Tag Archives: 2016 Election

06.17.16
by

Trump Campaign Isn’t A Grift, It’s A Con

sting_lg

If we want to make America great again, we have to go back to a time when our conmen were handsome and charming!

There’s been a lot of talk since Trumps started his run if this was just a ploy to boost his business. This was most ably stated by President Obama in the White House Correspondents Dinner in May, scolding the press for overhyping him. “The guy wanted to give his hotel business a boost and now we are praying that Cleveland makes it through July.”  The thrust of this is that he just wanted publicity, started winning, and it overtook him.

The correlation to this theory is that he doesn’t actually want to be President, which is why he is sabotaging himself with bizarre rants and a refusal to actually do anything it takes to be President. He’s worried about his business interests and wants to get out. This is exemplified in the Politico report where he had 20 top donors to call, called three, got bored, and stopped. He’s unserious, the thinking goes, because he doesn’t want to be President. He’s sabotaging himself.

The idea that it is a grift was furthered this week by unsubstantiated reports that he was looking to set up a TV station. He had riled up the rubes, using his undeniable skills as a demagogue, and then is going to drop out and get more money doing things his way. The whole thing was a grift that got taken too seriously, and now we’re faced with an openly white nationalist campaign.

Overlooking how scary that aspect is- and even overlooking, for the moment, what it says about our country and the Republican Party that such an obvious grift (if that is what it was) could have won, I think he need to come up with a more unified theory of Trump. His campaign isn’t a grift. It’s a con, and always has been.

There’s a slight difference there. A grift is to engage in petty theft, to take money pretty much outright, with no other goal. Sarah Palin’s whole career in the national spotlight has been a grift. If Trump were just doing this for his business, or to get a TV show, it would have been the merest (and biggest) grift.

I don’t think that’s what it was. I think he thinks he can be President, and thinks it is the best outlet for his petty grievances, his desire to punish enemies, to control people, and to propitiate his massive ego. It’s also a way to pursue the racism and anti-foreigner bias he’s harbored his whole life. He’s not interested in acting as the President, just being him. And, it is good for business as well.

So that’s the con they’ve been running: pretending to want to be a good President just so he can be President, if that makes sense. The goal was the further the Trump brand and let the boss have all the power in the world. So they ran it like a con: promising to be so Presidential later on, promising to raise money, saying they had the money, claiming they gave money to troops, and treating his campaign like any of his other businesses: an opportunity to tell people lies that they’ll believe, not deliver, and then tell them more lies. They’ll be so deep in the hole in their (financial, emotional, partisan) investment that they can’t back out. The long con, getting power, is based on a series of small cons that ensnare the gullible. Trump’s excellent at it.

He’s also excellent at getting out and letting other suckers hold the bag, which is why I think the self-sabotage theories have some validity. I think most of the damage is the fact that his is a lily-fingered narcissist who can pull things over on a lot of people, but not everyone at once, and whose ugliness and ill-tempered paranoia is exposed in the summer sun. But I do think he kind of wants to get out. His whole scheme his whole life has been to build a house of cards and then get out before the collapse, leveraging himself deeply, using one project to finance another one, stiffing creditors, and making money.

So now that he has historically terrible numbers, he can see the writing on the wall, and I think he might be looking for a reason to be treated “very unfairly” so he can leave, and pretend he’s a winner, and make more money off of the rubes. The TV thing is plausible, because the mark of a good con is to have a lot of outs.

But I don’t think this will happen. This is the biggest con of his life, and it has been amazing, in a terrible and godless sort of way. The heat of a Presidential campaign can give the feeling of power and destiny to even a dedicated public servant like Bernie Sanders. Imagine what it has done to Trump. I bet he thinks he can still pull off this huge con, because for god’s sake, he’s Trump. It’s what he does.

The one nice thing about this is that, possibly, it will all come down, be exposed, and he’ll be humiliated and revealed to all but the diehards for what he is. A cheap swindler whose only core beliefs are enriching himself and hating non-whites. It’s usually when you reach too high that the con gets brought down. Just ask Doyle Lonnegan.

06.17.16
by

Bernie Staying In; Hillary’s Savvy, Billionaire Fight, and More Political Quick Hits

giphy1

 

  • There is a trace amount of frustration, and even panic, in Bernie Sanders not taking the time yesterday to drop out and endorse Hillary. But that’s fine. He did the right thing. In not dropping out, he can continue to grow his left coalition, and keep pressure on for the Fight for $15, other labor issues, and everything else related to inequality. He pledged to make sure Trump doesn’t win, which precludes a lengthy run. And by telling his supporters that he knows “we must continue our grassroots efforts to create the America that we know we can become.” This is smart- building on the local and state levels, continuing with that energy, working to make a more progressive platform, and eventually reconciling differences with Clinton that turn into an endorsement. You can see the “We had serious differences, but over the last few months we have made our voice heard, and I can state that I unequivocally vote for Hillary Clinton, etc”.  This makes it seem- correctly!- like Bernie and his supporters will have a big influence. There will be a very small “sellout!” crowd, but those will mostly be people who were attracted to politics as a form of self-expression, a way to show that they were the real rebels, and whom identity as leftier-than-thou was more important than then actual election.
  • Speaking of that, unless something comes out that Bernie backstabbed Hillary, kudos to her for recognizing the passion of the Sanders campaign, and making sure that they can be eased off the hook. If Bernie’s speech was the result of an agreement at their meeting, she played this very well. It’s hard for a politician who has won to not spike the football a bit, but not only is she being gracious, she’s letting Bernie go out on roughly his own terms. This is really smart politics, and speaks very highly of her character.
  • Billionaire fight! Billionaire fight! Writing in The Financial Times, (behind paywall, Re/Code recap here) big-time VC Michael Moritz tears Trump apart for his phony business schemes, his fake narrative, and how he “seems little more than a hustler who takes from the rich (lenders he has short-changed, partners he has sued) and also takes from the poor (hapless students of Trump University, tenants whom he has allegedly bullied).” He praises the same immigrants who Trump has denigrated for being the real winners, people who came with nothing and made something of themselves, like Andy Grove or Jerry Yang. He also picks a side in the Trump/Bezos spat, in which Trump has revoked the WaPo’s access and threatened to use the power of the IRS and other government agencies to go after Bezos. It’s a tribute to Trump’s utter loathsomeness that you instinctively side with Bezos, instead of the normal reaction, which is “fuck Jeff Bezos”.
  • Speaking of jerks, hey guys, John McCain is running for office this year! It means that any reasonableness he might have is completely launched out the window and he once again reveals himself to be the grasping, desperate, unprincipled and self-righteous huckster he is. He can’t side tooooo close to Trump on most issues, because Hispanics do exist in Arizona, but he certainly doesn’t want to get tooooo far away either, because white racists make up his base, so what to do? Oh yeah- ISIS is Obama’s fault for not keeping and indefinite amount of American troops in Iraq indefinitely. This makes him directly responsible for Orlando, which was a devious ISIS plot. That’s the way to show steady leadership, John!  You can deconstruct a lot of right-wing lunacy, and the weird moonscape of their mentality, just from this. Maybe it deserves its own post.
06.15.16
by

Well, We Have to Bomb Somebody!

 

Coming soon…

 

I think just being around Donald Trump makes everyone dumber. Not that I thought Chris Christie was ever an astute foreign policy thinker, but yeesh…

“It’s unacceptable to allow this kind of stuff in our country and for us not to fight back, and we need to fight back, and that’s all these people understand,” Christie told the radio show. When the hosts smartly pressed the New Jersey governor on exactly where that fight should take place, he responded: ““You gotta get over there and start making them pay where they live. It’s an ugly and difficult thing but if we don’t get over there, they’re coming here, and they showed it again this weekend.”

Count the cliches!

  1. “that’s all these people understand.” This is always a good one, because it makes you sound really tough and realistic. Look, I don’t like violence, but it’s the only language we have in common. No translation needed. You should generally crack your neck after you say this.
  2. “start over there”. This is fantastic. It deals with the “if we stop them there, they won’t come here” reasoning which was one of the big reasons for why we are  supposed to fight ISIS in Iraq, even though the invasion created the conditions for regional collapse. But it’s even better because Christie has no idea what “over there” he’s referring to. As Will Bunch said, he “wants the U.S. military to drop bombs on Port St. Lucie, Florida,” since that’s where Mateen lived.
  3. “making them pay where they live”. He got this directly from a movie. I’m not sure which one. Maybe a cheap knockoff of The Sopranos, one in which the hero is a tough-talking, and tougher-acting, governor, played by Steve Schirripa. I’m not saying Christie wrote this movie (working title: The Boss of Jungleland), but I’m certainly not saying he didn’t.
  4. “ugly and difficult thing”. Translation: this’ll be great, but I have to use the somber face.
  5. “if we don’t get over there, they’re coming here, and they showed it again this weekend.” Mostly a repeat of number 3, because Christie literally has less than three sentences worth of foreign policy knowledge, but with a neat little bow that highlights the cruel absurdity of everything he is saying. They showed again that they’re coming here, like 30 years ago, and creating sexually-confused psychopaths who wrap their hatred up with the thinnest veneer of religion.

The thing is, this incoherent nonsense is essentially no different than what you hear from Lindsay Graham, who, anti-Trump charm tour notwithstanding, still believes we have to invade literally everywhere or we’re all gonna die. There isn’t a major GOP foreign policy “thinker” who doesn’t advocate this in some form or the other. We have to go there so they can’t come here. Action simply for the sake of action. The Max Power way. Christie isn’t saying just because he’s a dumb guy on foreign policy. He’s saying this because it is perfectly in line with his party’s mainstream ideas.

I don’t know guys. Newt “Bring back HUAC!” Gingrich has some strong credentials, but if Christie keeps sounding like such a dumbass he might get that Veep nod.

06.15.16
by

Trump and “Crooked”, Thieving Soldiers: I Mean, He’s Sort of Right

three-kings

“Oh, good, the news is on!” -Donald Trump

So Donald Trump in a rally yesterday took the politically…unusual step of accusing American service men and women of theft in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Iraq, crooked as hell,” Trump told a crowd in Greensboro, North Carolina. “How about bringing baskets of money – millions and millions of dollars – and handing it out? I wanna know, who are the soldiers that had that job? Because I think they’re living very well right now, whoever they may be.”

This isn’t the first time he’s gone down this road, either.

“They were going through Afghanistan paying off, I want to know who were the soldiers that are carrying cash of 50 million dollars? Cash! How stupid are we?” he said at a September rally. “I wouldn’t be surprised those soldiers, I wouldn’t be surprised if the cash didn’t get there, I have to be honest.”

His spokewoman, the impeccably-named Hope Hicks (turn out to vote), said that he was referring to Iraqi soldiers stealing the money, a rare case of cover-your-ass by the campaign, because this seems to be the one area in which he fears to tread. Accusing our boys and girls of being thieves? That’s suicide. But he clearly didn’t mean Iraqis. One, they weren’t given the bags full of money, and two, well:

“More than 100 enlisted military personnel have been convicted of stealing funds, bribery, and contract rigging while deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, crimes the nonpartisan Center for Public Integrity valued at $52 million in a 2015 report.”

So, yeah- Trump was right. Maybe exaggerating, certainly a wild conspiratorialist, imagining these veterans living large and laughing at us simps, but still, this did happen. And more so, it points to the insanity of these wars, the incredible waste of money (and of course lives, and honor, and any possibility of even weak regional stability, but let’s stick with money). We spent close to two trillion dollars in Iraq, a lot of it to crooked contractors who inflated prices building a simulacrum of safe areas in the Green Zone. We rented out war priorities to mercenaries. We relentlessly bribed leaders who could turn on us the next day without more bribes.

And that’s why this is the third rail. We can talk about the war in Iraq being a “mistake”, and most of the country is in agreement, but getting into why it was a mistake is dangerous ground. We never talk about the outsourcing of fighting, and we never talk about how the war was driven by money, but paid for in blood. (Here I don’t mean that Bush went to war to make money for his friends, but it was an inevitable outcome of bad intentions).  It was cheap and tacky and cruel, and there is no doubt that its cheap and tacky and cruel nature influenced people who were there, these little pieces flung around with bags of money. Why can’t they have a taste? Everyone else is.

To look at why there was so much corruption is to understand that everywhere our economic system touches becomes just as corrupt. So we gasp when someone insinuates such a thing about the military, whom we’ve mostly all agreed to never criticize. That’s partly understandable, of course, but also dangerous. Not just because it excuses when they do something wrong, but to admit that the military, our boys and girls in uniform, can be corrupted is to look at the whole system in a bare and unflattering hanging-bulb light.

So it is weird that Donald Trump, who never met a lie he didn’t like, and vigorously defend even when every fact in opposition is thrust in his face, accidentally stumbles on to a truth. It’s even more telling that this is the one in which he immediately backtracks.

 

06.14.16
by

Just a Normal Day on The Campaign Trail

Donald Trump

Let’s look at what happened in the 24 hours following the Orlando shooting.

  • Donald Trump gave a speech proposing a ban for immigrants from any Muslim country, and any country that has ever committed terrorism against the US and its allies (Ireland?), because, if you follow the logic of it, their children, or their children’s children might do something bad.
  • He suggested, to multiple outlets, that President Obama might in fact be in league with ISIS, or at least sympathetic to it. “He doesn’t get it or he gets it better than anybody understands — it’s one or the other, and either one is unacceptable.” Now, in his lying way, he said that he believes Obama just doesn’t get it, but you know, people might think otherwise, and it’s really unbelievable, and it’s also hard to believe. To recap: a Presidential candidate is repeating, and heightening, the idea that the sitting President is actively helping, or at least hoping for, and ISIS victory.
  • When a major publication called him out on it, he revoked their credentials. Nixon didn’t revoke the credentials of the Post during Watergate. Nixon! And they aren’t the first. “Among the news organizations whose reporters have been blacklisted: Gawker, BuzzFeed, Foreign Policy, Politico, Fusion, Univision, Mother Jones, the New Hampshire Union Leader, the Des Moines Register, the Daily Beast and Huffington Post.” That these bans are haphazardly enforced doesn’t make them any less scary.

To recap: this is not normal. The blood-and-soil race-hatred, the wild paranoia, the fiercely shouted conspiracy theories, the dismissing of noncompliant press. There is no way to normalize this. This is not a campaign strategy. It’s exactly how he’d govern, as the tinpot strongman of our nightmares.

I actually think the Post thing will backfire, as the mainstream media, who have been desperate to  treat this as a normal race, albeit one with an unusual candidate, will finally see it happening to one of their own. It was easy when it was local papers like the Union-Leader or the Register. And what’s this BuzzFed? And didn’t Gawker do the Hogan? Mother Jones? Fuck you.

But it’s different with the Post. As much as it has fallen, it is still the Post, the paper that brought down Nixon. I hope that this is when they realize that telling both sides and covering the debate is enabling an authoritarian the likes of which this country has never seen. I worry, and will worry until proven wrong, that the press will self-censor so they can stay in bed with the campaign. Access! That’s what most tyrants want. Self-censorship out of fear and preservation is so much more effective than having to line people up against the wall. Voices that are compliant in their own silence are usually too ashamed to ever speak up. That’s what Trump wants.

But maybe this will be different. Maybe this is so outrageous that they’ll push back. Maybe they’ll be fully awakened to the danger of this American monster.

06.13.16
by

Racism and Obama’s Legacy: African-American Turnout in 2016

 

Grant Park, 2008

 

There are few things more annoying than when a white commentator starts to talk about “the black vote”, not in terms of numbers (which can be captured objectively), but in terms of psychology, because it not only assumes a familiarity with every black voter, but assumes that they think en masse. It certainly isn’t intentional racism, but it is a thrown blanket in ways we don’t do with other groups. The “white working class” is probably the broadest market segment for non-minorities, which shows the subtle racial distinction at play. We have “soccer moms” and “NASCAR dad” and so on, and then “the black vote”, and the “Hispanic vote”.  It’s pernicious, and assumes a group mentality in the place of actual examination.

That said, there’s no way Trump is going to get the black vote.

Lauren Fox at Talking Points Memo has an article this morning exploring how analysts don’t really expect a dropoff in the African-American vote, after the highs of Obama. That’s hugely important, because it can negate Trump’s perceived advantage in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and a few other rusty states where he hopes to get high turnout among the (white) economic dispossessed.

There are a couple of reasons for this. TPM talks about how this election is also about Obama’s legacy, which is accurate in a few ways. An election is always partly about the incumbent, whether he is running for another term or finishing up. 2008 was partly a repudiation of Bush; 2000 was about Clinton’s moral failings (the majority of the country still picked Gore, but he lost 5-4), 1988 was about Reagan, etc. In this case, where Republicans have made no bones of their desire to tear down any social progress made by the President, the legacy is even starker. They want to erase everything Obama has done.

It goes slightly deeper than that: they want to erase not just his policies, but his very existence. They want to destroy the thought that there was a successful black President, to make him a footnote. That’s been their driving goal, and there is no one more suited to that than Trump.

You couldn’t have picked a better candidate to remind everyone who cares about racial justice the huge stakes of this election. Trump of course rose to political fame for being the country’s top birther. He has demanded not just to see proof that Obama was born in America, which is flagrantly racist (he’s got dark skin! He’s not one of us!) but also, even more disgustingly, waged a campaign to demand Obama’s college transcripts. In a way, that is far more racist. Obama, of course, isn’t the brilliant and hyper-intelligent person most people see him as, see? He got into college through affirmative action, taking a spot away from “someone” who deserves it. He’s just another dumb…well, you know, right folks?

That’s the kind of campaign that Trump runs, that made him famous. He’s the one who says everything that can be said, everything that people who hate Obama not-so-secretly believe. He’s negating not just Obama’s political accomplishments, but his every achievement. He’s saying, plainly, that Obama doesn’t deserve to be here, that he’s President because of affirmative action, essentially. He runs a campaign of negation, making plain what other Republicans have been trying to do for eight years.

So there is that. But there is also something that Elijah Cummings, who might know more about this than I do, told TPM. “I think Trump helps drive black voter turn out. I really do,” says Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) “He has created more unforced errors than any politician I’ve ever seen…People question his judgement.”

Oh yeah, one thinks. That’s right: the “black vote” isn’t just about black issues, obviously. That’s what we were talking about up above. The “black vote” is made up of millions of humans, many of whom can see that a Trump presidency is terrifying. It isn’t just about Obama’s legacy or any of those issues. It’s about being an engaged voter. Maybe, at the end of the day, Trump’s legacy will be that we recognize that every voting bloc contains multitudes, and they can’t be reduced. That they contain humans. Humans who are horrified that such an unqualified ill-temepered racist chump could be President.

06.10.16
by

Elizabeth Warren: The Natural

 

Pictured: A savage talent

 

I think Elizabeth Warren cemented herself as one of the canniest politicians working right now when, last week, she came out swinging against superdelegates, calling them unfair, and voting to “‘thoroughly, objectively and transparently’ study the superdelegate system before the 2020 presidential election.” This puts her on the side of angels, of course, (sort of) but it also was a smart and polite way but unmistakeable way to tell Bernie Sanders, whose whole campaign was counting on flipping supers against the will of the voters, to back off. It was brilliant.

Refusing to endorse either Bernie Sanders or Hillary Clinton during the primary season might have been the smartest and savviest move of any politician this season (admittedly, the fumbling flat-footed jackassery of every single Republican trying to figure out what to do about the monster they helped birth makes this a small field). I know that, anecdotally, there was some grumbling from the left about Warren’s refusal to get behind Bernie, the Only True Progressive, and from their perspective, that’s fair. Warren was acting like a typical politician, keeping her powder dry.

But that’s because Warren is, in many ways, a typical politician, in the sense that she is an absolute professional, who understands exactly how politics works. She knows how to get things done, and seems to have an unerring instinct for when to attack and when to lay back. Her endorsement of Clinton got nearly as big of headlines as Obama’s, even though both were inevitable, and now not only does she get to be the bridge between the activist left and Hillary’s relative center, but she gets to be seen as such.

This isn’t just smart positioning, personally. It helps the party achieve its goals of destroying Donald Trump so badly that it creates a whirlpool-level drag on the downticket, flipping the Senate and, in the best (nearly impossible, but what is June but for dreaming) case, taking back the House. The media will probably stop paying attention to Sanders altogether somewhere around the convention, unless he decides to burn down the house, which he won’t. That leaves Warren, whom the media already loves, as the fearless voice of progressive activism, but this one steeped in an understanding, borne from experience, of how things really work. Bernie, of course, knows how politics works, but he ran an explicitly anti-political campaign. It’s really hard to start talking about how to play politics after doing so. Warren can now adopt that coalition, working closely with Sanders, and try to lead it into actual change.

The media’s fascination with her also allows her to be the main point, after Obama (who clearly can’t wait), and Clinton, of course, to attack Trump. And she’s going to be great. She already is. She’s a smart, brilliant, witty-as-hell woman who has zero respect for Trump. She isn’t one of those “he’s a bully but what a man!” types. She sees him as a fraud and a showman, a lucky dope who is emblematic of everything gross and iniquitous about this country, and isn’t afraid to say it. That’s the kind of person (emphasis on woman) who makes him the angriest, and least able to respond, reducing him even more to a pile of spluttering non-sequiturs.

I hope she doesn’t take the VP position, as much as I’d like to see her with a higher profile. She can do battle in the Senate, which she’s quickly mastering. A true activist, with the ear of President Clinton, who knows how to play politics as well as she does the media, and who is fearless in standing up to the real enemy, can help make the Senate reclaim its role as half a co-equal branch. We don’t need all the talent in the White House. A Clinton Presidency and a Warren leadership role is the best chance for real progress.

06.09.16
by

Trump Grows Up! Again! Why You Shouldn’t Be Worried (And Also Be Very Worried)

In Talking Points Memo EdBlog this morning, John Judis outlines why Trump’s victory speech the other night could be cause for worry for Democrats. In it, Judis talked about  how Trump was reaching toward a less-racially tinged populism which could peel off enough white voters to have some kind of winning collation, or at least message. Judis certainly admits that it is probably too late for Trump to change his basic image, because his “incendiary racist, nativist, psycho-sexual and self-promotional provocations” are not the heart of his campaign, but the heart of who he is.

Still, though, the “Trump gives grown up speech” got some play the other day, for the umpteenth time. He used a teleprompter! He didn’t  spittle out “Mexican” as a pejorative! Is he finally pivoting?

Luckily, thankfully, this kind of nonsense didn’t get much traction. Everyone seems to understand that this was, despite Trump’s protestations to the contrary, the real act. His bombastic racist jackass routine is the real Trump, and his saying that he “can be so Presidential your head will spin” is just part of the act. But say he did start acting more like this on a daily basis (which he can’t, but pretend). Should we worry?

I say no, and here’s why.

trump-psu-2-1024x565

Image from ThinkProgress

Trump has built up his active base (though not all his voters) out of the dumbest, meanest, pastiest juvenile psychopaths filling alt-right message boards and hideous 4chan threads in the country. ThinkProgess has been doing a great job highlighting the racial hatred and misogynistic vitriol he’s unleashing and giving voice to, especially on college campuses. He’s empowering these awful people, these sniggering “anti-PC” cowards, who feel that the voice of white men is being buried under trigger warnings and safe spaces, and now feel like it is an act of courage, and revolutionary radicalism to say things that would have been acceptable in corporate boardrooms 40 years ago.

So even if Trump somehow moderates his rhetoric, his disgusting movement, the human and political equivalent of the Boston molasses disaster, a tidal wave of bitter and choking sludge, will fill in the gaps. These people will get louder as the summer moves on. Especially is he tones it down. There is a tribal connection, and they’ll think the boss is winking at them, playing the game so that he can get in power. They’ll pick up his slack. That’s why you shouldn’t worry about Trump being able to change his image too much. These are the people who will help sustain that.

Of course, while I still don’t think he can win, it is also why you should be worried on the very off-chance he does. And even if he loses, even if it is a historical nut-stomping that will make him history’s greatest loser, these forces he’s unleashed will be with us a long time.

06.08.16
by

The Times Finds The Worst

giphy

This is the movie where this blog’s name sort of came from! Isn’t that neat? Image from giphy.com

There might not be a lower form of political allegiance than basing your positions against a candidate’s worst supporters. Every candidate has some dumbass people voting for them; it is statistically inevitable. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t disquieting when fellow supporters say really dumb things to the NYTimes. I’m going to caveat that they are young(ish), and the heat of a primary battle makes monsters of us, all, but come on…

(Names withheld- they are in the Times, but it is not my job to call them out further)

(blank) a 26-year-old filmmaker from Glendale, Calif., was not interested in milestones. He said he thought Mrs. Clinton was a crook. “She could be indicted literally tomorrow if the system is not corrupt,” he said…

(blank) an actress living in Los Angeles, assailed Mrs. Clinton for having proclaimed victory before the Democratic Party had formally bestowed it on her at the convention.

“I think it’s absolutely unjust, undemocratic, un-American,” she said. “What kind of example is that setting?”

The first one could easily come from a Trump rally, and I am pretty sure if pushed, the speaker would give no more a coherent answer to the question of “for what” than did Trump (“for the servers!”). The second makes one think she started paying attention to politics approximately yesterday.

And all that’s fine. It is what happens when an exciting candidate comes to the forefront. New people get involved, and that’s great. And again, passions run high. But some of this has to come from the top. Sanders didn’t come close to congratulating Clinton yesterday. He doesn’t have to concede, though he should accede to reality. This isn’t a matter of playing the room. The crowd wouldn’t have booed him if he started to say nice things about Clinton.

I still think he will. I think he’ll take a few days, talk to Obama, and then begin to come around. As many have pointed out, this is the 8-year anniversary of when Hillary conceded eight long years ago, and she became a dynamite surrogate. I don’t expect the same level of commitment from Sanders, who has no real party loyalty, but I think he’s canny enough to know that it is time to roll it up.Maybe one last big, tearful, joyful speech in DC next week. Maybe the Times will find people who are more elegiac next time.

06.08.16
by

What If They Threw A Contested Convention And No One Came?

2016-03-12-1457776885-8487260-berniesanders

A legitimate thank you for moving the Democratic Party to the left.

One of the stranger political locutions of the last few weeks- outside of every top Republican being shocked that a white nationalist candidate would appeal to naked racism- has been Bernie Sanders saying that he believes “the Democratic Convention will be a contested convention.”  There was a strange passivity there, implying a lack of control. It wasn’t that he was choosing it to be contested in the face of math, reason, and democratic imperative- it just, sort of, was. Life, you know? What are ya gonna do?

That willingness to fight on despite having lost, and despite needing to do a 180 on superdelegates, was laid bare in a Politico article late last night, which demonstrated that it was Bernie Sanders in control of every decision the campaign made, including spending. This was a different narrative, pushed by erstwhile supporters and foes alike, that most of the annoying attacks and counterproductive strategies went through Jeff Weaver, whose pugnacity made him something of a centrist and center-left punching bag, Bernie’s own Mark Penn, except competent and resourceful and more likeable and able to do good for his candidate and understanding how campaigns work and not being unable to find his ass in a phone booth with two hands and a map. So not at all like Mark Penn, except in terms of being a target of loathing.

And, assuming that this article is true, and not just the ass-coverings of sunken ship survivors who realized that they might be playing with fire, and their careers, this doesn’t speak as ill of Bernie as I think people are making it out to. Yes, there is the usual bitterness that comes with a hard-fought campaign, where you focus every day on one person who is keeping you from getting what you want. That’s human nature, and that’s politics.

Some of the bitterness is disquieting for Dems, but also normal human nature, such as his anger at Sherrod Brown.

Aides say Sanders thinks that progressives who picked Clinton are cynical, power-chasing chickens — like Sen. Sherrod Brown, one of his most consistent allies in the Senate before endorsing Clinton and campaigning hard for her ahead of the Ohio primary. Sanders is so bitter about it that he’d be ready to nix Brown as an acceptable VP choice, if Clinton ever asked his advice on who’d be a good progressive champion.

In some ways, that doesn’t seem to bode well- it makes Bernie look like the self-appointed progressive messiah, who positions himself as the only acceptable candidate for the Left, and anyone who doesn’t believe so is an apostate. But really, that’s just politics. Everyone gets pissed when they don’t get an endorsement, especially one they are expecting. This should be fine. But…

But the good and the ill of the Sanders campaign was laid bare in what was, for Politico (as always, obsessed with process) a transition paragraph.

This isn’t about what’s good for the Democratic Party in his mind, but about what he thinks is good for advancing the agenda that he’s been pushing since before he got elected mayor of Burlington.

This campaign started out as an agenda one. It was a campaign that Bernie thought he could win, of course. No one runs for President without thinking that, with a few breaks, they might win (and don’t forget how successful a politician Bernie Sanders has been). He’s pushed a radically (for our post-Reagan times) progressive agenda, and has been able to move the party to the left.

That’s where the bad part comes in. In running a revolution, and not a campaign, Bernie and his most ardent supporters have convinced themselves that the Democratic Party is the obstacles to progressive change, and not, for all its ills the major vehicle for it. Politics work in this country because activists push creaking parties in one direction of the other, and sustain that movement. Sometimes you catch lightning in a bottle, like with President Obama, and sometimes you push party elders toward your positions, like with Hillary Clinton. But this is a good thing. It isn’t a loss.

It’s only a loss, weirdly, if they refuse to treat it like one, and continue to fight at and until the convention. (He’s staying in, for now, but that’s fine.Somehow I don’t think Washington DC is going to give him a boost.)This isn’t contested in any real sense, unless Bernie wants to make it such. But I think that’s what Obama will be telling him when they talk on Thursday, as is being reported. I imagine that it there will be a few major talking points.

  1. Don’t tell your supporters this was stolen. For one thing, that’s super insulting to the millions of people who voted for Hillary. They don’t represent the 1%. If your supporters think this was stolen, it’ll be harder to sustain the momentum you built. Have them keep driving the party. That’s how this works.
  2. Oh yeah- don’t tell them that it was stolen because she’s running against Donald Trump. As my friend BMK said, the conversation should involve the phrase “Donald Trump appearing in the first paragraph of your obituary”.
  3. You did a great and good and amazing thing. This is one of the most positive and remarkable campaigns in American history, and you will continue to play a huge role in advancing your agenda. But there is really only one viable high-level political path for that, and that’s the Democratic Party. We can work together on this. Make up with Sherrod Brown. Get over it. Get back to work.

The Politico article showed what a canny and involved politician Bernie Sanders is, to his great credit. And the race showed that a single-minded focus on the evils of inequality can have a remarkable impact. I don’t think Bernie is going to burn it to the ground. The question is whether or not he continues to push for positive progressive growth, or retreats into bitterness.