“Bernie Sanders Is A Totally Legitimate Presidential Candidate”: And It’s Time The Press Started Treating Him Like One
In democracy, the voters decide who wins a presidential election. But the media has great influence over which candidates get serious consideration. So when it comes to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont and the 2016 race, it’s clear that he’s getting a raw deal. It’s long since time the press gave him the respect he deserves.
Jay Rosen, the New York University journalism professor, has a useful concept for describing the ideology of journalists: nested spheres of legitimacy. These have to do with the way ideas are presented in a piece of journalism. The idea of women’s suffrage is presented as non-controversial, thus placed in the “sphere of consensus.” The idea that aliens control the government, say, is presented as nuts, thus placed in the “sphere of deviance.” The latter ideas are openly presented in the news as illegitimate or insane, if they are not ignored altogether.
What ideas go in which sphere is an inescapable part of journalism, though most reporters don’t acknowledge they’re doing it. And at the moment, the idea of Bernie Sanders as a candidate is getting placed in the deviant sphere. As Steve Hendricks noted, the media has mostly presented Sanders as a non-serious kook:
The Times, for example, buried his announcement on page A21, even though every other candidate who had declared before then had been put on the front page above the fold. Sanders’s straight-news story didn’t even crack 700 words, compared to the 1,100 to 1,500 that Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Hillary Clinton got. As for the content, the Times‘ reporters declared high in Sanders’ piece that he was a long shot for the Democratic nomination and that Clinton was all but a lock. None of the Republican entrants got the long-shot treatment, even though Paul, Rubio, and Cruz were generally polling fifth, seventh, and eighth among Republicans before they announced. [Columbia Journalism Review]
Indeed, if anything Sanders is more credible than the likes of Paul and Cruz. He has risen markedly in the polls of late, where his support has about tripled since the end of last year. He’s doing particularly well in New Hampshire, where a recent poll put him in second place at 18 percent support. As an opponent of the Iraq War and a longtime advocate for more progressive policy, he has a natural constituency in the liberal left, where he is genuinely admired.
Will he win? The odds are surely against him. Clinton’s level of name recognition, money, and elite support — Sanders didn’t even pick up an endorsement from the governor of his home state — makes it a very tough challenge. But it’s conceivable that he could win. As Hendricks notes, dark horse challengers like Jimmy Carter have reached victory facing even longer odds.
But more to the point, it is simply inappropriate for powerful media figures to consistently bookend any mention of Sanders with comments about his inevitable electoral demise. Matt Yglesias, for example, presents Sanders’ loss as so certain that if Clinton were to drop out, he would inevitably lose to Martin O’Malley.
It would be one thing to say that after February next year, when the primaries will have started. Statements like “he doesn’t seem to have a realistic path to winning the nomination” could be grounded in realistic, near-term projections. But a lot can happen in eight months! And it’s frankly ridiculous to present Sanders as a less credible candidate than O’Malley, who is currently polling behind Lincoln Chafee at 1.2 percent.
The constant presumptions about the electoral viability of some candidate amounts to an attempt to influence the outcome of the election, whether it’s intentional or not. That might be a justifiable enterprise with someone like former Rep. Ron Paul, who has an extensive history of racism, homophobia, and anti-Semitism. But while Sanders has odd hair, and can be grouchy at times, he’s not some random nutter from the Prohibition Party.
Bernie Sanders is a sitting United States senator who could easily finish second in the Democratic presidential primary. It is conceivable that he could even end up as Clinton’s running mate. The fact that he is utterly fearless in advocating for Scandinavian-style democratic socialism is no reason to treat him like a kook.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, May 26, 2015
“In A ‘Personal Agenda’ Giving Mood”: Koch Brothers Plan To Fund ‘Several’ GOP 2016 Presidential Hopefuls
The good news for Republican presidential candidates seeking to get a slice of Koch brothers cash is that the siblings, two of the world’s richest individuals, seem to be in a sharing mood.
In a Saturday interview on the Larry Kudlow Show, a nationally syndicated radio broadcast, David Koch let it slip that the roughly $900 million that he and his brother, Charles, plan to lavish on the 2016 presidential race could find its way into the hands of more than one GOP contender.
“We are thinking of supporting several Republicans,” David Koch said, adding, “If we’re happy with the policies that these individuals are supporting, we’ll finance their campaigns.”
Koch said the brothers would begin writing checks to individual candidates in “the primary season, winter and next spring.”
The pledge to fund multiple Republicans is consistent with what Charles Koch told USA Today in April about the candidacies of Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Texas Senator Ted Cruz, Kentucky Senator Rand Paul, and Florida Senator Marco Rubio. He indicated all six were at the top of the list in terms of who might receive funding.
“Those are the ones we have talked to the most and who seem to be the possible leaders,” Charles Koch said.
Cruz, Rubio and Paul all spoke at the Koch brothers’ event in Palm Springs, California, in January, which was dubbed the “American Recovery Policy Forum.” Walker has been a frequent recipient of Koch donations, and Bush also is considered to be still in the running for Koch backing.
“What we’ve told them all is that right now, we’re not supporting anyone,” Charles Koch said in April. “We’re telling them that if they want our support, one way to get it is articulating a good message to help Americans get a better understanding and a better appreciation of how certain policies … will benefit them and will benefit all America.”
The GOP field is still growing, and the Koch brothers seem content to let the sifting process play out before placing their chips on a single candidate.
“Only if somebody really stands out from the standpoint of their message and what they would actually do to benefit America and has a chance a decent chance of being elected, only then would we select one over the others,” Charles Koch told USA Today.
Charles and David Koch have matching fortunes of $51.3 billion dollars each, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, ranking them equal at number five in the world.
By: David Knowles, Bloomberg Politics, May 24, 2015
“Keeping Their Eyes On The Prize”: Democrats’ No. 1 Job; Remind Voters That American Wages Have Flatlined
For the moment, the Democrats have resumed their time-honored posture of arguing about trade policy. It’s an important issue, and one on which I’m not sure where I come down. But as they prepare to rip each other’s flesh, they might bear in mind it isn’t the issue. The issue, as I wrote two weeks ago in urging Hillary Clinton to go big, is wage stagnation. I offer this up as a timely public-service reminder: Remember, folks, what you agree on.
As I noted in the go big column, wages have been in essence flat for earners—up 6 percent (adjusted for inflation)—in the middle of the income scale since 1979. For the top 1 percent, compensation has risen about 140 percent since the fateful year. This needs to be the issue of this campaign. If American voters don’t know these 6 percent and 140 percent figures November 8 next year, Hillary Clinton and the Democrats will have done something very wrong.
Economists choose 1979 as the cutoff year because, looking back over the numbers, that’s when the flattening started. It’s also about when compensation at the top started soaring (a little later, actually). Until the early to mid-1980s, Wall Streeters and corporate lawyers and actors and university presidents and star athletes made more than the rest of us, but they didn’t make gobs more.
For example, the average baseball salary doubled, up to around $370,000, from 1981 to 1985. The average wage in that same time frame went from $13,773 in 1981 to $16,822 in 1985, an 18 percent increase. Not bad, better than average; but not double by a long shot. I’m not saying the juxtaposition of these numbers proves anything more than it proves. But it is certainly representative of what was happening to American wages then and has been happening since.
Another way of looking at it: The average ballplayer went from making about 12 times the average American to 22 times. Today, incidentally, it’s 108 times, $4.25 million to around $39,000.
So what we’re gonna do right here is go back, way back, as an old song had it, to the year of Apocalypse Now and Get the Knack and those hideous Pittsburgh Pirates uniforms that so offended my aesthetic sensibilities that I had no choice but to cheer against the team I’d grown up worshipping. Let’s ask: What if the wage structure in the United States today were the same as it was in 1979?
Larry Summers asked the question in the Financial Times back in January. The bottom 80 percent of earners, he wrote, would have $11,000 more per family, and the top 1 percent would have $750,000 less. In the wake of Summers’s column, the folks at NPR’s Planet Money took it one step further and calculated the increased (or decreased) income for households at several points along the wage structure. It’ll pop your little eyes.
The poorest wage-earners, at $12,000, would be making $3,282 more. That’s a 27 percent increase. Those at $30,000 would be making $6,928 more (23 percent). Those at $52,000 would be getting $8,752 more (16.8 percent). For those at $84,000, the increase drops off, to $5,834 more (7 percent). But it kicks back up for those at $122,000, to $17,311 (14.2 percent). And finally, those in the top 1 percent, at $1.41 million, would see a decrease in earnings of $824,844, or a whopping 58 percent.
Now before we go any further—no, no one today is talking about anything as confiscatory as wiping out 58 percent of the top 1 percent’s earnings. That isn’t how it’s going to work anymore, with top marginal tax rates of 76 percent (which does not mean that the government took three-quarters of someone’s money; go look up the concept of “marginal” if you don’t get this).
But the wage structure is a function of a whole host of other policies and practices that have nothing to do with marginal tax rates. It has to do, yes, with the minimum wage. It was $2.90 in 1979. Adjusted for inflation, that would be $9.38 today instead of the actual $7.25, which is a 23 percent decline for those workers, and minimum wage is generally thought to have knock-on effects at least a third of the way up the wage chain. It has a lot to do with corporate culture: In 1979, CEOs at the top few hundred corporations made about 28 times the average worker’s salary; now they make more than 200 times. There were 15.1 million private-sector union workers in the United States in 1979; last year, there were 7.35 million. And in 1979, Washington oversaw a lot more in public investment than it does today, and those dollars by and large went into real things, from bridges to scientific research, instead of swaps and derivatives.
Now, 1979 was a bad year in some important ways—inflation, hostage crisis—so I’m not saying I think it would be the world’s greatest idea for the Democrats to campaign on bringing back 1979. It’s not about the year per se. That just happens to be the year the thing started happening. And the thing is flat wages for most people who work for a living.
The trade fight has to be played out, and it seems that the unions and the Warren wing are probably going to lose, because the president will get enough votes from Republicans and moderate Democrats. And of course it’ll be interesting to see how Clinton plays it. Whichever position she takes, we can be sure she’ll do it cautiously.
So dust will be kicked up over that. It has to be. The differences are real. But comparatively, the differences are small. Democrats must keep their eyes on the prize. “Who cares more about increasing the wages of working Americans?” is a debate question the Republicans can never win. The Democrats have to make sure the election is about that question.
By: Michael Tomasky, The Daily Beast, April 24, 2015
“The GOP Primary Will Be Bloody As Hell”: GOP Fratricide; If You Turn The Other Cheek, You’ll Get Slapped From Both Sides
“There will be blood.” That’s not just the title of the Oscar-winning 2007 film starring Daniel Day Lewis that I have watched about 20 times on cable. (I’m sorta of obsessed with it.) It’s also what we can expect to see in the 2016 race for the Republican presidential nomination. Same goes for the Democratic presidential race if a well-funded challenger to Hillary Clinton emerges.
Both Mike Huckabee and Jeb Bush wants us to believe, though, that they are better than that and would not stoop to such tactics to win the GOP presidential nomination. These two holier-than-thou guys (especially Huckabee) want to be seen as the living, breathing manifestation of Ronald Reagan’s famous 11th Commandment: “thou shalt not speak ill of another Republican.” (FYI Reagan didn’t actually coin that expression, it was first formulated by the chair of the Republican Party in California in 1965, by why let facts get in the way of canonizing Reagan, right? )
First there was Bush, who last week promised that he would not attack his fellow Republicans during the GOP primaries, noting that, “tearing down other people won’t help at all.”
And then came Huckabee. While campaigning over the weekend in New Hampshire, the former pastor urged his fellow GOP candidates to not engage in a Cain versus Abel type “fratricide.” He then preached to his fellow GOPers to avoid a “free for all” and “demolition derby” among each other.
I have to give it up for both of them. Not for their sentiment. But given their own respective track records of ripping apart their Republican competitors in primaries that they were able to keep a straight face while making these statements.
Let’s look at the history of these two. Bush’s last contested GOP primary was in 1994 when he was running for governor of Florida as part of a crowded field of candidates. Bush, along with the other top-tier Republicans entries, entered into a “Clean Campaign Pledge” promising no personal attacks, just policy-based ones.
So there’s Bush a month before the September 1994 primary with a sizable lead over the pack. But then Bush “stunned” his fellow Republicans, as The New York Times noted at the time, by unleashing negative campaign ads on his top two GOP rivals. These ads alleged in part that the two other Republicans wanted to raise taxes- a claim they both vehemently disputed. (If you run an ad distorting the policy position of your opponents, you are in essence launching a personal attack—especially over taxes in a Southern GOP primary!)
And then in a sheer display of unabashed elitism, the Bush ad stated that his two opponents “are taking millions of your tax dollars to pay for their political campaigns.” The ad bragged that Bush wasn’t.
Technically Bush was correct: His opponents were taking public financing, and he wasn’t. Why? Well, because Bush was wealthy enough to bankroll his own campaign unlike his rivals.
But these attacks pale in comparison to Huckabee, who is expected to announce his presidential run on May 5. When Huckabee says a person should turn the other cheek, apparently it’s so he can slap both sides.
During Huckabee’s 2008 presidential run, he unloaded a barrage of attacks on his GOP rivals; I’m talking Old Testament, wrath of God stuff. For example a day before the 2008 New Hampshire primary, Huckabee mocked Mitt Romney for being wealthy, saying, “I can’t write a personal check for tens of millions of dollars to impress you with what a great guy I am.” Huckabee then ridiculed Romney for not knowing how to clean a gun.
And in the days before the Iowa caucus, Huckabee, reminiscent of what he’s saying now, tried to remain above the fray by holding a press conference to announce he would not run a campaign ad that called Romney “dishonest.” Of course, Huckabee knew by holding a press event it would still get the barb out there anyway.
But worse, the Huckabee campaign then aired that very ad at least 10 times in various Iowa TV markets after publicly promising not to. When Huckabee’s campaign was asked why, the response was, “the campaign gave their best effort to pull the ad. Perhaps they held a prayer circle and asked God to keep the ads off the air because a simple phone call to the TV stations would have presumably done the trick.
And after John McCain beat Huckabee in the South Carolina primary, Huckabee stood next to his pal Chuck Norris as Norris alleged that McCain was too old to be president. I may not be an expert on Jesus like Huckabee, but I’m pretty sure I know what Jesus would not do, and that’s let Chuck Norris do his dirty work for him.
Look, there’s no need for Bush and Huckabee to insult our intelligence by pretending to better than they are on the issue of negative campaigning. We all know this will be a vicious, bare knuckles brawl to the GOP nomination. And given Bush and Huckabees’ own history of attacking fellow Republicans, the question is not: Will there be blood? The only question is: How much Republican blood will they spill?
By: Dean Obeidallah, The Dailt Beast, April 21, 2015
“Hillary Clinton Is Quaking In Her Boots”: Two More Candidates To Begin Doomed Runs For Presidency
What leads a man to look in the mirror and say, “I could be president of the United States”? Anybody can say they should be president, of course—after all, aren’t all your ideas the right ones?—but it takes a remarkably optimistic spirit to think that you can do what it takes to make it to the White House. Can you raise all that money, run that huge organization, out-strategize your opponents, overcome the inevitable stumbles and controversies, have the stamina and fortitude and cleverness to do it all better than anyone else, and convince the American people that you’re the one?
Somebody has to do it, of course. But if you’re a politician who last ran for office thirteen years ago, who had a relatively undistinguished record, who represents a wing of your party that no longer exists, and whom nobody ever accused of being charismatic in the first place, what makes you look in that mirror and say, “Yeah. I’m ready. Let’s do this”?
America, I give you George Elmer Pataki:
Ready to get on that train to Victorytown? No? No matter, Pataki is in New Hampshire, pressing the flesh and winning hearts and minds. And he’s not the only one with visions of electoral glory dancing through his head:
Mike Huckabee, who stepped down from his Fox News Channel show, “Huckabee,” in January, is expected to return to Fox this evening to make his 2016 presidential campaign official. Huckabee said Friday he is “moving toward” announcing a second bid for the White House.
Huckabee told reporters in Washington this morning he would make a little news on “Special Report with Bret Baier,” which airs on FNC at 6 p.m. ET.
Huckabee’s bid is, if equally destined for failure, at least a little easier to understand. Unlike Pataki, Huckabee isn’t a walking Ambien, and he’s kept in touch with the Republican electorate since his last run in 2008 by being a ubiquitous presence on radio and television. But he’s also a con artist who seems to spend most of his time devising ways to separate gullible conservatives from their money. Not only is that likely to be raised by his opponents should he actually gain any momentum in the primaries, running for president isn’t a good way to make money, at least in the short term. He already had what I assume is a lucrative career. So he must really believe he can win. After all, Huckabee is a man of fervent and sincere faith.
Maybe it’s the imperfections of the announced candidates that lead people like Pataki and Huckabee to give it a shot. After all, Jeb Bush is a Bush, Marco Rubio is a whipper-snapper, Scott Walker is untested nationally—if you were motivated enough, you could come up with a scenario in which everyone else falls and you’re left as the obvious choice. But these guys? I’m sure Hillary Clinton is quaking in her boots.
By: Paul Waldman, Senior Writer, The American Prospect,April 17, 2015
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