In 2008, I blogged as a forceful advocate of Barack Obama’s candidacy during the primaries, and I retain a lot of the readership I built up over that campaign, which means that there are a lot of Clinton-bashing commenters in the threads of pretty much anything I write. I come at politics with a progressive but pragmatic point of view that is more naturally aligned with Sanders’ overall message than Clinton’s. But my assessment as a political analyst beginning in about 2014 was that Clinton was so popular with self-described progressives (she was then polling with, if I remember correctly, an 81% approval rate) that there was not enough room on her left for anyone to successfully challenge her from that direction. I was aware of the hunger for such a challenge. Seeing the #Occupy people in the streets was all the testimony I needed to convince me of that. But protestors can be deceiving, just as looking at the size of a political rally can give you a false conviction about the breadth of a political movement. Unless most progressives actually stopping approving of Clinton, she was going to be the nominee. And, with the president in her corner, there was a real limit on how much anti-Clinton growth would ever be possible in progressive circles.
So, my analysis was that Clinton would win. My audience didn’t want to hear that. They relentlessly accused me of being secretly in the bag for her, or of being a sell-out who was satisfied with the status quo, or of putting my fingers on the scale simply to discourage Sanders’ supporters.
How much more exciting is it to read that there’s a real race and that if Sanders can just win the next series of primaries, he’ll surely convince the superdelegates to abandon Hillary? What does it do to readership to tell them that the thing they’re tuning in to watch and read about and discuss is a nothing-burger?
Over the past year, I’ve felt a constant pull to succumb to this pressure. Sometimes, I wanted to get excited myself. Sometimes I just got weary of the criticism and didn’t feel like inviting more of it. And sometimes I worried that I was going to lose my readership if I kept telling them things they didn’t like and that the story they came to read about was no story at all.
In the end, I stuck to my guns and told people exactly what I thought because that’s basically my brand, and that’s what I want to do, regardless of the consequences. My reward is that I don’t have to apologize for being wrong as most of the political punditry class is currently doing in one form or another. Of course, their big missed call was related to Trump’s chances of winning the nomination. I don’t have to apologize for that mistake either, but I understand that audience reaction can exert a powerful set of incentives that can distort a political analyst’s good sense. Relatedly, so can concerns about circulation. And there’s always the temptation to submit to group-think.
I don’t know why so many analysts decided to say they would eat things (a plate of nails, their own column) if Trump won the nomination, but at least part of it was driven (at least at the later stages) by a desire not to tell their audiences that the story was a non-story. If only Ted Cruz can win in Indiana, then Trump might still be denied the nomination, and Cruz is looking good there!
Yeah, well, no.
That was just a failure of analysis that most people should have known better than to have sold their readers.
With Trump winning Indiana in what should have been totally predictable fashion, most pundits are saying what the evidence suggests they should, which is that Trump is a massive underdog.
But that story is not interesting. Audiences may not come back over and over again to read that the election is over before it really begins.
So, the media will be pushed and pushed by incentives small and large, subconscious and deliberate, to act like this election is going to be a barnburner.
It could be a barnburner, but they should wait to see some evidence for it before they start predicting that it will be.
Nancy touched this also, in her last piece when she cited David Roberts.
[T]he US political ecosystem — media, consultants, power brokers, think tanks, foundations, officeholders, the whole thick network of institutions and individuals involved in national politics — cannot deal with a presidential election in which one candidate is obviously and uncontroversially the superior (if not sole acceptable) choice. The machine is simply not built to handle a race that’s over before it’s begun.
This touches on what I’ve been talking about, but it also goes deeper. I’ve been talking about reasons that analysts are driven to say and predict things against their better judgment. But there’s also a kind of presumption of at least some neutrality and objectivity in most bigfoot political reporting, whether it’s in the New York Times or the nightly network news. If you’re openly and unapologetically partisan, then that gives you permission to be brutal in your assessment of the other side, but that’s not what we expect from reporters or network news anchors. Quite aside from wanting a competitive race for ratings and revenue purposes, we have media platforms that are not designed to deal with a candidacy that is nakedly beyond the pale of civilized discourse or serious consideration. There’s a real sense in which they are supposed to avoid the appearance of bias, and Trump is going to put them in a vice where their imperative to seem neutral comes up against their imperative to get the story right.
Partisans on both sides have been complaining for years that the “neutral” reporters are failing to accomplish this balance. Conservatives think the reporting class has such a fundamentally liberal worldview that it permeates all their coverage even when it is unintended. This was the rationale for Fox News, for example. Liberals think that a desire to be even-handed leads these “neutral” reporters to resort, time and time again, to a form of both-siderism, where no matter how atrociously a Republican behaves, some equivalency must be sought from a Democrat.
These criticisms both have a lot of merit, but we’re dealing with something in a different class with Trump. Even most responsible Republicans agree that he shouldn’t get within a country mile of the nuclear codes. There’s wide bipartisan consensus that he suffers from a narcissism disorder, that he’s ill-informed and prone to believe in conspiracy theories, that he’s a bully, that he’s built his political success on xenophobia and racism, and that he’s a misogynist.
If the reporters actually focus on this consensus, that doesn’t allow them to promote a traditional presidential race. They can’t find equivalent faults in Hillary Clinton even though they’ll do their best. They can’t just report everything as a he said/she said/you decide dispute.
In truth, they can’t report on this campaign while being both objective and neutral. And they can’t report on it the way they are designed to report on national politics.
It’s a real problem for them.
The last election that I feel that was reported as a non-race, accurately so, was 1996. I vaguely remember it being reported that Dole didn’t have a chance, and Dole was pretty low key anyway so he didn’t go nuts, and it was a relatively calm election in which the outcome was known and everyone knew it. (There were a bunch of other things going on, with all the attacks on Clinton by the GOP, but Dole wasn’t really behind that.)
I wanted to add — I think the younger media outlets are actually to a certain extent doing a better job than the venerable TV outlets.
Vox and VICE and Buzzfeed and QZ and so on are all skewed younger, skewed towards accurate reporting without both sides do it nonsense, and maybe a bit left leaning but only in the sense of “reality has a well-known liberal bias”.
Like this piece from Buzzfeed, calling out Trump and the media for his lie about the Iraq war — he supported the war and military intervention generally:
https://www.buzzfeed.com/bensmith/trump-supported-iraq-war
You write:
Not quite true.
The future is what has “a well-known liberal bias.”
It’s also called “evolution,” and MLK Jr. defined it this way:
Bet on it.
AG
Thanks for this. Unfortunately Hillary can’t use it. But Bernie can, anyway.
Sorry, one more thought (wish I could edit my other comments) —
I’ve really appreciated your commentary for all these years. I think I started reading you back when you cross-posted at DailyKos many, many years ago. I too was solidly in the Obama camp and was very anti-Clinton at the time.
I wanted Warren to run and when she didn’t I considered Sanders as a possible progressive standardbearer. I was on Sanders’s mailing list for many years and I appreciated his views. I was thinking of voting for him here in CA. But as the campaign has gone on, he has impressed me less and less, and Clinton has shown she has learned a lot from Obama. I like being in the reality-based community, so Sander’s magic math in tax and healthcare proposals really didn’t sit well with me, nor did his campaign’s evasions when called out. I also wasn’t impressed by Sander’s inability to think on his feet — that was something that Obama was amazing at (I watched hundreds of his town halls over the 2007/2008 campaign) and Clinton shows some ability in this regard as well. So I’ve reluctantly come around to Clinton, but am not unhappy about it. I feel like it’s time to go forward and win the general with some serious on the ground organizing like it’s Obama 2008.
This exposes the most sensitive bits of the political media: it is in it for the money. I have very little sympathy for an industry that enables (and even facilitates) all kinds of public harm in its quest to be profitable.
If they want to “serve” America as the noble 4th estate, then they need to either find a less poisonous funding source, or better yet, find another line of work.
Glad to know you think I should go hungry.
You come here and read for free and then tell me to go find “a less poisonous” funding source.
Nice.
You see, in a digital age, creative people don’t get paid. And newsrooms can’t afford to staff up and give you the reporting you think you’re entitled to.
You want good reporting and solid analysis without the people who provided it getting compensated for it.
Now, if you say that you didn’t mean me, then that’s the problem right there, because everyone who works has to consider how they’ll get paid.
And beyond the personalization of this issue, what you have said in this defensive comment is that the economy no longer intends to support an authentic democratic republic. Not no longer can, but no longer intends tp. The visible hand at work. The mask gone. The fourth estate revealed. The gloves off.
Just look at how NBC is treating Trump. That clearly is direction from the CEO of the holding company.
Those who do have the money, power, and status in the US don’t need any of the rest of us anymore — neither educated or hardworking or creative or productive. In so many ways the mainstream media is communicating the message that the powers that be wish the majority of Americans would just go away and let them go golfing or whatever they do with their time.
The way that you should read what I wrote, or at least the way I hoped you would read it, is that it’s up to ordinary people to pay for news coverage and analysis if they want it to be unconcerned with the bottom line.
More accurately, if a news organization or blogger doesn’t have to worry about the relationship between what they write and whether they’ll have a job at all or be able to pay the bills, then they’ll give it to you straight.
And, if there’s a remaining bias, it will be because they’re pandering to you, not some big funder.
I indeed did read it that way. I do understand that argument.
But one of the consequences of the information revolution that has created the competition of the internet and a large number of good journalists and analysts is that it has made everyone else tend toward redundancy (in the UK sense) as well. That constrains the funds that people have available to support all of the good journalists out there and also the political analysts. Fortunately, most mainstream media are tightening their paywalls, creating a two-tier information market. Even more fortunately, most of the best analysts, in the sense of not pandering and provided new insights, are outside those paywalls.
I have to trust that those BooMan readers who do have sufficient funds will take care of your finances and keep you online. And I thank them.
It is surprising what happens in this society when one resists the commodification of everything. Contributing to things which are public services amazes people.
I am not so far into postmodernist view or having given up so much on the Enlightenment project as to think that all is phony or pandering to someone or another.
I think we need to struggle with talking about what earlier generations denoted with the word “truth” and reduced with the term “objectivity”. Or the notion of it as “what God would see”. There is something about authenticity and integrity there that resists the demands to pander. At your best, you exhibit that. Which is why you have kept a lot of your earlier audience.
Pity that the culture that we have in the 21st century has little place for authenticity and integrity among all the reinvention of selves.
You write:
Yup.
Musicians are right at the front of that line!!!
Unless you cop out and stop being creative in a real sense…stop playing variations on the same-old, same-old…making a living is almost impossible now. Most fine players straddle that line the best that they can…teaching mostly same-old, same-old and/or playing commercial jobs that are defined by their same-oldness, then playing what they really hear in clubs for a dollar three-eighty.
So it goes.
The other side of that glittering digital coin?
No coin for the truly new.
Charlie Parker or John Coltrane today?
YouTubed to death.
Bet on it
AG
If the election is over before it begins, why bother to vote? What do the mechanics prove? The vote was to provide democratic legitimacy for an oligarchic structure that had some circulation of elites. If it’s over before it begins, the fix is indeed in.
Does political analysis the way it’s being done really serve governance of a democratic republican or is it serving some other motive – income, status, power, self-justification, or an endless supply of cocktail weenies?
There is a reason that people in the rest of the country hate Washington, and that designation goes beyond the members of Congress and the executive bureaucrats now to the lobbyists and political information establishment. In the past four decades, that information establishment has failed the American people because it marches to the drum of investors and chief executive officers.
That propagation of false information has led to the march of folly that has hamstrung practical solutions to national issues at every turn and now brings the country into constitutional crisis.
Political analysis that empowers people instead of disempowering people is very hard indeed.
It is not “…over before it begins,” Tarheel. Indeed, Trump’s RatPub win unfixes the PermaGov fix for the first time in decades…since JFK’s win and RFK’s nearly unavoidable win prior to his “OH so unfortunate!!!” death.
This is the first time in living memory that only one of the two presumptive nominees is line-level acceptable to the Permanent Government. Now…a good argument could be made that this time said Permanent Government has probably gotten it right, but the failures of its fix-winners over the preceding 30+ years may have guaranteed a win…if he survives long enough…for the unwanted and unloved (feared, even) upstart Donald Trump.
Time will tell.
I am watching with ‘bated breath, myself.
Later…
AG
You dismiss, or don’t mention, the massive amount of turmoil, anger, and despair that exists with people in this nation right now. The GOP fell victim to this because it allowed the TeaParty and other fringe, astroturf groups to fully participate. While the Drumpf effect was not predicted, it is not totally unexpected when looking at the recent upheavals within the GOP.
The Democratic side is a much different story. In this case Tarheel is totally on point. It was over before it began because the DNC did not allow the insurgent and outlier groups to fully participate in the process. And there was a constant message of what their place was. Hell, even people who claim to be progressive or liberal have no issue with the “hippie punching” or STFU memes that are usually directed at these groups.
It’s odd, because the democrats can’t muster or strong arm votes among their members in congress, where it is really important, but they appear to be much better at keeping out or controlling candidates they don’t want than the GOP.
Except for
bribery moneycampaign contributions, the life blood of and office holder.For most politicos that is enuf to keep them toeing the line, and preformimg tricks on demand for the party apparatchiks.
Bring back the Pork Barrel! That was a useful carrot for discipline and it did get infrastructure built.
Did you read Thomas Franks in the Guardian today?
…The year of our discontent rolls on, and now it is Indiana that hands victory to the insurgent senator Bernie Sanders and the protectionist demagogue Donald Trump.
Seven years have passed now since the last recession officially ended, and yet the country’s fury has scarcely cooled. To this day we remain angry at Wall Street; we rage against career politicians; and we are incandescent that the economic system seems to have been permanently “rigged” against working people. Median household income has still not recovered the levels of 2007. Wages are going nowhere. Elite bankers are probably never going to be held accountable for what they did. America is burning.”
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/may/04/democrats-acting-elitist-not-progressive-thomas
-frank?CMP=share_btn_fb
It goes on:
I thought the close focus on Obama’s treatment of the aspiration of a fixed retirement as some kind of Sparkle Pony was right on point, too.
No more nice things for us.
Oh goody. What did Thomas Franks explain this time around as the result of false consciousness?
This.
I’ve raised the variant of this issue as well: that people in positions that help to shape beliefs and views in our society/culture can affect voters before the election even starts. Based on nothing more than an opinion of “this person is unelectable”, with no factual basis.
Look at what many of the “experts” and political pundits were saying before the Democratic primary: according to them Sanders had absolutely no chance and the whole thing would be done as soon as it started. Didn’t turn out that way. And while the current path does not have Sanders winning, I still believe that if people had felt he actually had a chance from the start, many would have voted differently. People in this nation love to be on the winning side.
Routinely this is dismissed.
Booman is saying that it was over before it began because 81% of Democrats had a favorable view of Hillary Clinton. The voting is the way to make that choice official. In the end, the Democratic voters want Hillary Clinton. There’s no fix in that.
Which poll are you using for this stat? Also, note the “had” in your sentence.
This type of talk reminds me of the crap that was flying around before SB50. Everybody was certain Carolina was going to destroy Denver; it was already over. Guess that’s why they play the game.
I will the pundits and “experts” who follow politics would remember that. So quick to declare winners before the contest even starts. And they wonder why so many people are disillusioned…
Tarheel,
You make an essential point: “If the election is over before it begins … the fix is indeed in.” Most of what Booman says here is about how a commentator should balance objectivity with what the readers want to hear, and of course he comes down on the side of objectivity. What’s to disagree?
But, having been genuinely mystified as well as troubled by some aspects of how Booman has dealt with Hillary’s “lock” on the nomination, I find that the present post adds a few pieces to the puzzle — and, I should add, very unexpected ones.
In a lengthy comment I wrote yesterday, I raised some questions — if Booman was so sure Hillary had a lock (and his assessment was clear back in 2014, I remember it well), why didn’t he explain the situation as a matter for discussion? The long and short of it seems to be, there was nothing to discuss. Which strikes me as an odd attitude, even for a “done deal.” How do we know it is a done deal? Who was responsible for it, what exactly was done, how was it done, and with what ends in view?
Now he reveals how he knew: it’s because Hillary was so incredibly popular with progressives.
Really? That’s how he knew? In reality, Hillary’s popularity with progressives in 2014, has only a weak connection with her annointed status.
Hillary Clinton resigned from her position as Secretary of State on February 1, 2013. At that moment her national favorable, according to Huffpost Pollster (an aggregator) was 56.8%. This is not too much lower than her highest favorability score, which was Oct.30, 2010 — 62%. (The reason for that peak I don’t know.)
However, from the moment Hillary resigned (actually a little prior) her favorability began to decline. This decline continued unabated through the year 2013, so that by Dec.2, it had reached 49%. It went up a little bit in early 2014, to hover just over 50%, then began to decline again in May 2014. Now 49-50% is not bad at all, especially for such a polarizing figure. But then, from that time right up the present, her favorability has continued to decline.
Hillary started preparing her run by 2014. This was already clear by April of that year:
http://www.cnn.com/2014/04/10/opinion/miller-hillary-clinton-candidate/
This moment corresponds precisely with the resumption of her decline in national favorability.
My point is this: Hillary’s popularity with progressives, and even her popularity nationally, had nothing to do with the idea of her running for president. Probably just the opposite, it had to do with her having found a rewarding new career as SoS, under a president popular at least with Democrats.
The minute it was known that Hillary intended a new presidential run, her favorability began to decline. Thius decline has continued unbroken right up to the present day. By the end of March 2015, she was coming into net unfavorable territory. Her national unfavorable rating is now 54%, nearly as high as her favorable was at the moment she ended her secretaryship.
Then, when you talk about popularity among “progressives”, none of this, of course, has any reference to Bernie, since at the time Booman realized she had the “lock”, Bernie was nowhere to be seen. No wonder Booman has been so uncomfortable with the Bernie phenomenon. He had already made up his mind that nobody could possibly challenge Hillary, and now here comes somebody whose positions (as he is the first to admit) he prefers.
The truth is, Hillary’s popularity with progressives, and with anybody else, at the time she first began making noises about running, was not based on her candidacy, it was based on her non-candidacy and at least to some extent on the favor Obama apparently had shown for her service. It also, emphatically, did not take into account any rival candidates.
But that is not all — because of course this was accompanied by a great deal of Hillary-spin. We already knew how this works because we had all seen it several times before. You put out the meme that Hillary is inevitable. At the time, no rivals were on the horizon, and she did everything to make sure things stayed that way. But how exactly do you do that? In retrospect we begin to understand that this didn’t just “happen” and it wasn’t based so much on her popularity as it was on her control of the levers of power within the party apparatus and very likely, understandings arrived at beforehand.
We will never know if Hillary’s “lock” really would have been a lock if the media and the political class hadn’t played right along with it. And what people were grumbling about here was not Booman’s courageous determination to face facts, it was what some of us saw as a kind of deer-in-the-headlights lack of interesting in finding out what the hell was really going on.
Let me end with a story. Some time in the latter part of 2014 I got a fundraising call from a woman for the DNC. This was not unusual, as I had contributed many times over the years and was on their list. What I did find unusual was that her pitch — and it was quite heartfelt — was that Hillary was our only hope against the Republicans.
I politely pointed out to her that I wasn’t aware that Hillary Clinton was running for president, as she hadn’t announced that yet, and that I was going to wait to see what other candidates there might be to chose from, because perhaps I might consider someone else a better choice for the country and a better candidate against whomever the GOP might put up. At that point I was not thinking of anyone in particular, I was simply hoping there would be someone else. Why wasn’t there? Hillary was not an incumbent running for a second term. But somehow she was acting like one. Bernie Sanders was nowhere on the horizon at that point.
This was just the moment when Booman started talking about how Hillary was it and there’s nothing we could do it about, and a few others started wondering what the hell was going on. And we never got an answer. So it’s not that we were hearing something we didn’t want to hear. It’s that we weren’t hearing something we did want to hear.
Exactly right. Progressives’ appeal to “adults in the room” is analogous to conservatives’ appeal to “personal responsibility” — usually, it’s a way to foreclose the range of possibilities that are fit for consideration.
Obama did to Hillary what Sanders wanted to do to Hillary, assuming Sanders started out with the intention of actually winning, and not just pushing the Democratic party to the left.
What, in your opinion, did Sanders do or not do, that prevented him from…Obama-ing Clinton this time around?
What, in your opinion, was Booman’s responsibility to himself and his readers, in covering the primary process this year?
I supported Sanders, but he never struck me as having a real chance at winning over Clinton. He did much better than I or (and this is said, often), anyone else expected.
So, what is it about Sanders that isn’t as exciting as Obama? Is it race? Age? The Socialist label?
Was it Sanders’ campaign itself, which was better than expected, but just not enough to beat out Clinton?
Because if it was Sanders’ campaign, why would you worry about what Booman, or the DNC, or anyone else did? Obama worked from within and beat Clinton. Sanders had a working model of how to do it, and yet didn’t do it.
How would Booman being more openly favorable to Sanders have changed anything?
Obama had an inside sector of the party–the Kennedy wing–as his godfather, no?
Durbin pushed him.
His whiteness and maleness. How many times did you see posts disparaging it? In 2008 how many posts did you see posts disparaging Obama for being black? How many posts did you see disparaging Clinton for being female?
This situation was certainly in evidence with the horrific “interview” of Trump conducted by NBC News anchor Lester Holt. It was simply, without a doubt, one of the most awful things imaginable. Maybe Larry Wilmore was right, after all, about Lester Holt.
They will NOT tell the truth about Trump.
They simply won’t.
There is no ‘both sides do it’.
One person is qualified to be President.
The other is a reality tv show con artist.
It really is that simple.
And who will rake in a couple of billion dollars on convincing folks that there is a horse race? The very folks that made billions on reality TV shows.
NBC, broadcasting for free from Trump’s office, is already leading the pack.
I agree. But we disagree on who is which.
Not so much political analysis moves beyond predicting the winner as if its a sporting contest. Not so surprising that Silver was able to gain creds in the political prediction game. Interestingly enough, some of the best political analysts (Taibbi, Olbermann, Pierce) began as sportswriters, but not from the limited perspective of predicting the winners and losers.
The reporting on the 2016 election has been like “The Washington Generals may suck against the Harlem Globetrotters, but there’s not a junior high school basketball team in the country that can beat the Generals.”
But with more metaphors. lol
As I recall from the 538 website, Nate Silver does statistics, not predictions. Saying so-and-so has a 75% chance of winning is not a statement about predicted vote percentage, for example. And the 538 website actually provides graphics to help the reader visualize the statistical distribution of likely outcomes.
What a perfect articulation of the usuncut, occupydemocrats, addictinginfo, etc business model. “Tell the reader what he or she wants to hear, in the most breathless, over-the-top, conspiratorial, and misleading way possible. ” That’s why you have so many Sanders supporters -and not limited to young and first-time voters- believing things that are simply untrue and fantastical. And for each click, usuncut gets some revenue.
Yes, you finally figured it out. All supporters of Bernie Sanders are idiots. All they want is the excitement of a real race without a real race. Thanks for sharing, Brendan.
Well…She’s not strictly a reporter, but Camille Paglia has certainly found “equivalent faults in Hillary Clinton”
Oh yes she has…
The question remains, of course…will the mass of the mass media pick up on some of these themes?
My own bet?
Nope. Fearful of the PC-related reps, they will not.
Not until it’s too late, anyway.
AG
P.S. I gather Paglia is not well-liked by many leftinesses. Tough. She can write and she can think. Check her out.
I read Paglia right after I finish with Will, Brooks, etc. IOW never. Her schtick is being controversial within the broad framework of intellectual feminism. Pretentious, humorless, and arrogant.
Pretentious, humorless, and arrogant?
Yeah, I suppose…
But…that doesn’t mean she’s wrong!!!
Or stupid, either.
I’ve always felt that way about her myself, and I rarely read her. She always goes at least a bit over the top, sometimes more than a bit. Diane Feinstein my ass, one of the few Democratic women politicians who might just be worse than Hillary. (Except, at least no Bill.) And citing Rush Limbaugh? Come on. Just to get your nose out of joint.
Nevertheless, Paglia seems to be exactly tuned to the wavelength of BS kind of feminism that Hillary broadcasts on. Do you really not think she gets her dead to rights in that piece? Paglia’s been around for years, maybe we’re just catching up with her. So maybe it’s time to regroup.
The problem for me is that one need not be vicious and engage in arm-chair psychoanalysis to lay out the important reasons why HRC is unsuitable. Take away those components of the excerpt and she’s not saying anything that I, you, and others haven’t said/written. I been waiting for what felt like the right time to post a diary I wrote about debating HRC and have been undecided about posting another about her “off the reservation” comment. I don’t think Paglia gets either of those right.
Molly Ivins nailed it in 2006. As spot on today as it was then, if one is a progressive.
A good candidate is hard to find.
California, it’s now up to you. The polling says “Just like New York”. The exit polls elsewhere say that African Americans and Hispanics will back Clinton. The California Democratic establishment has lined up with Clinton.
Whatever bargaining power Sanders has at the convention will now be delivered by California, where I guess most voters think that the race is over.
Will be interesting to see what the total number of delegates over all 50 states and 8 territories turns out to be.
What bargaining power? Hillary doesn’t bargain – she obliterates.
Your first sentence says it all. It’s over. We lost. The oligarchs won.
Re: California “just like New York”.
As of now — Bernie is trailing Clinton, but not by as much as in New York. The gap has remained consistent at nine points since the end of March.
On the other hand, California does not have the kind of closed primary that is always bad news for Sanders. It has a semi-closed primary — if you are not a Democrat and you want to vote for Bernie you can register “no party preference.” If polls are based on “likely voters” they may not be taking this into account.
You suppose “most voters think that the race is over”. That must be true of GOP voters, but as for the Democratic primary, I don’t think so. On the contrary, because the primary isn’t until June 7, real campaigning in CA is only just starting.
You’re in SC, where the primary is very early. I vote in NY, which is a late one, so trust me on this. Voters in late primary states, who very rarely have an opportunity to make a difference for the candidate of their choice, are very eager to do that on the rare occasion when they can. (Look at Indiana.) Your point is valid for the GOP primary, but my point should apply to the California Democratic race in spades. Of course it applies to both candidates.
Finally, yes CA vitally important. But strong showings in the remaining earlier states could provide something of a cushion.
I’m not looking at the remaining opportunities for Bernie in terms of ultimate win or loss, but in terms of how well he can do. And I think the remaining voters are eager to have their voice be heard.
Wow. I miss Molly Ivins.
That piece is nuts. I can’t even begin to make it make sense.
Are you a Clinton supporter?
AG
Maha recently wrote:
“It has struck me for some time that the Clinton and Sanders supporters are not only disagreeing; we’re speaking different languages. We’re approaching the campaign with entirely different sets of assumptions and values. For this reason, it has been impossible to communicate with each other.”
She’s done quite a bit fo reading and research on this, and it’s very interesting.
http://www.mahablog.com/2016/04/29/the-great-democratic-party-schism/
Again…after all of the information so far available to you is in…
Are you a Clinton supporter?
AG
You know I’m not a Clinton supporter.
That was supposed to be a reply to the commenter above. Sorry.
AG
Example of Paglia’s “analysis”:
And is there anything creepier than that current Hillary meme, the campaign slogan “I’m with her”? The blurred borderlines of those pronouns (“I” numbly dissolving into “her”) and that ambiguous preposition (“with” her like a child, a lover, or a nurse’s aide with a geriatric patient?) are close to pathological.
And an authorized translation into normal English:
Folks, I have nothing to say, so I’ll just trot out some postmodernist boilerplate to fool you once again.
I recommend a look at The Postmodernist Generator.
Now that you mention it, 2008 was indeed when I started following you, and I was indeed a passionate pro-Obama anti-Hillary activist, and I’m still glad Obama prevailed.
That said, it’s a massively different situation now and HRC is at least a slightly better candidate. Her knowledge and composure during that 11 hour Benghazi hearing was the clincher for me. I mean, I’m still going to vote for Bernie in CA, but I’m good with Hillary.
Trump is obviously a clear and present danger, but I’m still not convinced that any of the other 16 GOP contenders was any better. The GOP in its entirety started getting really dangerous in 2010 – they absolutely have to be kept out of the WH – this is a defensive election.
All that said, the most important election is 2018. If we can’t get enough turnout to flip the statehouses pre-gerrymandering, we’re really screwed.
HRC’s record as SOS, along with her post SOS activities and those of the Clinton foundation, make her an even more unacceptable candidate IMO.
Support comes from those who decided it was “Time for a woman” or “Because the pastor or fellow worshippers said to vote for HRC” (why that isn’t a dog whistle it all)
While Sanders support comes from those who were fully informed about both candidates even though some weren’t even informed on what they needed to do to vote in the primary.
It is honestly sad the level of commentary some here at the pond have resorted to try and explain away why Clinton is handily beating Senator Sanders.
Try this level of commentary — The majority of Democrats think you’re wrong.
Oh. You’re one of those!!!
i see.
Then try this level of commentary. If the majority of Democrats think you’re wrong, you are probably correct.
Especially now that a great number of heretofore reliable RatPublican monied and hawk types are going to switch to the DemRat side because HRC is now the most right/centrist candidate left of the three possibilities.
AG.
Wow. That analysis has left my head spinning.
Get used to it.
That’s what happens when the world turns upside down…as it has politically since Trump entered (and proceeded to dominate) the presidential fray.
AG
“Because the pastor or fellow worshippers said to vote for HRC” (why that isn’t a dog whistle it all)
Guess I should have included “Because the pastor or fellow worshipers said to vote for Cruz,” which is also true in this election cycle, to make it clear that my criticism applied to all candidate politics from the pulpit. Regardless of the religious denomination and political party. Because some people hear racist dog whistles when none exists (and oddly, some of those same people don’t hear racist dog whistles when they do exist).
When Madeleine Albright is out there saying that there is a special place in hell for women that don’t support HRC, yes, I do think that is “time for a woman” preaching.
The only proper application of “time for a woman,” “time of a X,” etc. is when all other things are equal. (Tokenism for any job creates rather than resolves prior bad policies.) As a single criteria, it’s thoughtless. IMHO, Obama and McCain or Romney were never equally acceptable or qualified for the office of the Presidency, and it disturbed me that so many people used race as the criteria for their vote. Obama was the more acceptable candidate for the job and the color of his skin should have been irrelevant to a voter’s decision. That he also broke the color barrier at the level of the Presidency should have said more about voters in 2008 than it did about Obama (many exceptional AAs in the US came before him). A shame that was bollixed up by the GOP after the ’08 election.
When was it first possible to elect a Catholic POTUS? We don’t know. Did Al Smith lose in ’28 because he was Catholic or because he was a Democrat? Would JFK have been elected more easily in 1960 if he weren’t a Catholic or by then or before had it become a non-issue? When propositions and/or barriers that are assumed to exist are so rarely tested, and even when tested aren’t necessarily the deciding variable, it forever remains unknowable as to when such a barrier ceased to exist.
By 2000 there seemed to be fairly decent data that suggested a majority of voters were open to a woman or AA for POTUS if the candidate was otherwise deemed qualified. Dole, Braun, and Sharpton weren’t viewed as qualified. It takes time for any politician to build that resume. And regardless of Geraldine Ferraro said in 2008, the path forward has been steeper and filled with more rocks for AAs than women. Why did it take until 1974 for a women to be elected governor and 1981 for a women to be elected to the US Senate in her own right (not appointed and without family political connections)? (Although I’d count Margaret Chase Smith’s election in 1948 as in her own right, but she was first elected to the House as the widow of a US House Rep.) Why weren’t there more women following Mary Norton’s lead, elected to the US House in her own right in 1925 and remained in office until 1951? (Check out how most of the women made it to the US House in that period of time.
With college students pressuring their friends to support Sanders because it is the “cool” thing to do. My point is that sure there is some element of sheep herding for EVERY candidate but that certainly doesn’t mean that those people are the majority. It is the height of arrogance to assume that all the people who support your candidate are oh so thoughtful and enlightened while other candidates supporters are just uninformed sheeple. And even more arrogant is to demand proof that that is the case. Frankly that arrogance is exactly where the Sanders campaign went wrong with the BASE of the party. He and his surrogates talked down to them instead of talking with them.
As for what Secretary Albright said she has been saying it for years and I never agreed with it. And if you notice once she said it in the context of this primary and it blew up in her face she has not been out as public of a surrogate for Clinton. Same with Steinem.
Its always been a longshot bid but you certainly never used your platform or connections to help. And you quite possibly helped HRC with what you did do. It surely doesnt help when you’re equating Sanders supporters with children.
You dony think either are ideal. Fair enough but dont deny the real effect of what you did do. Its important to fight the good fight even if you think you’ll lose. Was the right thing to do.
Analysts are not obligated to be advocates, whatever their personal opinions might be. Nor are bloggers obligated to be activists.
We need to respect more the role and the risks that individuals are willing to take. Those are their own decisions.
Not obligated to, agreed. But I’m not going to shy away from calling it a bad decision on a case by case basis.
I said several weeks ago, when this whole discussion about “Bernie can’t win and never could win” was getting under way, that I was starting to really see that the the position of bloggers and commenters, just by virtue of being bloggers and commenters, could be inherently at odds.
So, bloggers are not obliged to be activists, right. But commenters , I believe, are free to agree or disagree with the poster, or each other. And what I value most about BT, in addition to Booman himself, is that the whole setup encourages thoughtful, long-term discussions of that kind.
Furthermore, as somebody who, in pre-blogging days, was involved with the information end of activism, I understand that activism and objectivity are not mutually exclusive. You have merely to think of all the perfectly FACTUAL stories the NY Times does not see “fit to print.”
I remember cases where people would tell me, “we can’t say that”, even though it was (a) absolutely relevant, (b) a matter of public record (c) about public business, and (d) already widely reported. Presumably because it would be considered too partisan. Even though we were not pretending to be nonpartisan! But we never gave out information that was not either true or (on matters of controversy) backed by research and documentation.
In one way the comparison with children was of a piece with the whole mildly patronizing tone. But simply as an analogy, it was a good one, except it leads to the opposite conclusion. You encourage your children in worthwhile efforts.
It’s like the old saying: “It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.” When people are collectively engaged in a collective effort towards important and necessary goals, and are doing it the right way, the main point is not whether they win or lose, nor is it predicting whether they will win or lose. The effort is valuable in itself, and “it has legs.” It is not something to be discouraged “because you can’t win.”
I don’t even understand that kind of thinking. If that’s you rattitude, why bother? Booman himself gets the basic idea, at least intellectually: he has said many times that Bernie should stay in and that the better he does by the convention, the better position we will all be in.
What he doesn’t seem to get is that the constant refrain of “winning is impossible” and “you’ll only be disappointed” is not the way to get to that. Nor is encouraging people to work for that “a lie.” It’s not a statement about a fact, whether true or false, it’s a motivation toward a goal. That’s why I say, let’s take our cue from how Bernie himself is handling this.
“It’s not whether you win or lose, it’s how you play the game.”
That’s true about games. It’s not true about life. Life is not a game. Life is a struggle for survival in a hostile world. Unrelated individuals band together for mutual support in this struggle to survive.
Supporting your enemies because they are on the same “Team” is for chumps.
I didn’t say or imply anything about supporting your enemies, or anything against the importance of unrelated individuals banding together.
And while we’re on the topic of unrelated individuals banding together for mutual support, you should note that 40% of black voters 29 and under support Bernie Sanders.
And by the way, the Latino vote for all age groups, as far as anyone can tell, seems to be just about divided between Sanders and Clinton.
http://www.nbcnews.com/news/latino/poll-latino-voters-near-evenly-divided-over-clinton-sanders-n5525
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And finally, right, life isn’t a game. But I didn’t say it was. First of all I wasn’t talking about life, but about an election campaign, as vital as it may be. Second of all I didn’t say the campaign was a game, I said in a certain way it resembles a game. That’s called an analogy. “A comparison between two things, typically on the basis of their structure and for the purpose of explanation or clarification.”
I was complaining about the philosophy embodied in the quote, not you personally. Sorry that I gave the wrong impression.
The worst was those poisonous pieces suggesting Sanders will surrender and help boost the Wall Street candidate.
They have succeeded in thoroughly disillusioning me about politics in general and the Democratic Party in particular. I always knew it was corrupt, but I always thought it was a bulwark for ordinary Americans against the owning class. Now, ironically, it is the Republican candidate who speaks (probably with forked tongue) for working Americans and the Democratic candidate who speaks for their oppressors.
I think Nixon had more integrity than either Clinton. At least he tried to help his people cover up when they got in trouble. He didn’t abandon them.
“…she’s not saying anything that I, you, and others haven’t said/written.”
I suppose that’s what I liked about it. LOL