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“Disagreeing Publicly?”: Is There Dissension In The Sanders Campaign About An Endgame?

Yesterday I noted that, on Tuesday night, Jeff Weaver was crystal clear about the Sanders’ endgame when he talked with Steve Kornacki: even if Clinton leads in pledged delegates and the popular vote at the end of the primaries, they will spend the weeks prior to the Democratic convention attempting to flip the support of superdelegates to vote for Sanders. As implausible as that sounds (and contrary to most everything Bernie Sanders stands for), Weaver stuck to his guns on this as the strategy of the campaign.

On the other hand, Tad Devine has sounded a different note – suggesting that the campaign would re-assess after the five primaries next Tuesday. In talking to Rachel Maddow last night, he continued with that approach.

The superdelegates are there. We’re gonna work hard to earn their support. I think we’ll be able to do that if we succeed. Listen, the key test is succeeding with voters. In 2008 I wrote a piece that they published in the New York Times right after Super Tuesday. And I argued that superdelegates should wait, should look, and listen to what the voters do and follow the will of the voters. And I can tell you I got a lot of pushback from the Clinton campaign at the time, you know, when I published that piece. But I believe that today, that our superdelegates, that our party leaders should let the voters speak first. And I think if they do that all the way through the end of voting that will strengthen our party, and certainly strengthen our hand if we succeed with voters between now and June.

Perhaps this is simply Devine making a more palatable case for the same strategy Weaver outlined. No one is likely to challenge the idea of letting the voters speak. But that “if” in the last sentence carries a lot of the load for what he seems to be saying. While Weaver indicates that the outcome of the last primaries won’t affect the strategy, Devine seems to indicate that it will.

It is very possible that candidate Sanders is receiving different advice from his campaign manager than he is from his chief strategist. One might expect this in any campaign that is on the ropes. The fact that they seem to be disagreeing publicly could indicate a problem. But ultimately it is Sanders who will decide on the path forward. The rational choice would obviously be to go with the advice he’s getting from Devine. We’ll see.

 

By: Nancy LeTourneau, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, April 21, 2016

April 25, 2016 Posted by | Bernie Sanders, Jeff Weaver, Tad Devine | , , , , | Leave a comment

“Bernie Sanders’s New Plans To Win The Nomination”: Convince The Corrupt Establishment That He’s Their Man

After a less-than-super Tuesday, Bernie Sanders’s campaign faces a virtually insurmountable deficit in pledged delegates. With her blowout wins in Florida, North Carolina, and Ohio — and narrow victories in Illinois and Missouri — Clinton could lose the vast majority of remaining states and still earn the nomination. But to keep his political revolution churning as the primary shifts to friendlier pastures, Sanders needs to offer his supporters and donors some vision for how a come-from-behind win could come about.

The best one his campaign has come up with is … not great. According to Politico, Sanders’s plan is to get as close in the race for pledged delegates as possible, and then convince the very Establishment that he’s been disparaging for months to override the consensus of voters and throw the primary to a socialist insurgent.

“The arguments that we’re going to muster are going to be based on a series of facts,” Sanders campaign manager Tad Devine told Politico (emphasis ours). “People will look at different measures: How many votes did you get? How many delegates did you win? How many states did you win? But it’s really about momentum.”

The Sanders campaign is not explicitly calling for superdelegates to negate the democratic will — a notion that it recently condemned. But Devine’s emphasis on momentum implies as much. Sanders has little chance of overcoming the delegate advantage that Clinton wracked up in her southern landslides, but he has a decent shot of winning more states than the front-runner between now and the nomination. Which is why, in Devine’s view, “it’s really about momentum.”

It seems doubtful that Sanders has genuine faith in this cockamamie scheme. The superdelegate system pretty much exists to prevent the nomination of someone like Sanders, a socialist insurgent looking to chase the money lenders from the Democratic temple.

Most likely, his campaign is merely looking for any narrative that can keep its supporters mobilized from here to the convention. Even if Sanders isn’t going to be the Democratic nominee, his political revolution has plenty to gain in collecting as many delegates as it possibly can. Sanders’s surprising strength in the race thus far — and, in particular, his dominance among millennial voters — has led many pundits to predict that his social-democratic vision represents the future of the Democratic Party. The next month of primary contests looks like the most Sanders-friendly stretch of the race thus far. According to FiveThirtyEight’s demographic projections, Sanders is favored to win seven of the next eight primaries or caucuses. If Sanders wishes to demonstrate the broad appeal of his ideology, there’s little sense in dropping out with those potential victories still on the table. Thanks to his campaign’s incredible fund-raising apparatus, the democratic socialist should have plenty of cash to keep fighting, even if donations slow down in the wake of last night’s losses.

Sanders is not going to convince the Democratic Party’s elders to back the candidate with fewer pledged delegates and Establishment connections. But suggesting that such a thing might be possible will allow him to send a louder message to the party’s younger politicians and operatives: Economic populism works. Clinton, for one, seems to have heard that message quite clearly.

 

By: Eric Levitz, Daily Intelligencer, New York Magazine, March 16, 2016

March 20, 2016 Posted by | Bernie Sanders, Democratic Establishment, Democratic Presidential Primaries, Hillary Clinton | , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The Right Policies, The Right Politics”: Seven Things President Obama Did Very Well In His Acceptance Speech

Game on, now. President Obama fired ’em up tonight and now all sides are ready to go officially on to the fall campaign which will be the visible manifestation of the “avalanche of money and advertising” which President Obama warned about. That onslaught will be punctuated three times in October by the presidential debates (oh I know, Joe Biden and Paul Ryan will spar once as well, but I’m talking about the main event). The president’s speech marked the last national moment before those debates and his best single chance to make his case to the country.

That case is getting mixed initial reviews from the punditverse, especially for lacking in programmatic specifics. Here are seven things he did right:

Working the values. For 20 years, winning Democrats have focused on the values of hard work and playing by the rules. They appeal to swing voters and they help inoculate the party of activist government from charges that they want to give hand outs to the undeserving poor at the cost of the suffering middle class. Obama repeatedly emphasized the formulation of hard work and equal opportunity, defining the American dream as “the promise that hard work will pay off; that responsibility will be rewarded; that everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same rules.” And later: “We insist on personal responsibility and we celebrate individual initiative. We’re not entitled to success. We have to earn it.”

A balancing act. Democrats (not unreasonably) paint the GOP as a party that has been lost to rigid ideologues unwilling to compromise. In his speech tonight Obama worked to present a nuanced view of governance, not only explicitly saying that “no party has a monopoly on wisdom,” but on a couple of other instances acknowledging the limitations of his party’s animating philosophy of active government. He cautioned the party of FDR, for example, that “not every problem can be remedied with another government program or dictate from Washington.”

Choose or lose. Since the start of the campaign, Team Obama has been determined to not let this election simply devolve into a referendum on the president’s record. In their view, the president’s clearest path to victory was to turn it into a choice between two competing visions—and while the Romney campaign initially seemed intent on a referendum campaign, their selection of Rep. Paul Ryan as vice presidential nominee solidified the choice narrative. Obama drove that frame, mentioning the notion of a choice or voters choosing at least 10 times in the first half of the speech, which was the more policy-oriented part of it.

Commanding-in-chief. Obama saluted the military, not simply those currently serving but those who have come home and are still owed a debt of thanks from the nation they served. This section had the dual value of being the right policy but also the right politics, exploiting Romney’s silence regarding the troops last week. It’s true that voters won’t cast their ballots based on foreign policy issues, but this respect for the military becomes one factor shaping Americans’ overall view of Obama as president and commander in chief. And in the longer term, Obama has an opportunity to close the gap Democrats have had on national security issues for more than 30 years.

Map to the future. According to Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, focus group participants’ number one question for Obama had been where he wants to take the country in a second term. And while he may not have laid out a State of the Union-style policy blueprint, he set out signposts for what he wants to accomplish.

Sober poetry. The president has a well deserved reputation as an accomplished orator, but the nation’s mood and his own incumbency present a challenge to his instinct for a singing speech. He tempered it by emphasizing—in a manner reminiscent of John F. Kennedy and his campaign for a “New Frontier” of challenges—that he doesn’t promise an easy road. “The path we offer may be harder,” he told voters, “but it leads to a better place.”

No change on hope. Even in times that require a somber note, however, voters want aspiration and optimism. It’s a truism in politics that the most optimistic candidate wins the election and so Obama was wise to end on a note that acknowledged the tough times but expressed unalloyed optimism (though it might have been hard to hear over the roar of the crowd): “We draw strength from our victories, and we learn from our mistakes, but we keep our eyes fixed on that distant horizon, knowing that Providence is with us, and that we are surely blessed to be citizens of the greatest nation on Earth.” Amen.

 

By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, September 7, 2012

September 7, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

“The GOP Manufactured Freak-Out”: What The Constitution And The Democratic Platform Have In Common

Paul Ryan, Fox News, the Christian Broadcasting Network, and assorted media figures everywhere seem to be fascinated by the same omission from the Democratic Party’s platform.

The word “God” is notably missing from this year’s 40-page document, as David Brody of the Christian Broadcasting Network first pointed out.

“We need a government that stands up for the hopes, values, and interests of working people, and gives everyone willing to work hard the chance to make the most of their God-given potential,” the party’s 2008 platform said.

This year, a similar paragraph instead states, “We gather to reclaim the basic bargain that built the largest middle class and the most prosperous nation on Earth — the simple principle that in America, hard work should pay off, responsibility should be rewarded, and each one of us should be able to go as far as our talent and drive take us.”

The Democratic platform honors religious freedom, but given the absence of the “g” word, the manufactured freak-out is now well underway.

It’s tempting to delve into an extended explanation of why, for believers, God probably doesn’t need perfunctory references in a political party platform, and why this trumped up story is silly, even by 2012 standards, but let’s instead consider another tidbit of news.

The United States Constitution — the foundation of our government, the basis for our laws, and a model for democracies around the globe for generations — includes no references to God. Literally, not one.

If the Constitution doesn’t mention God, I think the political world can probably keep its apoplexy in check over the Democratic platform. Unless Republicans and news organizations are going to start condemning the Constitution, too, demanding an explanation for its secular nature, let’s relax a bit.

 

BY: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, September 5, 2012

September 6, 2012 Posted by | Election 2012 | , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

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