It’s Clear By Now That the Second-Most Powerful Person in the Federal Government Will Be Bernie Sanders.
The Big Question Is, Who is the MOST Powerful Person: Paul Ryan or Donald Trump?
“I think my title [of head of outreach] is to be head of outreach and that’s something that I take very seriously,” he said, without explaining any more about the new role.
But Sanders did pound home his remedies for the Democratic Party.
“We need major, major reforms to the Democratic Party,” Sanders said going on to say that Trump was able to tap into discontent among Americans who felt completely ignored by the rest of the American political system.
Trump, Sanders continued, “said I hear that you are hurting and I hear and understand that you’re worried about the future, about your kids, and I alone can do something about it — and people voted for him.”
Sanders went on to tick off the promises Trump made that Democrats would hold him accountable for.
“He said we will not cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. Now I think that we should expand Social Security,” Sanders continued. “That is what he said, and pay attention to see what he now does. The question that will be resolved pretty quickly is whether or not everything that he was saying to the working class of this country was hypocrisy, was dishonest or whether he was sincere — and we will find out soon enough.”
Sanders recalled more promises made by the president-elect: “Mr. Trump says he wants to invest a trillion dollars in our crumbling infrastructure. That is a good sum of money, that is exactly what we should be doing and we will create millions of good-paying jobs if we do that. Mr. Trump, that’s what you said on the campaign trail; that’s what we look forward to seeing from you.”
Sanders’ speech comes as Trump grapples with reports that his transition team is struggling to make the necessary preparations for when Trump formally becomes president, as well as a time when he has appeared to waver over some of his key campaign promises.
Sanders wasn’t arguing that it is only important to call out Trump for any hypocrisy; he also said he would work with the incoming president if and where their policy positions intersected.
“Mr. Trump said that Wall Street, dangerous, doing bad things, he wants to re-establish Glass-Steagall legislation. I look forward to working with him,” Sanders said.
The Vermont senator’s speech also added to the growing demand among Democrats that Trump drop Steve Bannon, his incoming White House chief strategist. Bannon, while serving as executive chairman of Breitbart News, pegged the news outlet as the “platform for the alt-right,” which is known for anti-Semitic politics and ties to white nationalism. Almost 170 House Democrats earlier in the day signed a letter demanding Trump fire Bannon.
“We will not be involved in the expansion of bigotry, racism, sexism,” Sanders said. “Mr. Trump, we are not going backwards in terms of bigotry. We are going forward in creating a nondiscriminatory society.”
— Sanders on Trump: Hold him accountable, Daniel Strauss, Politico, last night
It may be pure coincidence that only about 36 hours after it was reported that someone “close to the transition team” publicly redefined political correctness as including criticism of appointments of Wall Street, banking, fossil fuel, and healthcare insurance insiders to the regulatory bodies charged with regulating and policing them—thus claiming that Trump was just being politically correct in promising to drain the swamp of extremely wealthy or extremely highly paid influence-peddlers-as-legislation-and-regulation-drafters—Trump ditched some of the Trump-government-by-industry-lobbyist juggernaut. At least for the moment.
Or maybe Jared Kushner reads Angry Bear.
More likely, though, it was, well, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren speaking to the public in the last 48 hours. And the realization that they weren’t gonna stop.
And that the news media was paying attention.
And that that could actually matter among the Rust Belt white blue-collar voters and rural voters who put him over the top in, well, the Rust Belt.
Cuz, unlike Hillary Clinton, Sanders and Warren won’t be offering contentless platitudes while flying over fly-over country.** They, unlike Clinton, will actually talk.*
Maybe they’ll even venture into, say, coal country and discuss the fact that oil and gas billionaires fighting for pipelines and to gain control of vast acreage of federal land have financial interests in further killing the coal industry, since it is the new technology of fracking and the like that, far more than the EPA, has killed the economy in Appalachia.
In any event, they as well as Sherrod Brown, who’s also speaking out (although no one outside of Ohio knows who is, but soon they very well might), do recognize that since it’s no longer actually the ‘80s or ‘90s, there’s actually little daylight on economic-policy interests between Rust Belt white blue-collar workers and the Obama coalition. And that therefore Paul Ryan’s agenda is effectively the diametric opposite of what they thought they were voting for.
Or at least what they wanted most to vote for.
As a reader noted to me this morning in the Comments thread to one of my recent posts, Trump received more votes in Wisconsin than Romney did. And indeed he did.
And as I pointed out to that reader, Bernie Sanders received fully 140,000 more votes in that state’s primary than did Clinton–140,000 more votes than Clinton, in a smallish state that is very predominantly white.
I also noted that Sanders received 17,000 more votes in Michigan than Clinton. And that he did that by keeping the African-American vote for Clinton down to 2-1–it was expected to be about 3-1–and by beating Clinton in every single county other than Wayne (Detroit) and Genesee (Flint).
And that that was an awful lot of white voters, in order to negate a 2-1 advantage for Clinton in Wayne and, probably, about that in Genesee. And that we’re talkin’ some mega-Republican-stronghold counties here.
I read those statistics–140,000-vote margin in WI and a 17,000-vote margin in MI for Sanders—just a few days ago. And I remember being shocked at the MI counties map the day after the primary.
Also telling: Sanders won the Indiana primary, as well, notwithstanding that a very sizable part of Indiana’s Democrats are African-Americans in Indianapolis and in the Gary/Hammond area.
And that although very much was made of Clinton’s large win in the Ohio primary, that primary was on the very last day of the state-primaries/caucuses season; only the DC primary came later, by a week. Ohio’s primary was on the same day as California’s, and the evening before, the AP reported that Clinton had just clinched the nomination with new commitments from super delegates. Meanwhile, in OH, Kasich, who was still on the ballot, won the Republican primary–although partly because the rest of the vote was split between Trump and Cruz.
In every one of these states, as well as in Iowa and New Hampshire, the Republican and Dem primaries were held on the same day. Iowa and New Hampshire are not only heavily white; they also are largely blue-collar. Sanders beat Clinton by 22 points in NH and won far more votes than did Trump. And in Iowa, while Clinton the caucus count by 0.03%, it is pretty widely believed that Sanders won the popular vote–which is why the state party committee, which had supported Clinton, refused to release the popular-vote count.
The beauty of the Sanders campaign was that it actually realized that the Reagan era’s divergence of economic interests between whites, especially blue-collar whites, and African Americans is largely now just history.
And that if Trump plays Charlie McCarthy to Paul Ryan’s Edgar Bergen, or for that matter to Mitch McConnell’s, or the U.S. Chamber of Commerce’s, or the Heritage Foundation’s—these do mostly overlap, of course—he’s unlikely to get away with it, politically. Past is not always prologue.
At least in the Facebook and Twitter era, which can cut in ways they and others don’t expect.
____
*I go back to August, when nothing much was happening in Clinton’s campaign, and I asked her to talk with me only about what her website said was her signature plan — a $270 billion proposal for infrastructure spending. Word came back that she wasn’t going to discuss it in any detail. To my knowledge, she never did.
It must be quite a relief, a warming feeling all over, to think you can win political campaigns without ever having to wrestle with complex subjects or talk to anyone who doesn’t already think you’re right.
— The Democrats’ 2016 mistake, Matt Bai, Yahoo News, today.
Throughout the general election campaign, beginning shortly after the California and Ohio primaries, I had this disorienting feeling that Clinton was not actually campaigning–that she was just giving a nod to it now and then. I don’t recall anything like that in any other presidential campaign. I kept expecting her to begin actually campaigning. She just never really did, until the last 10 days or so, when it was too late to matter.
In her address today she said, “I ask you to stay engaged.” I wish she had, when it mattered most.
____
**Link replaced with the right one. 11/17 at 6:44 p.m.
Bernie is right, of course, but the platform he agreed on with Clinton is a perfectly workable expression of Democratic Party principles that will sell right now. What needs to be reformed is the party’s willingness to fight on these principles. The current and most recent leadership that makes no effort to sell the party to the American people failed in 2000, 2004, 2010, 2012 (at Congressional level), 2014 and now 2016. It still seems to be dominated by Third Way thinking, instead of recognizing that the Sanders campaign, although not ultimately the winner due to the preception of many that he could not win because of his history and failure in the primaries to penetrate critical Democratic constituencies, nevertheless tapped into something real and important. They still seem to think they don’t have to sell the Democratic brand.
The best recap and analysis I’ve read is Molly Ball’s in The Atlantic titled “Why Hillary Clinton Lost,” posted on Tuesday, at http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/11/why-hillary-clinton-lost/507704/.
Here are the three paragraphs that what for me amount to Bingo:
“Meanwhile, Clinton’s single-minded focus on Republican-leaning college-educated white women meant she was reliant on soft support from a group that would rather, all things being equal, vote for the Republican candidate. When fresh doubts arose about Clinton, that group was all too ready to fly the coop. “One of Clinton’s strategies was to appeal to moderate Republican women by showing how disgusting Trump is,” Joe Dinkin of the Working Families Party, a left-wing party that endorsed Sanders in the primaries but worked for Clinton in the general election, told me. But, he said, “being a Republican voter means already having come to terms with voting for disgusting racists and sexists sometimes.”
…
“In one of his weirder and more imaginary riffs on the stump, Trump claimed that when Clinton came off the trail to supposedly prepare for the debates, she was actually “sleeping,” insinuating without evidence that she was lazy and frail. She wasn’t either of those things, but it was true that, even late in the campaign, she kept a light schedule, holding fewer events than her rival. This worried senior Democrats, who told me she seemed to be taking winning for granted rather than fighting for it.
“Clinton’s leisurely pace fed the perception that she thought she was marching to an inevitable coronation. Inevitability didn’t work out too well for Clinton in 2008, and it didn’t work this year, either.”
When she and Sanders reached that agreement on the platform just as the convention was beginning, I thought Sanders had handed Clinton a huge gift. Now she had a meaningfully progressive platform, putting forth what would be very significant change, to run on. In her convention speech, she really seemed to realize that and embrace it. And the spike in her polls following that speech lasted about three weeks, until release of a batch of her State Dept. emails that suggested (in my opinion, trivial) favors for a few Clinton Foundation donors, that the press was blowing out of any proportion, and that Clinton easily could have explained but instead remained ensconced in the Hamptons and Chapaqua—for four or five weeks.
I remember that right after the convention, she and Kaine traveled together to Ohio for a few appearances together. News coverage of her the rest of August consisted of the emails re the Clinton Foundation, her appearances at lavish fundraisers in the Hamptons and LA, and roll-outs of more and more establishment Republicans who were either endorsing her or saying Never Trump.
In the remaining months, she would mention the party platform briefly when her polls were dropping or she was suddenly beginning to worry about lack of enthusiasm from millennials, only to drop it when something new came out about Trump’s appallingness. But even when she mentioned the platform, it was never in any depth.
Molly Ball got it exactly right. Clinton talked almost exclusively about Trump’s sexual assaults and various insults, because she feared that talking about the platform planks would alienate moderate middle-class and upscale suburban Republicans. But of course there was not much in the platform that those voters didn’t support or at least would cause them to not support her.
But fearful that there was, she ran a virtually contentless campaign in ads and on the campaign trail when she deighed to venture out onto it.
Let’s see who becomes the next hack in chief, aka DNC chair.
Oh!, and both Sanders and Warren campaigned for HRC……..
some ‘splainin’ needed why they both went all in for the hacks whose platform was forced on them, in a battle that was neither winnable nor righteous.
I just ‘splained it for them, in my new post. Robert Waldmann ‘splains it in his post, too.
Sanders and Warren are hardly the ones who should ‘splain. Trump’s bait-and-switch on lobbyists, finance-industry insiders, and other corporate insiders is the most cynical thing since Nixon’s secret plan to end the Vietnam War.
The Molly Ball article looks pretty dead-on to me, too. I have no doubt whatsoever that a strong advertising campaign showing her in action with small groups promoting the most popular elements of the platform she agreed on with Bernie — minimum wage and raising incomes to make the economy grow, full employment, infrastructure — and contrasting those plans with the disgusting agenda of the Republican Party, in addition to some (but less) of the anti-Trump character stuff, she would have won easily. More aggressive counter-attacks on the email and Clinton Foundation stories would have insulated her better, too.
There was no reason why they couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time, and all of that was totally compatible with the “stronger together” theme. But the problems run deeper, and include Obama’s unwillingness to stick with being the leader of the Democratic Party in 2009, opting instead to stand above partisanship. It’s a party that refuses to fight, failing to see that it’s a zero sum game, with only one winner and one loser. The Republicans know that, our leaders do not. Zero effort was put into providing any brand advertising campaign promoting the Democratic Party and demolishing the Republican Party that could be used by candidates for Congress.
Maybe Keith Ellison gets it. Warren does, Bernie does (with some flaws in his analysis), but the Third Way people need to step aside and do a lot of self-examination. It does look like the path has been cleared for Warren to claim the 2020 nomination. Let’s hope she doesn’t succumb to the cautiousness that the “professionals” (so-called) always try to impose.
Amen. On all of it, but especially the use of the chew-gum-and-walk-backwards-at-the-same-time line.
One more toke over the line. Sweet Jesus.
Bernie Sanders is not remotely close to the second most powerful person in Wash.
Not yet. It’s early.
‘Course, were it not for the people-with-their-heads-buried-in-the-sand crowd, of which you were a ranking member, Sanders would be the MOST powerful person in Wash.
One problem. Bev.
I gave money to Sanders; I voted for him; I worked the polls for him.
Just because I supported the Dem candidate when the primary was decided does not make your thoughts true. Just like(spare me the fen polls) the idea that Sanders would have won the general election is just fantasy.
It doesn’t matter now, and reliving this nightmare is just a repetition of the inane behavior of progressives who spent months and months deflating the enthusiasm for HRC, mainly because she was not Bernie.
One day progressives will wake up and understand the our elections are winner take all, and their votes, or non votes, really count.
Meanwhile, you comment has nothing to do with my comment. A minority Senator has almost no power whatsoever other than being part of a filibuster, which puts him even with every Dem Senator. So your comment is silly and largely is based on your elevated blood pressure whenever Sanders speaks.
This is one of the few times I completely agree with EM. ” A minority Senator has almost no power whatsoever other than being part of a filibuster, which puts him even with every Dem Senator. So your comment is silly and largely is based on your elevated blood pressure whenever Sanders speaks.”
Indeed the comment/article’s claim was so bizarre to foster a giggle.
There is another article in the Atlantic which provides an historical view of how the Democrats made such a mess of things. An exerpt:
“After Humphrey’s loss to Nixon, Democrats formed the Commission on Party Structure and Delegate Selection, also known as the McGovern-Fraser Commission, which sought to heal and restructure the party. With the help of strategist Fred Dutton, Democrats forged a new coalition. By quietly cutting back the influence of unions, Dutton sought to eject the white working class from the Democratic Party, which he saw as “a major redoubt of traditional Americanism and of the antinegro, antiyouth vote.” The future, he argued, lay in a coalition of African Americans, feminists, and affluent, young, college-educated whites. In 1972, George McGovern would win the Democratic nomination with this very coalition, and many of the Watergate Babies entering office just three years later gleaned their first experiences in politics on his campaign.”
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/10/how-democrats-killed-their-populist-soul/504710/
Bernie’s new responsibility may be nearly impossible. The Democrats intentionally jettisoned working people, contributors mind you, and replaced those folks with potential voters who could be rewarded with tax revenues.
This, all very clever, especially considering that this would have Republicans subsidizing what amounts to bought votes. The Democrats then too, presumably, understood that the Republicans could be duped into adding to the number of Democrat voters because the Republicans would allow unusually high immigration quotas due to the Republican’s acceptance of anything that keeps labor costs down.
And the plan nearly worked, and at a pace of over a million immigrants per year, even with double-digit unemployment and a falling participation-rate, eventually then, the Democrats plan may have paid off. But, it has become increasingly obvious that this plan was based on betrayal and a degree of deceit that put party politics so far above the best interests of the nation, that I doubt that ol’ Bernie can find a way to right such a complicated, and embedded wrong. In fact, if the Republicans play their cards wisely, the Democrats may need a name change, along with a genuine shift to the left, and that would begin with an all-out effort for campaign reform. But of course that would require lots of money.