“Bernie Nation Can’t Get Behind Hillary Clinton”: The Extreme Left Now Mirrors The Extreme Right
“And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.”
Those are, of course, the opening lyrics to Frank Sinatra’s immortal recording of “My Way.” They are also a succinct description of the state of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign.
Last week, the candidate announced he was laying off hundreds of staff members after a series of bruising primary losses to Hillary Clinton. She increased her lead in the delegate count and Sanders, who was already walking a narrow pathway to the Democratic nomination, now walks a high wire in a high wind.
Though the campaign spun the layoffs as forward-leaning strategy, it was difficult not to read them as a tacit acknowledgment that “the Bern” has all but burned out. Indeed, Sanders has begun to openly ponder — though he still rejects — the idea of losing.
It may not be over yet, but the fat lady is running the scales. Now, how to break that to Bernie Nation?
Once in a while, a politician leads not a campaign, but a movement. Think Obama in 2008, Reagan in 1980, Bobby Kennedy in 1968, John in 1960. Such candidates catch the Zeitgeist in a bottle. They have not voters, but believers, receive not support, but faith. That’s Sanders in a nutshell.
Small wonder people love him. He has spoken against the corporate hijacking of American government and dreams. And he has pulled the Democratic Party back toward progressive values of which the party has seemed vaguely ashamed ever since the Reagan tsunami rendered “liberal” a four-letter word.
But Sanders is not going to win the Democratic nomination. As this sinks in, many of his believers are declaring their intent to boycott the fall election. A recent McClatchy-Marist poll tells us that one in four citizens of Bernie Nation will refuse to support Hillary Clinton if she is nominated.
It was recently suggested on “The Nightly Show with Larry Wilmore” that this may not be the smartest strategy in an election where the specter of a Donald Trump presidency looms. In response, Sanders believer Susan Sarandon invoked John F. Kennedy — “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.”
“This was our peaceful revolution,” she warned.
On the same program, comedian Mike Yard said, “People that supported Bernie are not people that play the game. They’re not afraid to blow (expletive) up. Maybe we need to blow this b—h up.”
They sound like Republicans did in 2008 and 2012.
They sound like the kid who snatches his ball and storms out of the park after losing a game.
But worse than churlish and childish, they sound Cruz-ish, as in Ted, who is hugely unpopular not just for his harshly conservative ideology, but even more for his hardline absolutism, his willingness to drive the nation off a cliff rather than bend. He, too, is unafraid “to blow (expletive) up.” Wasn’t that the takeaway from 2013’s disastrous government shutdown and multiple iterations of the manufactured debt ceiling crisis?
It comes, then, to this. The extreme left now mirrors the extreme right, each reflecting the anger and unbending rigidity of the other. And the idea that politics is the art of compromise, where everybody gets something but nobody gets everything, seems a lost artifact from a distant age.
How ironic that the Sanders campaign, conducted mostly on the high ground of ideas and ideals, descends to cries of boycott and even revolution as it nears its end. Granted, nobody likes to lose. But the loss was fair and square and those citizens of Bernie Nation who can’t deal with that, who want to opt out of the system or take up arms against it, should be ashamed of themselves. One feels sorry for them.
The nomination is the least of what they’ve lost.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist, The Miami Herald; The National Memo, May 1, 2016
“Barking Up The Wrong Tree”: Ted Cruz Keeps Talking About ‘Wages’ — But He Won’t Support Raising Them
“Washington” is keeping wages down and impoverishing the American middle class, at least according to Ted Cruz, who has adopted economic populism as a line of attack against the political establishment as a routine part of his stump speech in recent months.
The Texas senator has tried to link rival Donald Trump to Democratic frontrunner and perennial enemy of the American right, Hillary Clinton. But the argument that the federal government, and by extension the Obama administration, was responsible for the decline in wages of American workers, was yet another baseless charged levied against a rhetorically-convenient “Washington establishment.”
Where to start. It’s unclear whether or not Cruz believes in a minimum wage. He has argued against a minimum wage, saying it leads to job losses among American minority groups. “Every time we raise the minimum wage, predictably what happens is a significant number of people lose their jobs, and they’re almost always low-income, they’re often teenagers, African Americans and Hispanics,” he said, voicing concern for demographic groups that are unlikely to vote for him anyhow, and for whom his policies don’t reflect the concern of his talking points.
In Cruz’s mind, the minimum wage is best left to the states. While he assails the loss of American jobs, sounding much like a vague, rehearsed mashup of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in their criticism of outsourcing, his policies have a different end in mind: employment above all else.
“I think it’s bad policy,” said Cruz on CNBC, criticizing the existence of a minimum wage. “And you know, one observation I make to folks is next time you go to a fast food restaurant and you start ordering on an iPad, you’re seeing the minimum wage.”
During a Senate hearing in 2014, Cruz spoke out against President Barack Obama’s proposed federal wage increase to $10.10. He said:
The undeniable reality, the undeniable truth, is if the President succeeded in raising the minimum wage it would cost jobs for the most vulnerable. The people who have been hurt by this Obama economy would be hurt worse with the minimum wage proposal before this body. In 2013 the President in his State of the Union address proposed raising the minimum wage to $9.00. Now a year later the request has magically changed to $10.10. The only reason (there’s no economic justification) the only reason is politics. And I suppose if the approval ratings of democratic members of this body continue to fall in another month we’ll see a proposal for $15.00 an hour and then maybe $20.00 or $25.00 an hour. But I think the American people are tired of empty political show votes. The nonpartisan congressional budget office says that raising the minimum wage could cost a loss of 500,000 to 1 million jobs.
Cruz is barking up the wrong tree. It is not the $7.25 an hour minimum wage that made companies like Carrier, whose managers were infamously recorded laying off 1,400 at its Indianapolis plant earlier this year, outsource those jobs to Mexico. As the Economic Policy Institute pointed out in a 2003 report, NAFTA resulted in a period of job growth in the U.S. between 1994 and 2000. But starting in 2001, jobs started disappearing. “Job losses have been primarily concentrated in the manufacturing sector, which has experienced a total decline of 2.4 million jobs since March 2001,” read the institute’s report. “As job growth has dried up in the economy, the underlying problems caused by U.S. trade deficits have become much more apparent, especially in manufacturing.” It pointed to systemic turmoil in internationalized labor markets, the result of free trade agreements, which allow companies to move to where living costs (and thus labor) are cheapest.
But for Cruz, the problem has always been the minimum wage, despite evidence to the contrary: Another EPI report released in 2013 outlining the benefits of increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 concluded, “Raising the federal minimum wage to $10.10 by 2016 would lift incomes for millions of American workers and provide a modest boost to U.S. GDP.”
Despite the doomsday predictions from Cruz and the rest of the 2016 Republican field, the report also predicted large increases in employment. By increasing the federal minimum wage to at least $10.10, low wage earners would experience a recovery of real income the likes of which we haven’t seen in decades.
However, the federal minimum wage has not budged by even a penny, leaving wage increases largely to states or large American cities, exactly the sort of decentralized political process Cruz would be expected to support: Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle have all instituted $15 per hour minimum wages following concerted efforts by local organizations that stemmed partly from frustration over partisan gridlock in Washington. Both California and New York’s governors signed bills this year approving wage increases to the $15 an hour benchmark over a period of time. A total of 29 states, and Washington, D.C., have instituted their own minimum wages exceeding the federal minimum wage, as a result of slow progress on the federal level.
Since the minimum was last raised to $7.25 in 2009, it has lost 8.1 percent of its purchasing power as a result of inflation, according to Pew Research. The OECD has described the American minimum wage as an outlier amongst wealthy, industrialized nations — it should really be around $12, if we were to use GDP per capita as a guide. American workers are in desperate need of a minimum wage increase, not just poorly paid employment.
By: Saif Alnuweiri, The National Memo, April 29, 2016
“The Issues Are Not Even Close To Parallel”: Tax Transparency: Jane Sanders Goes Back On Disclosure Promise
Jane Sanders, wife of Bernie, backtracked Tuesday on promises both she and the senator made to release the couple’s complete tax returns for the years 2006 through 2013, making a red herring excuse.
The returns will be released, Jane suggested, when Hillary Clinton provides transcript of her lucrative speeches to Wall Street firms. Clinton should absolutely release the transcripts and she should have done so long ago, but the issues are not even close to parallel.
Two wrongs do not a right make. And being a good guy politician does not exempt one from criticism from those who favor many of his policies, including me.
In comments to Wolf Blitzer on CNN midday Tuesday, Jane Sanders revealed that she and her husband either lack an understanding of the historic reasons it is crucial that presidential candidates release many years of complete tax returns, that they lack a broad regard for integrity in government or that they have something to hide.
The latter concern grows from Jane Sanders’ own conduct. First, she falsely asserted that the couple had repeatedly released tax returns, an assertion with no basis in fact as my April 13 National Memo column showed. Then there was her role as the president of a small, financially struggling nonprofit college, where she reportedly funneled $500,000 to her daughter and may have made false statements on bank loan papers.
But even if the Sanders tax returns are clean as a whistle, we should care about the Sanders tax returns. That the one nearly complete return they have made available, for 2014, is pretty standard for a couple in their age and income brackets is entirely beside the point.
We should care because we want every single person running for president to make public their complete tax returns – including schedules, statements and worksheets – for many years so that we do not ever again have an unindicted felon in the White House or an admitted tax cheat just a heartbeat away.
If a white hat politician like Sanders will not follow a tradition dating to the corrupt, tax-cheating presidency of Richard Nixon and his first vice president, Spiro Agnew, it gives aid and comfort to those who want to hide their black hat conduct.
Sanders runs as Mr. Transparency, railing against what goes on beyond closed doors when Wall Streeters and CEOs meet with politicians. Yet the junior Senator from Vermont seems willfully blind to how his own conduct undermines his important arguments, which have received far too little attention in the mainstream news.
If Sanders will not walk his talk he cannot credibly challenge those whom he says, with good reason, are rigging the economy for their benefit. That loss of credibility is terrible because Sanders is raising issues that need our attention, about policies that must change or the wealthiest Americans will grow ever richer by diminishing the income and assets of the vast majority, as I have been documenting for more than 20 years.
But much worse than damage to Sanders’ credibility is the aid and comfort he gives to politicians, including Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and John Kasich who have released nothing (Trump) or only summaries (Cruz and Kasich). Cruz and Kasich are both rich thanks to Wall Street. Heidi Cruz is a Goldman Sachs-er and Kasich made a fortune fast at Lehman Brothers, the overleveraged firm whose collapse set in motion the Great Recession.
The only one of the Final 5 who has fully released is Hillary Clinton. Her and Bill’s complete tax returns to 1992 are posted at taxhistory.org as are many other partial and complete tax returns dating back to the Franklin D. Roosevelt administrations.
We really need to see the full tax returns of those three before any one of them is nominated by their party, but Sanders is making it easy for them to say no to disclosure.
Think ahead to the elections of 2020, 2024 and beyond, especially if the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision stands, enabling the wealthiest Americans to pour unlimited sums into elections. Some of that money will be to persuade. But as presidents including John Adams and James Madison warned, the business aristocrats will also trick people when it is in their interests to do so – and with Citizens United they can do so with abandon.
Plenty of people who want to exercise power over us from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will want to keep their tax returns out of public record now and for as long as the United States of America endures. Many of them who have something to hide will cite Sanders as their model. Some because their tax returns will show they paid little or no income tax for many years (Romney in 2012, Trump in 2016). Others may have taken aggressive positions that raise questions about their character and conduct. Still others may have unreported income, which we might learn if they disclose fully for many years and disgruntled business associates, mistresses or others come forth with cancelled checks, financial statements and other proofs.
What does it tell us that Sanders and his wife, who knew full well a year ago that they would be asked for their complete tax returns at least since 2007, have played a game of “hide the documents”? What does it tell us that Jane Sanders made an unconditional promise on Mark Halperin’s Bloomberg television program and now dishonors her word? What does it tell us that a man who rightfully demands transparency from others will not hold himself to the same standards?
And if there is something the Sanders need to hide – and I sure hope not — we need to know that, too. Why? Because even if Sanders fails to get the Democratic Party nomination for president, we don’t want crooks in the Senate any more than in the Oval Office.
By: David Cay Johnston, The National Memo, April 27, 2016
“A New Election-Year Blueprint”: Lieberman Mistakenly Believes He Has It All Figured Out
Though this may come as a bit of a surprise, the No Labels organization continues to exist, despite the fact that it doesn’t appear to have had any influence on anyone at any time on any level. A couple of years ago, Yahoo News reported that the outfit “spends a disproportionate part of its budget maintaining and promoting its own organization, trying to keep its profile high while ensuring a steady flow of fundraising dollars” from undisclosed donors.
The revelations did not, however, do any real lasting damage to No Labels, and as Slate’s Jim Newell explained the other day, the group and its leader even have a new election-year blueprint it wants the political world to take seriously.
Former Sen. Joe Lieberman, co-chairman of the nonpartisan “problem-solving” advocacy group No Labels, has a novel theory of what we’re seeing this campaign. “Take a look at the two most interesting, surprising candidacies of the presidential year,” he said Thursday at an event celebrating the release of No Labels’ “policy playbook” for the 2016 election. “They want people to do something different. The best politics may be unconventional politics.”
Lieberman, unconventionally, was explaining why he believes the moment is ripe for entitlement reform.
Ah, yes, there’s the Joe Lieberman we all know. The aggressively centrist former senator sees Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders generating some excitement on the right and left, respectively, and Lieberman naturally assumes their success reflects an opportunity for a policy agenda neither Trump nor Sanders want any part of.
“The best politics may be unconventional politics”? Maybe so. But consider the gap between the message and the messenger: a senator-turned-lobbyist appeared in a D.C. ballroom at a luxury hotel to pitch a centrist platform that no doubt delighted other D.C. centrists. It’s hard to even imagine a more “conventional” scenario. To think this relates in any way to the excitement surrounding Sanders and Trump is to miss the point of recent political developments in a rather spectacular way.
Or as the Slate piece put it, “For today’s discontented voters, the sort of ballroom-luncheon centrism practiced for so long by the likes of Lieberman is more the target than the solution.”
In fairness, on some issues, No Labels probably means well, and on a theoretical level, I can vaguely appreciate the appeal of non-partisan, technocratic policymaking.
But much of the No Labels blueprint for 2016 – called the National Strategic Agenda for reasons I don’t understand – include vague ideas that sound nice if one doesn’t look too closely and some credible ideas that Lieberman falsely assumed could receive Republican support.
Newell’s article noted that No Labels commissions polling that proves how popular its ideas are, and included this gem: “No Labels’ theory is that polling support will make risk-averse politicians feel safe enough to stake out what otherwise might be considered treacherous political territory. ‘I think the public would really honor and reward a leader who took the risks,’ Lieberman said.”
Yes, of course. And this explains why members of Congress took note of public attitudes and raised the minimum wage while approving universal background checks.
Oh wait, that didn’t actually happen.
In 2004, Lieberman launched a humiliating presidential campaign. In 2006, he lost a Senate primary in a state he’d represented for decades. In 2008, he was certain John McCain would be elected president. In 2015, he led an organization created to derail the international nuclear agreement with Iran.
Why anyone would take Lieberman’s political instincts seriously is a bit of a mystery.
By: Steve Benen, The Maddow Blog, April 25, 2016
“An Acknowledgment Of Where We’ve Been”: Tubman’s Twenty Moves Us Closer To A More Perfect Union
The journey toward a more perfect union was quickened with the announcement that Harriet Tubman, abolitionist, Union spy and activist for women’s suffrage, will grace the front of the $20 bill. The Tubman twenty will be unveiled in 2020, timed to honor the 100th anniversary of women’s suffrage.
She will be the first woman on U.S. paper currency in more than a century and the first black American ever. That a black woman who was born a slave will be given such a prominent commemoration is a testament to American exceptionalism, a reminder of the nation’s slow and erratic but continuing march toward a more just version of itself.
Not all Americans see it that way, of course. Some are already grumbling about the demotion of Andrew Jackson, the nation’s seventh president, to the back of the bill. (Fox News’ Greta Van Susteren has called the change “stupid.”) Others insist that the Treasury has simply caved to an ill-conceived political correctness. (Donald Trump claims that’s the case.) A few will venture commentary that has no place in polite society.
Indeed, the announcement of a revamped and more-inclusive currency comes at a fascinating time in our politics, a time when a sizable portion of the electorate is roiled by anger, agitation and fear. While some of that anxiety has its roots in economic uncertainty, much of it — especially among the supporters of Trump’s presidential bid — has its foundation in a deep-seated resentment of the nation’s changing demographics.
It’s no accident that Trump — who is among the “birthers” who insist President Barack Obama is not an American — leads the Republican presidential field while denouncing Mexican immigrants and denigrating Muslims. There is a substantial minority of white American voters who are threatened by the loss of numerical advantage, furious over the election of a black president, and resentful of the growing racial and ethnic diversity in American life.
Trump and his supporters have dominated the political narrative in this election season and ignited a civil war inside the Republican Party. They have panicked the Republican establishment. They have set off alarm bells in faraway capitals.
Yet, the racially intolerant are losing the battle for primacy in the American story. They no longer dominate the nation’s culture or mythology, as the changes in the currency illustrate.
Last year, Treasury Secretary Jacob Lew invited the public to comment on his decision to recast a paper bill to feature a woman. Of the 15 women suggested by the activist group Women on 20s, including Eleanor Roosevelt, Susan B. Anthony and Rosa Parks, Tubman received the most votes.
A genuine American hero, she deserves the honor. As a young woman, she escaped the Maryland plantation that had enslaved her, and then made several trips back to assist others. Over a little more than a decade, she helped around 70 enslaved men and women find their way to freedom, traveling by night, using ingenious disguises and employing the hideouts established by the Underground Railroad.
She became an outspoken advocate for abolition, and when the Civil War broke out, she worked first as a cook and a nurse, and later as a scout and spy for the Union Army. After the war ended, she moved to a home she had purchased in upstate New York and campaigned for women’s suffrage.
Giving her prominence on the $20 bill forces the nation to acknowledge its original sin, slavery, as does demoting Jackson, a slaveowner. An accurate history further notes that the seventh president was notorious for his brutal treatment of native Americans, whom he forcibly removed from their lands. From now on, it will be difficult for history texts to ignore Tubman or to venerate Jackson.
Lew plans other changes, as well. A depiction of a 1913 march for women’s suffrage will be added to the back of the $10 bill, as will portraits of leaders of that movement. Images of Marian Anderson, Martin Luther King Jr. and Eleanor Roosevelt will be added to the back of the $5 bill.
That’s as it should be. The journey toward a more perfect union demands an acknowledgment of where we’ve been.
By: Cynthia Tucker Haynes, Pulitzer Prize Winner for Commentary in 2007; Featured Post, The National Memo, April 23, 2016
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