“Sanders Over The Edge”: Starting To Sound Like His Worst Followers
From the beginning, many and probably most liberal policy wonks were skeptical about Bernie Sanders. On many major issues — including the signature issues of his campaign, especially financial reform — he seemed to go for easy slogans over hard thinking. And his political theory of change, his waving away of limits, seemed utterly unrealistic.
Some Sanders supporters responded angrily when these concerns were raised, immediately accusing anyone expressing doubts about their hero of being corrupt if not actually criminal. But intolerance and cultishness from some of a candidate’s supporters are one thing; what about the candidate himself?
Unfortunately, in the past few days the answer has become all too clear: Mr. Sanders is starting to sound like his worst followers. Bernie is becoming a Bernie Bro.
Let me illustrate the point about issues by talking about bank reform.
The easy slogan here is “Break up the big banks.” It’s obvious why this slogan is appealing from a political point of view: Wall Street supplies an excellent cast of villains. But were big banks really at the heart of the financial crisis, and would breaking them up protect us from future crises?
Many analysts concluded years ago that the answers to both questions were no. Predatory lending was largely carried out by smaller, non-Wall Street institutions like Countrywide Financial; the crisis itself was centered not on big banks but on “shadow banks” like Lehman Brothers that weren’t necessarily that big. And the financial reform that President Obama signed in 2010 made a real effort to address these problems. It could and should be made stronger, but pounding the table about big banks misses the point.
Yet going on about big banks is pretty much all Mr. Sanders has done. On the rare occasions on which he was asked for more detail, he didn’t seem to have anything more to offer. And this absence of substance beyond the slogans seems to be true of his positions across the board.
You could argue that policy details are unimportant as long as a politician has the right values and character. As it happens, I don’t agree. For one thing, a politician’s policy specifics are often a very important clue to his or her true character — I warned about George W. Bush’s mendacity back when most journalists were still portraying him as a bluff, honest fellow, because I actually looked at his tax proposals. For another, I consider a commitment to facing hard choices as opposed to taking the easy way out an important value in itself.
But in any case, the way Mr. Sanders is now campaigning raises serious character and values issues.
It’s one thing for the Sanders campaign to point to Hillary Clinton’s Wall Street connections, which are real, although the question should be whether they have distorted her positions, a case the campaign has never even tried to make. But recent attacks on Mrs. Clinton as a tool of the fossil fuel industry are just plain dishonest, and speak of a campaign that has lost its ethical moorings.
And then there was Wednesday’s rant about how Mrs. Clinton is not “qualified” to be president.
What probably set that off was a recent interview of Mr. Sanders by The Daily News, in which he repeatedly seemed unable to respond when pressed to go beyond his usual slogans. Mrs. Clinton, asked about that interview, was careful in her choice of words, suggesting that “he hadn’t done his homework.”
But Mr. Sanders wasn’t careful at all, declaring that what he considers Mrs. Clinton’s past sins, including her support for trade agreements and her vote to authorize the Iraq war — for which she has apologized — make her totally unfit for office.
This is really bad, on two levels. Holding people accountable for their past is O.K., but imposing a standard of purity, in which any compromise or misstep makes you the moral equivalent of the bad guys, isn’t. Abraham Lincoln didn’t meet that standard; neither did F.D.R. Nor, for that matter, has Bernie Sanders (think guns).
And the timing of the Sanders rant was truly astonishing. Given her large lead in delegates — based largely on the support of African-American voters, who respond to her pragmatism because history tells them to distrust extravagant promises — Mrs. Clinton is the strong favorite for the Democratic nomination.
Is Mr. Sanders positioning himself to join the “Bernie or bust” crowd, walking away if he can’t pull off an extraordinary upset, and possibly helping put Donald Trump or Ted Cruz in the White House? If not, what does he think he’s doing?
The Sanders campaign has brought out a lot of idealism and energy that the progressive movement needs. It has also, however, brought out a streak of petulant self-righteousness among some supporters. Has it brought out that streak in the candidate, too?
By: Paul Krugman, Op-Ed Columnist, The New York Times, April 8, 2016
“The Day Of Reckoning Is Nigh”: The Democratic Race Has Now Devolved Into Nastiness
The Democratic nominee for president will be running against a political novice who is widely despised, or a senator so unpopular that only two of his colleagues support him, or a governor far too moderate for his party’s hard-line base, or someone else chosen at a bitterly contested convention. For Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders, what could possibly go wrong?
Plenty. Begin with the fact that the Clinton-Sanders race has devolved into gratuitous and self-destructive nastiness.
The rhetorical hissing and spitting escalated Wednesday when Sanders charged that Clinton — a former senator, secretary of state and first lady — is not “qualified” to be president. It was a ridiculous thing to say. One thing it’s impossible to claim about Clinton is that she lacks an adequate résumé.
When challenged on the statement, Sanders resorted to the she-hit-me-first defense: “She has been saying lately that she thinks that I am, quote-unquote, not qualified to be president.” The problem is that Clinton never said such a thing. In fact, when pressed repeatedly by “Morning Joe” host Joe Scarborough on the question, Clinton touted herself as the better choice but refused to say that Sanders is unqualified. (I should note that I often appear on Scarborough’s show.)
Clinton did, in that interview, echo her standard critique of Sanders, which is that his proposals are pie in the sky. She drew attention to his recent meeting with the editorial board of the New York Daily News in which he was asked for details of his plan to break up the big banks. His less-than-complete answers, Clinton said, show that “what he has been saying about the core issue in his whole campaign doesn’t seem to be rooted in an understanding of either the law or the practical ways you get something done.”
Ouch. Sanders wasn’t that bad at the Daily News. And frankly, his questioners seemed more confused about some aspects of financial regulation than Sanders did.
On Thursday, Sanders was still hopping mad. At an appearance in Philadelphia, he told reporters that “if Secretary Clinton thinks that I just come from the small state of Vermont, that we’re not used to this, well, we’ll get used to it fast. I’m not going to get beaten up. I’m not going to get lied about. We will fight back.”
Clinton clearly wanted to be seen as taking the high road. “I don’t know why he’s saying that, but I will take Bernie Sanders over Ted Cruz or Donald Trump any time,” she said.
Does that ring a bell? Does anyone else recall those early debates in which both candidates pledged to forswear personal attacks and stick to the issues? We’re now at the point that it takes days of bitter squabbling before the campaigns can even agree on a time and place for their next debate. It will be in Brooklyn — Sanders’s birthplace and the site of Clinton’s campaign headquarters — on April 14. One assumes the gloves will be off.
It is no mystery why this once-polite contest has become so testy: What may be the day of reckoning is nigh.
Clinton’s lead in delegates is now big enough that Sanders practically has to run the table in the remaining states. He needs decisive wins, starting with the April 19 primary in New York. Conversely, Clinton can effectively put the nomination out of Sanders’s reach with a big victory in the state that elected her to the U.S. Senate.
The Clinton campaign’s view is that Sanders is already so far behind that he’ll never catch up; they should know, because that’s the position Clinton was in vs. Barack Obama in 2008. It is time, the Clintonistas believe, for Sanders to think about dropping out in the interest of party unity.
I have argued that Sanders has every right to stay in and that his many supporters in states yet to vote should have the chance to express their preference. But if it’s not time for Sanders to pull out, it’s also not time for him to scorch the earth in a way that damages Clinton’s prospects in November should she win the nomination.
Democrats begin general election campaigns with a big structural Electoral College advantage. But they forfeit this edge if progressive voters elect to stay home. The party cannot afford to have Sanders supporters — if their candidate loses — licking their wounds and nursing their grievances.
It ought to be hard for the eventual Democratic nominee to lose. More Clinton-Sanders nastiness just might do the trick.
By: Eugene Robinson, Opinion Writer, The Washington Post, April 7, 2016
“DEFCON 4”: Bernie Sanders’ PUMA Moment; Hillary Clinton ‘Not Qualified’
That didn’t take long.
I wondered Tuesday night how nasty both Democrats would get—whether Bernie Sanders would start aping conservative talking points against Hillary Clinton, and whether she would try to out-Israel him in New York. We’re not quite to those places yet, but Sanders’s blunt statement Wednesday night that Clinton “is not qualified” to be president ratchets up the arms race considerably.
This started Wednesday morning when Clinton appeared on Morning Joe and Joe Scarborough—jumping off from Sanders’s wobbly Daily News editorial board interview—tried to ask her four times whether she thought Sanders was qualified to be president. Here’s the full exchange so you can decide for yourself:
JS: In light of the questions he had problems with, do you believe this morning that Bernie Sanders is qualified and ready to be president of the United States?
HC: Well, I think the interview raised a lot of really serious questions, and I look at it this way. The core of his campaign has been break up the banks, and it didn’t seem in reading his answers that he understood exactly how that would work under Dodd-Frank and exactly who would be responsible, what the criteria were; and that means you really can’t help people if you don’t know how to do what you are campaigning on saying you want to do. And then there were other—
JS: So is he qualified?…And I’m serious, if you weren’t running today and you looked at Bernie Sanders would you say this guy is ready to be president of the United States?
HC: Well, I think he hadn’t done his homework and he’d been talking for more than a year about doing things that he obviously hadn’t really studied or understood, and that does raise a lot of questions and really what it goes to is for voters to ask themselves, can he deliver what he’s talking about, can he really help people—
JS: What do you think?
HC: Can he help our economy, can he keep our country strong…Well, obviously, I think I’m by far the better choice—
JS: But do you think he is qualified and do you think he is able to deliver on the things he is promising to all these Democratic voters?
HC: Well, lemme put it this way, Joe. I think that what he has been saying about the core issue in his whole campaign doesn’t seem to be rooted in an understanding of either the law or the practical ways you get something done. And I will leave it to voters to decide who of us can do the job that the country needs, who can do all aspects of the job. Both on the economic domestic issues and on national security and foreign policy.
I don’t know how you read that, but I read it as Scarborough trying four times to get Clinton to say outright that Bernie Sanders is not qualified to be president, and her refusing to do so. She came sorta close; The Washington Post headlined a write up on it “Clinton questions whether Sanders is qualified to be president,” but she never said the words, and after attempt number four, she retreated to the standard, and appropriate, dodge about it being up to the voters. From there, the interview moved on to other topics.
And what did Sanders do? This, in a speech in Philadelphia Wednesday night.
She has been saying lately that she thinks that I am not qualified to be president.
Well, let me, let me just say in response to Secretary Clinton: I don’t believe that she is qualified, if she is, through her super-PAC, taking tens of millions of dollars in special interest funds. I don’t think that you are qualified if you get $15 million from Wall Street through your super-PAC.
I don’t think you are qualified if you have voted for the disastrous war in Iraq. I don’t think you are qualified if you have supported virtually every disastrous trade agreement which has cost us millions of decent paying jobs. I don’t think you are qualified if you’ve supported the Panama free trade agreement, something I very strongly opposed and, which as all of you know, has allowed corporations and wealthy all over the world people to avoid paying their taxes to their countries.
Wait. What? “Has been saying”? “Has been saying,” as if she’d said it seven times? She didn’t even say it once!
Now—Sanders apologists will scream that she started it, and even neutral observers, if there are any, may be confused. But there’s a big difference between saying “raises serious questions” and “I’ll leave it to the voters to decide,” and saying flat out that one’s primary opponent is “not qualified.”
Clinton is still the favorite to win the nomination. I heard Chuck Todd say Wednesday morning that Sanders needs to win 67 percent of the remaining pledged delegates to overtake her lead. Since all delegates are awarded proportionally, and since there aren’t likely to be many huge blowouts in the upcoming states (we’re almost done with caucuses), that seems a tall order.
Clinton also leads the popular vote tally by almost exactly 2.4 million. Pretty hard to picture him overcoming that, too. How hard? Let’s assume, just for the sake of argument, big Sanders wins in New York and California. In 2008, Clinton won both of those handily over Barack Obama—New York by 17 percent and around 250,000 votes, and California by 8 percent and around 430,000.
It’s pretty unlikely that Sanders can equal those results, but let’s just say he does, and then let’s give him another 100,000 in Pennsylvania. That would be 780,000. That still puts him 1.6 million votes behind. Say he even runs the table and nets another 300,000 or so from the smaller states. He’s still more than a million votes behind in the most optimistic scenario.
Votes are important because they tend to determine what the superdelegates do. Superdelegates are hesitant to undo the voters’ collective will. It’s worth noting here that in 2008, Clinton lost the popular vote tally to Obama by only 300,000 or 400,000, depending on how you counted them. There were controversies then over whether to count Florida and Michigan, which had disobeyed the party’s mandated calendar. If you don’t include them, Obama won by around 450,000. If you do, he beat Clinton by just 60,000 (out of 35 million cast).
So it was much closer than it seems this is going to be, but even so, the superdelegates wouldn’t overturn the voters’ choice.
Why all these numbers? Just to show that it’s still likely that at the end of the process, Clinton will be ahead, and Sanders will have to endorse her. Not certain, of course, but likely. So the question is, how can he endorse her after saying flat out that she’s not qualified to be president?
Well, politicians have their ways. “She’s better than Trump/Cruz.” But won’t it ring awfully hollow? For her part, Clinton, looking toward a future mending of fences, brushed off Sanders’s remarks. It’s worth noting, too, that back in 2008, Clinton gave up the fight in early June right after the primaries ended and endorsed Obama. One has trouble picturing Sanders doing the same, if it comes to that, and what he said Wednesday night makes it even less likely.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 7, 2016
“Tentative, Unprepared And Unaware”: Rough Interview Raises Awkward Questions For Sanders Campaign
If you talk privately to Hillary Clinton campaign aides, one of the more common complaints is that Bernie Sanders just hasn’t faced enough scrutiny. It’s ironic, in a way – Sanders supporters generally argue the Vermont senator doesn’t get enough attention from the national media, and in a way, Team Clinton agrees.
As the argument goes, much of the political world has treated Sanders as a protest candidate, who’s serious about putting his ideas in the spotlight, but less serious about actually winning the presidency – a dynamic Sanders’ own campaign has conceded was largely true at the start of the race. The result has been less scrutiny and a less robust examination.
Whether you find these concerns compelling or not, Sanders’ Democratic critics embraced this Sanders interview with the editorial board of the New York Daily News with the kind of enthusiasm we haven’t seen all cycle. The Atlantic’s David Graham helped explain why.
There’s little doubting Bernie Sanders’s core political convictions – he’s been saying the same things for decades, with remarkable consistency. But turning convictions into policy is the challenge, and the Vermont senator’s interview with the editorial board of the New York Daily News raises some questions about his policy chops.
Throughout his interview, Sanders seemed taken aback when he was pressed on policy – and not just on the matters that are peripheral to his approach, like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or interrogation of detainees, but even on bread-and-butter matters like breaking up the big banks, the Democratic presidential hopeful came across as tentative, unprepared, or unaware.
It’s easy to overstate these things. A Washington Post piece called the interview, conducted on Monday and published yesterday, a “disaster.” A writer at Politico argued that when Sanders was pressed for specifics on trade and jobs, the senator was “not much better than Trump in his cluelessness.”
I wouldn’t go that far, but it’s not unfair to note that the Daily News interview raised concerns about Sanders that the Vermonter has largely avoided after nearly a year on the campaign trail.
If the senator had flubbed a question or two, struggling with details on obscure areas outside his wheelhouse, it wouldn’t have made much of a ripple. But as Jonathan Capehart noted, this happened more than once or twice in this interview. Asked about breaking up the big banks, Sanders wasn’t sure about the Fed’s authority, or the administration’s. Asked about court fights over too-big-to-fail measures, Sanders conceded, “It’s something I have not studied, honestly, the legal implications of that.”
There were a few too many similar answers. On negotiations between Israelis and Palestinians, Sanders said, “You’re asking me a very fair question, and if I had some paper in front of me, I would give you a better answer.” Asked whether the Obama administration is pursuing the right policy towards ISIS, he responded, “I don’t know the answer to that.” Asked about interrogations of ISIS leaders, Sanders said, “Actually I haven’t thought about it a whole lot.”
This is a sampling. There were other related exchanges. They were not encouraging.
For Sanders’ supporters, I suspect the response is that the senator is leading a revolution by emphasizing broad themes and identifying systemic crises. Presidents don’t need to know a lot of specific details, the argument goes, so much as they need to establish clear goals.
For Sanders’ detractors, meanwhile, it’s likely this interview was evidence that Sanders’ understanding of major issues is, at best, superficial. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are technocratic wonks, fluent in granular policy details on a wide range of issues, and Sanders just isn’t in their league when it comes to knowledge, preparation, and breadth of expertise.
Obviously, observers will make up their own minds about the significance of the interview. But as an objective matter, Sanders is just now facing the kind of questions he’s avoided for months: there’s no doubt the senator has a clear vision and the ability to inspire his supporters to follow his lead, but how much does he know about implementing his goals? Sanders can paint beautifully with a broad brush, but how prepared is he when it comes to the unglamorous work of governing?
If the senator and his campaign have good answers to these questions, now would be an excellent time to offer them.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 6, 2016
“The National Bitch Hunt”: Only The Ballot Box Can Beat Clinton, Not Bogus ‘Scandals’
Fearless prediction: no legalistic deus ex machina will descend to save the nation from the dread specter of President Hillary Rodham Clinton. No cigar-smoking duck like the one on the old Groucho Marx program, no Kenneth Starr-style “independent” prosecutor, no criminal indictment over her “damn emails,” no how, no way.’
Ain’t gonna happen.
Voters who can’t bear the thought of the former first lady, U.S. Senator, and Secretary of State taking the oath of office in January 2017 are going to have to do it the old-fashioned way: defeat her at the polls.
Those impassioned Trump supporters holding “Hillary for Prison” signs are sure to be disappointed. Again. Played for suckers by a scandal-mongering news media that declared open season on Clinton 25 years ago. And haven’t laid a glove on her yet.
Which doesn’t exactly make her Mother Theresa. But it does lend credence to former New York Times editor Jill Abramson’s somewhat surprising column in The Guardian to the effect that, when push comes to shove, “Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy.”
Surprising because from 1992 onward the New York Times has been de facto World Headquarters of what I’ve always called the “National Bitch Hunt.” However, after spending years probing Clinton’s “business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage,” Abramson’s been forced to conclude that said investigations all came to naught.
And whose fault it that? Why Hillary’s, of course. “Some of it she brings on herself,” Abramson thinks “by insisting on a perimeter or ‘zone of privacy’ that she protects too fiercely. It’s a natural impulse, given the level of scrutiny she’s attracted, more than any male politician I can think of.”
Well, some might argue that the years-long scrutiny of Bill Clinton’s zipper is comparable. However, being wrongfully labeled a “congenital liar” in the Times 20 years ago certainly might teach a girl to play her cards close. If not, being accused in a dear friend’s suicide (Vince Foster), might tend to make her, oh, a tad mistrustful of the press.
But enough ancient history, although few of the 40 percent of Democrats who tell pollsters they don’t trust her know it. Abramson is also right to say that Hillary “was colossally stupid to take those hefty speaking fees, but not corrupt. There are no instances I know of where Clinton was doing the bidding of a donor or benefactor.”
Even as somebody aware that Bill and Hillary Clinton have donated roughly $18 million in speaking fees to charity, I find the sums Goldman, Sachs paid her preposterous. But payola?
As the late Molly Ivins put it: “As they say around the Texas Legislature, if you can’t drink their whiskey, screw their women, take their money, and vote against ’em anyway, you don’t belong in office.”
But back to Hillary’s emails. From the onset of the Clinton Wars, it’s been my experience that when the corrections and retractions reach critical mass and the “investigative” articles start to read like Henry James novels—i.e. diffuse and impenetrable—the end of a given “scandal” episode is near.
Last July, the New York Times got things started with an anonymously sourced exclusive claiming that federal investigators had initiated a “criminal” probe into whether Secretary Clinton had sent classified documents on her personal email server. Almost everything important about the story was false. It wasn’t a criminal investigation, nor was Clinton a target.
Rather, it was a bureaucratic exercise to settle an inter-agency dispute about which messages to release—as Clinton herself had requested. The Times was so laggard about making corrections that Public Editor Margaret Sullivan thought readers “deserve a thorough, immediate explanation from the top.”
They never got it.
Now comes the Washington Post with an interminable 5000-word narrative anchored by an “eye-popping” claim that according to “a lawmaker briefed by FBI Director James B. Comey,” a small army of 147 FBI agents was at work deciding if a crime had been committed.
That one fell apart overnight. Last time I checked, NBC’s sources said maybe a dozen agents are involved—an order of magnitude fewer than the Post claimed.
Meanwhile, the American Prospect turned to former Homeland Security classification expert Richard Lempert. Currently a Michigan law professor, Lempert pointed out that there are two big problems with the idea of charging Hillary.
First, we don’t have ex post facto laws. You can’t classify something tomorrow and charge somebody with leaking it yesterday. If you could, working for the State Department would be like inhabiting a cubicle in Orwell’s Ministry of Truth. Nobody would ever be safe.
Second, the job of Secretary of State’s entails considerable powers: “Not only was Secretary Clinton the ultimate authority within the State Department to determine whether…information should be classified, but she was also the ultimate authority in determining whether classified information should be declassified.”
Another ballyhooed scandal goes up in smoke.
By: Gene Lyons, The National Memo, April 6, 2016
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