“Momentum Is Irrelevant”: Why Bernie Sanders Supporters Can’t Accept The Grim End Of Their Crusade
It’s hard to say goodbye to something you love — and there are a lot of people right now who absolutely love Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign. As well they should. It has been one of the most remarkable happenings in the recent history of American politics, as a rumpled, crotchety 74-year-old socialist put together a serious challenge to the Democratic Party’s anointed candidate, raising over $200 million and energizing young people across the country for a revolutionary crusade to remake American politics.
So you can understand why Sanders supporters have trouble accepting that there’s just no way for him to be the party’s nominee. Part of it comes from the fact that, technically, it’s still possible for Sanders to prevail. Yes, it would require him to persuade nearly every remaining Democratic voter to cast a ballot for him, and then get all the superdelegates now supporting Clinton to flip as well. So who knows?
Here’s the brutal truth, though: No matter how the big prize of California comes out next Tuesday, Clinton is still going to have a majority of the delegates and is still going to be the Democratic nominee. As Harry Enten has observed, it’s a near-certainty that Clinton will officially pass the number of delegates she needs when New Jersey closes its polls at 8 p.m. eastern on Tuesday. Even though the California primary looks to be extremely close — the widely revered Field Poll shows Clinton leading Sanders by a margin of 45 percent to 43 percent, and other recent polls have found similar splits — since Democrats allocate delegates proportionally, the two candidates will gain similar numbers of delegates. It won’t matter at that point who nosed out who in that last big contest.
But tell that to a Sanders supporter, and you’ll likely get an earful of protestation. That’s not because they aren’t rational people, it’s because they have so much invested in his campaign — often financially or in terms of the time they’ve spent, but mostly emotionally. Bernie has promised them so much, and the campaign has accomplished so much, that saying, “Oh well, we gave it a good shot but it didn’t work out” must seem like a betrayal of everything they’ve been fighting for.
Hillary Clinton has offered her supporters little in the way of grand dreams and glorious visions of transformation. She’s a pragmatic politician presenting a pragmatic program. Sanders, on the other hand, is a candidate of revolution. He asked his supporters to believe in something epic, to change their thinking about what’s possible in politics. If you Felt the Bern, you yourself were transformed. To admit that the campaign is over means admitting that the dream is dead, and that person you wanted to be — hopeful, committed, optimistic — was wrong about what was possible.
Add to that the fact that Sanders supporters have convinced each other that the system is rigged, which means that any outcome other than Sanders winning is not just unfortunate but fundamentally illegitimate. If you believe that, it means that once you assent to a Clinton victory you’ve assented to corruption.
While Sanders himself has gotten some criticism for not bowing out already or acknowledging that it’s all over, you can’t blame him — and when you watch him being interviewed in recent weeks, you can see his internal struggle. He surely feels that at the very least, he has an obligation to stay in the race long enough for all his supporters to have the chance to cast their ballots for him. And it would be weird to say, “I’m still in the race, even though I know I’ve lost.” So he can be forgiven for putting the best face on things, even if it sometimes means he has to stray into fantasyland. “If we win California, and if we win South Dakota, and North Dakota and Montana and New Mexico and New Jersey, and the following week do well in Washington, D.C.,” he told rapturous supporters this week, “I think we will be marching into the Democratic convention with an enormous amount of momentum.”
Which is, of course, ridiculous. First of all, he’s not going to win all those places. But even if he did, Clinton will still have passed beyond the majority of delegates she needs. After all the voting is done, “momentum” is irrelevant. It’s like saying that even though your team lost the game 5-4, the fact that you scored a run in the ninth inning means you ought to be considered the winner.
Even after all the TV anchors and newspaper headlines declare that Clinton is now the nominee of the party, there will be a few Sanders supporters who refuse to accept it (and those few will surely have no problem finding cameras into which they can air their grievances). They’ll say Bernie can still make his case to the superdelegates, that they’re holding out for the FBI to indict Clinton, that it was never a fair fight to begin with. If you feel the urge to mock, consider sparing a sympathetic thought for them.
They’ve come a long way, and their idealism is something our system needs. And eventually, even if it takes a while, they’ll make their peace with defeat.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect; Contributor, The Week, June 3, 2016
“Lazy And Ineffectual, But He Wants Her Endorsement”: Trump Decides He Likes New Mexico’s Governor After All
During the race for the Republican presidential nomination, Donald Trump was so unimpressed with Ted Cruz, he gave the senator a nickname: Lyin’ Ted. Yesterday, however, Trump held a rally in California where he announced a change of heart.
“Ted Cruz is no longer a liar,” Trump declared. “We don’t see ‘Lyin’ Ted’ anymore. We love Ted, we love him.”
The Texas senator evidently isn’t the only beneficiary of Trump’s magnanimity. The Republican presidential hopeful is apparently mending fences with Karl Rove – who called Trump “a complete idiot” in the recent past – and the Sante Fe New Mexican published a report overnight that suggests Trump is even ready to cozy up to New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R).
In a stunning reversal of rhetoric and tone, Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Thursday said he respects New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez and wants her endorsement. Trump’s comments in a phone interview with The New Mexican came just days after he castigated Martinez in front of 8,000 people in Albuquerque, saying her job performance was so poor that he might have to run for governor of New Mexico.
Trump’s criticisms of Martinez turned to praise Thursday, signs of their months long war thawing to a détente.
“I’d like to have it,” Trump said in a phone interview when asked if he wanted Martinez’s support. “I respect her. I have always liked her.”
Well, “always” appears to be an overstatement. It was literally last week when Trump appeared in New Mexico and told a local audience that Martinez, the nation’s first and only Latina governor, was lazy and ineffectual.
“We have got to get your governor to get going,” he said. “She’s got to do a better job, okay? Your governor has got to do a better job. She’s not doing the job…. She’s not doing the job. We’ve got to get her moving. Come on, let’s go, governor.”
Three days ago, Trump was asked about why he targeted Martinez. Apparently referring to the governor’s stated reluctance to appear with him publicly, Trump told reporters, “She was not nice. And I was fine – just a little bit of a jab. But she wasn’t nice, and you think I’m going to change? I’m not changing, including with her.”
That was Tuesday. Yesterday, however, Trump called the governor’s home-town newspaper, said he is changing his attitude towards Martinez, and he’d like her endorsement.
At a certain point, shouldn’t Trump’s erratic temperament warrant some scrutiny?
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, June 2, 2016
“The Champion”: Muhammad Ali, Bigger Than Boxing
I was 10 years old in March of 1971 when Muhammad Ali faced Joe Frazier in what was billed as “the fight of the century.” Ali had been stripped of his title in 1967 and barred from fighting in the United States. The case Clay vs. United States, captioned under his birth name, Cassius Clay, because the world at large wasn’t yet ready to recognize his chosen name, was working its way up to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, Atlanta, Georgia and the state of New York licensed him to fight, so in 1970 he finished off two tune-up opponents to prepare for his showdown with Frazier, who’d won the championship while Ali was sidelined.
It was a huge event. Not just a huge sports event, but a huge cultural event. At a time when these kinds of things didn’t happen, the pre-fight hype made the nightly newscasts; Walter Cronkite and John Chancellor had to talk about it. They’d show clips—Ali, urbane, machine-gun fast with his put-downs of Frazier; Frazier, poor Frazier, inarticulate, grunting, uncharismatic. Ali knew it wasn’t a fair fight, and in truth, he was mean and demagogic, as he was later to George Foreman. He called Frazier a “gorilla,” mocked him, belittled him. Frazier couldn’t hold a match to him.
Dad got four tickets to a closed-circuit screening of the fight at the U.S. armory in Fairmont, about 20 miles down the road from Morgantown, where Fairmont State played its basketball games. There was a huge screen, and, I don’t know now, maybe 2,000 seats. God, was it smoky. Smoke smoke smoke. And it was black and white. And if my mind isn’t playing tricks on me, there was no commentary. Just 2,000 chain-smoking men watching a silent screen.
Dad took a friend, I don’t remember who, and I chose my friend Steve Szapanos, which turned out to be unfortunate only in that Stevie was for Frazier. I was Ali all the way. Ever since I’d become aware of him, he’d embodied everything I liked. He was against authority. He did it his way. He said to the makers of rules that their rules were a fantasy, weren’t for him. This was right up my alley. Dad, a liberal atheist and normally an admirer of rule-flouters of every stripe, had a bit of an old-fashioned streak when it came to Old Glory (he volunteered for the Navy two days after Pearl Harbor), and didn’t like loudmouths besides.
Frazier put Ali on the canvas early in the 15th round and won a unanimous decision. I was crushed; thought he was finished. Then, in January 1973, George Foreman came out of nowhere and pulverized Frazier. Ali got a fight against Frazier. They put it in Kinshasa, Zaire, in October 1974. No one thought Ali had a chance. No one. Many people thought Foreman would literally kill him. Ali knocked him out in the eighth round. It was staggering.
Ali was born in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1942—in segregation. He had little schooling. The draft board rejected him, initially, because he could barely read and write. But he could think. He wondered why his name was Clay, the same name as the famous, and white, 19th-century Kentucky senator. He wondered why he wasn’t allowed into places white people were. He took the gold medal he’d earned in Rome at the 1960 Olympics and threw it into the Ohio River.
He ran rings around every other heavyweight contender, back in a time when boxing was a much bigger sport than it is now. It was baseball, college football, horse racing, boxing. He predicted the rounds he’d drop his opponents, and he was right every time. It was like Stephen Curry. Or Curry plus. Moved the sport to a place it had never been.
But then he did more. He transcended the sport. In February 1964, he was training for his big title fight with champion Sonny Liston in Miami. The Beatles were in town, on their first trip to America, and his people and their people understood somehow that Clay (as he was then called) and the Beatles were revolutionaries in the same vanguard, so they did a press thing together. He clobbered Liston, and the next day, he changed his name, joined the Nation of Islam, told America: I will not be what you want me to be.
He never was. He was, frankly, hated, and for many years. Despised. But in the end, America realized he’d been right and came to him. I remember now watching the opening ceremony of the 1996 Summer Olympics, in Atlanta. This and that person ran around the track carrying the torch. Finally, the last runner brought it up to the dais and handed it off, and the spotlight shone—on Ali. The crowd went mad. His right hand shook as he leaned down to light the torch. Parkinson’s had taken him. I knew. I knew because Dad, who strode so confidently into the Fairmont Armory in 1971, had been felled by the same disease. Dad couldn’t get out of bed by himself in 1996. He died on Pearl Harbor Day the next year, 55 years and 363 days after he’d enlisted, his organs laid waste, just as Ali’s have been now.
I had the great good fortune to meet him, in the early 1990s. He even shook his fist at me, that fist that was the most famous fist of the century, and pulled that face on me, raising his eyebrows, overbiting just as he did when he said “Mmmm, Frazier, you’re going down!” It was an ecstatic moment of my life. But my main memory of him isn’t selfish. It’s shared. Because, like all historical giants, he belonged to all of us. Meeting him was something, but the real thrill was just to have been alive in his time; to have had the chance to contemplate how a black baby born into segregation, whom fate might have made an elevator operator or a railroad station shoe-shine man, could change the world. He deserves for us all to spend some time marveling at that.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, June 4, 2016
“Ethnic Heritage On The Courts”: What Happens In A White Patriarchal Culture Where “Norms” Are The Default Mode
Even as legal experts express their alarm over Donald Trump’s remarks about U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel (who is presiding over the fraud cases against Trump University), the presumptive Republican presidential nominee decided to double down.
In an interview, Mr. Trump said U.S. District Judge Gonzalo Curiel had “an absolute conflict” in presiding over the litigation given that he was “of Mexican heritage” and a member of a Latino lawyers’ association. Mr. Trump said the background of the judge, who was born in Indiana to Mexican immigrants, was relevant because of his campaign stance against illegal immigration and his pledge to seal the southern U.S. border. “I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest,” Mr. Trump said.
So here’s how that breaks down: Trump makes racists proposals against Mexican immigrants and then assumes that presents a conflict of interest for a judge with Mexican heritage. Based on all of his racist and sexist comments, that might wipe out a pretty good portion of the judiciary from ever presiding over a case in which he is involved.
But there is something deeper at work here. I have no illusions that a man like Trump will ever understand it. But it’s important for us to be clear about what it means to single a judge out for their ethnic heritage.
As I’ve been watching this unfold, I am reminded of the Republican attacks on Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor. Because of her compelling story and exemplary career, they settled on going after her for her remarks about a “wise Latina.” They were part of a lecture she gave in 2009 titled: A Latina Judge’s Voice” in which she addressed the question of what it means to have more women and people of color on the bench.
I would hope that a wise Latina woman with the richness of her experiences would more often than not reach a better conclusion than a white male who hasn’t lived that life…
Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.
Now…compare that to what Sam Alito said during his confirmation hearing when Sen. Tom Coburn asked him to let us see a little bit of his heart.
…when a case comes before me involving, let’s say, someone who is an immigrant — and we get an awful lot of immigration cases and naturalization cases — I can’t help but think of my own ancestors, because it wasn’t that long ago when they were in that position.
And so it’s my job to apply the law. It’s not my job to change the law or to bend the law to achieve any result.
But when I look at those cases, I have to say to myself, and I do say to myself, “You know, this could be your grandfather, this could be your grandmother. They were not citizens at one time, and they were people who came to this country.”
The only real difference between what Sotomayor and Alito said is that her family is from Puerto Rico and his are from Italy. And yet one nominee’s words were cause for a firestorm and the other’s were heralded as heartfelt – when noticed at all. That is what happens in a white patriarchal culture where “norms” are established as the default mode for expectations.
Let’s take a look at how Justice Sotomayor ended her lecture.
Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion. I am reminded each day that I render decisions that affect people concretely and that I owe them constant and complete vigilance in checking my assumptions, presumptions and perspectives and ensuring that to the extent that my limited abilities and capabilities permit me, that I reevaluate them and change as circumstances and cases before me requires. I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations. I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.
There is always a danger embedded in relative morality, but since judging is a series of choices that we must make, that I am forced to make, I hope that I can make them by informing myself on the questions I must not avoid asking and continuously pondering.
One has to wonder whether Justice Alito questions his own assumptions, presumptions and perspectives that stem from being a white male on the court. The systemic bias we witness in the courts is largely a result of the failure to do so.
By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, June 3, 2016
“Americans Believe All Manner Of Dumb Things”: Donald Trump’s ‘Secret’ Americans Love Bullsh*t Peddlers And Miracle Cures
It’s a requirement for a certain sort of political journalist to file at least one heavy-breathing dispatch on the cynical brilliance of Donald Trump, stuffed with clichés about the Republican nominee’s “genius… ability to make facts irrelevant” and his supposed skill at “hypnotizing” voters into believing things that are demonstrably false. These are often accompanied by a compulsory comment from a Trump supporter denouncing an “elite media” that doesn’t understand ordinary, salt-of-the-Earth types susceptible to cheering-New-Jersey-Muslims-on-9/11 conspiracy theories.
During an appearance on Real Time with Bill Maher last week, I made the uncontroversial point that Americans believe many stupid things and that it was necessary to challenge those stupidities. This provoked a barely coherent Trump-supporter named Wayne Allyn Root to suggest that my “elitism” betrayed a disconnect with those in real America. Later in the show, Root, author of the autobiographical book Millionaire Republican (“The real key to becoming a Millionaire Republican is to do the opposite of what the masses do”), boasted that he went to Columbia and his daughter attended Harvard. (Live television, I decided, was no place to admit penury and a degree from a state university.)
The question, of course, remained unanswered: if Trump has such a fraught relationship with reality, why are voters—those stolid and honest middle Americans—so easily charmed by his lies? There now exists a significant literature on this question, most of which forgoes simple explanations in favor of needlessly complicated ones. The boring truth is that Americans of all backgrounds believe all manner of dumb things. Why would we expect voters to exhibit a degree of rationality they rarely display in other aspects of life?
Indeed, Americans have a particular talent for transforming charlatans, cranks, and frauds into celebrities—and a particular tolerance for fact-free fads promoted by already-existing celebrities. Our favorite medical man is arguably Dr. Oz, who indulges all sorts of unscientific mysticism. We’ve made the absurd television “medium” John Edward absurdly wealthy for pretending he can communicate with your dead pet newt. Ours is a culture in which an Oscar-winning actress has a second act as a lifestyle guru peddling pseudoscientific nonsense, forcing Canadian academic Timothy Caufield to publish the book Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything? (Spoiler: pretty much.)
Believing stupid things is, alas, a habit of both plebs and elites, celebrities and nobodies. It doesn’t take a genius to figure that out.
On any given night in New York City, dinner parties are thrown, forthcoming Hamptons holidays compared, and fantastically ignorant conversations about politics and “wellness” trends are had (sound baths, steamed vaginas, vinegar diets, child sacrifice, etc). I was once in the unpleasant company of an obscenely wealthy literary agent when she advised her guests that this summer they should all commit to hiring her German-born “energy person” in Southampton, who would tinker with their chakras and free their radicals, while draining their bank accounts for the privilege.
You would be unsurprised to discover that my host diligently ate organic, shunned gluten, ingested handfuls of probiotics, and avoided Genetically Modified Organisms. And most well-informed people would also be unsurprised that last month the National Academy of Science released an authoritative report aggregating 20 years of research on genetic modification showing no evidence exists to support claims that GMOs are harmful to humans or the environment. But like the dozens of studies that preceded it, the new report will have no effect on those friends convinced that tinkering with nature inevitably precipitates civilizational disaster.
And of those friends, I doubt you’d be surprised if more than one owned a copy of The 10-Day Green Smoothie Cleanse, a book that has lurked on the New York Times bestseller list since 2014, promising to “cleanse your cells and insides.” There is, as Tim Caufield points out in his anti-Paltrow opus, “absolutely no evidence to support the idea that we need to detoxify our bodies in the manner suggested by the cleansing industry.” The body is quite capable of “cleansing” and “detoxifying” itself—your kidneys and liver take care of that—but smart people still believe in scrubbing cells clean with pint glasses full of plutonium-scented green sludge. (A friend pointed me to his preferred local organic restaurant, in one of New York City’s most expensive neighborhoods, that hawks a “16 oz. Alzheimer’s Fighter” juice, which will set you back $8 and do absolutely nothing to stave off Alzheimers.)
Or how about my Facebook acquaintance who recently recommended Arianna Huffington’s best-selling book The Sleep Revolution, which extols the virtues of a good night’s rest. An uncontroversial premise, sure, but when I thumbed through the book I spotted Huffington’s praise for a colleague who shared “insights about acupuncture, herbs, homeopathy, and all sorts of natural ways” to help readers fall asleep. I don’t want to be uncharitable, but homeopathy is voodoo, “herbs” is a meaningless category of “healing” (some herbs, if ingested, will kill you), and acupuncture, to paraphrase Yale Medical School professor Steven Novella, doesn’t work.
The same day I was advised to revolutionize my sleep, I happened upon a short and pointless Yahoo News article about supermodel Elle Macpherson’s “alkaline diet,” a change necessitated by a discovery that “her pH levels—of acid to alkaline—weren’t balanced.” Of course, Yahoo’s celebrity stenographer challenged none of Macpherson’s antiscience. “I didn’t realize that stress, worry, jet lag, not getting enough sleep, and eating too much red meat, dairy, or not enough greens can make your body acidic.” Well, it can’t. And the science supporting an “alkaline diet” is nonexistent. But Gwyneth, Gisele, and Victoria “swear by it.”
My favorite of the countless money-grubbing mystics skulking around Hollywood is Anthony William, the self-proclaimed “Medical Medium” who has no medical training but, according to the prolific woo-woo endorser Gwyneth, “always knows what the problem is and the pathway for healing,” even when your doctor doesn’t. (In fairness, William is also endorsed by phone-throwing model Naomi Campbell and former Quantum Leap star Scott Bakula.) Anthony claims he can “see” illnesses lurking inside patients because of some unexplained supernatural vision that visited him as a 4-year-old child, hilariously dramatized in this YouTube video. William’s Facebook page has 1.6 million likes—including, I was distressed to discover, a few of my own Facebook friends—and his book Medical Medium: Secrets Behind Chronic and Mystery Illness and How to Finally Heal recently appeared on the New York Times list.
Of course cancer is best detected by real doctors and their expensive machines, not a man wearing linen pants and a pony tail who hears voices. This might seem obvious, but desperate people are rather easily convinced by quacks peddling “politically incorrect” solutions to terminal problems.
And so it is with a certain strata of Trump voters, alienated by stagnant wages and an America they believe is on the decline, despite significant evidence to the contrary, who feel that desperate times demand the suspension of common sense and unity behind a political quack. MSNBC’s Andrea Mitchell recently lamented that we live in unique times and in 2016 “facts no longer matter.” Though we might ask themselves if they ever mattered or is it just Trump’s brazenness and lack of political sophistication that’s unique?
Our political brains are governed by the same bad instincts and dumb hunches that make us believe we can detox our own bodies with juice and protect our kids bodies from the nonexistent ravages of GMO corn. Sure, there’s no evidence to support such claims but they’re certainly things that feel true. Sound familiar?
So next time you’re out in the world, look around—at the shelves full of hoax supplements, powdered vitamin C packets meant to stave off a cold (they don’t), and best-selling books promoting cynical and exploitative mysticism—and remember that we’re susceptible to Donald Trump’s charms not because he’s a genius, a hypnotist, a skilled outsider politician. Americans fall for it because he’s famous, moderately funny, and we spend most of our lives surrounded by bullshit people making bullshit claims.
What’s one more in the White House?
By: Michael Moynihan, The Daily Beast, June 3, 2016
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