Brent Budowsky is experiencing some exuberance. Whether it’s irrational exuberance or not, we may never know.
Stop the presses! According to a new poll by Quinnipiac University on Tuesday, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) destroys Republican candidate Donald Trump in a general election by 13 percentage points. In this new poll, Sanders has 51 percent to Trump’s 38 percent. If this margin held in a general election, Democrats would almost certainly regain control of the United States Senate and very possibly the House of Representatives.
It is high time and long overdue for television networks such as CNN to end their obsession with Trump and report the all-important fact that in most polls, both Hillary Clinton and Sanders would defeat Trump by landslide margins. In the new Quinnipiac poll, Clinton would defeat Trump by 7 percentage points, which is itself impressive and would qualify as a landslide, while the Sanders lead of 13 points would bring a landslide of epic proportions.
Obviously, polls like this taken eleven months before a general election aren’t worth much. But there’s a point here regardless. There’s a pretty strong assumption in many quarters that a Brooklyn-raised seventy-four year old self-proclaimed socialist Jewish guy from granola-chomping Vermont doesn’t stand a snowball’s chance in hell of being elected president of the United States. Yet, this Quinnipiac poll shows he’d schlong the current Republican front-runner, and schlong him like a drum. Not only that, but he’d have more potential coattails than Hillary Clinton.
Maybe that’s true right now–maybe it would even still be true next November–but that’s not the main point that Budowsky wants to make. His point is that Trump is getting too much media attention and Bernie Sanders (especially) and Hillary Clinton are getting too little.
I know a lot of regular voters who are not media-types who would vote for Sanders over Clinton in a heartbeat if only they could be assured that he wouldn’t lose a very winnable election. And who knows what happens when the Republicans bring out all their Willie Hortons and Swift-Boat Veterans for Truth? Does Sanders have the kind of teflon that the Clintons are famous for possessing?
I don’t know the answers to those questions. I do sometimes wonder if the right in this country will just completely and finally lose their shit if we elect someone like Sanders as president. Putting up with a President Hillary Clinton seems like indignity enough for these folks who have been raised on Vince Foster watermelon conspiracies and Benghazi heat-fever dreams. But, at least the Establishment knows that the Clintons are what happens to you when you lose an election and not some earth-shattering proof that your country has been lost forever and turned over to the communists.
Then part of me just has a prurient interest in seeing just how mental the right will go if it turns out that Sanders can not only win but that he can destroy them in a wipeout landslide.
What I am pretty sure about is that Trump is at least as unorthodox and unacceptable to a huge swath of the electorate as Sanders would be. In a matchup between the two of them, we’d be assured of getting something we’ve never seen before and basically no one thought was possible.
I’d have plenty to write about, that’s for sure.
The effective difference between a Clinton administration and a Sanders administration would be so small that the size of the right-wing freak-out wouldn’t really change that much.
Sanders isn’t exactly Evo Morales….
Like facts matter.
Really? So you don’t think Bernie’s DOJ would try and prosecute Wall Street? Or that he might actually try for peace in the Middle East?
I’d like to think that Sanders would do those things, but I’m doubting that Sanders would be “permitted” to do those things. And I’m not talking about Congress at this moment.
There’s evidence (not all that concrete) that Obama, for example, wanted to bust up Citi Bank, but somehow his push to have that happen just somehow died on the vine (with not even a whimper, much less a bang).
Although I do feel that there are substantive (not huge, though) differences between a possible R-Admin/POTUS and a D-Admin/POTUS, I doubt Sanders ability to accomplish hardly anything that he SAYS he wants to.
Sanders may or may not (I don’t really know) be more “sincere” in his stated desire to stand up for the 99% and attempt to redress some of the current giant sucking imbalance between the mega-ugly wealthy and the rest of us serfs.
Do I think he can accomplish anything more than marginal, incremental improvements?? Nah.
Undoubtedly would be better to have Sanders than Trump or Rubio or Cruz. Also at least marginally better than HRC, but not by much. JMHO, of course.
If you don’t think there can be huge differences between R and D administrations, you haven’t watched the last two presidents. Yes, radical change that goes against the ownership class is very difficult and incremental. But radical fuck-ups, corporate bonanzas, military disasters, constitutional travesties, environmental catastrophes, etc. aren’t hard at all, and the next R President will have a massive appetite and cheering section for all of those and more.
We’ll have to agree to disagree then. I still think the differences aren’t all that huge, especially terms of the things you mention. JMHO, of course, and yes, I pay very close attention and have for years.
I do agree that rightwing voters are more inclined to applaud the things you mention, but only when such things happen under an R-Admin. The current conservative base continues to ignore the fustercluck in MENA that happened during the O Admin, which, in theory, they should love. I refuse to place blame on the past 7 years on the W Bush Admin.
Again, JMHO, of course.
Obama and Kerry have “tried” for peace in the Middle East. The Middle East will have none of it.
Blowing up everything in creation, round the clock drone assassinations, and shelling hospitals count as “trying for peace”? Well, is suppose Napoleon tried for peace in Europe, but those war monger Brits would have none of it.
The only try for peace that I’ve seen from Obama and Kerry that has had no momentum has been blocked by Netanyahu. That “tried” you so blithely toss out has some nasty US national security networks tangled up in it. The conflicting politics in the Middle East is mostly American-made over 75 years. The US has shifted two alliances Saudis and Turkey pretty dramatically in order to hold non-proliferation in Iran and to destroy Daesh in Syria. The United States cannot decide exactly what it wants to see in the Middle East.
Who will they prosecute? And what will the charges be?
How many high profile defeats could the DOJ withstand before the public turns against them?
Why try to do anything? it’s all doomed to failure. Just “relax and enjoy it”.
Is a coherent plan too much to ask for?
Just hire William Black and leave it to him .
Not the question. The question is ‘How much more would the right freak out if there were prosecutions?’
My guess is ‘not much’.
That’s on the assumption that a Sanders and HRC Administration would both fail to win the House. I’m positive that HRC won’t win the House. Obama’s only significant demographic bleeding between 2008 and 2012 was youth voters (though it was a huge amount of bleeding) and HRC is doing quite poorly with youth voters. And as long as HRC continues to run the Dukakis/BC/Gore/Kerry/Obama playbook that will be the case.
Even if HRC was objectively worse than Sanders from an ideological perspective, as long as the demographic battlelines are drawn the way they are I’d support Sanders. Because at the end of the day, Sanders’ formula may not get us the House. HRC’s formula certainly won’t.
Two ways of looking at that though. I don’t think Sanders would have coattails especially in the House because the candidates would be afraid to ask him for support, just the way they ran away from Obama, and they’d lose as they did in 2014. I do believe he would win himself, perhaps with a bigger majority than HRC, but I fear he’d be considerably less able to push through any progressive agenda than Obama has been. Whereas Clintnn for better or worse would have a more unified party. Don’t know what’s her “formula” to win the House, though. Does she have one?
Personally, I think that the whole ‘running away from Obama’ thing is overrated, insofar that the platform was otherwise fine but we were screwed by optics. We were fucked by demographics and a platform that’s been much the same since 2010 in that election. That is, an electorate that skews older and more rural.
It’d be more unified, but it’d also be smaller because she’d bleed youth and would not even try to reach outside of the Obama Coalition. Don’t get me wrong, unification is a good thing to have, but not at the expense of, you know, breadth. Did Nixon have a unified party in 1972? Did FDR in 1932? Or 1940 for that matter? No.
She doesn’t have one. Even her supporters have pretty much given up on the idea. Her plan is to use the two years of probably having the Senate in 2016-18 to hope to get all of the justices/Cabinet appointees in. Some HRC supporters tell me that there’s ‘no way’ the GOP could get away with leaving USSC seats open in 2018-2020, because they’d be eviscerated by the public/media. I openly laugh in their faces.
Maybe your positive Hillary won’t win the house, others are not so sure.
FYI, I am on speaking terms with about 10 women in Kansas who voted for Romney. All of them fully intend to vote for Hillary.
Anecdotal evidence isn’t worth much, but …
Why would she win the House? The demographic analysis is pretty sobering. If you believe Sam Wang, Democratic candidate needs to win by about 7-8% to get the House assuming voter geography doesn’t change much between 2012 and 2016. The racial minority vote grows by about 2% every four years. Obama won by about 4%. Unfortunately, while 2012 Obama did better with racial minorities as a whole than in 2008, he bled massive support by raw vote-% and turnout-% with Millenials of all races. Obama didn’t do worse with any other of the big demographics (race, region, class, gender, etc.) once you control for age.
HRC right now doesn’t seem to be capable of patching up Obama’s big weakness. It’s not reflected in primary or general election polling and she’s more ideologically disconnected from the more liberal youth than Obama. If you believe those polls of ‘what do you look for most in a candidate’ those augur even more poorly, as her ‘trustworthiness’ rating is bad and Millenials rate integrity as the highest value.
HRC may win the House, especially if the GOP derps out and nominates Cruz or Rubio (who I think is much weaker than everyone says). But it won’t be under her own power.
Why would she win the house? Coattails, my man, coattails. You are parroting the conventional wisdom of the DNC and Beltway pundits. AAANNNDDD … You might be right. But what if you’re wrong ???
What coattails? Where is this evidence of coattails reflected in anything?
Does she excite low-turnout demographics? Does she cut into traditional Republican demographics? If you say yes, what does 2016 HRC have that 2012 Obama doesn’t? Does she have more popular policies? Does she have higher favorables? Does she have a better organization? If it’s the last one, why would having a better organization give her an advantage and what’s the strength of it?
My hypothesis is that there’s no evidence that she does anything better than Obama 2012 did in terms of getting or motivating voters. There’s evidence that she’ll do worse, but that’s not even my point. If she simply does as well as Obama 2012 did and the Republicans don’t run anyone substantially better or worse than Romney, she’ll win with about 6% of the vote. There used to be talk about HRC being able to cut into the female white working class outside of the Democratic coalition, but I haven’t seen anyone make a serious, poll-supported argument for it in months.
One of those electoral terms, like brokered convention, that that get political junkies and pundits all excited to throw around as if they’ve ever seen such an event.
“Does she cut into traditional Republican demographics?”
Did you even bother to read my first iteration of this link????
What does 2016 HRC have that 2012 Obama doesn’t???? Try WHITENESS … <expletive deleted>.
Except in a handful of Applachian counties, 2012 Obama did better than 2004 Kerry with the non-Southern white vote. Even if you include the South, Obama did only 2% worse. Granted, this was mostly due to Millenials + passive demographic growth. But 2012 Obama didn’t do any worse with older non-Southern whites than Kerry. You can see this most dramatically in the Midwest; 2012 Obama comfortably won states that Bush fought Kerry to a near-win on despite lack of racial shifts simply due to passive growth of white Midwestern Millenials.
So, yeah. Unless you have a poll or three showing otherwise, HRC’s whiteness is not going to get her anywhere that it didn’t get Kerry.
Nate Cohn puts it better than I can here: https://newrepublic.com/article/110039/the-gop-has-problems-white-voters-too.
The problem with “coattails” is simply it does not take into account vote splitting.
Nixon’s ’72 win didn’t hand him the house.
A number of democrats must have simultaneously voted for tricky dick, and their democratic house member
People in Delaware certainly did because both Nixon and a guy named Joe Biden carried the state.
Compare these two maps;
https:/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/1972prescountymap2.PNG
1972 House Elections
https:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1972_House_Elections.png
Same idea happened in 1980;
1980Presidential Election results by county.
https:
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/1980prescountymap2.PNG
1980 House Elections
https:
/upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/18/1980_House_Elections.png
Especially true given the gerrymandering done in GOPer states to benefit their congresscritters.
Please explain how these supposed coattails will change this again.
1972 Presidential Election Election results by county.
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/ef/1972prescountymap2.PNG
Sorry this got deleted somehow,
hate the no edit ability
Because people say things like there is really no difference between Hillary and Bernie is the exact reason I’ve been (any remain) so frustrated with this progressive blog. It’s not this commenter that frustrates me but the lack of posts that examine in depth the differences between Hillary’s and Bernie’s campaign. We seem to want to know every minute detail of the Republican train wreck but nothing of the historic challenge being made from inside the Democratic Party, pretty much what the Tea Party did to the Republican Establishment but in a much different direction.
Because of visiting during the Holidays I have had a rare (for me anyway) opportunity to listen to MSNBC, specifically Chris Matthews and his gaggle of establishment pundits. First they talked about Trump’s tax plan giving the biggest tax breaks once again to the top that would add an enormous increase to the national debt then promptly dismissed that plan because congress controls taxes plus Trump is never going to become President anyway. Then they brought up Bernie’s proposal for a transaction tax on Wall Street to pay for making State Universities and Community Colleges tuition free. They then dismissed Bernie’s transition tax for the exact same reason they rejected Trump’s tax plan. Congress will never pass anything Bernie wants, so you best just forget about it. Then Howard Dean pointed out that congress had just passed a Trump style tax bill with quite a few Democratic votes.
On Rachel Maddow’s best political ad segment we see a Hillary campaign ad where she fights for a student who takes 4 years to graduate then 25 years to repay the loan. Not mentioned is only a few weeks ago we have Hillary saying she doesn’t want to pay college tuition for Trump’s kids then gave a means tested watered down set of half measures as her assistance plan to make college affordable.
Maybe Chris Matthew’s establishment panel is right that congress would never pass the transition tax then use the money to make college tuition free or for that matter even Hillary’s watered down proposal that would still leave college education unaffordable.
Bernie would agree that the Matthew establishment panel is correct, that is, correct without a political revolution. We haven’t heard those words before, political revolution. What kind of political revolution and how would it work? First Bernie would swell the ranks of voters with people who have given up on our political process (think landslide general election victory) then threaten the political lives of Democrats (in the majority by now) with their political lives if they don’t align with the people instead of their corporate masters. This is coming from a political master who has been working inside this conservative legislative mess for a lifetime where his only weapon had often been only to get amendments to Republican crap (thanks to the DNC) trying to make things marginally better. He was good at it, check the record.
I challenge the leaders of this progressive blog to examine in future posts the very long list of these kinds of things in detail in front of the many well informed people who comment on this blog. Then let’s see how many people would still say there would be no real difference between a Sanders and a Clinton administration.
Would be like saying that on domestic issues there was no difference between LBJ/McGovern and Nixon (not that he cared that much about domestic issue and couldn’t, if he’d wanted to, move the needle much anyway because Democrats controlled Congress and a lot of members were still New Dealers).
And on foreign affairs there was no difference between JFK(potentially)/McGovern and Nixon.
For me it’s as if I’ve fallen through a looking glass to 1972 and the GOP primary is a battle between McCarthy and Bull Connor and the DEM primary is a battle between Nixon and McGovern.
It is very easy to see Trump as Bull Connor and Ted Cruz as Joe McCarthy. Cruz not only sounds like McCarthy but looks like him as well.
With Hillary’s Republican foreign and economic policy she is almost the definition of a Nixon neo-liberal. I have a more difficult time seeing Bernie as JFK/McGovern because neither of those gentlemen was even close to being Social Democrats.
Take heart and come back through the looking glass because Nixon is now a Democrat and his (her) Silent Majority is split having lost its power because the racists have gone back to the other party and the rest of the Silent Majority middle class has been destroyed by the corporatists.
What we have this cycle are large populist anti-establishment movements on both the Republican and the Democratic sides. The difference is Trump/Cruz represents the dark side of populism while Bernie represents the bright progressive side. Hillary is the Jeb Bush being opposite of a populist. A populist is going to win this general election and the winner depends on whether the Democrats have enough sense to nominate their much stronger progressive populist candidate or nominate Hillary to lose an otherwise winnable election.
Sanders isn’t a socialist. And the New Deal from FDR through LBJ and proposed by McGovern was most definitely the application of social-democracy. National health care as a right was goes back at least as far as FDR and Truman. Free public college tuition — almost existed back then. Financial institution regulation did exist, and is why there was no system wide meltdowns from 1934 to the S&L debacle.
Right and left populism is a factor this time. Seeing same in Europe. Too many know exactly what to expect–more austerity and pain to them. Spain just said “a pox on both” to the traditional parties. That recent Q-poll reflects this, too, imo.
JFK was a Clinton-style neoliberal before it was cool. If he ran today we’d be slamming him as an incrementalist DINO who was flushing our country’s credibility down the tubes with unnecessary gunboat diplomacy. But McGovern was the real deal. I mean, he had a lot of flaws but when you advocate for universal health care and a Job Guarantee (the holy grail of socialism/social democracy; not even Scandanavia has it) you’re a fucking social democrat.
Eh. I’ve been saying that Trump might be the only candidate that HRC should worry about, but I’ve been changing my mind on that. I used to think that he was crazy like a fox, but lately I just think that he’s crazy.
I’m not sure whether he’s trapped in a zugswang where he loses the interest of the herrenvolk lumpenbigots by keeping it down for the general or he keeps his base ginned up by doubling-down on sexism and racism (Trump can profit off of racism, but not sexism) but he’s just not going to capture the Midwestern and Northeastern (female) white working class, especially Millenials, with talk like this.
It’s an interesting thought experiment as to whether a proto-fascist like Trump needs to have his cultural baggage in order to have a chance of winning a nomination or if there’s a way for a Trump 2.0 to ascend in 2020 without the fatal flaw of, you know, having the brains of a cheese sandwich. But unless polling shows otherwise I think I’m going to turn down the alarm on Trump.
Always unfortunate when one’s life is cut short and one doesn’t get to write one’s own legacy and others opine on who one was.
There’s some information to suggest that JFK could have been a Clinton style neo-liberal — but not much and it may be more that Clinton presented himself as “cool” like JFK and therefore on the same political page. There’s stronger evidence that he was in tune with the “New Deal” and he struggled with how to disentangle the country from the Cold War. Would he have been as bold as LBJ was on civil and economic rights? Undefined. Less bold on pursuing armed conflict in Vietnam? Again undefined. His personal inclinations may have been less bellicose, but the foreign policy teams of the two weren’t different.
“For me it’s as if I’ve fallen through a looking glass to 1972 and the GOP primary is a battle between McCarthy and Bull Connor and the DEM primary is a battle between Nixon and McGovern.”
That’s pretty frickin brilliant
Hesitated to post that and risk getting troll rated off the site.
That’s just the thing, isn’t it? The soft left, like the Blair-ites in the UK, fear Sanders more than the GOP. Why? Because it means they’ve been wrong all along, especially now. It means the New Deal, minus the racism, is still pretty damn popular. Jeff Weaver is a shitty pitcher, he’s not someone who covers up murders(Rahm Emanuel).
*Sorry, I had to mix metaphors there. I’m pretty sure there was a Jeff Weaver who was a baseball pitcher a few years back. He has a brother Jared Weaver who pitchers for the Halos.
Jeff Weaver was a borderline ace until his career became undone by injuries.
Does Sanders have the kind of teflon that the Clintons are famous for possessing?
Hold on. Teflon? The Clintons?!?
Ahem. Whitewater. Monica. Benghazi. The definition of “is.” Filegate. Vince Foster. Mena airport. Gennifer Flowers. Ron Brown’s “murder.” Travelgate. Billing records. Paula Jones. Lincoln bedroom. Email servers. Foundation donations.
Any of these ring a bell? They sure as hell should, because they all still hold currency in the right-wing rumor mill and most are still treated as open questions by the Beltway media.
None of them stuck in any way that matters. Hence, our current frontrunner.
Agree.
For the most part, the M$M/rightwingers have gone after the Clintons (either or both) on stupid stuff, not on anything that’s really of any importance.
Sure, the Clintons get a ton of poo flung at them. It’s all part of the game. The Clintons know that and choose to endure it (can you hear: CHA CHING???).
And et voila: here comes HRC the inevitable.
How much has any of that poo-flinging done significant damage to her ascendency?
Shorter A: not a bloody lot.
HRC has more to fear from Sanders than from the rightwing howler monkeys who’ll always be flinging poo at her.
If Clinton is elected, 33 percent of all voters would be proud and 35 percent would be embarrassed.
Teflon? Only to those more interested in her plumbing than in her persona.
and the other third think the question is stupid
Yeah, it’s not Teflon, it’s 5 inches of tempered steel, covered in ceramic armor and then layered with Kevlar.
The Clintons are basically the Terminator, which is what I admire about them – and especially her.
The MSM has been going after the Clintons, especially HRC, on cultural flotsam. Nothing with any real meat to it.
Getting confident in the Clintons’ ability to roll with these kinds of attacks is like bragging about your ability to completely shut down teams that use the prevent defense. It’s a good skill, don’t get me wrong, but it says nothing about your actual strength. And HRC is nowhere near as good as a politician as Bill Clinton. She’s a gaffe machine surrounded by an inner circle of aging Boomer courtiers and an outer shell of bourgeois identarians. #NotMyAbuela is standard operating procedure with HRC. She’s seriously as bad as Michael Dukakis.
When HRC starts surviving attacks (and I mean real attacks, not Sanders-style softballs) on her flip-flopping, dodgy Wall Street donations, and her actual shady finances then maybe start up the triumphalism.
And exactly WHO is going to do this attacking? The current Klown Kar Kavalcade isn’t capable of stringing two sentences together coherently.
The worthless corporate whore media and their plutocratic pimpmasters? The people who breathlessly carried water for Paul fucking Ryan while he and Romney went on their ‘Obama cut 600 billion from Medicare!!!’ jags. Same people as usual.
It’s not like it’s a particularly difficult line of attack to run. ‘Here’s Hillary Clinton proclaiming herself to be a progressive. Here’s Hillary Clinton a month later saying that she’s a moderate.’ ‘Here’s Hillary Clinton arguing for public education during the first Democratic debate. Here’s Hillary Clinton having her husband assure the #1 mogul of charter schools that her campaign has his back.’ Etc.
Why do you think Addelson bought a big Nevada paper?
This. Here’s why.
Of the same:
As open secrets go this one is increasingly a no-brainer.
Trump and Sanders are so very different in so many ways, but one way stands out for me in a non-substantive way.
Trump exists entirely as a creature of the spotlight. As soon as his poll numbers start to dip, he says something awful and they shoot right back up again. If he fails to generate outrage in the future, if he fails to keep stealing the spotlight, he will fade.
Sanders, I’m afraid, exists as a creature of the shadows. He’s kind of a blank slate for Progressives to write their dreams upon, despite being somewhat heterodox on several issues (guns, civil rights, etc.). And Sanders/Larry David hasn’t had to endure the incessant attacks that Clinton lives with every day.
Because liberals are held to different standards, Sanders would have to explain how his budgets make sense in ways that Cruz and Rubio won’t. And he benefits from that.
Clinton’s unfavorables and Trump’s unfavorables are baked into the numbers now. They aren’t going anywhere, unless something incredibly damaging comes up.
But Sanders’ unfavorables (and to a lesser degree Rubio’s) will go up once they get that target on their back.
Why? Because he’s older? Kidding aside, give it some thought and it’s hard to come up with a reason why his unfavorables would rise. Polling shows him with astronomical favorables consistently since he started running this year. You can argue that he remains largely unknown, and has largely avoided the commie-pinko Wurlitzer effect so far, but even as his familiarity has increased over the past nine months or so, we haven’t seen those (baseless kinds of) attacks stick very well. Surely I’m naive thinking a guy that’s been a professional politician since the dawn of man might know a little how to effectively rebut and deflect criticism. But I watch him work and marvel at how very good he is at it. I disagree with him for not taking the fight to Hillary Clinton by now. Also wish he were funnier, like Obama. But other than that, unlike Hillary, he’s a master politician.
One of the unfortunate side-effects of the post-Carter Democratic Party’s continued political weakness (and I kind of touched on this below) is that they, especially those in the establishment/centrist and/or of middle-age, have complete buy-in to the idea that Presidential elections are won not by positions or even by personality but by spitting the best ‘game’.
Of course, no one applies this analysis to candidates before 1968. No one says that the reason why Truman lost to Eisenhower was because of gaffes and not having good enough fireside chats. No one says that the reason why Lincoln muscled his way to a victory was because of his exquisite oratory and choice in suits. They kinda-sorta try with JFK, but it always becomes laughable because JFK’s performance is one of the biggest counter-examples to the idea that playing the political game is more important than basic ideological alignment.
I like Obama, but unfortunately his success (and failures) validates this rather nihilistic line of thinking. People are convinced that he’s some kind of political master who gets all of the Millenials a-swooning and all of the voters a-registered based on how well he works the media when in reality his electoral performance is pretty historically unimpressive. Like all post-Dukakis Democratic candidates, his Presidential election performance maps pretty nicely to brute demographic growth once you account for the black swans of the Reform Party and the 1990-1991 and 2007-present recessions.
Your kidding, right? That was Obama 08.
Out of anyone running, Sanders has served in elected office the longest and has the most consistently liberal voting record. To say he he is a blank slate just ignores what he has been saying over an entire career. He certainly has been attacked by the right, but the biggest attack against politicians these days (and specifically Hillary), with out a doubt, is that they are bought and paid for and that charge just falls flat on its face against Sanders.
Almost find that comment on a leftie blog posted by someone who is educated scarier than ignorant R/W nuts screaming about the commie, muslim, Nazi, socialist Kenyan in the WH. It totally betrays an inability to evaluate character and principles of public figures. No wonder the nutters on the right are such easy marks for Trump.
I beg to differ. That was Dean in ’04.
Come again? How more thoroughly could they lose said shit? Their shit is on milk cartons. It’s been a seven year gathering of the Klans since the Kenyan Muslim Socialist Usurper staged a coup. Seriously, what’s the next step? Armed insurrection? Nah, these keyboard commandos and hoveround patriots ain’t up for that. Sure they’ll stock up on firearms if they haven’t already, but these ain’t your hardened cadres. It’ll be business as usual.
And who knows what happens when the Republicans bring out all their Willie Hortons and Swift-Boat Veterans for Truth? Does Sanders have the kind of teflon that the Clintons are famous for possessing?
That’s spelled “teflon” but pronounced “money.”
There is a curious alienation reflected in some of the thinking about Sanders. It goes something like this:
“Well of course I would be for Bernie if I thought he could win, but…”
What it reflects as much as anything is how alienated liberals feel from American political life. They don’t really believe that they will win an argument with a conservative before the typical american because “Americuns” are dumb, or stupid, or something else.
In my experience this alienation is actually in an odd way a source of pride. I hear it expressed when traveling abroad”: “I am not like most Americans”.
So along comes Bernie, and in a way he strikes at the core of this alienation. He says, dammit, I can win this argument. He polls way better than most people I know would have ever anticipated.
Much of the reaction to this is simple disbelief. But there is something else as well: I sometimes suspect that what is challenged is a comfortable disengagement from the nuts and bolts of politics.
Liberals have been painting themselves as an embattled sect of brave underdogs fighting against a tidal wave of bigots and plutocrats since the 80s. I’m not going to challenge how true this assumption is, but it’s my hypothesis that liberals who most ascribe to this worldview were most politically aware between the 80s and mid-00s. This kind of self-satisfied nihilism is an affliction of middle-aged leftists, not in older (65+) or younger (<35) ones.
DINOs, Republicans, and the MSM have been painting liberals as “losers” since 1972. Amazing that they haven’t killed us off by now. Amazing that any of us still care enough to keep trying.
Many of your comments are perceptive, rational, and logical, but your DFH bashing isn’t new to us; it’s well within old rhetoric promulgated by the center and right.
If I make fun of DFHs, it’s out of love. DFHs kept me same during the Internet 1.0 smalltimes. BartCop, Rackjite, Scott Bidstrup, Zompist, Steve Kangas, Mike Huben… I love them all! I don’t agree with them 100%, but I do have respect for them. If I criticize them it’s out of disappointment, not hatred. When I mock the quixotic (but worthy) aspirations of the New Left, it’s sour grapes.
…I genuinely do despise the New Democrats, though. Especially after 2002, which is about when they unquestionably started doing more harm than good.
“New Democrats” is the “DLC” and they’ve been doing active and serious harm since 1995.
Boomers, DFHs, didn’t sprout out of some new cabbage patch. There were old lefties, socialists, beatniks pointing us in the right direction as to what we needed to learn. They’d been at it a long time by then and without much recent success and many paid a large price during the HUAC/McCarthy witch hunt period. They had their own generational peculiarities, but it would never have occurred to me to make fun of them “out of love” as if they were a subspecies warranting ridicule.
But those from those generations differed as widely as contemporaries John McCain and this guy did:
If you were wondering how I was able to see through the brainwashing charade, it is because my parents made the mistake of allowing me to watch Carlin with the greater family (grandparents and uncles/aunts) when I was 10. Exposure to his material, while not completely responsible, was a significant part of it. Thanks, George!
The DLC folded four years ago….
I know; everybody here knows that the formal DLC operation no long exists. Just as the PNAC no longer exists. But the players haven’t died and they carry on under different umbrellas. The better to confuse that mass who can’t keep up with the ever changing names of political operations and all their assorted acronyms. DLC is faster and easier to type than whatever name they are using this week.
And the Blue Dog Caucus is a quarter of its size at its peak.
It’s not 2002 any more.
They’re running a candidate for President the year, didn’t you notice?
So? The Democratic party is a mass party, and coalition politics isn’t pretty.
You are right that coalition politics isn’t pretty but hopefully it will get worse. I hate to break it to you but the Hillary controlled DNC (or whatever they call themselves this month) has managed to hand both houses of congress to the Republicans. Those Blue Dogs have to go, all of them including Hillary.
My understanding of demographics and the political process under the US Constitution informs me that if those Blue Dogs go away from a party but still exist, that almost anything that you or I would even consider remotely tolerable politically would not be physically possible while still having a Democracy in the US.
Coalition Politics isn’t going away until after the reforms to make it go away are in place, and maybe not even then. There is currently no clear majority of any segment of any coalition.
If the Dem coalition breaks first, then the Republican coalition will hold long enough to burn the country to the ground and maybe the world with it. If the Republican coalition breaks first, then maybe there will be a window of time where a Dem coalition will be able to advance the cause of progressivism and make the country more liberal. But right now both coalitions are ‘playing chicken’ hoping the other breaks first.
It’s not one thing. And you may be right about a component of it. Risk aversion and failure of imagination or not trusting one’s imagination may be playing a large role. For decades, “too left” has been drilled into all Democrats that it = McGovern and a landslide loss. Whereas when the GOP went “too right” and had their landslide loss, they came back with “too right” sixteen years later and won with “too right” (and that was after winning a landslide with pretty far right who chose resignation over impeachment).
This has led to the CW that FDR/New Deal Democrats can’t win. They went to far. Americans don’t like all that liberal nonsense. DFHs have been dismissed as delusional for pointing out that it’s pretty fucking hard to win if nobody competent even tries. Then that devolves into: it’s the most important election evah and we can’t afford to take a chance (as if Mondale, Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry won) and it’s the Supreme Court, stupid (as if the SCOTUS hasn’t had a GOP majority for thirty years).
What’s amazing to me so far is how freaking well Sanders has done against the institutional DEM party that had predetermined the nomination and the corporate media ignoring Sanders as if he’s a joke candidate. Whereas they can’t get enough of the true joke candidate on the GOP side.
One ‘good’ thing about the establishment deciding that risk aversion and positional caginess were the two most important vegetables in the victory garden is that they’ve let the political apparatus of the Democratic Party atrophy. Have you looked at the 2008-9 DNC leadership list versus the who’s-who of Hillary’s 2016 campaign? It’s… pretty damn similar. And faintly sad.
If the Democratic establishment had been healthier and/or less clueless, DWS should’ve been fired and ridiculed in the media after 2014, if not 2010. There’s no way anyone should be keeping that position after two disastrous elections. But she and the rest of her dilberts bumble onwards, protected by the bubble the stupid fucking bourgeois neoliberal identarians constructed for themselves.
Sanders overcoming the power of the Democratic establishment is quite possible, but it’ll be more due to the fact that his opponent is a paper tiger than his own personal brand. If Sanders was up against the FDR or even the Cuomo machine, he would’ve been crushed like a bug months ago.
“Atrophy” is the wrong word. It was staffed to accomplish a major goal: the third and fourth Clinton Presidential terms. It has been their party since 1992 with the brief exception of the 2005-9 period (overall good for the party but bad for Clinton).
Tim Kaine, not DWS, was the DNC chair during the 2010 election.
What Sanders has accomplished is fucking amazing.
TIED in New Hampshire against Clinton? Within striking distance in Iowa?
Are you kidding me? Aligned against the entire power structure of the Democratic Party. Against a figure well liked within the party.
And the reaction of the blogs on the left: mostly silence. Little thought into what has happened here.
I am tempted to say it is Stockholm Syndrome.
I suspect you are on to something in the reaction to the necessity to pay attention and engage with the nuts and bolts of politics. It’s the same sort of alienation that people who are technically proficient (i.e. nerdy) experience when they get lectured on having to “sell yourself” to an employer. Demanding that one play to their weakest skill in order to survive in society.
IMHO, winning a wave election would be a jolly good way for Bernie and the Progressive Democrats to strike at that alienation.
The alienation is a product of a culture that educates people for a particular style of politics, business operations, and ethics and the first year of work life communicates very strongly that the values they insisted on you learning aren’t expected in action. Most Democrats have absorbed a strong dose of freedom and democracy as values. The shock that less than half of the population, most all going through schooling, did not absorb those common values is a constant affront to those who did.
For the boomer Democrats, there is another source of alienation. They had their hopes and dreams for a more progressive government assassinated in close enough to real time for it to be experienced as first hand. The assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy killed the momentum of a budding progressive movement interested in peace and justice and public service. Most members of this group of boomer Democrats were forced into the private sector into jobs that were not their first priority. Well, yes, that is the way life is. But it also is the way that the internal opposition to those liberalizing trends in the Democratic Party shut down the changes it did not like. Entrenched interests are entrenched interests in any party.
It is hard not to be alienated from the Democratic Party that sabotaged the War on Poverty with the War in Vietnam.
“Well of course I could be for Bernie if I thought he could win, but…” is the voice of dashed dreams, their parents if not theirs, a deep cynicism parading as “realism”, and the results of 25 years of the Democratic Party pandering with the label “practical”.
And we are to the point that if we are to survive as a country, in 2016 we have to made the necessary practical.
Why do you hate Loomis and Lemieux?!?!?
My wife – and maybe it is the no-nonsense Brooklyn Jew reaction (which is why this WASP married her) – was straightforward to Bernie- I am going to get a clipboard. Make phone calls.
But then my wife has little tolerance for self-pity and alienation that accomplishes nothing.
It is so much easier to say “Too bad” at a cocktail party, then it is to actually do something. That takes time, that requires an actual investment in something of yourself.
Maybe it’s the grassy knoll lurking in our collective subconscious.
Bernie Sanders doesn’t seem at all exotic to me, but then I’m from California. In fact, he’s a much more familiar type of person to me than someone like Mike Huckabee or Rand Paul.
But if the hardest thing to digest about him is the “socialist” thing, I think the best way to counter that is with the simple fact that if you take the label away, the kinds of policies and values he’s talking about are an American tradition. He’s done some of this, citing Theodore Roosevelt and so forth, but there’s some incredibly rich material that is being neglected–TR was the Republican Roosevelt, for Christ’s sake.
If anything, it’s free-market fundamentalism that is a foreign import, what with all these Austrians and that Russian woman.
Yeah, Bernie Sanders is basically my father. He’s the most relatable politician I’ve ever seen. But I’m a Jew.
I find it interesting that the comments about how exotic or out-of-the-mainstream his is almost never reference that fact that he’s utterly in the mainstream of American Jewish politics. It’s as if his Jewishness is somehow apart from that. An interesting exotic bauble, or something.
It’s not often acknowledged that his Jewishness informs everything about his politics (and his personality, from what I’ve seen), and that we have an historic opportunity to nominate a Jew who actually reflects mainstream Jewish American perspectives (ie, not Lieberman). I’ll admit that, on the merits of representation alone, I’m more excited about Clinton. But it’s not nothing. And the general shying away from mentioning the subtext of ‘what will mainstream American thing of his gruff, opinionated, bleeding heart, guy with the funny accent’ makes me curious.
Drill down. Look at the trees. This is an interesting poll. Beyond the top line numbers that Socialism beats Trump by a wider margin than the DEM with 100% name recognition.
“I do sometimes wonder if the right in this country will just completely and finally lose their shit if we elect someone like Sanders as president.”
Be careful what you wish for, it’s not the reaction of the right that will destroy you, it’s the reaction of the majority.
Ahem, that’s President Sanders to you, Comrade.
Ive strongly considered learning how to fight in those schools run by the exmilitary guys. If theres ever a general rightwing uprising I want to be able to put some down before they get me, believe you me.
Main problem is finding one that isnt a sham.
ummmm…sorry to bust your bubble, but they don’t teach military tactics. Strategy, sometimes boxing, but not tactics. For that you can get the books written by the experts:
Marine Corps
Army
Navy (Seals)
I couldn’t find anything technical for Air Force or Coast Guard. They have special ops and they ARE really badass mothers. They just don’t write books.
For hand to hand stuff, you’re far better off finding an instructor in street fighting.
Good Luck
Thanks for the tips. Its also about being familiar with a gun since i have only held and fired on once in my entire life.
I received my early firearms training from my grandfather at about age 8. He was farm raised, but later went on to earn his PhD in education. I served in the military for 11 years. As one of my lawyer friends likes to say, “liberals have guns too”. We just don’t wave them wildly about at any excuse.