BE EMAILING THIS TO JOURNALISTS AND STATE LEGISLATORS AROUND THE COUNTRY — my take a month.
Trump won by trading places with Obama.
NYT’s Nate Cohn: “Just as Mr. Obama’s team caricatured Mr. Romney, Mr. Trump caricatured Mrs. Clinton as a tool of Wall Street” … “At every point of the race, Mr. Trump was doing better among white voters without a college degree than Mitt Romney did in 2012 — by a wide margin.
America should feel perfectly free to rebuild labor union density one state at at time — making union busting a felony. Republicans will have no place to hide.
Suppose the 1935 Congress passed the NLRA(a) intending to leave any criminal sanctions for obstructing union organizing to the states. Might have been because NLRB(b) conducted union elections take place local by local (not nationwide) and Congress could have opined states would deal more efficiently with home conditions — or whatever. What extra words might Congress have needed to add to today’s actual bill? Actually, today’s identical NLRA wording would have sufficed perfectly.
Suppose, again, that under the RLA (Railroad Labor Act — covers railroads and airlines, FedEx) — wherein elections are conducted nationally — that Congress desired to forbid states criminalizing the firing of organizers — how could Congress have worded such a preemption (assuming it was constitutionally valid)? Shouldn’t matter to us. Congress did not!
Note well: it is not mostly the organizer’s job loss to be punished; it is much more the interference with all employees’ bargaining power — working them for less.
Sorry Denis, but Clinton beat Trump on economic issues. Trump won the electoral college because Clinton had to much baggage that the establishment GOP used to vilify her. The Comey letter was the final blow. Then you had Trump appealing to typical Neo-liberals who vote on abortion or security issues(like immigration). That created a 1/2 punch.
I think for the establishment GOP, this was as Supreme Court move. You probably get the Supreme Court back on your side before the electorate moves again. Whether in 2018 or 2020 or both. My guess they really wanted to let Clinton win even if those coattails meant Dem Senate, but that lead toward Supreme Court disaster with Garland replacing Scalia and Clinton them replacing Kennedy and maybe another oldster. I think people miss this point of the election.
The fact the credit cycle is nearing its end on auto’s is not a good sign. Once the contraction begins(oh, about 2019 I suspect) I suspect auto sales to go down sharply.
You do not win the EC, you win the vote in each state which designates which Electorates go to the state assembly and cast their votes for the designated candidate who won the vote. Clinton had too many supposed lies stacked up against her by Republicans whose constant drone of emails, Benghazi, etc. were taken as the truth by those spending more time listening to faux news. No one goes through that many Congressional Investigations to emerge unscathed. HRC did such. In total and between both Clintons, the only thing proven was one blow job. Meanwhile Ken Starr hides a rape case at Baylor for a football player. How appropo for the leader of the case against Bill Clinton to work against the law in such a manner.
Rage; shhh! Quiet! I’m trying to get Dems all over the country to do what I’m always trying to get them to do anyway. 🙂
Actually, Hill’s majorities came in heavily Dem states — no big help with the electoral college. If you read Barack Obama: a noble failure by New Deal democrat — below — you may discover that O was all talk and no do on helping most people.
Restoring labor union density is the core thing to do that would actually make America a great place to live again like it was in the 50s-60s-70s (at least if you were white*). 6% union density in private business is akin to 20/10 blood pressure — it starves every other healthy process.
*After I explained America’s spin-your-wheels labor market to my late, more articulate brother John, he came back with: “Martin Luther King got his people on the up escalator just in time for it to start going down for everyone.”
The success of the coordinated “Save Our Healthcare” rallies around the country on Sunday received a lot of publicity, but what received less publicity is that the idea for this was Bernie Sanders’ and that Sanders really publicized it, though emails and such.
Two key things struck me. Warren, MI (i.e., Ford), where the rally that Sanders himself headlined took place, and the rest of Macomb County are Ground Zero for UAW members and retirees—who don’t get their healthcare coverage through Obamacare. Yet this was a mega-rally, and looking through the pics (click the links) what you see is lots and lots of whites, most but by no means all middle-aged, some elderly (and therefore themselves on Medicare, not Obamacare), some millennials. Some African Americans, but mostly whites. Many middle-aged white men who are supposed to be all “Trump!” “Republicans!”
Anyone who thinks Sanders wouldn’t have won in a landslide and brought with him a Dem Senate majority is willfully clueless.
Yeah, cause Trump would not have been able to appeal to his base with Sanders singing “death to Yankees” in South America.
And he could have made nothing of Sanders supporting the Ayotollah Khomenie while Americans were held hostage in Iran.
And he could have made nothing regarding Sanders other “peculiarities” in his life(stealing electricity, naked kids, etc.)
Sanders has never, ever faced a negative campaign. That would have ended.
But let’s face real facts here, Bev.
What you are saying is that people that would have voted for Sanders did not vote for Clinton. Which makes them the most stupid people in the world.
At the same time, you are saying that people that voted for Clinton would have voted for Sanders.
You don’t see anything strange in that?
I am beyond tired of this bs. Sanders lost the Dem nomination because millions more people voted for Clinton than Sanders.
And that would have changed if Sanders had had the balls to get into the game before he decided to run for the nomination. He sat on the sidelines in his safe little enclave in an almost all white state; did nothing his whole life that amounted to a hill of beans; and then bitched cause Dems would not make him the nominee.
EMichael,
I must respectfully take issue, FWIW — where I came into this movie:
*************
NYT’s Nate Cohn: “Just as Mr. Obama’s team caricatured Mr. Romney, Mr. Trump caricatured Mrs. Clinton as a tool of Wall Street” … “At every point of the race, Mr. Trump was doing better among white voters without a college degree than Mitt Romney did in 2012 — by a wide margin.
” … Mr. Obama] would have won Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin each time even if Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee had been severed from their states and cast adrift into the Great Lakes.)” http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/upshot/how-the-obama-coalition-crumbled-leaving-an-opening-for-trump.html
************
At the very least, Trump would not have been able to sick Wall Street on Bernie. And Bernie is every bit as capable of working up a crowd as Donald — with the added tactical advantage that he is for real; class would have told.
PS. It occurred to me overnight that Donald resembles Andrew Jackson: know nothing/malicious/even more impulsive.
Sanders supported the Ayatollah Khomeini? Really? He sang “death to Yankees” in South America? Stealing electricity, naked kids, etc.? Where are you getting this stuff from?
And why do you think anything that mattered circa Reagan era would have mattered re Sanders although it didn’t re Trump?
This election was about economic and power-structure populism. By which I mean, it was the people who were NOT part of Trump’s base, but voted for him—and against Clinton—on economic and power-structure populism (thoroughly faux, but it worked) that won the electoral college, by tiny percentages in three states, for Trump.
You didn’t notice that somehow Trump’s pro-former-KGB-guy thing didn’t keep him from winning those states, EMichael, even though that would have been a deal breaker back in, say, 1980?
I get it. Its forever the ‘80s and ‘90s. For the Clintons, and for you. No matter that no one under the age of 50 remembers the Reagan era, and about half the people who voted for him are dead.
As for millions more people voting for Clinton than for Sanders, the main reason for that was the incessant insistence by the Dem establishment and Dem-leaning pundits that Sanders couldn’t win the general election cuz, well, he sure couldn’t have won it in the ‘80s, ‘90s and pre-crash ‘00s. In addition to the fact that Sanders was not well-known outside of upper New England, and his campaign was being largely ignored by the national press for months—which would not have been the case in the general election.
And then there was the absurd problem that independents couldn’t vote at all in the NY primaries and the primaries in a few other states; that by the last day of the primary season—CA’s and OH’s primaries—two huge states, the super delegates made it known that the primaries were over; the curious goings-on in the NV caucuses; and a couple of other, well, oddities. Clinton suddenly woke up shortly before the CA and OH primaries and started making promises adopting some of Sanders’ positions, and saying that since she would be winning the nomination courtesy of the super delegates, she needed to show strength in her support and party unity going into the convention and the general election. The very morning after those primaries, she was on the phone with moderate REPUBLICAN DONORS requesting donations.
And then she took the entire summer off, with the exception of convention week and appearances at fundraisers in private homes in CA and NY, and calls to big-name moderate Republicans asking them for their endorsements or at least for renouncements of Trump.
Had Sanders, or for that matter another progressive—Warren, Sherrod Brown—not been intimidated by the Clinton/Dem Party machine into leaving the field open for Clinton, been the Dem nominee, the general election campaign would have been about economic and power-structure populist issues, not about emails, not about State Dept./family-charitable-foundation connections, not about $250,000 speeches to Wall Street and other corporate-special-interest folks.
But most important of all, it would not have been a campaign directed entirely—and I do mean entirely-toward appealing to moderate suburban Republicans, under the assumption that the Dem Party platform was ooooo too progressive for them (it was not).
And it’s a reeeeal safe bet that the public would have known by the time they voted that Trump was being backed by billionaire hedge fund and banking families and investment banking executive-suite guys, by oil and gas billionaires; that his finance chairman owned a bank that aggressively foreclosed on everyone it could, often violating the law; and that in April he had met with Ryan and expressly promised him that he—Ryan—would be the one to write the budget that Trump would sign, cuz, Trump said, Ryan knew about “that stuff”.
And it’s just as safe a bet that Sanders, Warren, Brown would not have taken a three months off following the primary season. Much less expended most of his or her effort courting moderate Republicans and being careful to not say anything that they might not approve of.
Nor would they have forgotten that in the Rust Belt, especially in MI, OH and WI, labor union members ARE part of the Dem base. Not in the numbers they once were, but, y’know, in actual meaningful numbers.
So shut the hell up about what YOU’RE sick of hearing. You’re like a 1990s-era computer software program. Windows 3.1 is hard to find these days.
EXACTLY, Denis. This willful cluelessness is absurd.
Paul Krugman’s still engaging in this “Clinton-was-a-fine-candidate-who-ran-a-fine-campaign” stupidity, too. Including in an eight-part tweet commentary yesterday that included this:
“But her campaign would have looked fine if the press hadn’t decided on saturation coverage of the BS email “scandal” 6/”
It is all true. You were just spared from the truth because Hillary would not run a negative campaign.
Interestingly, I have posted this in here before in a post you authored. I guess you ignored it then.
“There’s more. In 1980, Sanders served as an elector for the Socialist Workers Party, which was founded on the principles of Leon Trotsky. According to the New York Times, that party called for abolishing the military budget. It also called for “solidarity” with the revolutionary regimes in Iran, Nicaragua, Grenada, and Cuba; this was in the middle of the Iranian hostage crisis.”
I do not think I posed this in here, I saw no point.
“Right now there’s no way of knowing, because there’s been only scattered excavation of Sanders’ radical connections. He has never been asked to account for his relationship with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, for which he served as a presidential elector in 1980. At the time, the party’s platform called for abolishing the U.S. military budget and proclaimed “solidarity” with revolutionary Iran. (This was in the middle of the Iranian hostage crisis.) There’s been little cable news chatter about Sanders’ 1985 trip to Nicaragua, where he reportedly joined a Sandinista rally with a crowd chanting, “Here, there, everywhere/ The Yankee will die.” It would be nice if this were due to a national consensus on the criminal nature of America’s support for the Contras. More likely, the media’s attention has simply been elsewhere.
The Sanderistas appear to believe they were treated unfairly in this primary. In fact, they’ve been handled gingerly.
The Clinton campaign has also ignored Sanders’ youthful sex writings. Republicans are unlikely to be so decorous. Imagine an ad drawing from the old Sanders essay “The Revolution Is Life Versus Death.” First it might quote the candidate mocking taboos on child nudity: “Now, if children go around naked, they are liable to see each others [sic] sexual organs, and maybe even touch them. Terrible thing!” Then it would quote him celebrating girls who defy their mothers and have sex with their boyfriends: “The revolution comes … when a girl pushes aside all that her mother has ‘taught’ her and accepts her boyfriends [sic] love.” Finally, it would remind viewers that Sanders was one of 14 congressmen to vote against the law establishing the Amber Alert system and one of 15 to vote against an amendment criminalizing computer-generated child pornography. The fact that these votes were cast for entirely principled civil libertarian reasons is, in the context of a general-election attack, beside the point. (It’s also beside the point that lots of people, myself included, have no problem with either child nudity or teenage sex.) It takes no special political insight to see that Republicans will try to make Sanders seem like a sexual weirdo. Will it work? I have no idea, but there’s no shorter route to the frightened lizard brain of the American electorate than dark talk about children and sex.”
” But if his positions are well known, the person, it turns out, is less known. Before Sanders was a U.S. senator, before he was a congressman, before he was mayor of Burlington — before he won one shocking election, then 13 more — he was a radical and an agitator in the ferment of 1960s and ’70s Vermont, a tireless campaigner and champion of laborers who didn’t collect his first steady paycheck until he was an elected official pushing 40 years old.
In his chosen home, a state that at the time was morphing from one of the country’s most resolutely conservative to one of its most reliably liberal, the New York City-raised Sanders found an environment that suited him: a tolerant, loosey-goosey era and place, but with an abiding Yankee sense of privacy. It allowed him to focus on what fueled him without being forced to discuss publicly significant details about his personal life — like his meager finances, his bare-bones living arrangement, and the fact that the mother of his one biological child is not his ex-wife. That’s a surprise to some who have known him for decades. It’s also very much a product of an unwritten compact between Sanders, his supporters and local reporters who have steered clear rather than risk lectures about the twisted priorities of the press.
That these kinds of basic biographical details could emerge now, almost 44 years after he first ran for office, is a point of sharp contrast with the woman he’s running against, and gaining on. Clinton just might be the most unceasingly scrutinized citizen of her generation — while, of all the 2016 presidential candidates, Sanders, public figure and private person, is a rarity on the national stage: the known unknown….
The best man at my wedding(both of them), has lived, and still does, I Burlington since the late 70’s. Sometime in the 80s I was visiting there and heard a speech from Sanders at some function. I loved his ideas. Thought he was unrealistic, but his passion was out of hand.
I think the same thing now
But I do find it amazing that a fan like you knows nothing about his life, and probably more about Clinton’s life than anyone wants to know.
EMichael,
“like his meager finances, his bare-bones living arrangement”
Love gossip. Let’s hear more about Bernies’ bare-bones living arrangement — please.
Meantime: Sanders seems like the only Democrat totally unintimidated by Trump — coming right at him just like he did during the primary campaign — the only full-fledged bluster counterweight.
Of course if Obama had been even a half-way decent president for the average person’s economic woes, then, Donald wouldn’t be our next president. Wonder if the specter of that will fill churches — sort of like an alien mother ship?
We get it, EMichael. You believe that those people who’ve watched their towns disintegrate, who once had middle-class incomes from manufacturing jobs, whose homes were foreclosed on by the likes of IndyMac, whose kids can’t afford to go to college without incurring debilitating debt, who realize that billionaire donors and mega-corporation lobbyists are writing statutes and regulatory agency regulations—and who weren’t so troubled by Trump’s voiced approval of Putin’s annexation of Crimea and open threats to take the rest of Ukraine and the Baltics, that they refused to vote for Trump—nonetheless would have been so offended by what Bernie Sanders did or said in the 1970s and ‘80s that they would have voted for Trump on that basis.
You also believe that millennials would have been so shocked and offended by these things that they wouldn’t have voted for Sanders. “I really want to see Citizens United overturned, the big banks broken up and the finance industry’s economic and political power reduced, antitrust laws aggressively enforced, single-payer healthcare insurance, and tuition-free public universities and colleges and trades programs, but I just can’t get past what Sanders said in Nicaragua about those Sandinistas, and that hippy lifestyle he lived in his 20s and 30s, 40-50 years ago, so I’ll sit out this election.”
This is palpably ridiculous.
This is from Greg Sargent today:
“A new CBS News poll finds that 65 percent of Americans think Trump’s policies will mostly benefit the rich, and 72 percent think they will benefit large corporations. However, 61 percent also think Trump will keep a significant number of jobs from going overseas.”
I’m no fan of Kellyanne Conway, but at that Harvard election-post-mortem discussion among the top people at the campaigns, a comment she made in response to something one of Clinton’s people said summed it up exactly: “There’s a difference between what offends you and what affects you.”
As for Clinton’s decision to not run that kind of negative campaign against Sanders, it wasn’t out of courtesy. That stuff WAS out there; that’s how you knew of it. But its impact was the same as that of a lead balloon. And Clinton’s folks knew that.
BE EMAILING THIS TO JOURNALISTS AND STATE LEGISLATORS AROUND THE COUNTRY — my take a month.
Trump won by trading places with Obama.
NYT’s Nate Cohn: “Just as Mr. Obama’s team caricatured Mr. Romney, Mr. Trump caricatured Mrs. Clinton as a tool of Wall Street” … “At every point of the race, Mr. Trump was doing better among white voters without a college degree than Mitt Romney did in 2012 — by a wide margin.
” … Mr. Obama] would have won Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin each time even if Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee had been severed from their states and cast adrift into the Great Lakes.)”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/upshot/how-the-obama-coalition-crumbled-leaving-an-opening-for-trump.html
* * * * * * * * * * * *
America should feel perfectly free to rebuild labor union density one state at at time — making union busting a felony. Republicans will have no place to hide.
Suppose the 1935 Congress passed the NLRA(a) intending to leave any criminal sanctions for obstructing union organizing to the states. Might have been because NLRB(b) conducted union elections take place local by local (not nationwide) and Congress could have opined states would deal more efficiently with home conditions — or whatever. What extra words might Congress have needed to add to today’s actual bill? Actually, today’s identical NLRA wording would have sufficed perfectly.
Suppose, again, that under the RLA (Railroad Labor Act — covers railroads and airlines, FedEx) — wherein elections are conducted nationally — that Congress desired to forbid states criminalizing the firing of organizers — how could Congress have worded such a preemption (assuming it was constitutionally valid)? Shouldn’t matter to us. Congress did not!
Note well: it is not mostly the organizer’s job loss to be punished; it is much more the interference with all employees’ bargaining power — working them for less.
For more musings on what and how else to dump the Trump boys by banging loudly and everywhere on the labor union drum, see here (work permanently in progress): http://ontodayspage.blogspot.com/2016/12/wet-backs-and-narrow-backs-irish.html
Sorry Denis, but Clinton beat Trump on economic issues. Trump won the electoral college because Clinton had to much baggage that the establishment GOP used to vilify her. The Comey letter was the final blow. Then you had Trump appealing to typical Neo-liberals who vote on abortion or security issues(like immigration). That created a 1/2 punch.
I think for the establishment GOP, this was as Supreme Court move. You probably get the Supreme Court back on your side before the electorate moves again. Whether in 2018 or 2020 or both. My guess they really wanted to let Clinton win even if those coattails meant Dem Senate, but that lead toward Supreme Court disaster with Garland replacing Scalia and Clinton them replacing Kennedy and maybe another oldster. I think people miss this point of the election.
The fact the credit cycle is nearing its end on auto’s is not a good sign. Once the contraction begins(oh, about 2019 I suspect) I suspect auto sales to go down sharply.
The Rage:
You do not win the EC, you win the vote in each state which designates which Electorates go to the state assembly and cast their votes for the designated candidate who won the vote. Clinton had too many supposed lies stacked up against her by Republicans whose constant drone of emails, Benghazi, etc. were taken as the truth by those spending more time listening to faux news. No one goes through that many Congressional Investigations to emerge unscathed. HRC did such. In total and between both Clintons, the only thing proven was one blow job. Meanwhile Ken Starr hides a rape case at Baylor for a football player. How appropo for the leader of the case against Bill Clinton to work against the law in such a manner.
Rage; shhh! Quiet! I’m trying to get Dems all over the country to do what I’m always trying to get them to do anyway. 🙂
Actually, Hill’s majorities came in heavily Dem states — no big help with the electoral college. If you read Barack Obama: a noble failure by New Deal democrat — below — you may discover that O was all talk and no do on helping most people.
Restoring labor union density is the core thing to do that would actually make America a great place to live again like it was in the 50s-60s-70s (at least if you were white*). 6% union density in private business is akin to 20/10 blood pressure — it starves every other healthy process.
*After I explained America’s spin-your-wheels labor market to my late, more articulate brother John, he came back with: “Martin Luther King got his people on the up escalator just in time for it to start going down for everyone.”
Comey changed no minds in May, nor October. Putin may have hacked the DNC, but to call the dump Bernie DNC “the US election” is superb hyperbole.
Those memes are extensions of fog to hide the main stream’s flawed candidate. The fog worked no better than Comey or Putin excuses justify.
Hillary began losing in 1993 when Strobe Talbot took neocons with him to Foggy Bottom.
BTW the Clinton foundation is folding: the ‘connected’ democrats can no longer offer ‘play for pay’!
Who will get the kickbacks for those cluster bombs killing kids in Yemen?
http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2017/01/democrats_declare_michigan_gro.html
http://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/2017/01/15/bernie-sanders-draws-thousands-warren-health-care-rally/96617018/
The success of the coordinated “Save Our Healthcare” rallies around the country on Sunday received a lot of publicity, but what received less publicity is that the idea for this was Bernie Sanders’ and that Sanders really publicized it, though emails and such.
Two key things struck me. Warren, MI (i.e., Ford), where the rally that Sanders himself headlined took place, and the rest of Macomb County are Ground Zero for UAW members and retirees—who don’t get their healthcare coverage through Obamacare. Yet this was a mega-rally, and looking through the pics (click the links) what you see is lots and lots of whites, most but by no means all middle-aged, some elderly (and therefore themselves on Medicare, not Obamacare), some millennials. Some African Americans, but mostly whites. Many middle-aged white men who are supposed to be all “Trump!” “Republicans!”
Anyone who thinks Sanders wouldn’t have won in a landslide and brought with him a Dem Senate majority is willfully clueless.
This is just the start.
Yeah, cause Trump would not have been able to appeal to his base with Sanders singing “death to Yankees” in South America.
And he could have made nothing of Sanders supporting the Ayotollah Khomenie while Americans were held hostage in Iran.
And he could have made nothing regarding Sanders other “peculiarities” in his life(stealing electricity, naked kids, etc.)
Sanders has never, ever faced a negative campaign. That would have ended.
But let’s face real facts here, Bev.
What you are saying is that people that would have voted for Sanders did not vote for Clinton. Which makes them the most stupid people in the world.
At the same time, you are saying that people that voted for Clinton would have voted for Sanders.
You don’t see anything strange in that?
I am beyond tired of this bs. Sanders lost the Dem nomination because millions more people voted for Clinton than Sanders.
And that would have changed if Sanders had had the balls to get into the game before he decided to run for the nomination. He sat on the sidelines in his safe little enclave in an almost all white state; did nothing his whole life that amounted to a hill of beans; and then bitched cause Dems would not make him the nominee.
EMichael,
I must respectfully take issue, FWIW — where I came into this movie:
*************
NYT’s Nate Cohn: “Just as Mr. Obama’s team caricatured Mr. Romney, Mr. Trump caricatured Mrs. Clinton as a tool of Wall Street” … “At every point of the race, Mr. Trump was doing better among white voters without a college degree than Mitt Romney did in 2012 — by a wide margin.
” … Mr. Obama] would have won Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin each time even if Detroit, Cleveland and Milwaukee had been severed from their states and cast adrift into the Great Lakes.)”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/23/upshot/how-the-obama-coalition-crumbled-leaving-an-opening-for-trump.html
************
At the very least, Trump would not have been able to sick Wall Street on Bernie. And Bernie is every bit as capable of working up a crowd as Donald — with the added tactical advantage that he is for real; class would have told.
PS. It occurred to me overnight that Donald resembles Andrew Jackson: know nothing/malicious/even more impulsive.
Sanders supported the Ayatollah Khomeini? Really? He sang “death to Yankees” in South America? Stealing electricity, naked kids, etc.? Where are you getting this stuff from?
And why do you think anything that mattered circa Reagan era would have mattered re Sanders although it didn’t re Trump?
This election was about economic and power-structure populism. By which I mean, it was the people who were NOT part of Trump’s base, but voted for him—and against Clinton—on economic and power-structure populism (thoroughly faux, but it worked) that won the electoral college, by tiny percentages in three states, for Trump.
You didn’t notice that somehow Trump’s pro-former-KGB-guy thing didn’t keep him from winning those states, EMichael, even though that would have been a deal breaker back in, say, 1980?
I get it. Its forever the ‘80s and ‘90s. For the Clintons, and for you. No matter that no one under the age of 50 remembers the Reagan era, and about half the people who voted for him are dead.
As for millions more people voting for Clinton than for Sanders, the main reason for that was the incessant insistence by the Dem establishment and Dem-leaning pundits that Sanders couldn’t win the general election cuz, well, he sure couldn’t have won it in the ‘80s, ‘90s and pre-crash ‘00s. In addition to the fact that Sanders was not well-known outside of upper New England, and his campaign was being largely ignored by the national press for months—which would not have been the case in the general election.
And then there was the absurd problem that independents couldn’t vote at all in the NY primaries and the primaries in a few other states; that by the last day of the primary season—CA’s and OH’s primaries—two huge states, the super delegates made it known that the primaries were over; the curious goings-on in the NV caucuses; and a couple of other, well, oddities. Clinton suddenly woke up shortly before the CA and OH primaries and started making promises adopting some of Sanders’ positions, and saying that since she would be winning the nomination courtesy of the super delegates, she needed to show strength in her support and party unity going into the convention and the general election. The very morning after those primaries, she was on the phone with moderate REPUBLICAN DONORS requesting donations.
And then she took the entire summer off, with the exception of convention week and appearances at fundraisers in private homes in CA and NY, and calls to big-name moderate Republicans asking them for their endorsements or at least for renouncements of Trump.
Had Sanders, or for that matter another progressive—Warren, Sherrod Brown—not been intimidated by the Clinton/Dem Party machine into leaving the field open for Clinton, been the Dem nominee, the general election campaign would have been about economic and power-structure populist issues, not about emails, not about State Dept./family-charitable-foundation connections, not about $250,000 speeches to Wall Street and other corporate-special-interest folks.
But most important of all, it would not have been a campaign directed entirely—and I do mean entirely-toward appealing to moderate suburban Republicans, under the assumption that the Dem Party platform was ooooo too progressive for them (it was not).
And it’s a reeeeal safe bet that the public would have known by the time they voted that Trump was being backed by billionaire hedge fund and banking families and investment banking executive-suite guys, by oil and gas billionaires; that his finance chairman owned a bank that aggressively foreclosed on everyone it could, often violating the law; and that in April he had met with Ryan and expressly promised him that he—Ryan—would be the one to write the budget that Trump would sign, cuz, Trump said, Ryan knew about “that stuff”.
And it’s just as safe a bet that Sanders, Warren, Brown would not have taken a three months off following the primary season. Much less expended most of his or her effort courting moderate Republicans and being careful to not say anything that they might not approve of.
Nor would they have forgotten that in the Rust Belt, especially in MI, OH and WI, labor union members ARE part of the Dem base. Not in the numbers they once were, but, y’know, in actual meaningful numbers.
So shut the hell up about what YOU’RE sick of hearing. You’re like a 1990s-era computer software program. Windows 3.1 is hard to find these days.
Except here. Windows 3.1 is hard to find these days, except here.
EXACTLY, Denis. This willful cluelessness is absurd.
Paul Krugman’s still engaging in this “Clinton-was-a-fine-candidate-who-ran-a-fine-campaign” stupidity, too. Including in an eight-part tweet commentary yesterday that included this:
“But her campaign would have looked fine if the press hadn’t decided on saturation coverage of the BS email “scandal” 6/”
To which I replied with this:
“@paulkrugman No, THIS is what a fine campaign looks like: http://www.mlive.com/news/detroit/index.ssf/2017/01/democrats_declare_michigan_gro.html …. IN WARREN, MI, Sun.
“LOTS OF WORKING-CLASS WHITES. MEN!!”
6:38 PM – 17 Jan 2017 Reply
WOW. SPOT-ON FROM BEGINNING TO END:
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/books/2017/01/why_thomas_friedman_s_thank_you_for_being_late_is_a_blockbuster.html
Bev,
It is all true. You were just spared from the truth because Hillary would not run a negative campaign.
Interestingly, I have posted this in here before in a post you authored. I guess you ignored it then.
“There’s more. In 1980, Sanders served as an elector for the Socialist Workers Party, which was founded on the principles of Leon Trotsky. According to the New York Times, that party called for abolishing the military budget. It also called for “solidarity” with the revolutionary regimes in Iran, Nicaragua, Grenada, and Cuba; this was in the middle of the Iranian hostage crisis.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/02/bernie_sanders_radical_past_would_haunt_him_in_a_general_election.html
I do not think I posed this in here, I saw no point.
“Right now there’s no way of knowing, because there’s been only scattered excavation of Sanders’ radical connections. He has never been asked to account for his relationship with the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party, for which he served as a presidential elector in 1980. At the time, the party’s platform called for abolishing the U.S. military budget and proclaimed “solidarity” with revolutionary Iran. (This was in the middle of the Iranian hostage crisis.) There’s been little cable news chatter about Sanders’ 1985 trip to Nicaragua, where he reportedly joined a Sandinista rally with a crowd chanting, “Here, there, everywhere/ The Yankee will die.” It would be nice if this were due to a national consensus on the criminal nature of America’s support for the Contras. More likely, the media’s attention has simply been elsewhere.
The Sanderistas appear to believe they were treated unfairly in this primary. In fact, they’ve been handled gingerly.
The Clinton campaign has also ignored Sanders’ youthful sex writings. Republicans are unlikely to be so decorous. Imagine an ad drawing from the old Sanders essay “The Revolution Is Life Versus Death.” First it might quote the candidate mocking taboos on child nudity: “Now, if children go around naked, they are liable to see each others [sic] sexual organs, and maybe even touch them. Terrible thing!” Then it would quote him celebrating girls who defy their mothers and have sex with their boyfriends: “The revolution comes … when a girl pushes aside all that her mother has ‘taught’ her and accepts her boyfriends [sic] love.” Finally, it would remind viewers that Sanders was one of 14 congressmen to vote against the law establishing the Amber Alert system and one of 15 to vote against an amendment criminalizing computer-generated child pornography. The fact that these votes were cast for entirely principled civil libertarian reasons is, in the context of a general-election attack, beside the point. (It’s also beside the point that lots of people, myself included, have no problem with either child nudity or teenage sex.) It takes no special political insight to see that Republicans will try to make Sanders seem like a sexual weirdo. Will it work? I have no idea, but there’s no shorter route to the frightened lizard brain of the American electorate than dark talk about children and sex.”
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/05/bernie_sanders_electability_argument_is_still_a_myth.html
” But if his positions are well known, the person, it turns out, is less known. Before Sanders was a U.S. senator, before he was a congressman, before he was mayor of Burlington — before he won one shocking election, then 13 more — he was a radical and an agitator in the ferment of 1960s and ’70s Vermont, a tireless campaigner and champion of laborers who didn’t collect his first steady paycheck until he was an elected official pushing 40 years old.
In his chosen home, a state that at the time was morphing from one of the country’s most resolutely conservative to one of its most reliably liberal, the New York City-raised Sanders found an environment that suited him: a tolerant, loosey-goosey era and place, but with an abiding Yankee sense of privacy. It allowed him to focus on what fueled him without being forced to discuss publicly significant details about his personal life — like his meager finances, his bare-bones living arrangement, and the fact that the mother of his one biological child is not his ex-wife. That’s a surprise to some who have known him for decades. It’s also very much a product of an unwritten compact between Sanders, his supporters and local reporters who have steered clear rather than risk lectures about the twisted priorities of the press.
That these kinds of basic biographical details could emerge now, almost 44 years after he first ran for office, is a point of sharp contrast with the woman he’s running against, and gaining on. Clinton just might be the most unceasingly scrutinized citizen of her generation — while, of all the 2016 presidential candidates, Sanders, public figure and private person, is a rarity on the national stage: the known unknown….
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2015/07/bernie-sanders-vermont-119927
The best man at my wedding(both of them), has lived, and still does, I Burlington since the late 70’s. Sometime in the 80s I was visiting there and heard a speech from Sanders at some function. I loved his ideas. Thought he was unrealistic, but his passion was out of hand.
I think the same thing now
But I do find it amazing that a fan like you knows nothing about his life, and probably more about Clinton’s life than anyone wants to know.
EMichael,
“like his meager finances, his bare-bones living arrangement”
Love gossip. Let’s hear more about Bernies’ bare-bones living arrangement — please.
Meantime: Sanders seems like the only Democrat totally unintimidated by Trump — coming right at him just like he did during the primary campaign — the only full-fledged bluster counterweight.
Of course if Obama had been even a half-way decent president for the average person’s economic woes, then, Donald wouldn’t be our next president. Wonder if the specter of that will fill churches — sort of like an alien mother ship?
We get it, EMichael. You believe that those people who’ve watched their towns disintegrate, who once had middle-class incomes from manufacturing jobs, whose homes were foreclosed on by the likes of IndyMac, whose kids can’t afford to go to college without incurring debilitating debt, who realize that billionaire donors and mega-corporation lobbyists are writing statutes and regulatory agency regulations—and who weren’t so troubled by Trump’s voiced approval of Putin’s annexation of Crimea and open threats to take the rest of Ukraine and the Baltics, that they refused to vote for Trump—nonetheless would have been so offended by what Bernie Sanders did or said in the 1970s and ‘80s that they would have voted for Trump on that basis.
You also believe that millennials would have been so shocked and offended by these things that they wouldn’t have voted for Sanders. “I really want to see Citizens United overturned, the big banks broken up and the finance industry’s economic and political power reduced, antitrust laws aggressively enforced, single-payer healthcare insurance, and tuition-free public universities and colleges and trades programs, but I just can’t get past what Sanders said in Nicaragua about those Sandinistas, and that hippy lifestyle he lived in his 20s and 30s, 40-50 years ago, so I’ll sit out this election.”
This is palpably ridiculous.
This is from Greg Sargent today:
“A new CBS News poll finds that 65 percent of Americans think Trump’s policies will mostly benefit the rich, and 72 percent think they will benefit large corporations. However, 61 percent also think Trump will keep a significant number of jobs from going overseas.”
I’m no fan of Kellyanne Conway, but at that Harvard election-post-mortem discussion among the top people at the campaigns, a comment she made in response to something one of Clinton’s people said summed it up exactly: “There’s a difference between what offends you and what affects you.”
As for Clinton’s decision to not run that kind of negative campaign against Sanders, it wasn’t out of courtesy. That stuff WAS out there; that’s how you knew of it. But its impact was the same as that of a lead balloon. And Clinton’s folks knew that.
Really?
Then how come you did not know of it?
Clinton did not run a negative campaign for the simple reason that she did not want to alienate Dem voters.
Trump would not have given that a thought.
Dennis,
Go back to your union stuff.