Category Archives: 2016 presidential election

Booing Bernie

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I am not surprised that Bernie was booed by his own true believers. If you have been looking at any of the Bernie or Bust pages you would have already seen comments from people who think he’s a traitor or a sell out, and lots more comments that were convinced he was still running and would win the nomination. People have been trying to contact superdelegates all week long, thinking they could be convinced to turn this around.

A lot of these delegates have had to spend everything they had just to get to Philadelphia, and a lot of the posts on FB are for crowdfunding Bernie delegates to get to the convention. No effort was made by Bernie’s campaign to help at all, even though he is sitting on millions. So the connection between Bernie Sanders and many of his delegates has gotten tenuous…they came there to support Bernie Sanders the presidential candidate, and not Bernie Sanders the Democratic Senator. His speech to the DNC will be his biggest challenge. He might well be booed by his own people as he is cheered by Hillary’s. Embarrassing….

I’ve been figuring there would be a lot of excitement on the floor for a week now, even before Julian Assange dumped all those DNC emails. Since then, though, the Bernie or Bust pages have gone ballistic, with loud demands that Bernie withdraw his endorsement. I suspect that a lot of people in that crowd of delegates today were expecting to hear just that, Bernie withdrawing his endorsement and announcing he was still in it to win. The boos were by people hearing what they had refused to believe all along, that Bernie Sanders had no attention of contesting Hillary Clinton for the nomination on the floor. The chants of Lock Her Up are no surprise either, as the Bernie of Bust pages are rife with crazy conservative propaganda lately. Breitbart was everywhere. Not every Berniecrat is a democratic socialist. Don’t forget he got all those Rand Paul people, H.A. Goodman being the most famous. Libertarian one week, socialist the next, and then back again. Far more Sanders people have switched to Johnson than to Stein so far. More have switched to Trump than to Stein so far. Maybe this will change now, but some of those booing Bernie today will be voting for Trump, guaranteed. And while the vast majority of Bernie Sanders supporters in the country switched their support to Hillary weeks ago, they are not the ones in Philadelphia booing and chanting in front of television cameras.

It will also be interesting watching how angry Bernie delegates, nearly all of them white, interact with Hillary delegates, a great many of them African American and Hispanic. Progressives might discover a racial divide they did not was even there, one they exacerbated every time they claimed that Hillary’s victory margins–propelled as they were by black and Hispanic voters–were fraudulent. White people angry that their votes did not mean more than black and brown votes. It wasn’t meant that way, but it was often heard that way.

Fun times ahead, maybe. Like I said before, the Democrat in me wants a smooth running convention, but the political junkie in me is thrilled at the prospect for so much excitement….

Hating electrons

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So much hate speech from Trump supporters at the RNC, and then seeing so much of it echoed by Bernie or Busters…. It is all so alien to me. I was a genuine left wing activist, and helped out in political campaigns later, and have such a different approach to politics now than you see on social media. Maybe because we dealt with people and not electrons, I don’t know. It was different. I could never get myself to hate people automatically. I hated Nazis, I hated teamster thugs who beat up farmworkers, but hating someone because he is a Republican or because he likes a candidate I am against, I can’t even imagine. The verbal violence you hear on the left and right nowadays still startles me. People I know exploding in blind fury over memes. I don’t get it.

Xavier Becerra for vice president

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A lot of veepstakes talk in the air. Personally, I’m hoping Hillary picks Xavier Becerra. It’s true that Liz Warren (my second choice) would help bring some of the angrier Bernie voters on board. And it’s true that Corey Booker (my other second choice) is a helluva man. No kidding. Rescued a man from a burning house, literally. Hard to top that. But both he and Warren are senators, and we need every senator we can get. And both are also future and exceptionally qualified presidential candidates, and being veep is rarely a path to the oval office without somebody getting shot first. So I’m loathe to pluck someone out of the Senate. It doesn’t help any that both Massachusetts and New Jersey have Republican governors who would not replace either with a Democrat.

Corey Booker’s base is solidly Democratic and already vote at a higher rate than anyone else in that Democratic base….including nice white middle class Democrats. (Indeed, boomer/gen-x black women have the highest rate of voting of all Americans.) And to pick Liz Warren to draw Berniecrats seems a little unseemly. Most of them are going to come over anyway, and a fifth will vote for Trump whether or not Liz Warren in on the ticket. There’s no doubt that selecting the eminently qualified Elizabeth Warren would be interpreted, unfairly and wrongly, as pleading for Bernie votes. Still, that is how many would interpret it, Hillary pleading for votes. Begging even. And a presidential candidate should never beg. Jimmy Carter begged the voters once. He never recovered.

Xavier Becerra, though, not only rewards one of the key components of Hillary’s winning coalition, but it would dramatically increase the amount of Hispanics who will vote on election day, always a weak point for the Democrats. There were already record numbers of Hispanics registering to vote in the primaries this year, such was their fear and loathing of Donald Trump. With Xavier Becerra on the ballot, the son of Mexican immigrants much like a certain Indiana judge, versus Donald Trump, who has called everyone from Mexico to potential rapists and degenerates, the number of Mexican American voter registrations will sky rocket. This would not only help the Democrats beat Trump this year, but would have profound long term implications for political power in the south west. If Hispanics began voting at the same level as whites, a lot of crazed Tea Partiers and redneck sheriffs can kiss their political asses goodbye. At last there would be a price to pay come election day for all that Republican nativist ranting.

Becerra could turn the southwest into an electoral vote nightmare for the GOP. The increase in Mexican-American voters coming out for a second generation immigrant a heartbeat away from the presidency will deliver Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico to the Democrat column, turn Arizona into a swing state and even force the Trump campaign to spend its limited resources in Texas, where the Hillary campaign will make a huge effort if only because the Republicans will have to spend so much money fighting it (Texas with its seventeen media markets is very expensive for statewide TV advertising.) Becerra on the ticket will give an increased edge in Illinois, make things that much harder for Trump in Florida, and dramatically increase fundraising in California. And above all, it puts Trump’s vicious anti-Mexican bigotry (and his prejudice in general) in the front row seat all campaign long. With Becerra on the ticket, Trump will be a racist 24/7.

And besides all that, Becerra is thoroughly qualified, smart as hell, and a nice guy. He was our congressman for years, and come to think of it, he actually knocked on our door once. As did his brother. The man walked the precincts, old school.

Yeah, Xavier Becerra for vice president

End of pitch.

Bernie Sanders is still a candidate for the nomination but not the kind of candidate who actively seeks the nomination but just the kind of candidate who can’t stand the idea of conceding ever, so he won’t.

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Asked if Bernie Sanders is actively seeking the nomination, his campaign manager Jeff Weaver says no. Is the campaign still polling super delegates? No. Asked 12 hours later if Bernie Sanders is still a candidate for the nomination Jeff Weaver says yes.

For a campaign that is different than all the others because it tells the truth, it says, truth seems to have become very relative. It’s hard to see what advantage Bernie has by maintaining the fiction that he is still a presidential candidate when he cannot possibly be one because there are no more delegates to be had and he is not trying to flip any super delegates. But many of his core supporters, the true believers, the ones who have been the most dedicated donors even when they couldn’t afford it, those people still believe in their heart of hearts that Bernie can and will the nomination. And as long as Bernie has not conceded, the campaign can still continue to raise money from these people. Doubtless donations spiked after his speech last night. You have to wonder just how much of this equivocation nonsense–he is not actively seeking the nomination but is still a candidate for the nomination–is because they were flat broke after the California primary. Maybe they couldn’t pay the bills and meet whatever payroll remained, the fate of most failed political campaigns. But then no campaign ever collected donations the way Bernie’s does, in smallish dollar amounts via social media. As long as they have that dedicated base of followers they have money coming in, provided that base still thinks Bernie is actually seeking the nomination. Is that what is happening? Is that why Jeff Weaver takes such pains to state that Bernie is still a candidate? Maybe, maybe not. It’s impossible to tell since they stopped releasing monthly donation totals a couple months ago. For a campaign that began so idealistically, it’s a rather unseemly finish.

He spent part of his speech last night saying how important it was to defeat Trump. But you do not defeat Trump by donating to the Bernie Sanders for President campaign. You do not help other progressive candidates by donating to the Bernie For President campaign. You don’t take back congress or statehouses or state legislatures by donating to the Bernie Sanders for President campaign. You don’t fund ballot initiatives to stop open carry or legalize marijuana or provide homes to the homeless by donating to the Bernie Sanders for President campaign either. It’s hard to tell just who you are benefiting by donating to the Bernie Sanders campaign. Sometimes campaigns wind up existing only to feed themselves, aimless organizations serving no purpose other than collecting funds to collect more funds. I don’t know if the Bernie Sanders campaign has reached that point yet, but I am starting to wonder. Because right now, for all political intents and nomination purposes, the campaign serves no function at all. As current events and filibusters pass it by, the campaign seems to be just spinning its wheels, going nowhere and making money doing it.

don't quit bernie

Bernie’s final campaign rally, Washington D.C. (Photo by Molly Riley, Getty Images.)

Bernie Sanders exits, stage left.

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That was a helluva speech Liz Warren gave. It’s unfortunate it had to be today, though, and not tomorrow, because I would have loved to have seen Bernie Sanders’ speech at RFK stadium. He was a couple minutes into it, subdued, almost pensive, like an immense weight was upon him. Where was he going with this? How would the crowd respond? I was transfixed. Suddenly it’s a split screen, and Liz Warren came walking out onto a stage, beaming. Bernie, exhausted, was speaking but you couldn’t help but be distracted by the electricity in Elizabeth Warren’s stride. Bernie was telling the crowd that his campaign is doing something different. It is telling the truth, he says, as he has said a thousand times–when the audio switches without warning to Liz Warren and Bernie is cut off mid-sentence. We hear Liz Warren launch into one of the greatest speeches in our modern political history. It was that good. Bernie’s stump speech was forgotten. None of the talking heads even mentioned he had been speaking. They were all about Elizabeth Warren, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump. It’s like Bernie was never even there. Bernie Sanders, the man who had upended American politics, who had dominated every Democratic conversation. Bernie Sanders, who is all anyone could talk about yesterday. Bernie Sanders, who held the fate of the nation in his hands. But through the magic of live television it seemed like Warren’s star had risen, instantly, and Bernie’s had waned, just as instantly. Was it intended that way? Who knows. But it did make for exciting television. Will it have an electrifying effect on Bernie voters? No doubt, especially the under thirty young women who had been so loyal to Bernie Sanders and not so crazy about Hillary Clinton. Elizabeth Warren had changed the political demographics instantaneously. Liz will definitely win over the Millennial women for Hillary, a young under thirty journalist said, if not the Bernie Bros. Bernie Bros. She rolled her eyes saying it, as if ill mannered, foul mouthed Bernie Bros were suddenly a relic of an older, more primitive time. Angry young men with no respect for women in a women’s world.

But this was not the way this should be happening. I’d been waiting for hours for Bernie’s speech. It was supposed to be a major speech. All the news networks were waiting for it. It was to be broadcast in its entirety. This was to be one of the most significant speeches by the single most significant politician of 2016. “How Bernie Sanders’s day in Washington got eclipsed by Democratic unity” said the headline in the Washington Post. It had all happened so fast. If only somebody could have worked the timing out, coordinated the two events, but perhaps they just were determined to have Elizabeth Warren scorch Donald Trump before she endorsed Hillary this afternoon. And scorch him she did, beautifully, rehearsed to perfection, leaving a pile of cinders where once a big loutish billionaire had been.

There was a lot of stagecraft today, that was obvious, the Obama White House and Hillary Clinton campaign and Elizabeth Warren’s every move choreographed to perfection, without a wasted motion. Smooth and perfect. Political tai chi. Meanwhile Bernie, good honest Bernie, truthful Bernie, crusading Bernie, is left looking like William Jennings Bryan in Inherit the Wind, somehow immediately dated, a relic from an earlier time when he left crowds spellbound and chanting his name. Bernie’s speech today seemed divorced from reality, said the usually sympathetic Huffington Post, scolding him for pretending his campaign was not over. But you had to scroll way down to find that story, it was buried far beneath Elizabeth’s Warren’s enormous photo and name in huge red letters. Scroll down past Marco Rubio’s picture, and a bit further on, between an article on mosquitos and an article on a hit and run driver, was Bernie’s small picture and smaller font, an afterthought. “It would be extraordinary if the people of Washington, our nation’s capital, stood up and told the world that they are ready to lead this country into a political revolution” Bernie told the smallish crowd, just a fraction of the turnout he’d gotten in Los Angeles only days before. But Tuesday’s Washington D.C. primary, would be the last stop in the political revolution, and he will lose it like he lost the South, by a huge margin. Bernie knew that. He had told President Obama just that morning he understood the math. But he was putting on the show for the true believers spread out on the lawn before him. They cheered, they swooned, they knew the catechism by heart. Stay in the race, they chanted. Some said they’d write in Bernie Sanders on the ballot come November. He smiled wanly. It’d been scarcely forty eight hours since the California primary, but that seemed like another time.

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The undumpable Trump

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Why Can’t Republicans Distance Themselves From Donald Trump? Jamelle Bouie asks in his latest Slate piece. They’re Afraid, he says. Afraid of power, afraid for their careers, afraid of Donald. Which is all true. It’s a fascinating piece (as are all his articles), but I think he missed a key point about what makes them afraid. It’s Facebook. I think that something the media regularly misses (because they spend most of their time on social media with other pundits) but politicians do not miss (because they read social media from their constituents every day) is the power of Facebook to drive politics. Defying Trump can be disastrous for a Republican politician, because it could set off a tsunami–even a series of tsunamis–of incredibly angry, out of control, and crazily inaccurate Facebook posts that can severely damage a politician. When you have a tidal wave of furious Trump supporters calling Paul Ryan a RINO–he the lifelong Republican and they mostly recent converts–you can see just how dangerous a thing Facebook can be if you are on its wrong side.

The Tea Party was dangerous for Republicans, too, but it was an email phenomenon, and as such a Republican could confront it because Tea Partier’s frenzied emails would be seen by relatively few. Hundreds at most. But taking on Trump’s followers can expose you to literally hundreds of thousands of virally angry people, and there is as yet no way to safely contain that. This is anger several orders of magnitude beyond that of the Tea Party. An anger that actually crushed the Tea Party candidate, Donald Cruz. And while the media understands that the media itself has been instrumental in making Donald Trump the presumptive nominee of the Republican Party, it doesn’t quite understand that it was not just the media,  not all that free television they gave him, but that television in conjunction with Facebook. The impact of an analog appearance on television would expand exponentially in the digital universe that is Facebook. Trump would be everywhere on Facebook, pro and against. He seemed to dominate it. Even progressives were overwhelmed by Trump related posts. While all his opponents were spending big money in traditional campaigns, Trump sucked up all the Republican oxygen on Facebook. Each opponent smothered and died. Trump became not only the presumptive nominee, but became the Republican Party as far as Facebook was concerned.

Now, Facebook also went a long way to propelling Bernie Sanders too, but unlike the ethnically homogenous Republicans, Hillary had a firewall of Black and Hispanic voters who were not in the same Facebook universe as all those angry white progressives. Facebook dominance only works if everyone is Facebook friends with each other. But Facebook connections between blacks and whites are few, and between whites and Hispanics are few. The tsunami of pro-Bernie posts (and they were overwhelming) stopped at that racial/ethnic line. Bernie people never seemed to notice this and the Bernie Sanders phenomenon wound up a white people thing, as you could see from the faces at his rallies. As the campaign went on Bernie began picking up support across color lines from under thirty voters, but this was past the time of that first critical explosion of Berniemania. Hillary’s firewalls had held fast just about everywhere and Bernie’s campaign was on the mathematical ropes after the Southern primaries. The battle lines hardened and Bernie’s revolution never really expanded beyond his base of white progressives. It was that demographic topography of Democratic and Democratic leaning independent voters that limited Bernie Sanders’ success to mostly small states (he won eleven of the states with under thirty delegates, and two of the thirteen with over one hundred delegates), and failed at all to shake the confidence of the Democratic establishment. Only one Senator endorsed Bernie. A handful of congressmen. A few unions. He barely made a dent in the establishment at all. Voters over fifty had little use for him. Hispanics rejected him by two or even three to one. Blacks by four to one. Bernie’s Facebook world was a swirl with passionate intensity, a passion that had not been seen in American politics in generations, but it was mainly among white people under age forty who never noticed that so few outside that demographic were sharing their posts.

But among Republicans and Republican leaning independents on Facebook, there were no barriers to Trump at all. Compared to Democrats, Republicans are an endless flat plain of ideologically very similar people, differing in little but their accents, and you don’t hear accents on Facebook. The Donald’s presence just kept growing and growing, flowing like water in all directions, and it seems now to have no limits within Republican voters. There are no firewalls stopping him. There are certainly no ethnic divisions. Everybody can share everybody’s posts. And as a result, Republican politicians are much more at the mercy of outraged people on Facebook. They can’t hide, like Hillary, in all the places where white Millennials do not digitally congregate, because Trump supporters are anywhere and everywhere. And I think to a large degree this explains the fearful reticence of Republican politicians to cross Donald Trump. Even John McCain doesn’t want to cross Donald Trump. Trump could level him with one tweet, a tweet pasted onto Facebook and posted from one end of the party of Abraham Lincoln to the other. And McCain’s own Arizona Republican constituents love Donald Trump. He has to tread very carefully now. That RINO POW McCain and the Mexican judge both gotta go, someone might post, and the likes would pop up like dandelions after a spring rain.

But has Trump gone too far quintupling down on that judge? Could Trump be dumped? The media seems to think so. You can see the reporters and analysts and the scary bald GOP strategists and the lovely Nicole Wallace convincing each other of this on panel shows. You cannot be a racist presidential nominee howls an outraged Joe Scarborough. But I suspect it is far too late to dump Trump. I think that the press sees more change in Republicans than is real. I think they take the hopeful and logical and thoroughly unracist opinions of some valiant Republican politicians far too seriously. Because a poll today showed that a majority of Republicans do not think that Trump has been racist going after that judge. And it is that majority of Republicans, across that immense flat and seamless plain of Republicanism, and not the press corps and their favorite talking heads, who will be going nuts on Facebook every time faint of heart Republicans try to dump or even distance themselves from The Donald. Facebook dominates the GOP rank and file right now, and any politician who knows how to dominate both the media and Facebook will rule the Republican Party for the foreseeable future. Republican politicians are right to be afraid of crossing Donald Trump. He has too many Facebook friends.

Bernie Sanders and the very last primary of 2016

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Bernie said in Santa Monica tonight that he will continue the fight for every last delegate. Yet the one remaining contest is the primary next week in Washington DC, and if demographic trends continue as they have in every other single race with comparable demographics, Bernie Sanders will get creamed. It could be 80-20 for Hillary. It is a guaranteed complete humiliation, yet he is making his last big push there, even calling for an army of volunteers and maximum effort. Today’s results were bad enough, but by announcing it is his last stand, he is bringing all the Washington and campaign press corps’ attention on his final disastrous defeat in the nation’s capitol next Tuesday, a contest that otherwise would have been a small item in the news. It’ll just make his campaign look like a failure. At least he won two of the six states tonight, but he cannot win anything in the Washington D.C. primary. And what is after that, the Super Delegates? Being blown out of the water in the last nine contests is a way to impress the Super Delegates? Because in a four day span Bernie Sanders lost the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, New Jersey, South Dakota, New Mexico, and California primaries. Next week, add Washington D.C. to that list. In the three biggest of those, the ones with most of the delegates–Puerto Rico, New Jersey and California–Bernie was crushed. Three Hillary landslides. She expanded her delegate lead by hundreds, and in a four day span Hillary Clinton increased her popular vote total over Bernie Sanders by about 800,000 votes. Bernie Sanders won the Montana primary and the North Dakota caucuses. That is it. Fighting for delegates this late in the game is not doing him any good. Indeed, it’s weakening him. He was a much bigger candidate just a week ago, making demands, promising an upset in California, getting more press than Hillary. He’s not so big now. He’ll be even less big after next Tuesday.

The Donald speaks

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The Donald giving a victory speech. Strangely subdued. Emasculated even. He sounds more like the guy in that Volkwagen Passat commercial driving his daughter to school than a raving fascist demagogue. Sad.

Wait..now he is picking up. Accusing Hillary of taking hundreds of millions of rubles in bribes from Putin while secretary of state. China too. Zillions of dollars. Shaking ’em down. Bill and Hillary using the State Department to make huge amounts of money at the expense of the American people. He promises a major speech next week. I wonder if he will have documentation, or just use Joe McCarthy’s list of communists in the State Department.

I knew it, one fifth of Bernie voters will say, he has my vote.

Also, Hillary has caused the mass migration of people from the middle east to America and Europe. From the entire world maybe, perhaps even that Mexican judge, it was all rather vague. Other bad things too, but I was too startled by the realization that Hillary was the change agent in 21st century human migration patterns. Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi.

No PPP! an audience member yells. Yeah, no PPP Trumps says.

I have no idea what PPP means.

Then Trump says you mean no PP.

The audience snickers. I am still bewildered.

Maybe it was another penis joke.