweep Super Tuesday.
Another statistical affirmation comes from Bloomberg Analysts (full pdf below) who conducted polling of the “Super Tuesday” states and found Donald Trump leading in every contest, every demographic, and every metric in the multiple races.
Donald Trump isn’t just winning, he’s way ahead of Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz – AND even more substantially Trump beats each of them as individuals in head-to-head matchups. It’s not even close – heck, he’s even more supported than Pope Francis:
Clinton is aware what lies ahead and sees Trump as the clear rival.
With three state wins under Donald Trump‘s belt, Hillary Clinton is now ready to acknowledge something many on both sides of the aisle never could have imagined saying: that the real estate mogul turned reality-TV star will likely be the Republican presidential nominee.
“Yes,” Clinton said on “Morning Joe” today when asked by Joe Scarborough whether she thinks Trump will beat the remaining GOP contenders.
“I mean, right now it looks like that,” she continued. “But I’m not going to handicap their race. I want to let them decide that.”
I woke up to the trolling and howling of the BernieBros. Bernie’s the only one that can beat the STrump. It’s all over the usual suspect places including Current Affairs where I wonder if the author of this article even shaves yet. (BB’s put it up before.) Here’s one at Slate. But, I’m actually beginning to look at this like the endless and endlessly boring Rocky movie franchise. If any one was set up for a long term battle fully knowing what’s going to be thrown at you, it’s Hillary Clinton. Here’s the voice to the contrary at TNR with some hesitation.
According to RCP’s average of polls, Clinton enjoys only a slim lead over Trump in a head-to-head match-up. You have to think that her lead will climb once the Democratic Party revs up the Trump attack machine, which the GOP has so far mysteriously declined to use.
But at the same time, in a polarized, nearly evenly divided electorate, there’s only so much the Democratic Party can do to expand its coalition. It’s unlikely that the editors of National Reviewand other anti-Trumpists will flock to Clinton. The real question is whether Trump can consolidate the GOP and perhaps even make inroads with blue-collar workers who have traditionally voted Democratic. As Noam Scheiber reported, even labor unions are interested in Trump, given his idiosyncratic position on trade.
So, maybe?
So, getting out, supporting and voting for Hillary may be the most important thing we do this year. This argues that it’s more important than voting for Obama in 2008. Okay, I should probably tell you who wrote this first at the Daily Beast. Sit down. Swallow any drinks you may be sipping. Ready? Jon Favreau.
Recently, though, there are signs that Hillary is finding this courage. About a month ago, Buzzfeed’s Ruby Cramer asked Clinton a simple question that, for some strange reason, no reporter or staffer ever thought to press her on: Why are you doing this? What truly motivates you?
Her response was not to talk about fighting for this constituency or that issue. There is no pablum about real solutions for real people with real problems, or the poll-tested garbage about coming from the middle of America with the middle class at the middle of her priorities (I can no longer remember if that’s a joke we used to make as speechwriters or an actual line).
There is only this, from Hillary: “love and kindness.” She mentioned it for the first time after the shooting in Charleston, and then expanded on the theme a few weeks later: “I want this campaign, and eventually my administration, to be more about inspiring young people, and older ones as well, to find that niche where kindness matters, whether it’s to a friend, a neighbor, a colleague, a fellow student—whether it’s in a classroom, or in a doctor’s office, or in a business—we need to do more to help each other.”
You think it might be another cynical ploy. But this turns out to be a theme that she’s repeated throughout her life. In her announcement speech, Hillary talked about being raised to believe Methodist founder John Wesley’s admonition to “do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, for as long as you can.” In her 1969 Wellesley Commencement, she called for a “mutuality of respect.” After working at the Children’s Defense Fund, she would often cite Marian Wright Edelman’s quote that “Service the rent we pay for living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.”
As First Lady, Hillary spoke about the need for “a new ethos of individual responsibility, “a great renaissance of caring in this country,” and “going back and actually living by the Golden Rule.” In the State Department, she’d talk about Alexis de Tocqueville’s “habits of the heart,” and says in Hard Chocies that “I’ve also returned again and again to this question of universality—how much we all have in common even if the circumstances of our lives may be different.”
If nothing else, you’ll notice that Hillary Clinton’s words are the very antithesis of the mean-spirited, xenophobic bile that spits from the mouth of Donald Trump.
He continues.
In her campaign against Sanders, Hillary has begun to tell that broader, more inclusive story about the future. There she is, comforting a crying child in Nevada who worries that her parents might be deported. There she is in South Carolina, with five mothers of African American children who died of gun violence, who told Mother Jones, “She listened and followed through for us. You can’t fake that…She cares. Not only does she care about victims of gun violence but she cares about women, she cares about African Americans. She cares!”
She cares.
Hillary Clinton isn’t perfect. She isn’t flashy or entertaining. She isn’t cool or hip, so please stop forcing the poor woman to learn the Dab on Ellen. As someone who’s been in politics for a few decades, she’s made plenty of mistakes, and will probably make many more.
But Hillary is also more than just a policy wonk who can’t wait to start shuffling through white papers in the Oval. She cares. She tries. She perseveres. And now she has a chance to tell the story she’s always wanted about America: the story about a country that found the courage to turn away from our darkest impulses; that chose to embrace our growing diversity as a strength, not a weakness; that pushed the boundaries of opportunity outward and upward, until there are no more barriers, and no more ceilings.
At stake in this election is control of a Tea Party-run Congress, at least one Supreme Court vacancy that could tip the balance for a generation, and the very real chance that a highly unstable demagogue could become the 45th President of the United States. So while I may not have imagined myself saying this a few years ago, I certainly believe it now: It’s far more important to elect Hillary Clinton in 2016 than it was to elect Barack Obama in 2008.
See. That ObamaBot grew up. There’s hope for the BernieBros. Let’s just hope it’s soon so we can stop Trump.
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
Thursday Reads: Political Parasites
Posted: February 25, 2016 Filed under: Barack Obama, morning reads, Republican politics, U.S. Politics | Tags: 2016 Democratic nomination fight, 2016 Republican nomination race, Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, political parasites 40 Comments![gazette-du-bon-ton-by-gose-1914-art-deco-pochoir.-il-a-ete-prime-[2]-58970-p](https://skydancingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/gazette-du-bon-ton-by-gose-1914-art-deco-pochoir-il-a-ete-prime-2-58970-p.jpg?w=590&h=786)
Good Morning!!
I’m illustrating this post with drawings from a vintage French fashion magazine. You can read about it at Abe Books: Gazette du Bon Ton: A Journal of Good Taste.
There’s another Republican debate tonight, this time in Houston. I honestly don’t think I can stand to watch it, but I’ll keep an eye on today’s thread and put up another one tonight if necessary. The debate is on CNN, so you shouldn’t have any trouble streaming it on-line if you want to watch from your computer or other device. The freak show starts at 8:30PM ET.
Reuters: Trump versus Rubio and Cruz at Houston Republican debate.
At a CNN-hosted debate at the University of Houston, [Donald] Trump’s rivals will have one of their last best chances to try to derail the blunt-spoken political outsider before the Super Tuesday contests.
Whether they can pull it off is an open question. On stage with Trump will be U.S. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, U.S. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, Ohio Governor John Kasich and retired neurosurgeon Ben Carson. None have been able to slow Trump’s momentum in previous debates.
“Trump is on cruise control,” said Eric Fehrnstrom, a former senior adviser to 2012 Republican nominee Mitt Romney. He said Trump should ignore his opponents and focus on the key planks in his platform – a border wall to keep out illegal immigrants, a stronger military, defeating Islamic State and fair trade.
“It’s getting late in the game for everyone else. People who are expecting a sudden shift in the direction of the race are deluding themselves. Trump is Goliath, and we’ve seen enough of the other candidates to know there are no Davids in this field,” Fehrnstrom said.
Rubio, 44, has an added incentive to change the makeup of the race. He is scrambling to attract the financial donors who supported one-time establishment favorite Jeb Bush, who dropped out of the race after his disappointing finish in South Carolina on Saturday….
Cruz, 45, enters the debate under pressure. He must do well in his home state of Texas on Super Tuesday. Recently, he has been accused by his rivals of using negative tactics, including one that led to the resignation of his spokesman, Rick Tyler.
Mitt Romney has inserted himself into the GOP race with a highly ironic attack on Donald Trump. The Boston Globe reports:
Mitt Romney, whose 2012 presidential campaign was bedeviled over his own reluctance to publicly release his personal income tax returns, aggressively criticized Donald Trump on Wednesday for not releasing his returns….
“I think we have good reason to believe that there’s a bombshell in Donald Trump’s taxes,” Romney said on Fox News. “I think there is something there. Either he is not anywhere near as wealthy as he says he is, or he hasn’t been paying the kind of taxes we would expect him to pay, or perhaps he hasn’t been giving money to the vets or the disabled like he has been telling us he’s been doing.”
Trump quickly responded, ridiculing Romney — whom he endorsed in 2012 in a gold-studded event at Trump Tower in Las Vegas — and calling him a loser.
“Mitt Romney, who totally blew an election that should have been won and whose tax returns made him look like a fool, is now playing tough guy,” Trump wrote on Twitter. Then, he added: “When Mitt Romney asked me for my endorsement last time around, he was so awkward and goofy that we all should have known he could not win!”
In 2012, Republican candidates like Newt Gingrich and Herman Cain were running vanity campaigns–basically running for president in order to sell books.
That also seemed to be the case this year with Ben Carson. He even suspended his campaign for time to go to book signings. But it turns out that Carson’s campaign may be even a worse “scam”–one that Carson himself may not have been aware of until recently. From The Atlantic:
Carson has taken in incredible amounts of money during the race. His campaign has raised more than any other Republican presidential rival, though they’ve raised more when super PACs are included. But he’s also spent more than any of them, so that despite his prolific fundraising, he has barely $4 million in cash on hand.
That’s because Team Carson has been plowing a huge portion of the money it raises back into fundraising, using costly direct-mail and telemarketing tactics. Pretty much every campaign uses those tools, but the extent to which Carson was using it raised eyebrows around politics. First, many of the companies being paid millions and millions of dollars are run by top campaign officials or their friends and relations, meaning those people are making a mint. Second, many of the contributions are coming from small-dollar donors. If that money is being given by well-meaning grassroots conservatives for a campaign that’s designed not to win but to produce revenue for venders, isn’t it just a grift?
These questions have been circling since last summer. If they’re right, the most sympathetic interpretation is that Carson, like his donors, was being taken for a ride by his aides, and wasn’t in on the scam. Carson seemed to suggest as much on Tuesday, implying he was taken advantage of by aides who treated the campaign as an ATM.
Read more at the link.
I’m wondering if Bernie Sanders will use his higher visibility from his campaign–which is basically a vanity campaign at this point–to get a big book contract and increase his speaking fees. It turns out Sanders has done something similar in the past. From The Center for Public Integrity:
Sanders turned a fiery, hourslong filibuster against extending the Bush tax cuts into a book. During the 2012 election cycle, his campaign gave a copy to donors of at least $50.
What he did was use campaign funds to purchase a lot of the books and then “gave” them to donors who contributed at least $50.00 That’s a pretty good profit on a paperback book that sold for around $10.00. I don’t think this is illegal, but it seems a little bit questionable for a man who calls himself a socialist (he isn’t one). Here’s a graphic posted on Twitter.
https://twitter.com/SDzzz/status/702771840859549696
From US News: Sanders’s 8.5 Hour Tax Cut Filibuster Gets a Book.
It wasn’t exactly Washington’s version of The King’s Speech, but independent Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders’s 8½-hour blast in December at President Obama’s deal with Republicans to extend the Bush tax cuts is getting star treatment. Nation Books is printing it in its entirety in The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class. The senator’s passionate address, which runs over 255 pages in the book, was a rare oratorical tour de force: It attracted so many online viewers it crashed the Senate television website. Some say Obama was so miffed by the speech that he held an impromptu press conference with former President Clinton to divert attention.
So he used the speech to undermine President Obama twice–by giving the speech against the Obama’s wishes and using it to run Senate during the president’s reelection campaign. By the way, Sanders’ book “The Speech” was published by Nation Books, the publishing arm of The Nation magazine which has endorsed Sanders in the 2016 race.
![gazette-du-bon-ton-by-barbier-1912-art-deco-pochoir.-la-belle-aux-moineaux-[2]-59024-p](https://skydancingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/gazette-du-bon-ton-by-barbier-1912-art-deco-pochoir-la-belle-aux-moineaux-2-59024-p.jpg?w=225&h=300)
At Politico, Jack Shafer has an interesting piece on Trump and Sanders as “political parasites.”
Think of the Republican Party as a host organism that has only now discovered the parasite it acquired eight months ago. The parasite, of course, is Donald J. Trump—no more a Republican than I—who has inserted himself into the party and appears to be on his way to winning its presidential nomination. Feeding on the Republican Party’s primary and caucus process, the Trump parasite has progressed from egg to larva and has now commandeered many of the Republican Party’s metabolic functions. But it’s been managed growth, as the smart-thinking parasite likes to keep its zombie host alive long enough to develop into the next stage and lay its own eggs and begin the process anew.
Trump isn’t the only political parasite on the hustings this season. Bernie Sanders, who never ran as a Democrat before this election, has likewise attempted to colonize the gastrointestinal tract of a major party in hopes that it will eventually deposit him at the White House. True to his parasitical nature, Sanders loves the idea of the party but has little interest in actually supporting it. He has raised only $1,000 for the Democratic Party’s fundraising alliance, while Hillary Clinton, who is many things but assuredly not a parasite, has raised $26.9 million.
Trump has similarly stiffed his party’s fundraising operations, canceling a scheduled appearance at a December Republican National Committee fundraising event, and Twitter-shouting his fury at the RNC for allegedly using his name in a fundraising solicitation without his consent. “Totally unauthorized, do not pay,” Trump tweeted. The true parasite never supports the host!
The life cycles of the Trump and Sanders parasites are nowhere near as gruesome as the life cycles of the Guinea worm and the parasitoid wasp, but they are as striking as anything we witness in nature. Viewing Trump and Sanders with an ideological microscope, it’s apparent that neither has much affinity for the parties they’ve joined. Their object and their genius has been to seize as much control as they can of the major parties from the various “establishments” and wage their outsider third-party candidacies from inside. Suitably camouflaged, neither Trump nor Sanders is seen by the average voter for political freeloaders they are.
I’m not a big fan of Schafer’s but that makes a lot of sense to me. Are both parties being hollowed out from within?
![gazette-du-bon-ton-by-fabius-1914-art-deco-pochoir.-sophonisbe-[2]-59150-p](https://skydancingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/gazette-du-bon-ton-by-fabius-1914-art-deco-pochoir-sophonisbe-2-59150-p.jpg?w=225&h=300)
If the polls in upcoming primary and caucus states are anything close to correct, Sanders has no chance to get the Democratic nomination. But he is still out there trying to tear down the party and attacking Hillary Clinton–the likely nominee–in the most vicious ways he can think of. It is really starting to bother me a great deal, and I’m glad that the party seems to be coalescing around the potential first woman president.
I’ll end this post with another powerful essay from Sady Doyle: America loves women like Hillary Clinton–as long as they’re not asking for a promotion.
It’s hard to remember these days, but just a few years ago, everybody loved Hillary Rodham Clinton. When she stepped down as US secretary of state in January 2013 after four years in office, her approval rating stood at what the Wall Street Journal described as an “eye-popping”69%. That made her not only the most popular politician in the country,but the second-most popular secretary of state since 1948.
The 2012 “Texts from Hillary” meme, which featured a sunglasses-clad Clinton scrolling through her Blackberry aboard a military flight to Libya, had given rise to a flood of think pieces hailing her “badass cool.” The Washington Post wanted president Barack Obama to give vice president Joe Biden the boot and replace him with Clinton. Taking stock of Clinton’s approval ratings, Nate Silver noted in a 2012 piece for the New York Times that she currently held “remarkably high numbers for a politician in an era when many public officials are distrusted or disliked.”
![gazette-du-bon-ton-by-barbier-1914-deco-pochoir.-la-fontaine-de-coquillages-[2]-59020-p](https://skydancingblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/gazette-du-bon-ton-by-barbier-1914-deco-pochoir-la-fontaine-de-coquillages-2-59020-p.jpg?w=225&h=300)
How times have changed. “The FBI And 67 Percent of Americans Distrust Hillary Clinton,” booms a recent headline in the Huffington Post. Clinton’s favorability ratings currently hover around 40.8%. Bob Woodward complains that “there is something unrelaxed about the way she is communicating.” “Hillary’s personality repels me,” Walker Bragman writes in Salon.How can we reconcile the “unlikable” Democratic presidential candidate of today with the adored politician of recent history? It’s simple: Public opinion of Clinton has followed a fixed pattern throughout her career. Her public approval plummets whenever she applies for a new position. Then it soars when she gets the job. The wild difference between the way we talk about Clinton when she campaigns and the way we talk about her when she’s in office can’t be explained as ordinary political mud-slinging. Rather, the predictable swings of public opinion reveal Americans’ continued prejudice against women caught in the act of asking for power.
I hope you’ll go over to the Quartz link and read the whole thing.
So . . . what stories are you following today?
Tuesday Reads: Why Can’t We All Just Get Along?
Posted: February 23, 2016 Filed under: morning reads, U.S. Politics | Tags: Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Marco Rubio, Nevada Caucuses, Ted Cruz 44 Comments
The World of Peace and Harmony, Prinsa S., Kathmandu, Nepal
Age:13
Good Morning!!
Today the Republicans will caucus in Nevada, and Donald Trump will probably win. The Republican leadership is slowly moving through the stages of grief as they come to terms with the likelihood that the clowniest clown in the clown car will be at the top of their ticket in November.
Politico: GOP wakes up to Trump nightmare.
Establishment Republicans are reckoning with something they thought would never happen: That it might soon be too late to stop Donald Trump.
With the controversial businessman the clear front-runner heading into Nevada and next week’s Super Tuesday contests, there’s an emerging consensus that the odds of dislodging him are growing longer by the day. Whispered fears that Trump could become the Republican nominee have given way to a din of resigned conventional wisdom – with top party officials and strategists openly wondering what the path to defeating him will be….
”World Peace from Nagasaki Megami Bridge: Tamako and Maria” by 47 children of 175 members of Club Kids Peace in Tomachi Elementary School.
Lately they are telling themselves that if only the weaker candidates would drop out maybe Rubio or Cruz could win.
The biggest hurdle confronting the mogul’s four rivals is that they continue to divide support among themselves. In each of the three contests that have been held so for, the anti-Trump field has fractured, making it impossible for any single contender to surpass him. A similar dynamic could play out again in Nevada, with Trump failing to win a majority of support but still earning more than his opponents.
While the field has winnowed somewhat in recent days, the compressed nature of this year’s Republican primary calendar means there is precious little time for the anti-Trump field to consolidate. Should Trump notch his third consecutive win on Tuesday, some foresee him steamrolling through Super Tuesday a week later, when a quarter of the party’s delegates are awarded. A batch of newly released polls show him with sizable leads in several of those states, including Massachusetts and Georgia.
“Either Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio would have a shot at the nomination, but I don’t see how they can stop Donald Trump while both of them are splitting votes,” said Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party and American Conservative Union chairman who had supported Jeb Bush. “I don’t see either senator, both of whom have strong-willed backers, dropping out any time soon. Maybe after March 15, but will that be too late to stop Trump?”
It should be funny to see the GOP panicking, but I dread having to watch the repulsive spectacle that the presidential election would be if Trump were one of the candidates. The primary race has already been way beyond disgusting.
If We Could Just Join Hands
Washington Post: GOP candidates make intense 11th-hour arguments in Nevada.
Front-runner Donald Trump delivered a broadside against competitor Ted Cruz, telling thousands in Las Vegas he thinks the Texas senator “is sick.”
“There’s something wrong with this guy,” said Trump.
For his part, Cruz spent significant time Monday seeking to explain the ouster of his spokesman for tweeting a story that falsely accused White House hopeful Marco Rubio of insulting the Bible. And when the candidates weren’t directing their fire at each other, they used scattered appearances on the eve of Tuesday’s caucuses to assail Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
So raucous was this day that Trump stopped short at one point in his talk to bemoan the very delegate-selection he was in Nevada to tap.
“Forget the word caucus,” he told a crowd of some 5,000. “Just go out and vote, OK?” At another point, he said, “What the hell is caucus?”
This is the kind of idiocy that we have to look forward to this fall.
Prize-winning poster by middle school student Daniel Mendoza
Ted Cruz tried to steal some of Trump’s thunder by promising to deport 12 million undocumented immigrants. The Dallas Morning News:
Ted Cruz said…that he would use federal immigration officers to round up and deport all 12 million people in the country illegally — a markedly tougher stance that he has struck in the past.
“Yes, we should deport them,” Cruz told Fox host Bill O’Reilly. “That’s what ICE exists for. We have law enforcement that looks for people who are violating the laws, that apprehends them and deports them.”
The toughening stance comes after a disappointing, if narrow, third place finish in South Carolina on Saturday, with immigration hardliner Donald Trump strengthening his grip on the race.
“There’s no change here,” Cruz spokeswoman Catherine Frazier said late Monday by email. “Cruz has been very clear: people who are here illegally should be deported. That is the law today. Period. They broke the law, they face the consequence. ICE exists for that purpose and they should continue to do their job. And on top of that any law enforcement that encounters those here illegally should follow the law and deport them.”
Marco Rubio is still the GOP “establishment’s” chosen candidate, but it’s difficult to see how he has much chance against Trump.
Here’s Paul Waldman at The Week: Donald Trump is about to do terrible things to Marco Rubio.
As bullies go, Donald Trump is unusually skilled.
When Trump decides to go after you, he considers carefully both your weak points and the audience for his attack. So when he decided to pummel Jeb Bush — apparently for his own amusement, as much as out of any real political concerns — he hit upon the idea that Bush was “low energy,” something Bush had a hard time countering without sounding like a whiny grade-schooler saying, “Am not!” More than anything else it was a dominance display, a way of showing voters he could push Jeb around and there was nothing Jeb could do about it. With a primary electorate primed by years of watching their candidates fetishize manliness and aggression, the attack touched a nerve.
And now with the Republican race effectively narrowed to three candidates, the one Trump hasn’t bothered to go after too often — Marco Rubio — must prepare for the mockery and rumor-mongering that will surely be coming his way from the frontrunner. Whether he can withstand it could go a long way toward determining how this race turns out.
Until now, Trump has been relatively soft on Rubio. But with the increasing possibility that Rubio could be the greatest threat to Trump winning the nomination, he’s almost certain to go after him. If the past is any guide, Trump will throw a bunch of different attacks Rubio’s way until he happens upon one that seems to resonate; then he’ll stick with it as long as it works. Trump is already dabbling in Rubio birtherism (though he doesn’t seem quite committed to it), but eventually he’ll find a line of personal criticism with just the right note of cruelty and derision….
Rubio may have avoided Trump’s wrath up until now, but that won’t last. The only question is what brand of contempt Trump will heap on him. It might be some kind of attack based on Rubio’s ethnicity, or it might be the same kind of you’re-a-girly-man insults he used on Bush. That could be effective, since Rubio does look like he didn’t graduate high school all that long ago. He could go after Rubio’s occasionally shaky finances, which Trump surely looks on with utter contempt, since as far as he’s concerned, not being rich makes you a loser.
To be honest, the insanity is really getting to me today. I can barely stand to read about these clowns anymore, much less actually watch them spew their hateful nonsense on TV. That’s why I’ve illustrated this post with art by children and adults about world peace.
Our world our future, Tongbram Mahesh Singh
A couple more links on Nevada:
Time: What to Watch at the Nevada Caucuses.
LA Times: Four big questions await answers Tuesday in Nevada’s Republican caucuses.
On the Democratic side, Senator Bernie Sanders is starting to look really desperate. Yesterday, instead of campaigning in South Carolina, where the primary is this Saturday, he came to Boston and then held a rally at another university–U. Mass Amherst. The appearance in Boston was billed as a “press conference,” but Sanders didn’t take questions. He just gave a variation of his stump speech with some more mean-spirited than usual attacks on Hillary Clinton thrown in. NBC News reports:
BOSTON—Just two days after losing to former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in the Nevada caucuses, Senator Bernie Sanders launched a broadside against his rival, aggressively emphasizing differences between himself and Clinton on issues of campaign finance and trade policy.
“What I intend to do over the next number of weeks is kind of contrast my record to Secretary Clinton’s” Sanders began as he addressed the press at Boston’s International Association of Ironworkers, Local 7.
Keeping true to his word, the Vermont senator — who boasts of having never run a negative campaign — dove into a litany of contrast points he sees between himself and Clinton, launching some of the most direct swipes Sanders has taken at his competitor during this campaign season.
“I am delighted that Secretary Clinton month after month seems to be adopting more and more of the positions that we have advocated, that’s good,” he said.
“And in fact, she is beginning to use a lot of the language and phraseology that we have used,” Sanders added, joking that he saw a TV ad and thought it was him speaking despite Clinton’s photo being pictured in the spot.
Sanders hit Clinton hardest on her use of a Super PAC— the pro-Clinton Priorities USA – and used the group to tie her to Wall Street and big donor influences.
Nothing new there–just the same tired old smears and innuendo.
The headline in The Boston Globe this morning is kind of pathetic if you know anything about where most of the delegates are going to be won.
Bernie Sanders’ path to the nomination runs squarely through Massachusetts.
The Democratic primary could be effectively decided within the next two weeks, if Hillary Clinton’s campaign gets the outcome they’re looking for. With more than 1,000 delegates up for grabs, early March will be do-or-die for Bernie Sanders’ campaign….
“On Tuesday, March 1, we’re going to make history here in Massachusetts,” Sanders told a crowd Monday at UMass Amherst. “This great state is going to lead us forward to a political revolution.”
If Sanders’ political revolution is going anywhere on Super Tuesday, it will have to be in states like Massachusetts, where he has a demographic advantage [meaning lots of white liberals]….
As of Monday night, Clinton leads Sanders in pledged delegates 52 to 51, after votes were cast in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada. Clinton is expected to trounce in South Carolina, where she has the strong support of black voters. Polls also show strong leads for the former secretary of state in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, Texas, and Virginia—all of which vote March 1.
But even if Sanders wins in states with lots of white people–like Massachusetts, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Colorado–there no way he will win enough delegates to compete with Clinton. I just don’t see a path to the nomination for him when he’s polling so badly with people of color.’
Poster by Lianwei H. Chengdu, Sichuan, China age 17
I actually think it’s time for Clinton supporters to begin showing empathy and compassion for Sanders supporters–especially the young ones who really don’t understand how politics works. They are going to have broken hearts soon, and we need to help bind their wounds and make them feel welcome in the party. I don’t think we should start telling Bernie to quit–let him go on as long as he wants and let his followers vote for him.
More stories to check out:
Pew Research Center: Majority of Public Wants Senate to Act on Obama’s Court Nominee.
New York Times: Seas are Rising at Fastest Rate in Last 28 Centuries.
Washington Post: ‘Slaps on the wrist’ for white men who watched friend throw black man onto train tracks.
Politico: Spike Lee backs Sanders in radio ad.
Politico: Ben Carson: Obama was ‘raised white.’
Gawker: Hot Mic Captures Trump Chatting With Morning Joe Hosts: “You Had Me Almost As a Legendary Figure.”
Media Matters: 8 Things Trump And Morning Joe Hosts Discussed When Cameras Were Off.
Digby: When is MSNBC going to do something about this?
Mass Politics Profs: Warren Won’t Endorse Sanders.
AP: Gun maker seeks dismissal of lawsuit over Newtown shooting. (Thanks to the bill Sanders voted for.)
Politico: Bernie’s Spring Break Blues. “When Bernie Sanders will need college students the most, they’ll be watching Netflix and partying.”
So . . . what stories are you following today?
Monday Reads
Posted: February 22, 2016 Filed under: 2016 elections | Tags: Bernie Bros, Bernie Sanders, Dolores Heurta, Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, March Presidential Primaries 2016, unions 92 Comments
It’s Monday!!!
So, most of my friends and family know that politics is my favorite blood sport. I’ve been at this since volunteering in high school for a friend’s father’s re-election to Congress. I also was forced to drop Nixon flyers along with knocking on doors for the Congressman which is something I may never forgive myself for doing. I did drop them a variety of places though, I might add. It was a different time back then as my “very flamboyant” friend Mark who was door knocking with me will tell ya. We didn’t quite have the right words for that sort’ve thing back then other than “very flamboyant”. My grandmother was still thrilled she been given the right to vote in middle age too. Who among us would want to go back to that?
Every wide open primary is like the Super Bowl/March Madness/World Cup all rolled into one big Shindig for me! They just have to put up with my normal issue-centered self and watch me go Super Fan until the nominations get sewed up. Then, there’s my deep hibernation until fall. You know my birthday is usually on an election day too. Maybe that has something to do with it!
So we’re headed towards a ton of primaries! Early voting is on here in Louisiana and many other places!!! Our Sky Dancers in Massachusetts, Georgia and Texas will be voting shortly too! Speak up and let us know what it’s like on the ground in your state!!! We’re going to have our usual live blogs and we just love hearing from every one!!!!
Turnout has not been high among Democrats compared to 2008. Turnout is high among Republicans. This is America folks! We invented democracy here!! Get out there and vote!!!! (Warning this goes to the Washington Times.)
Republicans’ turnout streak continued, with GOP voters shattering their South Carolina primary record Saturday night.
With almost all precincts reporting, more than 737,000 votes had been counted. That was more than 20 percent higher than 2012, when about 603,000 voted.
It follows record GOP turnout in Iowa’s caucuses and New Hampshire’s primary earlier this month.
By contrast, Democrats’ turnout has tumbled from its 2008 records in all three contests, including Saturday’s caucuses in Nevada. About 80,000 voters took part in the caucuses, with was 33 percent less than 2008’s level.
Republicans hold their caucuses Tuesday in Nevada, while Democrats shift to South Carolina next weekend.
Clinton leads in 10 of the 12 early March Primaries. Her win in Nevada was significant. It also looks like Trump is on the way to becoming the Republican nominee according to Mark Halperin.
Only suckers bet on presidential politics or professional wrestling, especially in this most tumultuous campaign cycle in recent memory. But if you were playing the odds, you would have to say that the weekend’s electoral results have, for now, put Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in extraordinarily commanding positions to become their parties’ de facto nominees as early as mid-March.
The two New Yorkers arrived here by different routes. For Clinton, her solid victory over Bernie Sanders in Saturday’s caucuses in Nevada provided a circuit breaker on her rival’s weeks-long run of momentum, punctuated by his landslide win in the New Hampshire primary.
Such is the inexorable power of the expectations game in determining the meaning of election results that what would have, only a few weeks ago, been seen as a miraculous showing by Sanders in Nevada (losing to Clinton by just 5 points) is now a potentially candidacy-ending loss. The Vermont senator’s campaign compounded some bad luck with some bad judgment. First, after a long period without any credible polling in the Silver State, a CNN survey released three days before the caucuses showed the race effectively tied. Then, Sanders’ team made it clear to reporters that they were playinghard to win on Saturday and their body language suggested they thought they would prevail. Thus, Clinton’s victory was seen as a reassertion of her hold on non-white voters, seniors, and other elements of a majority coalition that can be replicated in almost every upcoming contest.
It is crude and irrational, but the impact of the CNN poll and Team Sanders’ misplaced display of confidence was to take the full measure of his momentum and transfer it to the former secretary of state in one fell swoop Saturday night. Now, Clinton has regained the Big Mo just in time for a three-week stretch after South Carolina and created a potential killing field for Sanders.
So, a Trump nomination is really interesting for RepublicanLand. I guess the Southern Strategy really is biting the oldtimer’s country club asses. Nate Silver characterizes it as going to war.
If you think the arguments between the Republican candidates have been bad, well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Pundits, reporters and political analysts are going to really have at it. Two competing theories about the Republican race are about to come to a head, and both of them can claim a victory of sorts after South Carolina.
The first theory is simple. It can be summarized in one word: Trump! The more detailed version would argue the following:
- Trump has easily won two of the first three states.
- Trump is ahead in the polls in pretty much every remaining state.
- Trump is ahead in delegates — in fact, he may win all 50 delegates from South Carolina.
- Trump has been extremely resilient despite pundits constantly predicting his demise.1 He’s been at 35 percent in national polls for months now. That’s as steady as it gets!
So, um, isn’t it obvious that Trump is going to be the Republican nominee?
Not so, say the Trump skeptics. Their case is pretty simple also:
- Trump is winning states, but he’s only getting about one-third of the vote.
- Trump has a relatively low ceiling on his support.
- Trump now has a chief rival: Florida senator Marco Rubio.
What did the Trump skeptics find to like about South Carolina? Quite a lot, actually. They’d point out that Trump faded down the stretch run, getting 32 percent of the vote after initially polling at about 36 percent after New Hampshire, because of his continuing struggles with late-deciding voters. They’d note that Trump’s numbers worsened from New Hampshire to South Carolina despite several candidates having dropped out. They’d say that Rubio, who went from 11 percent in South Carolina polls before Iowa2 to 22 percent of the vote on Saturday night, had a pretty good night. They’d also say that Rubio will be helped by Jeb Bush dropping out, even if it hadalready become clear that Rubio was the preferred choice of Republican Party “elites.”
“So what?” sayeth the Trump optimists. Second place means you’re a loser! There’s no guarantee that the other candidates will drop out any time soon. And as Trump himself has argued, it’s a mistake to assume that all of the support from Bush and other candidates will wind up in Rubio’s column. Some of it will go to Trump!
There’s still plenty of trouble coming from Bernie’s Thralls. Amanda Marcotte discusses the recent attacks on the integrity of Dolores Huerta who is a modern day working class shero for many of the left’s most precious causes. It seems that many of them have a complete misunderstanding of intersectionality and of outreach to minority voters.
Things are tense right now because the Nevada loss is starting to look like a devastating blow to the Sanders campaign. From the beginning, the biggest obstacle to the Sanders campaign was convincing voters that this was about serious change instead of a bunch of privileged people posturing about how radical they are.
It seemed, until Saturday, that the campaign had a real shot at this. Sanders is an articulate candidate who sells his ideas well, and the improved poll numbers and real inroads with voters outside of the privileged white guy tent were heartening.
Unfortunately, Nevada showed that the inroads just weren’t enough. “He lost among women, blacks, nonwhites, and self-described Democrats,” Charles Blow of The New York Times writes. Early reports that Sanders had outperformed Clinton with Latino voters proved unlikely, as caucus results show that Clinton won the more Latino-heavy precincts. The Sanders message of economic populism is not resonating with people of color, women, or union workers— the very people you need to convince people your campaign is a serious one and not the electoral equivalent of the white guy in dreads wearing the Che shirt playing guitar in the quad.
Under the circumstances, it’s understandable why Sanders supporters would be a bit touchy about Dolores Huerta accusing them of disrespect. Huerta sits right at the intersection of three demographics — labor, women, people of colo r— that the Sanders campaign needed, and failed, to win over in order to convincingly argue that this is a real political revolution instead of a social signaling opportunity for people who want to be seen as radical.
So it’s easy to see why Sanders supporters want to yell at Huerta. She’s an easy punching bag for those frustrated with voters they believe should vote for Sanders but stubbornly refuse to do what Sanders supporters want them to do. (It’s similar to way that older female Clinton supporters have gotten bossy with younger women who vote Sanders.) Painting Huerta as delusional, corrupt or a liar makes the loss of these voting blocs easier to swallow, because the alternative possibility, that Clinton voters know what they are doing, is too painful to contemplate.
I still continue to shake my head at the horrible treatment of Congressman Lewis by the Bernie Bros. This just sort’ve doubles down on those reactions. South Carolina does not look like it will be kind to Bernie even though he’s saying many things Black Voters want to hear. This could be because he frames much of his issues and candidacy as a criticism of President Obama.
There are lots of explanations, but the most important one is the most obvious. Sanders committed the cardinal sin for any Democratic presidential hopeful in 2016: He framed his candidacy as a critique of Barack Obama’s legacy. As much as conservatives revile the nation’s first African American president, the base of the Democratic Party reveres him — especially black voters, who can make or break a Democratic primary candidate’s campaign in many states.
What exactly did Sanders do? He suggested in 2011 that Obama needed a primary challenge from the left. He entered the 2016 race suggesting that the progressive agenda hasn’t been adequately advanced under Obama, and that he would do more to fight inequality and to take on the financial elites of Wall Street.
Clinton also has firm union support which was central to the Nevada win.
In an effort to dispute what they say is a false narrative that union voters are closely split between Hillary Clinton and Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a group of more than 20 unions representing more than 10 million workers released a statement on Monday reaffirming support for Mrs. Clinton.
“Secretary Clinton has proven herself as the fighter and champion working people and their families need in the White House,” says the statement, which was embraced by several large unions, including the American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees, the American Federation of Teachers, and the Service Employees International Union. “That is why, of all unions endorsing a candidate in the Democratic primary, the vast majority of the membership in these unions has endorsed her.”
The statement is partly a reaction to the aftermath of the announcement by the A.F.L.-C.I.O., a federation of unions, that it would not vote during its executive council meeting this week on whether to endorse a candidate in the Democratic presidential primaries, essentially postponing an endorsement until the primaries are no longer competitive.
“I have concluded that there is broad consensus for the A.F.L.-C.I.O. to remain neutral in the presidential primaries for the time being,” Richard L. Trumka, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. president, said in an email to union officials last week.
The dissection of the now-dead Bush campaign is starting. Here’s the take from writers at WAPO.
At what would become a crucial moment, Bush’s team had no clear strategy for a rival who was beginning to hijack the Republican Party that the Bush family had helped to build, other than to stay the course set months earlier of telling Bush’s story to voters.
“There was no consensus,” senior strategist David Kochel said of the discussions about how to combat the threat of Trump’s candidacy. Other campaigns were wrestling with the same problems, but as the front-runner in the polls at the time, Bush would suffer more than the others.
The Republicans have become a party of insurgents and insurrectionists. Many of them also hold extremist religious views. It’s no wonder that the penultimate party insider was an easy target and never got off the ground despite scads of cash. Only Kasich and goofus Rubio continue to be the Great White Hope of the Country Club Set. My guess is that Rubio may get the Trump VP nod eventually. We’ll see how the Terrible Trio feeds on each other going into Nevada and March.
The photos today come via the dazzling Lynda Woolard who has started a twitter handle called @TweetsToHillary and featuring the New Orleans Krewe of Hillary. We’re GOTV for Hillary! How about you?
So, this has been a fairly political post today! What’s on your reading and blogging list?
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Carissa
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