Sanders beat Trump in NY by over 200,000 votes
New York primary results: track the votes live
Raw numbers are funny. But Trump’s admittedly massive victory tonight over his rivals doesn’t even mean he could deliver his own State in November.
This works both ways. I am feeling the Bern but understand that his relative massive wins in the Mountain West don’t mean much in the final analysis. Neither Bernie or Hillary is going to carry Wyoming or Idaho.
My point? It is on the top of my head. And a reason I have a hard time finding hats that fit right. Or left. Or center.
Which is a backhand way of addressing the Hillary Camp’s arguments about inevitability based on her structural advantage in super delegates, fund raising and back stop in Super and SEC Tuesdays. Every single bit of that was baked in the cake on the day Hilary announced. And in effect the argument is that no matter what happened between say June 1 2015 and April 1 2016 that we should all conclude “Hil has got this”. But given the starting advantage was their ANY scenario that would have changed this narrative? Given the advantages in money, organizational structure, endorsements, name recognition was there EVER a chance that Hil would be blown out in Iowa? As opposed to squeaking out a narrow win? Was Nevada really going to go sideways that far? Or South Carolina as a plate setter for Super Tuesday?
No. The original plan was for Hilary to clear the field by March 1. And it was a good plan. And one that I was okay with on the whole. But it came kind of a cropper, a plan that would have and in fact did put paid to people like Next Generation Malloy came up a little short against “Are you Fucking Kidding Me Socialist Bernie?”
But now the Clinton folk want to have it the same way. “Gosh we only managed to transform our huge initial advantage in money, superdelagates and initial state support into a major lead rather than the overwhelming lead we anticipated so you all should quit anyway”.
Well no. Hilary and her team had the goal of sweeping the board, of clearing all obstacles by last month. Instead they are just the overwhelming favorites in the month of April. But the argument that Sanders shouldn’t even have tried is kind of lame. Because exactly nobody expected this to be even this close. Even if realistically the gap cannot be closed.
If Bernie had been in the Democratic Party for the last 25 years and supported other Democrats during that period I believe he would have beaten Hillary easily.
But he took the easy way, in a tiny liberal state, sitting on the sidelines and telling everyone(like every green lantern) what a shitty job everyone was doing.
His message and thoughts are great on many levels, but he got in the game way, way too late.
EMichael I get that in part. But lets be realistic. Bernie started from a position that he would not accept Super Pac money and was at a huge disadvantage to his opponent who not only would accept it but had a clear in with the Party Committees starting with but not stopping with the DNC.
Hillary started literally $100 million ahead and with 100% name recognition and with 500 or so super delegates in her camp, most of whom came with their own established fund raising networks to deploy not only on her behalf and their own but also to fund down ticket candidates. In light of all that asking Bernie to share his small dollar network with a bunch of down ticket folk that were mostly committed to his opponent is nutty.
The major Party Committees are dedicated to supporting incumbents and candidates willing to go along to get along and get dollars as a consequence. And I am okay with that. But to ask insurgents to fund establishment down ticket people when they are starting roughly $99,999,999 behind their opponent is asking a little much
Bernie’s organizations are now beginning to share their fundraising with selected progressives like Zephyr Teachout. Key word “selected”. They have and had NO obligation to throw money behind candidates favored by DWS. Or for that matter past heads of the DNC like Terry McA.
You might as well ask why Bernie wasn’t a charter member of the DLC and Third Way over the last 25 years. Maybe because those parts of the Party were not actually pulling the oars to propel the boat in the right direction?
The political story that is missing is in NY; only registered party members may vote in primary. To me this raises the issue of voter suppression by this two party system. As an ever larger portion of the population is registered as independents. Who are barred from voting in primary’s.
This kind of tells us where all the BS is coming from when we as democrats are requested to sign petitions about voter suppression.
To say Bernie has been sitting back and criticizing others for 25 years is correct – or at least one way of putting it. To say Bernie has been engaged in hand to hand combat, often without allies, never surrendering, with a prevailing economic and political system that does not serve the interests of the citizenry is also correct. But even the most perfunctory glance at the landscape reveals one thing: he has been right all along.
Bernie was at the first sit-in in the North in support of Dr. King’s Civil Rights movement in Chicago in 1962, the same Dr. King who leveled blistering critiques of the prevailing model of capitalism as a failed system that does not serve the interests of the citizenry. In his speech at Georgetown Bernie explained what he means by Democratic Socialism, where he invoked time and again the history of FDR’s ideas, ideals and accomplishments, the same FDR who was called a traitor to his class and pejoratively a “Socialist” (despite rescuing capitalism from itself). Both FDR and MLK were also right.
Bernie began his campaign on faith, on the idea of “if you build it, they will come,” reasoning that there were millions of outraged and disaffected citizens like himself who accurately perceived how the prevailing political and economic order serves the interests of the tiniest fraction of the citizenry at the direct expense of the whole. There can be little doubt that the most accurate definition of the prevailing political order is not democracy – self-rule by the governed – but plutocracy – government by the rich. He – we – resist and reject this prevailing order, and offer meaningful alternative ways to construct an order that does, in fact, serve the interests of the citizenry. In the process, he – we – have contributed $200 million to carry on the fight. We have been right all along.
The real question now is whether a movement has been created, and, if so, how it proceeds. As “money talks and bullshit walks” is the dominant mode of politics today, a steady accumulation of $200 million every 15 months to advance the ideas of Bernie’s Democratic Socialism would be to permanently alter that dominant mode. And I for one would be plenty happy to continue donating to it for as long as I live.
There is one last minute thought that comes to mind that could save the day. It would be the remote possibility that Trump would team up with Sanders as a VP in the general election. This move would tilt the general election back into Trump Sanders favor although it would be going against every principle that Sanders has been preaching…I still think they should do anything to beat the Clinton machine.
Seriously???
Bill, you are walking a little to far on the wild side
Ryan, I would suggest had everyone who showed for Bernie been able to vote Clinton would have lost. In NY if you were not a register democrat since October of last year, you were not permitted to vote. Remember Bernie has brought thousand out of the closet of not taking part in elections.
Trump and Bernie were the only ones to bring up the trade issues, or taxing gambling on wall street; so not entirely different. Still the idea of them running together is a pipe dream, which I do like.
Bruce,
You have to be in the system to change the system. Unless you use guns.
“You had to pay — or collect — as much as $353,000 per couple to attend last week’s fundraisers for Democratic presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton, including one hosted at the home of actor George Clooney. After the affair drew protesters who support Bernie Sanders, Chuck Todd, host of NBC’s Meet the Press, asked Clooney what happened when he encountered them.
Clooney said he was accused of being a corporate shill, which is “one of the funnier things you could say about me.” Then he told Todd, “The overwhelming amount of money that we’re raising, and it is a lot, but the overwhelming amount of the money that we’re raising is not going to Hillary to run for president, it’s going to the down-ticket.
“It’s going to the congressmen and senators to try to take back Congress. And the reason that’s important (is) … we need to take the Senate back because we need to confirm the Supreme Court justice, because that fifth vote on the Supreme Court can overturn Citizens United and get this obscene, ridiculous amount of money out so I never have to do a fundraiser again. And that’s why I’m doing it.”
http://www.politifact.com/punditfact/statements/2016/apr/17/george-clooney/george-clooney-decries-big-money-politics-says-mos/
Sanders is focused on a political and economic agenda. He is not focused on defeating the Clinton regime except to the extent he is involved in a campaign against her. he and his wife have said repeatedly that they would vote for her in an election and that any day of the week she is better than any GOP alternative — especially Trump.
He is completely straightforward in his desire to build a “revolution” against the prevailing order — exemplified above and beyond all other candidates running on either side by HRH HRC — by building (emphasis on build) a mass movement of the citizenry to change the system. Ironically, that mass movement includes all those disaffected Trump supporters who cannot see on which side their bread is buttered, primarily whites who accurately perceive that American society is changing and that soon they will be not a majority but a majority minority. There is deep-seated anxiety about that change, which is the reason why they support Trump, accompanied by a deep-seated economic anxiety. But the aims and interests of Bernie and Trump could not be more antagonistic.
Bill the Soviets thought the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact was a good idea at the time. Frankly anyone that thinks that having Hilary in the Presidency as an essential continuation of Obama is more risky to the country and the world than giving the atomic codes to Trump needs their head examined.
Trump is not a friend of the working class, look at his actual tax plan. Plus his unhinged racism. Sanders is going to ally with him for what? To keep Robert Rubin out of the West Wing? Get a grip.
Bruce,
He has nothing to get a grip on.
I am so tired of this uproar about closed primaries. One day people will understand that primaries are not elections, they are the process by which candidates are chosen by the party.
Meanwhile, not one of these people have a bad thing to say about caucuses(wonder why?), which are far, far more undemocratic that closed primaries.
In 22 primary elections, Clinton has won 17 states with a combined population of 167 million, by an average margin of 29 points. Sanders has won 5 states with a combined population of 22 million. The rest of Sanders victories have been in caucuses, generally in some of the smallest states.
It’s a pretty tough case to say Sanders should be handed the nomination anyway because the rules that have been in place for enough time for a campaign to know them sometimes don’t allow people who are not members of the party to help select the party’s candidate — and when President Obama beat the allegedly already-coronated Clinton under more or less the same unfair rules. At some point the sour grapes ought to stop.
And now it’s time for Sanders to publicly acknowledge that Clinton gets contributions from many sources, including unions, civil rights groups, women’s groups, consumer rights groups and environmental organizations that in many cases advocate policies diametrically opposed to the ones that would be favored by Wall Street, major corporations and the wealthy.
It’s also time to acknowledge publicly that this widespread and sometimes contradictory support, along with Clinton’s stated positions like a new tax on financial transactions, elimination of the special tax break for hedge fund managers, extension of regulation to more financial institutions not currently covered by Dodd-Frank, closing the Volcker Rule loophole, defending Dodd-Frank from Republican attacks, raising the Federal minimum wage that businesses have to pay workers by 70%, making it easier for workers to bring in union representation, instituting a “Buffet Rule” that will raise taxes on the wealthy, and defending Obama executive initiatives like the overtime rule and the FCC’s net neutrality ruling, are not consistent with the “it stands to reason” logic that Sanders has been trying to push with some success about her support from Wall Street and corporate sources as the only support that would affect her policy proposals.
Continued success with that misrepresentation now will have no effect on who is nominated but only on depressing turnout for the Democratic Party’s Presidential nominee and, therefore, for the rest of the Democratic ticket. If he doesn’t care about whether the Democrats take back the Senate and the House, he will continue these attacks that amount to character assaults reinforcing the negative image Fox News has been trying to promote with no evidentiary support for many years. If he does care, he will change his tune from demonizing her to promoting his ideas as he promised he would confine himself to in the first place.
Lets be clear. The caucus and the closed primary are the tools the oligarchs established long ago in both parties as a means of control the election process.. There is really no democracy intended in the rules rigging process. Just because something has always been done that way doesn’t make it right. Lets face it if it were not for Trump and Sanders we would not even be talking about any of these issues…Trump and Sanders have already done more for democracy than all the Clintons , Bushes and Obama have all combined. If we get another Clinton we will all get more of the same where no change will come about on any issue. We can no longer afford that as a nation. We need major change in so many government policies that will bring power back to the people. We must have a real functioning democracy to make changes in our economy and society.
Bill not sure why this went to moderation.
ditto.
One rather interesting thing about the campaigns for the party’s nomination in both parties is the extent to which it has become explicit that the parties are private organizations, choosing their representative as they wish, and their wishes are not necessarily democratic.
Once it’s explicit, the problem becomes obvious: why should government power be used to protect a private duopoly? Why should the government fund elections in which candidature is limited by private, non-democratic organizations? Why should it permit limits on ballot access for both candidates and voters? The U.S. is among the least democratic of the self-described democratic nations. I hope the problems that have become so obvious lead to some thoughts about reforming the way we elect officials.
“At the Federal Reserve’s Jackson Hole conference in 2008, the group of bankers and regulators exploded in anger when former central banker Willem Buiter dared to point out the obvious, that the Fed had a bad case of “cognitive regulatory capture,” meaning it “listens to Wall Street and believes what it hears.” Or as German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble put it: “If you want to drain the swamp, then you don’t ask the frogs for their opinion.”
In the United Kingdom, in marked contrast to the U.S. response, the Bank of England and the Financial Services Authority, which was one of three key banking regulators from 2001 to its abolition in 2013, were both highly critical of British banks after the crisis. This is more important than it might seem. A widespread failing in the United States is the degree to which banking authorities treat their charges with undue deference.
The British regulators were less generous to banks during their rescues than ours were. Banks that received bailouts were barred from paying directors bonuses, subject to restrictions on executive pay, and required to continue lending to consumers and small businesses and in particular to help “people struggling with mortgage payments to stay in their homes.” The only similar measure in the US was minor restrictions on executive pay for TARP recipients.
The Bank of England and the FSA also pushed for more radical reforms than their U.S. counterparts did. They advocated strenuously for a breakup of banks along Glass-Steagall lines, separating retail banking and banking to small- and medium-size businesses from “wholesale” banking and investment banking. The U.K. Treasury was vehemently opposed, but the resulting reforms, set forth in the 2013 Vickers Report on banking standards, did include “ring-fencing” the retail and small-business operations in ways that go further than the watered-down measures in the U.S. In the U.K., the retail/small-business units segregate deposits from risky derivatives and trading activities. Those operations also have their own boards and publish financial statements as though they were independent. By contrast, the U.S. still allows banks to use consumer deposits to finance derivatives positions.
In a striking contrast to the Federal Reserve, the Bank of England has also provided intellectual leadership on the hazards created by big banks. Widely recognized as one of the most creative and original economists of his generation, Andrew Haldane, the BoE’s executive director of financial stability, has published a wide range of articles that lay waste the banking industry’s claims that it deserves kid-glove treatment. For instance, one favorite “keep-your-hands-off-the-regulatory-dial” argument is that banks are so valuable to the economy that they must be given free rein.
On the contrary, Haldane and other overseas regulators have argued that regulators should be treating the banks more as public utilities, like water or power, which are heavily regulated precisely because they are essential to the running of an economy. This is also something that is not discussed in U.S. regulatory circles. In a 2010 speech, “The $100 Billion Question,” Haldane concluded that the financial crisis of 2008-09 produced an output loss equivalent to $60 trillion to $200 trillion for the world economy. Assuming that a crisis occurs every 20 years, he said, overall that means that a poorly regulated financial sector does not add any net benefit to the economy—its repeated crises cost far more than Wall Street brings to overall economic growth. Haldane compared the speculative trading excesses of bankers to air pollution from the auto industry and wrote that “systemic risk is a noxious by-product” not unlike the damage to public health from carbon monoxide, lead and other toxins. In the auto sector, those problems were redressed through taxation and occasional prohibitions or restrictions on poisonous emissions. Why not take a similar approach to over-the-counter derivatives?
Haldane used a 2008 crisis cost of one times global GDP, the low end of his estimated range. That sounded large at the time but has proved to be about right. Haldane then tried the tax approach: make the big banks pay for the cost of the crisis over 20 years, which is about how often big busts occur in our deregulated world. The first-year charge alone would wipe out the banks. Or as Haldane colorfully put it: “Fully internalizing the output costs of financial crises would risk putting banks on the same trajectory as the dinosaurs, with the levy playing the role of the meteorite.” The implication was that barring banks from crisis-inducing behavior was the best remedy, regardless of the impact on profits, since banks could not begin to pay for the costs of financial meltdowns.
Dire tradeoffs that clear-cut mean that there’s no justification for the timid approach that U.S. and many foreign regulators have taken to systemically risky banks. Haldane’s opus confirms the popular instinct: Bankers need to be leashed and collared—and the sooner, the better.
Skeptics are right to harbor doubts. For instance, the recent living-will reviews deemed Morgan Stanley and Goldman to be sketchy on how they’d wind down their derivatives positions. In fact, there’s no tidy way to shutter a major derivatives player. Top derivatives expert Satyajit Das, who has advised on every major international financial bankruptcy since the mid-1990s, described how messy the resolution of Lehman Brothers’ derivatives was, and for reasons that were intrinsic to its business model, not just the unplanned bankruptcy filing. American regulators refuse to challenge the financial-services industry’s claim that derivatives are used primarily for legitimate hedging and arbitrage. In truth, as the 2009 report by the U.K.’s FSA concluded, derivatives trading is mainly used for speculation, meaning creating risk and leverage.
Today U.S. banks are loading up on derivatives trading again. But until U.S. regulators come to conclusions about Wall Street’s practices that are similar to those of the U.K. and other European regulators, there’s ample reason to wonder whether they will realize the dangers of these untested living wills before the next crisis hits. The grim truth is that no one in the U.S. government is seriously considering an alternative solution to this problem. That spells trouble the next time Wall Street threatens to blow up the economy.”
Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/04/new-york-primary-financial-crisis-wall-street-213822#ixzz46PRwgvHf
Bernie Sanders? “I don’t need Dodd-Frank now to tell me that we have got to break up these banks.”
Hillary Clinton? According to tax returns released by Clinton’s campaign, she received a total of $675,000, for three separate speeches to Goldman Sachs in 2013 alone.
Hillary’s misrepresentation, about Frank Dodd and that large contribution did not affect Obama behavior on financial laws, and that Frank Dodd would suffice with minor changes.
We must also remember Hillary wanted even more draconian measures add to welfare reform legislation.
Clinton Vs. Sanders on Big Banks (1/2)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QiIRK3lRwEw
Beene,
You are simply a total ass that should spend all his time trying not to talk.
The world would thank you if you are successful.
EMichael, sorry you’re candidate (Hillary) is such bright person with absolutely no ethics or morals in the past or present.
You do remember she was fired from her first job in DC for lying.
Not my candidate.
Now, try to think about that for a second………
Then bored and posting fulfills some personal need?
I thought Ms 57’s posts were interesting and well-written.
FDR was not a perfect human being. Neither were the heroes of my youth, JFK and Mickey Mantle. Ms. Clinton is certainly not, but I recall a right-wing email that circulated in my office in the early 1990’s, about how the bleeding-heart-liberal lawyer, HRC, represented two black criminals, a man and a woman, and got them off on a murder charge, so that today (at the time of the email), instead of being in jail where they belong, the man is a high-school coach and the woman is the Vice President of a local bank. That isn’t how it was slanted but those were the facts I gleaned from it. I can’t vouch for its accuracy but it outraged the right-wingers in my office and provoked the opposite reaction from me.
Jim V, thanks for the compliment, but just to be clear — HRC has talked for years about the “vast right-wing conspiracy” out to get her, and it is undeniably true. It is amazing how widely-disliked she is, but impossible to tell how much of that is due to the conspirators — I suspect a lot, especially on the right. The rest she has earned for herself.
It is also to amazing to realize that the Democrats, though it isn’t yet certain, are about to nominate a candidate who is hated by one-third and distrusted by two-thirds of the populace — yet she is in the fight. She better drop to her knees every night and thank God for Trump and Cruz. But what a situation we are all left to face — the election of a President will turn on which candidate is most hated. Helluva way to run a country.
Beene’s claim that Hillary was fired from the Watergate investigation legal team has been thoroughly debunked. It was a rumor that surfaced in 2008 in the right wing email fever swamp based on accusations by someone who claimed to be her supervisor but although part of the same team wasn’t her supervisor. His accusations were thoroughly implausible — as if she could hide documents in her office that would hide the existence of precedent contrary to the position she was being asked to argue.
http://www.snopes.com/politics/clintons/zeifman.asp
Notice that Beene provided no link — and not the slightest hint that there is another side to the story. That suggests that he is one of the paid Republican trolls given the task of pretending to be a Bernie Berner while putting junk on left-leaning websites that will tend to undermine the likely Democratic Presidential candidate. Can you imagine what we would start seeing if Sanders were to start looking like the clear favorite?
I voted for Bernie in the VA primary, but obviously I have not been among the super-Hillary-hating BernieSiblings who just want to wipe up the floor with her. She is unpopular now and highly distrusted, despite having run reportedly the most honest campaign of any of the candidates (yes, check it out, and that includes Bernie, although not by much over him). Remember that about two years ago when she was not SecState or running for office, she was wildly popular with that pic of her on her phone circulating all over, cool as all get out, but now, ugh.
I think all the rules and money are a big wash. Of course she had and has the backing of the overwhelming majority of the Dem establishment and thus also of the super delegates. But if Bernie were to beat her in pledged delegates and votes, those super delegates would probably be able to be convinced to switch, as they did in 2008. But neither of those outcomes looks likely, so even though Bernie does better in matchup polls against GOP candidates, the s-ds are unlikely to be convinced to switch, despite some Bernie backers promising an effort to do so, even if he comes in behind on pledged delegates and votes, as now looks extremely likely.
On the money issue, Hillary started out ahead, but for the last several months Bernie has been raising more than she has, and from all these wonderful sources that are not big rich people or organizations. If money were what determines things, he would be in the lead. But he is not. And if money determined things, Jeb Bush would have the GOP nomination sewn up, him being much further ahead in money than anybody in either party. But look where he is now. Trump has his own money (although probably less than he claims), but has mostly ridden on free publicity from making outrageous statements and having brawls at his rallies.
As for the rules, they cut both ways. I saw someone above saying caucuses were put in to help party elites control things, but Bernie has won all but about two (if that many) caucuses with his more enthusiastic followers. Yeah, Hillary has the edge in closed primaries, while Bernie has the edge in open ones, but there is clearly a distribution of states across these categories. And as for NY, sure Bernie would have done better in an open primary, but a 58-42 lead is hard to overcome and Trump would have pulled some of the independents. What surprises me about that primary is that Bernie did not do better in his old home town, especially in Brooklyn. But he did not, and that has probably done him in for good in terms of the nomination.
As it is, in terms of things being “baked in,” what looks to me to have been baked in and not much changed as we have gone along has been which groups have tended to favor which candidate. So even before things got going seriously, we knew that Bernie was way ahead of Hillary among youthful voters (and especially while male ones), while Hillary had a commanding lead among African American voters, especially middle-aged and older ones, along with smaller leads among other racial/ethnic minority groups. While some Hillary supporters have sneered at especially while male youthful Bernie supporters, the sneering at African-American supporters, especially those in the South, by Bernie supporters has been pretty embarrassing. In any case, the groups that were tilting one way or the other have continued to do so pretty consistently throughout the campaign.
Hi Barkley
My only quibble is on the African-American in the South question where I think it has been the Hillary supporters who have been quibbling and dissembling.
The argument, at least among the more straight thinking Bernie supporters, was not that these voters shouldn’t COUNT but that contrary to the narrative being sold by the Hilary folk that they shouldn’t be DISPOSITIVE.
The Hilary people got and get very close to the argument that they are winning in States that look like “Real Democrats” and Bernie is only winning in outliers while throwing in a lot of bullshit about Primary vs Caucus states. Meanwhile deliberately ignoring what should be the big question:
Why should we care that you have shown you can run up 29 point victories in a deep Red State like Texas that you have zero chance of carrying in the Fall? This to some degree is the point of the post title, how YUUUGE of a victory is New York for Trump when he ended up 240,000 or so votes BEHIND the guy who got STOMPED by Hilary?
As a hard headed vote counter there are excellent reasons to discount many of the States Hilary won on Super and SEC Tuesday. But the ones that you CAN’T dismiss are Florida, Virginia, Massachusetts and Missouri. When Bernie dropped the last two I concluded “not this year”. But I was right to dismiss her margins in Alabama and Mississippi. Like Trump’s win in New York we are talking something that in November has little to no import. And should never been allowed to be presented as DISPOSITIVE in the way it was. And certainly not to be spun as it was and is as signs of some systematic racism by Bernie and so-called “Bernie Bros”. (Not that there are not annoying crazy fanboys and fangirls on both sides).
The original narrative of the Hilary campaign was that her money, public record and subsequent 100% name recognition would allow her to sweep the first four States: Iowa because superior organization, New Hampshire because of deep connections going back to Bill’s “comeback Kid!” narrative, South Carolina as proof of black support and Nevada as some combination of all three of organization and political support plus deep support by minorities. In all of this the Superdelegates were only to serve as validation. And the same for the sealing of the deal on Super and SEC Tuesdays. All of that was designed to seal the deal and put a point on the narrative.
Instead things were a lot more messy than expected and New Hampshire wasn’t Hilary vs O’Malley or some other guy and Iowa was WAY closer than expected. And so the narrative pivoted.
If you think about it there was no way that Hilary was going to come into March having already lost her super delegates or having gotten stomped in the South. There is no realistic scenario that wouldn’t have had her with an advantage in the count. Which means using that lead as being DISPOSITIVE IN THE EVENT is the equivalent of saying we shouldn’t have had a contest AT ALL. That having locked down the Establishment (and you can’t spin Supers as anything else) and Red State Dems everyone else was just wasting their time.
And I don’t really have quarrels with this as a political strategy, the name of the game is to win. But to have her lead among Supers and Southern African Americans be advanced as some sort of MORAL validation rather than a POLITICAL move is disingenuous.
Like Bush, Hilary started with a lot of advantages. Leading to endless discussions of dynastic contests etc, etc ad nauseum. Unlike Bush though Hilary’s basic strategy held up, enough at least to deliver her to March with a large numeric edge even as it didn’t (as planned) wrap the whole contest up. But there is a big difference between calculated political advantage and moral and political mandate. Nailing down the Superdelegates in advance shouldn’t be allowed to make any argument at all. “Hey Hilary has this great big lead!” “Uh yeah, but a big part of that was in place months before the first vote was cast”.
Fact Check: Was Hillary Clinton fired from Watergate investigation?
By Carole Fader Sat, Mar 8, 2014 @ 9:48 pm | updated Sat, Mar 8, 2014 @ 10:01 pm
“In order to pull this off, Zeifman said that Rodham wrote a fraudulent legal brief, and confiscated public documents.
After the Nixon impeachment investigation was finished, Zeifman fired Rodham and said he refused to give her a letter of recommendation.
According to the Calabrese column as reported by TruthOrFiction.com, Zeifman said he regrets not reporting Rodham to the appropriate bar association.
So what are we to make of all this? Calabrese’s interview with Zeifman has been published around the Internet and repeated by pundits such as Rush Limbaugh and Neil Boortz. But there is nothing to out-and-out confirm Zeifman’s rendition. That doesn’t mean it couldn’t be true, but it makes it difficult to arrive at the truth.”
More…..http://jacksonville.com/reason/fact-check/2014-03-08/story/fact-check-was-hillary-clinton-fired-watergate-investigation#
Beene try to stay on topic. This is awfully close to trolling and even closer to spamming the thread. My first impulse was just to have it go away.
Angry Bear likes to stay as close to First Amendment absolutism as we can. But that doesn’t extend to ads for Ugg Boots or posts that cite m-effing Rush Limbaugh and the truly execrable Neil Boortz as sources. Take that shit to Red State or the Freepers.
urban legend, I do from time to time post errors, but do not intentionally lie about anything.
Like my post the other day, I posted the wrong link, which I will correct now.
A little truth about what large donation get donators.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xu2L9cTSiDY
Bruce, please remove the post if you think it is inappropriate or really misrepresents Hillary’s behavior.
I think it is both. But you made and are making your bed here. “Please proceed Governor”.
It is awfully easy to stumble on a story like the one about Hillary and Watergate and run with it — even after doing “due diligence” on its veracity. It’s also awfully easy to want to stand by a post once you’ve determined for yourself that it is true or false. The only real solution is to keep an open mind if seriously challenged, as Beene has done, and have enough intellectual honesty to retract it and retreat into further research. Personally, I’ve looked into it since Beene first posted it earlier today and I don’t think it holds much water. A partisan posted, he was challenged, he worked to prove it, and was basically asked to fall back and reconsider — which he did. No harm, no foul.
Yes but we also have to consider “Cokie’s Law” that holds that anything out there that is under discussion, even in the fever swamps, is worth discussing on the Sunday talk shows as opposed to an older and wiser principle of “consider the source”. That is ANYONE citing Rush Limbaugh on a left of center site better be damn well prepared IN ADVANCE to have his evidentiary ducks in a row. Because you don’t get to just say “Some people say HITLERY, I was just repeating what I read on the Intertoobz”, and “let me get back to you”.
It’s like citing Frank Gaffney on Muslim infiltration of the highest levels of the U.S. government. No. Just NO.
Bruce,
Three points:
1) I am unaware of anybody who has argued that Hillary’s lead among super delegates grants her a moral edge, although some have made that argument about her African-American support. Indeed, many point to it as a moral failing. And I pointed out that her s-d support would probably disappear if Bernie were to come in first in both pledged delegates and votes. It is pledged delegates that people are clearly paying the most attention to. He fell behind in the southern states, but he could have caught up in others more than he did, with his loss in NY especially damaging.
2) In terms of this “red states should not count (as much)” in fact the Dem rules already have that baked in somewhat. Regularly blue states get more delegates than regularly red states, which is why NY is second in Dem delegates, even though it is fourth in pop after TX and FL (with CA first in both pop and delegates). As it is, even as Bernie has done well in the supposedly pro-elites caucus states, he has also done well in plenty of red states, probably as many as has Hillary. And I find it funny that you point out how she did not do all that well in (most of) the first four states, but then somehow that she got ahead in the following southern state primaries is to be held against her.
3) The really crucial states are the swingiest of the swing states. Bernie has won some of those, including NH and WI, but Hillary has taken all three of what are probably the most crucial: VA, FL, and OH (which you did not mention).
Barkley good points. In my defense my only pushback against your original post was “My only quibble is on the African-American in the South question”
And while I didn’t mention Ohio, neither did I mention Michigan or Wisconsin. Which while not traditionally as swingy as Ohio do have Republican governors and would not be put out of play by anyone today.
Plus you might have missed my overall point. If your formula for Success is A + B + C and A doesn’t perform as anticipated it is not obvious that you can fall back on B + C numerically equals “almost Success”. Not if B + C were in the bag to start with. Under that formula almost any outcome for A qualifies.
The Hilary plan as openly stated in July 2015 was to enter March 2016 with the nomination totally in the bag and all opponents exhausted and broke. Which of course was the exact same plan that JEB! had. And is in fact the standard plan for victory in these things. Which is why New Yorkers were marveling that for the first time in decades their votes actually meant something. Even though numerically the race was barely to the half way point. Well it didn’t work out that way. Not for JEB! and not entirely for Hilary. Instead they are reduced to saying “Hey the B Superdelegates still give us a huge advantage and why are you dissing the C African Americans”..
My ultimate point rests on matters of rhetoric and textual analysis (using ‘textual’ in its post-modern sense) and not really politics. Which is why I remained silent right up to this post. And tried to make it as joking and self-deprecating as I could going in. Not that I don’t take it seriously but because I got burned out in 2008 between Obots and PUMAs.
Guys,
Do not forget North Carolina. The actions of the GOP in that state will bring out an awful lot of voters in 2016. It will be in play.