In order to win the Democratic nomination for the presidency, you have to amass 2,382 of the 4,763 delegates who will attend the party’s convention in July. The three contests that have taken place in Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada have allotted only 118 of those delegates, or 2 percent. And yet to listen to journalists, pundits, and analysts, the end of the Democratic race is in sight. If Hillary Clinton succeeds in beating Bernie Sanders in South Carolina this coming Saturday, they will declare that she has delivered a crushing blow, leaving him face-down on the canvas, his vision doubled and ears ringing as his weakened arms struggle to raise him up for Super Tuesday, when the final, gruesome pummeling will be administered.
If that’s what they say, will it be unfair? You bet. There’s still a long way to go, most Democrats haven’t voted, and South Carolina won’t change that no matter what happens. But Sanders doesn’t have a lot of time to prove that his already remarkable campaign more resembles Barack Obama’s in 2008 than Howard Dean’s in 2004.
No analogy is perfect, but those are roughly the two paths facing Sanders: an extraordinary run that challenges conventional wisdom and the political establishment, confounding expectations by bringing in huge numbers of small donors, and exciting young people to get involved in politics for the first time, and then wins; or a campaign that does all those things, and then loses.
On Sunday, the day after Clinton won the Nevada caucuses, Sanders was candid about why he fell short. Here’s what he told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press:
Well, what happened is over the last five weeks, Chuck, we came from 25 points down to five points down. As I understand it, we actually won the Latino vote yesterday, which is a big breakthrough for us. But the voter turnout was not as high as I had wanted. And what I’ve said over and over again, we will do well when young people, when working-class people come out. We do not do well when the voter turnout is not large. We did not do as good a job as I had wanted to bring out a large turnout. …
Again, I wish we had had a larger voter turnout. But by the way, we did phenomenally well with young people. I think we did well with working-class people. But remember, we were taking on a candidate who ran in 2008. She knew Nevada a lot better than we did, she had the names of a lot of her supporters. So I am proud of the campaign that we ran. Obviously, I wish we could have done a little bit better. But at the end of the day, I think she gets 19 delegates, we get 15 delegates, we move onto the next state.
Sanders is right: The Democratic Party in Nevada is estimating the turnout for the caucuses at around 80,000. In 2008, the last contested caucuses, just under 120,000 Nevadans turned out. In other words, turnout was down by about a third.
Caucuses are, of course, ridiculous and anti-democratic. They make voting even harder than it is in primaries, so rather than expressing the will of the voters, they express the will of a relatively small group of highly motivated voters who happen to be willing and able to attend a long meeting in order to state their preference. While 80,000 Democrats attended the caucuses, 530,000 Nevadans voted for Barack Obama in 2012. If the number voting for the Democratic candidate this November turns out to be in the same neighborhood, it would mean that only one in six or seven Democratic voters actually participated in the event to choose that candidate.
And it’s true that for many people inclined to vote for Sanders, like young people, caucusing may be particularly difficult. That’s a big part of the reason that Hillary Clinton was able to win the Iowa caucuses by a hair: The older people and frequent voters who were more likely to support her were more likely to caucus.
But in Iowa, turnout was down, too. Around 171,000 Iowa Democrats caucused this year, but in 2008, that number was 236,000, meaning it dropped by 27 percent. And in New Hampshire, which Sanders won easily, turnout this year was just over 250,000; in 2008 it exceeded 288,000. That’s a smaller decline (13 percent), but still a decline.
You might say that it’s a high standard—after all, 2008 was an unusual campaign, one that got Democratic voters energized in ways they had never been before. And that’s true. The problem for Sanders is that he needs to duplicate that excitement in order to win. His campaign is predicated not just on doing well with young voters or new voters or any other kind of voters. It’s predicated on expanding the electorate, both in the primaries and in the general election, so much that he overcomes the advantages more traditional politicians have.
More so than Obama or even Dean, Sanders is counting on a revolution, not only to help him defeat a primary opponent who has more of the traditional advantages of an establishment favorite, but also to govern once he wins the White House. When Sanders is challenged on how he’ll be able to push his ambitious policy plans through a recalcitrant Congress, he responds that he will lead a powerful uprising of the citizenry that will force politicians to accept change. So far though, the uprising looks pretty limited.
Sanders has already accomplished something remarkable. The fact that a frumpy 74-year-old democratic socialist from Vermont has turned what was supposed to be a walk in the park for Hillary Clinton into a genuinely competitive race is positively historic. But unless he really can expand the electorate, it may not be enough.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect, February 24, 2016
February 25, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
Bernie Sanders, Democratic Presidential Primaries, Hillary Clinton | Congress, Democrats, Iowa Caucuses, Latinos, Nevada Caucuses, Sanders Revolution, Voter Turnout, Youth Vote |
4 Comments
“Things fall apart. The centre cannot hold.” — William Butler Yeats
And so this is the presidential campaign of 2016.
If it were a movie, it would be pornography. If it were a sporting event, it would be a cockfight. If it were music, it would be the sound of cats on a hot blackboard.
In other words, it has not been the most high-minded affair.
But beyond the fact that it has been ugly and dispiriting, the campaign has also come to feel … ominous, like a portent of some dystopian future. You wonder if maybe the superficial nastiness of it isn’t truly superficial at all, but rather, evidence of a grim new reality: that we are a nation of 323 million people in 50 states who not only are not united, but don’t particularly want to be.
It is hard to escape a sense that at some level, we have disengaged from one another and that as a result, our politics has shrunken to its extremes, like two boxers who retreat to neutral corners to yell across the ring.
Two men in particular embody this. The first, of course, is Donald Trump, who has channeled angry misanthropy into political power. The reality show impresario has pulled the Republican Party far to the right, using as his prod the inchoate, done-wrong, want-my-country-back rage of those for whom change is always, by definition, threat.
The second man is Bernie Sanders, who has channeled the angry populism of the political left into a movement that is no slouch for power itself. The Vermont senator has yanked the Democratic field — i.e., Hillary Clinton — far to the left, forcing her to compete for the affections of angry, tired-of-being-dumped-on 99 percenters who see democracy being stolen by Big Money and like it not at all.
Don’t misunderstand the point. Sanders has given voice to concerns too often ignored by Republicans and paid lip service to by Democrats. So the argument here is not that there is equivalence between the extremes of left and right. No, the argument — the observation, really — is that they are both, well … extremes. And that, apparently, that’s all our national politics has left.
It is instructive to watch Clinton and Sanders bicker about which is the more ideologically pure. Until recently, that kind of quarrel was restricted to Republicans jousting over who was most “conservative” — by which they meant draconian — on issues like immigration and abortion. Now, apparently, Democrats, too, want their candidates to pledge allegiance to philosophical dogma.
It raises a question: Whither the center? And if there is no center, how does the nation’s business get done? As ungovernable as the country has been under Barack Obama, a center-left pragmatist the Republicans made out to be the reincarnation of Che Guevara, it can only be worse under a leader whose ideological purity is zealously policed and for whom compromise is apostasy.
One struggles to even imagine what the fall campaign will be like. Usually, candidates argue over who has the best ideas for solving a given set of problems. But in neutral corners America, there is not even consensus on what the problems are. Will we have Trump campaigning on Mexicans and Muslims, while Sanders rails about money and malfeasance? Will we be asked only to decide which makes us most angry and afraid?
If so, whither hope?
And here, Democrats will want it noted that they were not the first to abandon the center. Let the record so state. The GOP eschewed all claim to that ground long ago and even purged itself of members who dared wander too close.
Still, the question of who is to blame for a politics of extremism is less compelling than the question of what that politics portends. Two boxers yelling at one another from neutral corners makes for great theater.
But the fighting is done in the center of the ring.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; Then National Memo, February 22, 2016
February 23, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump, Election 2016, Governing, Politicians | Conservatives, Democracy, Democrats, Extremists, Hillary Clinton, Presidential Candidates, Republicans |
3 Comments
Conventional wisdom states that Republicans have every political reason to block anyone President Obama nominates for the Supreme Court.
Any Republican who voted for an Obama nominee could face a primary challenge. The people who care most about judicial battles are ideological base voters, so swing voters in a general election wouldn’t blame one party over the other. And if a Republican wins the presidency, then Senate Republicans would confirm a conservative, while if a Democrat wins, the person’s nominee would be no different from an Obama nominee. Nothing lost by holding out.
But there are reasons to question all of these assumptions.
First, the immediate electoral risk for Republicans is in the general election, not the primary.
There are 21 incumbent Senate Republicans up for re-election in 2016. (Three other Republican incumbents are retiring from the Senate.) Six of them, five of which are in “blue” states, are rated as “toss-up” or “lean Republican” (as opposed to “likely” or “solid” Republican) by the Cook Political Report.
These six – Sens. Kelly Ayotte (N.H.), Ron Johnson (Wis.), Rob Portman (Ohio), Mark Kirk (Ill.), Pat Toomey (Pa.), Richard Burr (N.C.) – were all elected to their first terms in the Tea Party-infused 2010 midterm. This time, they will be running in a presidential year in which Democratic turnout will be higher.
Kirk, Portman, Toomey and Burr have primary challengers. But none have gained traction yet, and the primaries for most are soon – all in March except for Toomey’s in late April. Any vote on a court nominee would likely come after that.
(The one probably worried the most about a primary challenge is New Hampshire’s Ayotte; her primary is not until September, the filing deadline is June and Trump’s presidential primary win showed an unruly anti-establishment GOP electorate.)
For the other 15 “safe” Republicans up for re-election, several face nominal primary challenges, 10 of them in June or later. These folks won’t want to take any unnecessary political risks.
That leaves 30 Republicans who don’t face any immediate electoral pressures.
They may have a reason to worry about future primaries; political scientist Dave Hopkins noted that longtime Sen. Dick Lugar was ousted in the 2012 primary after voting for Obama nominees in 2009 and 2010. But those were votes for nominees that were considered to be “liberal” picks. The political dynamic around a pick widely deemed to be a centrist would be an entirely different ballgame.
That brings us to the second assumption: only base voters care about judges.
It’s an understandable assumption. It has been true when we’ve had Senate scrums over lower court judges. It has been true when voices on one side of the spectrum futilely try to rally opposition to a judge on the other side. (Contemporaneous polls showed little public interest in the epic 1991 Clarence Thomas and 1987 Robert Bork battles, not to mention the less-remembered 2005 conservative kneecapping of Harriet Miers.)
But none of those episodes happened in the middle of a presidential election.
In fact, SCOTUSBlog checked the record going to back to 1900, and found no instance of a Supreme Court seat left vacant on Election Day. If Republicans refuse to approve anybody by November, we will be in a truly unprecedented situation.
The public won’t tune out of the judicial battle because a presidential election season is the one time when most people tune in. And no matter who Obama picks, barring a poor vet and unexpected scandal, Republicans will be on the losing side of the argument.
Obama is highly unlikely to pick a left-wing version of a Bork. He would either pick someone in the “mainstream liberal” mold of Sonia Sotomayor or Elana Kagan, or he would offer a compromise choice, a centrist swing vote – perhaps negotiated with some Senate Republicans – putting the Supreme Court in perfect ideological balance.
Either direction squeezes obstructionist Republicans.
Republicans would have a relatively easier time resisting a mainstream liberal, or more accurately, it would be a bigger risk for individual Republicans to cross the aisle and vote for a mainstream liberal. That could be used against a Republican in a primary this year or beyond.
Nevertheless, a general electorate majority would embrace a mainstream liberal since he or she would uphold rights that are widely embraced, including abortion rights under Roe v. Wade and equal rights for gay people. Putting those hot-button social issues on the line for Election Day is an clear-cut loser for Republicans. Not only would Republicans be more likely to lose the presidency, they would also be more likely to lose the Senate.
Naming an undisputed non-ideological judge would put Republicans in an even worse political bind. A nominee showered with praise from the legal establishment as an eminently qualified straight-shooter would isolate Republicans as hostages to ideological extremists. They would not be able to claim that they were protecting the court from a dramatic ideological shift; they would be exposed as holding out for their own ideological comrade at the expense of good governance.
And that brings us to the final assumption: that Republicans lose nothing by holding out. On the contrary, they could lose everything.
As it stands, Republicans have the ability to bargain with Obama and win that compromise pick, ticking the court a half-step leftward into exact ideological balance.
By refusing to bargain, Republicans weaken their general election prospects for both the White House and Senate. If Democrats take both, they could install a young liberal – as well as replace older liberals Ruth Bader Ginsberg and Stephen Breyer – and create a five-person Court majority that would rule for a generation.
Seeing the madness that is the Republican presidential primary, one could see why the Republican Party’s first instinct is to reflexively obstruct. But after making a cold calculation, clear-headed Republicans will see that the logical move is to make a deal.
The only question remains: How many clear-headed Republicans are left in the Senate?
By: Bill Scher, Campaign for America’s Future, OurFuture.org; February 17, 2016
February 22, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
GOP Base, Senate Republicans, U. S. Supreme Court Nominees | Democrats, Ideology, Kelly Ayotte, Marriage Equality, Roe v Wade, Senate Primary Challenges, Swing Voters, Tea-party |
1 Comment
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
February 21, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Nevada Caucus | African Americans, Democrats, Latinos, Populism, South Carolina Primaries, Super Delegates, Super Tuesday, Women, Youth Vote |
5 Comments
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
February 19, 2016
Posted by raemd95 |
Bernie Sanders, Hillary Clinton, Women, Women in Politics | 9/11 Attacks, Ann Richards, Childrens Defense Fund, Childrens Health Insurance Program, Democrats, Foreign Policy, Harry Reid, Iraq War, Max Cleland, Saddam Hussein |
2 Comments
mykeystrokes.com 