“The Sum Of All Fears”: A Signal From America’s Emergency Broadcast System
On the heels of his dominant victory in last night’s South Carolina Republican primary, does anyone still think that Donald Trump’s rise to the GOP nomination can be stopped?
Trump is, for all intents and purposes, already the GOP nominee, a prospect that should unnerve any American who believes in common decency. His conquest of South Carolina was nothing less than a signal from America’s emergency broadcast system: this is only a test of whether rational America will allow fear and fury to flourish over the course of the next four years.
The thought of this man–this embodiment of every dark, demonic force in American history–becoming the 45th President of the United States chills the blood. What does it say about our educational system that this man was not laughed right out of the political system the moment he announced his candidacy?
He talks about what Mexico allegedly sends to the United States. Imagine what a President Trump would send to the rest of the world: a message that racism, sexism, xenophobia and narcissism are virtues, not vices. A message that reason is for the weak. A message that America has fallen into a deep moral abyss.
I’m scared for my friends’ children. They will be of an impressionable age over the next four years. When they see President Donald Trump on the TV screen, what warped values will penetrate their minds? What flawed lessons will they carry with them for the rest of their lives? Will I have to tell my friends not to let their kids watch President Trump, for the same reason one doesn’t let children watch movies with explicit sex, violence and profanity?
What kind of world will those kids inherit? A Trump victory would be far more devastating for our climate than the Keystone XL pipeline would have been. I guarantee that within 24 hours of a Trump victory, China, India and other major polluters will abandon the Paris climate agreement, reasoning that by electing an unrepentant climate-change denier, America cannot possibly be trusted to hold up its end of the deal. Without that deal, you can say goodbye to a livable future–and say hello to more fires, more floods, more disease, more death. (And by the way, Mr. Kasich, if you’re serious about climate, you will not endorse Trump once you suspend your campaign.)
A part of me wants to believe that hope will ultimately conquer fear, that morality will defeat madness, that progressivism will win over revanchism. Another part of me fears that such hope is an illusion, and that on Election Day, a majority of voters, hooked on the opiate of hate, will rush to the polls for their next fix from Donald the Dealer, this pathetic pusher of prejudice.
What would Marvin Gaye say about this, this dark moment in time? What would Nina Simone say? What would Maya Angelou say? Stevie Wonder once sang about finding joy inside his tears. What if, on the night of November 8, there’s no joy to be found?
I have to believe that hope will survive. Maybe that’s my opiate. Maybe I’m addicted to optimism. Nevertheless, I have yet to abandon my view that in the event Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders cannot go the distance in his quest for the nomination, his passionate and enthusiastic supporters will step back, take stock, and set aside whatever grievances they have with Hillary Clinton, concluding that at the end of the day, an alleged “corporatist” cannot threaten democracy and civility the way an actual crackpot can.
Think about what’s at stake. This country is only so resilient. In 1992, America could have survived four more years of Poppy Bush. In 1996, America could have survived four years of President Bob Dole. In 2008, America could have survived four years of President John McCain. In 2012, America could have even survived four years of President Mitt Romney.
Does anyone think this country could survive four days, much less four years, of President Donald Trump?
The progressives currently feuding over the merits of Clinton v. Sanders will lay down their rhetorical arms and embrace each other as brothers and sisters at the conclusion of the Democratic primary. They will unify as the general election approaches, attending to their tasks with the skill and effectiveness of a veteran worker for a suicide prevention hotline. That analogy is apt, because progressives will, in essence, try to stop the country from cutting its own wrist on November 8.
By: D. R. Tucker, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 21, 2016
“A Phony GOP Parody”: Why The Democratic Candidates Need To Get Obama’s Record Straight
There is an imbalance in the argument at the heart of the 2016 presidential campaign that threatens to undercut the Democrats’ chances of holding the White House.
You might think otherwise. The divisions among Republicans are as sharp as they have been since 1964. Donald Trump may be building on the politics of resentment the GOP has pursued throughout President Obama’s term. But Trump’s mix of nationalism, xenophobia, a dash of economic populism and a searing critique of George W. Bush’s foreign policy offers a philosophical smorgasbord that leaves the party’s traditional ideology behind.
Jeb Bush, the candidate who represents the greatest degree of continuity with the Republican past, is floundering. Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, both Cuban Americans, are competing fiercely over who is toughest on immigration. So much for the party opening its doors to new Americans. As for the less incendiary John Kasich, he probably won’t be relevant to the race again until the primaries hit the Midwest.
Add to this the GOP’s demographic weakness — young Americans are profoundly alienated from the party, and nonwhites will only be further turned off by the spectacle created by Trump, Cruz & Co. — and the likelihood of a third consecutive Democratic presidential victory is in view.
But then comes the imbalance: If there is a common element in the rhetoric of all the Republican candidates, it is that Obama’s presidency is an utter disaster, and he is trying to turn us, as Rubio keeps saying, into “a different kind of country.” You’d imagine from hearing the Republicans speak (Kasich is a partial exception) that we were in the midst of a new Great Depression, had just been defeated in a war, had lost our moral compass entirely, had no religious liberty and were on the verge of a dictatorship established by a slew of illegal executive orders.
Oh, yes, and the president who brought about all these horrors has lost the authority to name a Supreme Court justice, no matter what the Constitution — which should otherwise be strictly interpreted — says.
You can laugh or cry over this, but it is a consistent message, carried every day by the media whenever they cover the Republican contest.
The Democrats offer, well, a more nuanced approach. True, Hillary Clinton has embraced Obama more and more, seeing him as a life raft against Bernie Sanders’s formidable challenge. In particular, she knows that African American voters deeply resent the way Obama has been treated by Republicans. (No other president, after all, has ever been told that any nomination he makes to the Supreme Court will be ignored.) Tying herself to Obama is a wise way of shoring up her up-to-now strong support among voters of color.
Nonetheless, because so many Americans have been hurt by rising inequality and the economic changes of the past several decades, neither Democratic presidential candidate can quite say what hopefuls representing the incumbent party usually shout from the rooftops: Our stewardship has been a smashing success and we should get another term.
Sanders, in fact, represents a wholesale rebellion against the status quo. He tries to say positive things about Obama and how the president dealt with the economic catastrophe that struck at the end of George W. Bush’s term. But the democratic socialist from Vermont is not shy about insisting that much more should have been done to break up the banks, rein in the power of the wealthy, and provide far more sweeping health insurance and education benefits.
A good case can be made — and has been made by progressives throughout Obama’s term — that if Democrats said that everything was peachy, voters who were still hurting would write off the party entirely.
But ambivalence does not win elections. Running to succeed Ronald Reagan in 1988, George H.W. Bush triumphed by proposing adjustments in Reagan’s environmental and education policies but otherwise touting what enough voters decided were Reagan’s successes.
Democrats need to insist that while much work remains to be done, the United States is in far better shape economically than most other countries in the world. The nation is better off for the reforms in health care, financial regulation and environmental protection enacted during Obama’s term and should be proud of its energetic, entrepreneurial and diverse citizenry.
If Clinton, Sanders and their party don’t provide a forceful response to the wildly inaccurate and ridiculously bleak characterization of Obama’s presidency that the Republicans are offering, nobody will. And if this parody is allowed to stand as reality, the Democrats will lose.
By: E. J. Dionne, Jr., Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, February 19, 2016
“A Common Purpose”: Nevada Gives Hillary Clinton A Clear Path To Victory
Hillary Clinton needed a decisive victory in Nevada to put to rest fears that her campaign was in trouble, and it looks like she got it. At this writing, with final results still to come, it appears that she will win by four or five percentage points, basically matching her 2008 win in the state over Barack Obama. With this victory, Clinton has a clear path for pushing aside her too-close win in Iowa and big loss in New Hampshire. She can plausibly argue that Bernie Sanders’s coalition is too narrow—that it is, in particular, too heavily white—to reflect the Democratic Party, which after all is a multi-racial coalition.
And she’s clearly aiming to broaden her own coalition. In her victory speech, Clinton incorporated many of the themes of Sanders’s campaign, emphasizing economic populist messages like student debt. She also made sure to note (a la Sanders) that most of her funding comes from small donors contributing less than $100. And throughout the speech, she repeatedly used the communitarian “we”—a response perhaps to criticism that her campaign has been too much about her leadership and experience, and not enough about common purpose.
If this win is followed by Clinton’s expected victory in next Saturday’s South Carolina primary and the six Southern states of Super Tuesday on March 1, she has a clear path to racking up enough delegates to be the prohibitive front-runner, especially in light of her strong lead among the Democratic super-delegates. The irony is that Clinton might end up making the same argument from delegate math that Obama made in 2008. If Clinton wants to wrap up the primary early, she could soon be in a position to argue that the delegate math overwhelmingly favors her—and Sanders would have to make the same argument that Clinton did in 2008, when Obama took the lead, that every voter needs to be heard from and that he could still conceivably win a majority of votes going forward.
The news isn’t entirely bleak for Sanders. He doesn’t have as clear a path out of Nevada, but he has done better in the state than he could’ve been expected to do even a few weeks ago. By all logic, a state where the demographics trend both older and non-white should have been a bigger Clinton blow-out. Even as the Clinton campaign will likely gather force in the Southern states, Sanders can still make a credible showing in other Super Tuesday states like Colorado, Massachusetts, and Minnesota. In theory, if he does well enough in those states he can make the race tighter again nationally, especially if the inroads he appeared to make among young Latinos in Nevada can be replicated elsewhere.
But just how well Sanders actually did with Latinos in Nevada is murky. Entrance polls showed Sanders winning Latinos, but these results are suspect given the fact that he lost the race. What’s more plausible is that he was at least competitive with Latinos, given the margin of the final vote—heartening for Sanders, but hardly convincing proof that he’s made the breakthrough with non-white voters that he needs.
Ultimately, the harder part for Sanders going forward will be crafting a plausible narrative. Coming out of Nevada, Clinton can reasonably argue that she won in a state that looks much more like the Democratic coalition than largely white states like Iowa and New Hampshire. Clinton has the support of women (although it’s not clear if she won young women in Nevada after losing them in New Hampshire), African-Americans, and Latinos. That is close to the coalition that Obama used to win two elections in a row. The only thing missing from the equation is the enthusiasm of young people, which Sanders still has.
As the challenger, Sanders has the more difficult task of proving that he can both bring in new voters and appeal to loyal Democrats. So far, Sanders has been more successful at the first half of the equation. And unless he can make genuine inroads among African-Americans and improve with Latinos above what he’s achieved in Nevada, it’ll be hard for him to argue that he represents the broader Democratic Party. Even a self-professed revolutionary has to work with the existing party before he or she can expand it. Sanders remains a viable candidate, but coming out of Nevada he faces the bigger burden of forging a winning coalition.
By: Jeet Heer, The New Republic, February 20, 2016
“Hillary’s Double-Standard Dance”: Same Dance Women, Especially Female Candidates, Have Been Expected To Do For Years
Things I heard Hillary Clinton talk about Saturday night in Denver at the Colorado Democrats’ Jefferson-Jackson dinner: Supreme Court appointments. Health care. Gun violence, with a catch in her voice when she mentioned Aurora, Columbine and Sandy Hook families turning their grief into action. Electing Morgan Carroll to Congress to represent Colorado’s sixth district, returning Michael Bennet to the Senate and regaining Democrats’ state senate majority. Anti-abortion personhood measures. The reopening of the Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado Springs on Monday.
Things Bernie Sanders talked about: The Supreme Court and Citizens United. Income equality. Single-payer health care. Zero mention of helping other Democrats in swing-state Colorado, or much specific to Colorado at all.
As my hero Ann Richards famously said, “Ginger Rogers did everything that Fred Astaire did. She just did it backwards and in high heels.”
So how much does Hillary Clinton have to do backwards and in high heels before she gets the credit she deserves? I agree with Bernie Sanders’ positions on the issues (guns aside), as do most Democrats, even though he wasn’t one until a year ago. But Sanders’ positions wouldn’t exist without the groundwork Hillary Clinton has done on health care, women’s rights, LGBT rights, civil rights, as secretary of state and in 40 years as a child advocate, including creating the State Children’s Health Insurance Program and starting with her first job as a staff attorney for the Children’s Defense Fund.
So yes, there is some frustration among those of us in the Thelma and Louise generation, that while Bernie gets accolades for what he says, Hillary still has to earn them for what she’s done.
The same goes for the entirety of Bernie’s foreign policy, resting on his vote against the Iraq War. That’s nice. Meanwhile, as secretary of state Hillary successfully navigated the complexities of international diplomacy, restored our stature in the world, contributed to our taking out Osama bin Laden, normalized relations with Cuba, negotiated a cease-fire in Gaza, laid the foundation for the agreement to denuclearize Iran and traveled to more countries than any other secretary of state. As Sen. Harry Reid put it, “Nearly every foreign policy victory of President Obama’s second term has Secretary Clinton’s fingerprints on it.”
Bernie Sander wants credit for a day. Hillary Clinton doesn’t get credit for four years.
And a personal note to Bernie-backers: I was Sen. Barbara Boxer’s press secretary when she was one of 23 senators to vote ‘no’ on the Iraq Resolution in 2002. She was up for re-election at the time, and even though her seat, like Bernie’s, was considered safe, our campaign manager nearly had a stroke.
The political atmosphere courtesy of the Bush administration was toxic and just this side of McCarthyism – they were questioning the patriotism of Sen. Max Cleland, an Army captain who left both legs and an arm on a helicopter pad in Vietnam, for disagreeing with President Bush. Minnesota Sen. Paul Wellstone voted ‘no,’ and had he not been killed in a plane crash he likely would have lost his seat.
So the idea that the senator from New York could have voted ‘no’ a year after 9/11 is simply ridiculous. As Hillary has said, if she knew then what we all know now – that the Bush administration was lying about the connection between Saddam and 9/11 to foment a rush to war – she would have voted differently. Hindsight is 20/20 and apparently politically beneficial.
It’s also worth noting that Sens. Boxer and Franken, the latter the Democratic successor to Paul Wellstone’s seat, have both endorsed Hillary.
Hillary may be in a pantsuit. But she’s doing the same double-standard dance women, and especially female candidates, have been expected to do for years.
By: Laura K. Chapin, U. S. News and World Report, February 17, 2016
“Democrats, Don’t Blow It”: Ask Yourselves, Whom Would You Prefer To Name Future Supreme Court Judges?
The death of Antonin Scalia has set off yet another epic partisan struggle as Senate Republicans seek to deny President Obama his constitutional right to nominate the next Supreme Court justice. They want to wait out Obama’s last year in office, hoping his successor will be one of their own.
If the Democrats choose Bernie Sanders as their presidential candidate, Republicans will almost certainly get their wish. Furthermore, the Republican president would probably have a Republican-majority Senate happy to approve his selection.
The makeup of senatorial races this November gives Democrats a decent chance of capturing a majority. Having the radical Sanders on the ballot would hurt them in swing states.
Some Sanders devotees will argue with conviction that these purplish Democrats are not real progressives anyway, not like our Bernie. Herein lies the Democrats’ problem.
No sophisticated pollster puts stock in current numbers showing Sanders doing well against possible Republican foes. The right has not subjected Sanders to the brutality it routinely rains on Hillary Clinton — precisely because he is the candidate they want to run a Republican against. Should Sanders become the nominee, the skies will open.
One may applaud Sanders’ denunciation of big money in politics, but a moderate Democrat in the White House could do something about it. A democratic socialist not in the White House cannot. Campaign finance reform would be a hard slog under any circumstances, but a seasoned politician who plays well with others could bring a reluctant few to her side.
Some younger liberals may not know the history of the disastrous 2000 election, where Republicans played the left for fools. Polls were showing Al Gore and George W. Bush neck-and-neck, particularly in the pivotal state of Florida.
Despite the stakes, prominent left-wing voices continued to back the third-party candidacy of Ralph Nader. You had Michael Moore bouncing on stages where he urged cheering liberals to vote for the radical Nader because there was no difference between Gore and Bush. Republicans, meanwhile, were running ads for Nader. That was no secret. It was in the papers.
When the Florida tally came in, Bush held a mere 537-vote edge. The close results prompted Florida to start a recount of the votes. Then, in a purely partisan play, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court stopped the recount, handing the election to Bush.
The bigger point is that Gore would have been the undisputed winner in 2000 had Nader not vacuumed up almost 100,000 Florida votes, most of which would have surely gone to him.
Same deal in New Hampshire, where Nader siphoned off more than 22,000 votes. Bush won there by only 7,211 ballots.
Now, Sanders is an honorable man running a straightforward campaign for the Democratic nomination. One can’t imagine his playing the third-party spoiler.
But what makes today similar to 2000 is how many on the left are so demanding of ideological purity that they’d blow the opportunity to keep the White House in Democratic hands. Of course, they don’t see it that way. This may reflect their closed circle of like-minded friends — or an illusion that others need only see the light, and their hero will sweep into the Oval Office.
The other similarity to 2000 is the scorn the believers heap on the experienced liberal alternative. They can’t accept the compromises, contradictions and occasional bad calls that attach to any politician who’s fought in the trenches.
The next president will almost certainly be either Clinton or a Republican. Democrats must ask themselves: Whom would you prefer to name future Supreme Court judges?
By: Froma Harrop, The National Memo, February 16, 2016
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