“Is GOP ‘Feeling The Bern’?”: Does The Republican Party Want Bernie Sanders To Win Democratic Nomination?
Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) has attracted unexpected support from millions of Americans, but one endorsement may be more surprising than any other. The Republican Party (yes, that one) seems to be “feeling the Bern,” if its press releases and publicly available “research” are any indication of the party leadership’s preferences.
While not openly admitting their purpose, party strategists apparently hope a Sanders ticket will galvanize their own voters to prevent his election and ensure Republican victory. With Hillary Clinton out of the race, a democratic socialist could also alienate conservative Democrats, who might either turn to the Republicans or simply stay home on Election Day.
The Republican National Committee has repeatedly, and quite surprisingly, propped up Bernie Sanders against both Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee. In fact, recent noises from the RNC sound almost like dyed-in-the-wool-ultraliberal Democrats. “With only six sanctioned debates, the DNC is providing new opportunities for voters to get to know the candidates and see where they stand on the issues,” said a post by Team GOP in the run up to the second Democratic debate in Des Moines, Iowa.
Michael Short, the Rapid Response Director for the RNC, published an aggregated list claiming that Sanders performed better among focus groups and online polls than Hillary Clinton, who still remains the leading Democratic aspirant. “Hillary Clinton may be the stronger debater on stage — she was in 2008 too — but like Barack Obama in 2007 and 2008 it was Bernie Sanders that won the hearts and interest of Democrat voters,” wrote Short. Quite a glowing review for the candidate most likely to debate “the merits of socialism over capitalism.”
To the naive voters, Republican support for Sanders might seem contradictory. After all, most Republicans dislike any notion of wealth redistribution, public healthcare, and other socially progressive policies designed to help poorer voters, preferring “trickle-down economics” and tax cuts for the super-rich. So if Republican spokespersons are backing a democratic socialist against the “practical progressive” candidate, it’s because they hope moderate and conservative Democrats will so disagree with his platform that they will deprive their own party of a crucial voting bloc. Together self-identified moderates and conservatives still constitute just over half of all Democrats, although Democrats who identify with the liberal wing have grown to become the single largest voting bloc in the party.
The GOP clearly hopes to portray Democrats as led by a bunch of socialists and even communists (as Donald Trump puts it) who chose Sanders. Electing a socialist will mean “unending layovers of senseless government bureaucracy.” Or maybe it will mean “rich and decadent government spending.” (Some media intern probably got a pat on the back for that timely “The 5 flavors of Bernie Sanders” listicle.) Either way, Sanders’ election will result in bigger government, a cause the Republicans have vowed to fight in perpetuity.
Currently, however, there are reputable polls that show Sanders beating every leading Republican candidate in a general election. Trump loses. Cruz loses. Carson isn’t even competitive among Republican candidates, a decline that began soon after disclosing he believed the Pyramids were used for agriculture in the Egyptian desert. Sanders, on the other hand, has increased his support since launching his campaign in April.
Perhaps those clever Republican strategists should be careful what they wish for.
By: Saif Alnuweiri, The National Memo, January 19, 2016
“The Problem Is The Politics”: Sanders’ Single-Payer Plan Is A Distraction
If you’ve successfully landed on the beaches, but your forces are still taking heavy fire, what do you do? Do you concentrate on trying to hold the line and make further advances or do you sit in a circle and design a better landing craft?
The problem with Bernie Sanders’ health care vision isn’t the vision. His raw outline for a greatly simplified and less expensive health-care system is excellent in theory. The problem is the politics — the reality of which battle-scarred Hillary Clinton clearly has the better grasp.
This was the message Clinton tried to convey in the Sunday Democratic debate. Her most potent point on health-care reform centered on recalling the “public option” fiasco during the fight for the Affordable Care Act.
The public option was to be a government-run health plan competing with the private offerings in the health-care exchanges. It was a no-brainer to keep the insurance companies on a shorter leash. But, as Clinton noted, “even when the Democrats were in charge of the Congress, we couldn’t get the votes for that.”
John E. McDonough, a health policy expert at Harvard, has also been through the health-care wars. As a Massachusetts state legislator, McDonough led an unsuccessful campaign to bring single-payer to his liberal state. In a recent New England Journal of Medicine article, he explained why a similar effort in Sanders’ own state of Vermont failed.
Vermont was the great hope for we fans of single-payer. (I was waving pompoms.) The state is progressive and one footstep from Canada. Gov. Peter Shumlin was totally onboard. He spent four years trying to make a single-payer plan happen. Three major-league studies showed that it was economically feasible.
But even in Vermont, a clear public mandate for single payer never materialized. A rebellion against it almost cost Shumlin the governor’s job.
Asked about this on Sunday, Sanders took a swipe at Shumlin (who has endorsed Clinton).
“Let me just say that you might want to ask the governor of the state of Vermont why he could not do it,” Sanders responded. “I’m not the governor. I’m the senator from the state of Vermont.”
Yes, and as senator from Vermont, Sanders introduced several single-payer bills that went nowhere. The most recent one, the 2013 American Health Security Act, attracted not a single co-sponsor.
The plan Sanders released two hours before the debate remains too sketchy for a reliable independent analysis, according to McDonough. But lack of detail isn’t his biggest concern. It’s opening a new front in the battle to defend Obamacare.
“Republicans sent a bill to the President’s desk last week that would eliminate health insurance for 22 million Americans by 2018,” McDonough wrote me. “This is not beanbag. It’s the real deal, and we have to focus where it matters the most.”
“Bernie wants to lead us on a distraction tour while Republicans want to kill the progress we have made.”
How far have we come? Thanks to Obamacare, almost 18 million formerly uninsured Americans now have health coverage. A report just out of Georgetown University has the rate of uninsured Hispanic children falling to a historic low.
Insurers can no longer turn down people with pre-existing conditions. And important politically, Obamacare has demonstrated that universal coverage is doable without creating mass unemployment or “exploding” deficits. On the contrary.
Making Obamacare more Medicare-like through incremental steps may not feed the romantic urge to reinvent health-care reform from scratch, but there’s no other road, not in the America of 2016. Finally, let’s not forget that vanguard of reform is still on the beaches and taking fire.
Correction: The health policy expert at Harvard is John E. McDonough, not Thomas. We regret the error. This article has been updated to reflect that change.
By: Froma Harrop, Featured Post, The National Memo, January 19, 2016
“Strategic Lessons Have Been Learned”: Whatever Happens To Hillary Clinton’s Campaign, It Won’t Be ‘2008 All Over Again’
It’s understandable that Hillary Clinton supporters are feeling nervous now that Bernie Sanders appears to have overcome an autumn swoon in the polls and is showing strength in both Iowa and New Hampshire.
But that doesn’t completely justify Paul Kane’s Washington Post piece on Friday describing Team Clinton’s jitters as “a sense of deja vu from 2008, when Clinton’s overwhelming edge cratered in the days before the Iowa caucuses.” For one thing, the momentum has seesawed back and forth in the Clinton-Sanders race. It’s hyperbolic to say there’s any cratering going on. And looking back to 2008, the element of surprise at Clinton’s showing is apparently stronger in the rear-view mirror. The early leader in Iowa was John Edwards, not Hillary Clinton. And Obama was leading in an ABC/Washington Post poll as early as July.
Another major difference is the key dynamic in the Obama-Clinton contest, wherein his Iowa win instantly moved the bulk of African-American voters from her column to his after this demonstration of viability. Kane’s piece suggests the same thing could happen to Sanders, but the analogy is questionable unless there are vast numbers of self-described democratic socialists lurking in Clinton’s columns in the post–New Hampshire states, waiting for a sign.
But the biggest difference is in Clinton’s own team. It could not be 2008 all over again without Mark Penn, the ubiquitous pollster-strategist who offended just about everyone (including his many detractors in Hillaryland) and hogged media attention. By all accounts, in fact, the whole Clinton operation, under low-key campaign manager Robby Mook, is massively less fraught with rivalries and negative vibes. And the strategic lessons of 2008 have surely been learned; there is zero chance Clinton will neglect to devote resources to small-state caucuses, where Obama, nearly unopposed, offset her Super Tuesday wins.
One echo of 2008 that could be heard if Sanders manages to wrest the nomination away from Clinton is the reemergence of the PUMAs (short for “Party Unity My Ass”), women angry that their candidate had been repulsed in favor of a significantly less experienced man. And indeed, the anger could be more intense without the parallel history-making Obama represented. Yes, Bernie Sanders could be the first septuagenarian elected to a first term as president (and the first Democrat of that vintage to win a nomination), but that hardly seems the same.
Finally, it’s unlikely Clinton will lose in Iowa and then win New Hampshire, which is probably Sanders’s best state outside his own Vermont or perhaps those Bern-ed over grounds in the Pacific Northwest where he’s so immensely popular. But it’s also unlikely, at present, that she will get wiped out in a string of southern states stretching from Virginia to Louisiana the way she was by Obama, unless Sanders shows an appeal to African-Americans that he can only dream about at present.
The more you look at it, the more any 2008 “déjà vu” for Clintonians seems ill-placed. But if Mark Penn shows up at headquarters, all bets are off.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, January 18, 2016
“Clinton’s Clever Debate Strategy”: Cling To Obama In A Party That’s Already Missing Him
If only Democratic primary voters were as furious at their own party’s powers-that-be as are Republican voters, the posture taken by Bernie Sanders in the NBC/YouTube debate Sunday night would’ve been a clear winner: Both parties have been bought by wealthy interests, and only an anti-corporate crusader like Bernie can avoid the terrible policy mistakes committed by and under the Clinton and Obama administrations. Indeed, if a sizable majority of Democrats thought the last two administrations of their own party were the corporate betrayals that many of Sanders’s most avid supporters consider them to be, HRC would be the perfect symbol of the continuing DINO establishment that had to be overthrown to install progressive governance.
Alas for the Sanders campaign, that’s not how Democrats feel. According to the latest Gallup weekly presidential-job-approval tracking poll, the 44th president’s rating among Democrats is 84 percent. Among self-identified Liberal Democrats it’s at 89 percent; among African-Americans it’s at 85 percent. Yet it is extremely difficult for Sanders to make his case that HRC is too close to Wall Street or too militaristic or too timid on domestic policy without co-indicting the incumbent president. Hillary Clinton understands that, which is why she took so much care in the NBC debate to identify her approach to the regulation of Wall Street with Obama’s; to defend Obamacare in contrast to Sanders’s advocacy of a single-payer health-care system; to remind Democrats she was a major architect of Obama’s foreign policy; and to refuse opportunities to separate herself from Obama even though some consultants probably think she’ll need to do that to win a general election.
Meanwhile, Sanders is on the horns of an excruciating dilemma: Even if he manages to win in both Iowa and New Hampshire early next month, the long-term success of his campaign will depend on a breakthrough with minority voters in the South and large industrial states who don’t particularly know or have reason to trust him, and don’t particularly want to hear the first nonwhite president — who has been, and is continuing to be, assailed by Republicans on a daily basis as a hopeless incompetent and near-traitor — being instead described by a Democrat as a corporate whore. Yet an implicit indictment of the Obama administration (and less directly, Bill Clinton’s administration) as compromised by corporate ties and hobbled by unprincipled centrist compromises is at the heart of the entire Sanders campaign, and intrinsic to the kind of activist energy he’s showing in the first two states and other hotbeds like the Pacific Northwest.
Beyond that, it seems difficult for Sanders to think or talk beyond the Evil Corporate Cash Nexus to embrace other Democratic voter concerns. Even when he stops talking about economics — as he briefly did in this debate in a very well-wrought and comprehensive answer to a question about police conduct — you get the sense he wants to get back to his Great White Whale. In a conversation on climate change, Sanders insisted fossil-fuel industry campaign contributions were the sole reason for climate-science denialism, ignoring the regional, cultural, and even religious factors feeding the reactionary position of the GOP and the conservative movement on this subject.
Sanders did get in some telling shots at Clinton’s acceptance of speaking fees from Goldman Sachs (though one wonders if the name of that firm inspires the same fury in his listeners as better known banks they deal with every day), and defended his oscillating position on guns pretty well. And even his response to the “bipartisanship” question — the Naderite position that both parties have been bought and sold — wasn’t that much less convincing than Clinton’s or O’Malley’s stale rap about reaching across party lines and forging the kind of coalitions that have become largely a distant memory.
But Bernie’s plight was perhaps best captured by the moment observers are already calling one of his best in the debate, when he sharply replied to Andrea Mitchell’s out-of-context quote of his condemnation of Bill Clinton’s behavior in the Lewinsky scandal by saying:
I cannot walk down the street, Secretary Clinton knows that, without being told how much I have to attack Secretary Clinton.
That’s undoubtedly true. His core supporters want a civil war — for “the soul of the Democratic Party,” as the pundits love to say. But it’s doubtful the Democratic Party, and particularly the voters he most needs to expand his beachhead in nearly all-white states into more representative Donkey territory, wants its soul contested.
By: Ed Kilgore, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, January 18, 2016
“The Case Against Bernie Sanders”: The Despairing Vision He Paints Of Contemporary America Is Oversimplified
Until very recently, nobody had any cause to regret Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. Sanders is earnest and widely liked. He has tugged the terms of the political debate leftward in a way both moderates and left-wingers could appreciate. (Moderate liberals might not agree with Sanders’s ideas, but they can appreciate that his presence changes for the better a political landscape in which support for things like Mitt Romney’s old positions on health care and the environment were defined as hard-core liberalism.) Sanders’s rapid rise, in both early states and national polling, has made him a plausible threat to defeat Hillary Clinton. Suddenly, liberals who have used the nominating process to unilaterally vet Clinton, processing every development through its likely impact on her as the inevitable candidate, need to think anew. Do we support Sanders not just in his role as lovable Uncle Bernie, complaining about inequality, but as the actual Democratic nominee for president? My answer to that question is no.
Sanders’s core argument is that the problems of the American economy require far more drastic remedies than anything the Obama administration has done, or that Clinton proposes to build on. Clinton has put little pressure on Sanders’s fatalistic assessment, but the evidence for it is far weaker than he assumes. Sanders has grudgingly credited what he calls “the modest gains of the Affordable Care Act,” which seems like an exceedingly stingy assessment of a law that has already reduced the number of uninsured Americans by 20 million. The Dodd-Frank reforms of the financial industry may not have broken up the big banks, but they have, at the very least, deeply reduced systemic risk. The penalties for being too big to fail exceed the benefits, and, as a result, banks are actually breaking themselves up to avoid being large enough to be regulated as systemic risks.
It is true that the Great Recession inflicted catastrophic economic damage, and that fiscal policy did too little to alleviate it. The impression of economic failure hardened into place as the sluggish recovery dragged on for several years. Recently, conditions have improved. Unemployment has dropped, the number of people quitting their job has risen, and — as one would predict would happen when employers start to run short of available workers — average wages have started to climb. Whether the apparent rise in the median wage is the beginning of a sustained increase, or merely a short-lived blip, remains to be seen. At the very least, the conclusion that Obama’s policies have failed to raise living standards for average people is premature. And the progress under Obama refutes Sanders’s corollary point, that meaningful change is impossible without a revolutionary transformation that eliminates corporate power.
Nor should his proposed remedies be considered self-evidently benign. Evidence has shown that, at low levels, raising the minimum wage does little or nothing to kill jobs. At some point, though, the government could set a minimum wage too high for employers to be willing to pay it for certain jobs. Even liberal labor economists like Alan Krueger, who have supported more modest increases, have blanched at Sanders’s proposal for a $15 minimum wage.
Sanders’s worldview is not a fantasy. It is a serious critique based on ideas he has developed over many years, and it bears at least some relation to the instincts shared by all liberals. The moral urgency with which Sanders presents his ideas has helped shelter him from necessary internal criticism. Nobody on the left wants to defend Wall Street or downplay the pressure on middle- and working-class Americans. But Sanders’s ideas should not be waved through as a more honest or uncorrupted version of the liberal catechism. The despairing vision he paints of contemporary America is oversimplified.
Even those who do share Sanders’s critique of American politics and endorse his platform, though, should have serious doubts about his nomination. Sanders does bring some assets as a potential nominee — his rumpled style connotes authenticity, and his populist forays against Wall Street have appeal beyond the Democratic base. But his self-identification as a socialist poses an enormous obstacle, as Americans respond to “socialism” with overwhelming negativity. Likewise, his support for higher taxes on the middle class — while substantively sensible — also saddles him with a highly unpopular stance. He also has difficulty addressing issues outside his economic populism wheelhouse. In his opening statement at the debate the day after the Paris attacks, Sanders briefly and vaguely gestured toward the attacks before quickly turning back to his economic themes.
Against these liabilities, Sanders offers the left-wing version of a hoary political fantasy: that a more pure candidate can rally the People into a righteous uprising that would unsettle the conventional laws of politics. Versions of this have circulated in both parties for years, having notably inspired the disastrous Goldwater and McGovern campaigns. The Republican Party may well fall for it again this year. Sanders’s version involves the mobilization of a mass grassroots volunteer army that can depose the special interests. “The major political, strategic difference I have with Obama is it’s too late to do anything inside the Beltway,” he told Andrew Prokop. “You gotta take your case to the American people, mobilize them, and organize them at the grassroots level in a way that we have never done before.” But Obama did organize passionate volunteers on a massive scale — far broader than anything Sanders has done — and tried to keep his volunteers engaged throughout his presidency. Why would Sanders’s grassroots campaign succeed where Obama’s far larger one failed?
Sanders has promised to replace Obamacare with a single-payer plan, without having any remotely plausible prospects for doing so. Many advocates of single-payer imagine that only the power of insurance companies stands in their way, but the more imposing obstacles would be reassuring suspicious voters that the change in their insurance (from private to public) would not harm them and — more difficult still — raising the taxes to pay for it. As Sarah Kliff details, Vermont had to abandon hopes of creating its own single-payer plan. If Vermont, one of the most liberal states in America, can’t summon the political willpower for single-payer, it is impossible to imagine the country as a whole doing it. Not surprisingly, Sanders’s health-care plan uses the kind of magical-realism approach to fiscal policy usually found in Republican budgets, conjuring trillions of dollars in savings without defining their source.
The Sanders campaign represents a revolution of rising expectations. In 2008, the last time Democrats held a contested primary, the prospect of simply taking back the presidency from Republican control was nearly enough to motivate the party’s vote. The potential to enact dramatic change was merely a bonus. After nearly two terms of power, with the prospect of Republican rule now merely hypothetical, Democrats want more.
The paradox is that the president’s ability to deliver more change is far more limited. The current occupant of the Oval Office and his successor will have a House of Representatives firmly under right-wing rule, making the prospects of important progressive legislation impossible. This hardly renders the presidency impotent, obviously. The end of Obama’s term has shown that a creative president can still drive some change.
But here is a second irony: Those areas in which a Democratic Executive branch has no power are those in which Sanders demands aggressive action, and the areas in which the Executive branch still has power now are precisely those in which Sanders has the least to say. The president retains full command of foreign affairs; can use executive authority to drive social policy change in areas like criminal justice and gender; and can, at least in theory, staff the judiciary. What the next president won’t accomplish is to increase taxes, expand social programs, or do anything to reduce inequality, given the House Republicans’ fanatically pro-inequality positions across the board. The next Democratic presidential term will be mostly defensive, a bulwark against the enactment of the radical Ryan plan. What little progress liberals can expect will be concentrated in the non-Sanders realm.
So even if you fervently endorse Sanders’s policy vision (which, again for the sake of full candor, I do not), he has chosen an unusually poor time to make it the centerpiece of a presidential campaign. It can be rational for a party to move away from the center in order to set itself up for dramatic new policy changes; the risk the Republican Party accepted in 1980 when Ronald Reagan endorsed the radical new doctrine of supply-side economics allowed it to reshape the face of government. But it seems bizarre for Democrats to risk losing the presidency by embracing a politically radical doctrine that stands zero chance of enactment even if they win.
By: Jonathan Chait, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, January 18, 2015
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