America is like the latest episodes of Game Of Thrones in that nerds who read all the books have no idea what the fuck is going on anymore
— Erin Gloria Ryan (@morninggloria) March 2, 2016
As a sidebar to Cole’s excellent post last night, here’s Jamelle Bouie, at Slate, on “The Real Difference Between Hillary and Bernie”:
… Primaries obscure this, but parties are far more than their voters. They are the volunteers that give time, the donors that give money, the local and state officials that build organizations, the recruiters that find candidates, etc. They are also loose coalitions of groups and interests that work in tandem for common goals and, equally, work against each other for particular gains. Some are more powerful than others, and that influences the broad direction and shape of the parties.
In addition to chief executive and commander in chief, the president of the United States is also the leader of his or her party. And as much as anything else, the president has to navigate these groups and interests, as well as communicate with other party members, from congressional leaders to local and state party officials…
Hillary Clinton, a prominent leader from the ideological center of the Democratic Party, is running to lead the Democratic coalition as it exists. She wants to lead the party as much as she wants to be president. Which makes her more attentive to traditional party building—she’s pledged to devote resources to boosting state parties and candidates—and more cautious with her rhetoric. Liberals in the Democratic coalition are opposed to fracking, but many rural and purple state Democrats aren’t. Clinton doesn’t want to alienate either, so she tries to satisfy both.
Bernie Sanders, by contrast, comes from the left wing of American politics with a nominal attachment to the Democratic Party—until his run for the presidency, he didn’t identify as a Democrat. He’s not as concerned with the usual party building and coalition maintenance. He wants to change the terms of the institution that is the Democratic Party and put ideological liberals at the fulcrum of Democratic politics, in the same way that ideological conservatives sit at the center of Republican politics. And so, his appeals are broad and expansive. He doesn’t worry about details as much as he focuses on energizing like-minded voters. Rather than trying to satisfy Democrats in conservative places, Sanders is trying to reduce their influence by attracting sympathetic voters (his “political revolution”).
The problem for Sanders is that ideological liberals are one faction among many, and they compete for influence with party stalwarts like union members and black Americans, who offer support based on transaction—what can you do for the interests of our specific group—as much as belief. To win on his terms, Sanders has to grow the space for ideological politics in those groups and satisfy its more moderate and conservative members. This is hard (I call them “stalwarts” for a reason), and it’s why Sanders has had a hard time in states where they play an important part…
***********
Apart from political self-examination, what’s on the agenda for the day?
sherifffruitfly
wholsale vs retail isn’t really magic either way. what’s magic is being able to create a tapestry with BOTH threads interwoven in various ways. neither can do the job of the other.
we won’t be getting that magic, of course, which is why i don’t especially care which one trick pony we get. both are better than any gop, and both fall hillariously short of Obama albeit for different reasons. (shrug)
Amir Khalid
I think the arguing in these threads over Hillary vs. Bernie will last until well after the convention. I also think Jamelle Bouie doesn’t have it quite right when he says Bernie wants to reshape the Democratic party by putting liberals at its heart. If so, then why isn’t Bernie campaigning for a more liberal Democratic party, or helping to put more liberal Democrats in office or in local party orgs? It seems to me that what Bernie wants to do is lead a charge of liberals for President Bernie. He only joined the Democratic party to be eligible for its primary ballots. It isn’t any deeper than that.
Applejinx
That’s well observed, thanks.
If you correctly identified Al Gore as a neoliberal even back in the day, only to be appalled by getting exactly the same crap only with a BIG SIDE ORDER of Iraq war from Bush, it’s easy enough to see Hillary Clinton as the continuation of what the real Democratic Party represents.
With a big side order of fracking, apparently? Ironic to be defending that in Flint, given that water table corruption and being able to set fire to your water is one side-effect of fracking. I suppose this gets points for obviousness, at least when it reaches that state: lead poisoning, less so, though the brown color might be a tip-off.
It’s pretty alarming when ‘stop wrecking the country we live in!’ becomes not only a faction, but a small and insignificant faction that can’t compete on an equal basis with other factions standing to gain huge sums of money from things like fracking and predatory lending. However, it looks like that’s where we’re at.
If there’s a lot of strain it’s because folks like Bernie and Elizabeth Warren are shoving the Overton Window as hard as they can in one direction, and then you’ve got the fracking and payday loan people and Martin Shkreli and his ilk, and they are shoving as hard as they can in the other direction. And when you coalition-build and try to represent everybody, and this is the problem for Clinton and I wish we lived in a better world where her approach wasn’t so suicidal, you end up with a patchwork of awfulness with something to hate for everyone, no cohesion to any of it, and a legacy of not only failure but a tragic morality play.
Where you quite understand why they did it, sympathize with their motives, and yet you shudder with horror as the worst decisions keep getting made for understandable reasons, and the story trundles on to an epically grim ending.
We would like to not do that please :/
NotMax
What is that, an excerpt from a poor knock-off of Politics for Dummies?
If it were any more facile and vanilla it would be pudding.
Cermet
There is a reason so-called “Moderates” run a party (any.) They are either the reps of the money interests or the money interests themselves. Sanders scares those types because he doesn’t serve their interest directly, and he will alienate many common voters causing a possible lost. Hillary has contacts with moderates because she represents that most powerful group – get over it people; that is life in a rich country and no one will change it – only a major economic shock or similar disaster can mobilize enough people. President Obama stopped that disaster so accept that we have a good (hardly great) economic recovery and no major change will occur. If (really when) Hillary gets the nod, we must strongly support her or a real disaster will take office – yes, you might later get your powerful change but the suffering you, I and the rest of the country (and likely the world) will NOT be worth the cost. Grow up and stop wishing for unicorns.
Anne Laurie
@NotMax: Not everybody is as politically well-read as you (and some of those who are appreciate ‘vanilla’ commentary they can forward to less-astute friends).
I also have a prejudice that most people don’t like screaming controversy with their breakfast, nor do I like writing about such just before I go to bed (which I, like you I assume, am about to do).
Unless it’s The Disloyal Opposition getting itself into another clown-fight — and even then, only if I can make a joke of it.
raven
FOOD FIGHT!
NotMax
@Anne Laurie
Never assume. In fact, woke up from a nap about 30 minutes ago, made and ate dinner and shall be up for many hours now. And for lots of folks, it isn’t breakfast time (East coast blinders at work).
Knowing you often schedule posts for publishing ahead of time, there’s no way to determine what you may have typed up just before going to bed, either.
Slate has more and more and more become a dumping ground for articles other places with normative standards would reject outright or send back for extensive retooling. Seeing a link to there sets off the Do Not Click alarm nearly as strongly as a link to Politco does. That it was a handy thing to copy and paste doesn’t make it any less pap.
amk
“He wants to change the terms of the institution that is the Democratic Party and put ideological liberals at the fulcrum of Democratic politics, in the same way that ideological conservatives sit at the center of Republican politics.”
The only diff is that ideological cons are actually the members of that party and hence they are able to dictate to their party unlike the carpetbagger. Good luck with that.
NotMax
@raven
I love the smell of
napalmcoffee in the morning. :)Hey, it is Balloon Juice, after all. Double :)
Applejinx
@Cermet:
He most certainly did not, and major change is going to occur. The question is whether we want that or whether we want that AND our own little genocide within our borders, so in the case that Hil gets the nod, major change does seem impossible to avoid.
Very likely that is simply voting for the little genocide to take place outside our borders rather than in them, but then Obama has been the ‘drone guy’ and that’s now considered normal. It all depends on how you define ‘real disaster’. In geopolitical terms he’s just kicked the can down the road and Hillary would be doing likewise, more clumsily. The end of the road is still apocalypse and just because we’re not being fired by Republicans from a cannon directly to the end stage doesn’t change what the road is.
Slower is better, if that’s the only choice, and for all our efforts it’s looking suspiciously like that’s the only choice.
Let’s not have this ‘things are good, no major change will occur, the system works’, ok? The system is ungovernable and broken beyond repair, it leads to catastrophe and a relatively small number of system-gamers fleeing to Argentina with their takings, and there’s no point in any sort of enthusiasm for any of it. YES, let’s resist decline into a nationalist Reich herding ‘others’ into mass graves, at least within our borders. Let’s not be complete idiots and acknowledge that we’re voting for that to still happen on a smaller scale OUTside our borders, and for continued decline in myriad ways accompanied by incoherent pep talks and totally unwarranted exceptionalism.
Check back after two terms of Hils, if that’s what’s scheduled, and see if I wasn’t absolutely right. You can not want a President Trump, or Cruz, and still be honest that we are completely screwed at this point.
raven
@NotMax: And Joe is screaming at Nicole! Time to hike to the bakery.
NotMax
@raven
Dunno if you saw the pic of the vog from an earlier thread. As you know what the island normally looks like, you might appreciate the difference.
OzarkHillbilly
Rain, rain, and more rain. Today thru Thursday. At least they took the flooding out of the forecast for the moment as the heaviest rains look to be south of us. Even still, with all we’re supposed to get, there will be flooding around here, just not a repeat of the New Year’s floods.
Chyron HR
@Applejinx:
Al Gore is impure now?
Well, of course he is, he’s not Bernie. Silly of me to even ask.
rikyrah
Good Morning ?, Everyone ?
AnonPhenom
26% of Dems favor fracking.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/182075/americans-split-support-fracking-oil-natural-gas.aspx
Never let the facts get in the way of your argument.
Applejinx
@Chyron HR:
Gore swung hard right as soon as he won the primary. He was for privatizing Social Security and investing it in the stock market, and wanted to push for ‘faith-based’ institutions as government-funded social services.
We all hated the crap out of Lieberman back in the day, but when you look back on it, in many ways the Third Way people CHASED the Republicans to the right. You’ll never know what would have happened if Gore had been given the Presidency (that he in fact narrowly won). Of course he was fucking impure! The party was doubling down on its Third Way conservatism.
Just as it may be doing again. We shall see.
Mustang Bobby
Oh, what fun; David Brooks is using the “it’s 2 a.m. in the bar and they’ve turned up the lights and the guy you thought was Zac Efron turns out to be a Klingon and you’re stuck with going home with him or settling for a bottle of baby oil in the bathroom…” metaphor. But it’s still not too late for Marco! Or Paul! Or John!
Applejinx
@AnonPhenom: My point exactly. There are many struggling communities that desperately want the short-term economic stimulus of turning themselves over to the fracking industry. Briefly, they boom. Then, the frackers move on, and it’s over.
There are Dem constituencies who WANT fracking, because it’s immediate money. To argue against that you have to argue ‘you’re only hurting yourself’. Which is true, but doesn’t change the fact that you can simply pander to them and let them hurt themselves, and take their votes.
AnonPhenom
By being to the right of Clinton on gun control.
Never let the facts……
OzarkHillbilly
@Applejinx:
You really don’t get human nature, do you?
Currants
@NotMax: where on the Big Island are you? I’ve got a friend who lives in Volcano–which was not what I expected the first time I went out to visit.
Aimai
@Applejinx: you know thats a lie dont you? Gore was not for privatizing social security. Thst was the whole ” lock box” conversation. Bush wanted to privatize snd gore trued to explsin how important it was to protect SS. You should be banned for misrepresentation.
Baud
Now that I’ve lost both American Samoa and John Cole, I’m not sure if I should go on.
On the other hand, if I drop out, I think I would be required by law to become eithet a network pundit, a grifter, or a troll for some other candidate. None of those alternatives appeal to me.
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
Are you and your ankle back to normal yet?
debbie
@Baud:
After all your hard work?!? How many people would you let down if you gave up now?
LAO
OT: For any one interested in the Bundy bunch saga, a link to the goverment’s detention memo filed last Friday against Pete Santilli. http://media.oregonlive.com/oregon-standoff/other/2016/03/07/govtmotiondetainsantilliNV.pdf
NotMax
@Currants
I’m on Maui. That’s what the pic is showing, too.
Baud
@debbie: All of them, Katie?
OzarkHillbilly
@debbie: I’ve got a ways to go yet. Was forced by reality to hold off the walking program. I hope to start it by the end of this week. The plan was to have ‘normal’ in sight by the end of the month. Now I’m thinking more like by Tax Day. Time, and pain, will tell.
Kay
If Democrats don’t start winning state races none of this “who better represents the Party” will matter. It’s not a theory. A lot of the issues Democrats care about are state law. Sanders said something to the effect that he would reduce the inmate population by X amount were he elected. That was widely (and rightly) criticized because the vast majority of inmates are STATE prisoners and they’re in there under STATE law. But that’s where the criticism ends! “Bernie Sanders said it wrong”. Okay, touche, we won that debate point. The problem remains- how do Democrats plan on reforming the criminal justice system when they run so few states?
I heard it again and again in the Flint debate. Both candidates said they want the governor to resign because the emergency manager was appointed under state law and Detroit schools have been under state management for years. They want him to “resign”? That seems oddly passive. I don’t know- instead maybe Democrats could win a governor’s race in Michigan and then they wouldn’t be reduced to demanding resignations or relying on a recall process that is so difficult to achieve it will never work? If they think winning governor’s races is hard, wait until they see how hard it is to recall Snyder. It’s almost impossible.
They can’t be an exclusively national political Party, centered in DC, with governors on both coasts. They won’t have any influence on 90% of the laws they care about.
NotMax
@Mustang Bobby
Actually, Zac Efron sounds like something in Klingon, if used with proper bellowing delivery.
ZAC EF-RON!
Joel
@NotMax: I like Jamelle Bouie, but that wasn’t his strongest effort.
Joel
@AnonPhenom: They are concentrated in electorally influential areas, like Pennsylvania and Ohio.
debbie
@OzarkHillbilly:
Good luck and be patient.
Thoroughly Pizzled
I was in Frank Luntz’s focus group last night to talk about the Democratic town hall here in Detroit. The group was an even split between Hillary and Bernie voters. The Bernie supporters generally thought that Hillary was corrupt and untrustworthy, but they still all planned on voting for her over Trump, so that’s good.
I tried to make the point that Bernie should use his war chest to identify and support progressive House and Senate candidates, but I kept letting the others talk over me, and Megyn Kelly used the other clip anyway. Oh well.
Frank Luntz himself is being driven insane by the Republican primary, so he told us he was happy to be doing Democrats for once. He also wears sneakers with his suit.
Baud
@Thoroughly Pizzled: Wow. That’s kind of cool.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Baud: I did not get to plug your candidacy, unfortunately.
Tripod
His strongest supporters are rural state Democrats, who are voting their race & gender. His candidacy is largely cult of personality driven, which doesn’t do much for changing a party’s dynamic when they lose…
Slate – what a bunch of bullshit.
debbie
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
I wouldn’t trust that snake in the grass for one moment. Five bucks says he was there for oppo research.
Baud
@Thoroughly Pizzled: It’s ok. They would have found a way to silence you if you had, just like they shut down the blog yesterday. Safety first.
Kay
The (new) Democratic governor of Pennsylvania has been desperately trying to get a budget thru the state legislature for months. It matters, a lot, because their public schools are running out of money. The schools that would be the MOST hard hit will be the poor schools, because they have teetering budgets to begin with. With all the hundreds of national liberal advocacy groups none of them can help with that? It’s completely up to the governor, one person, along with maybe a teachers union? If the tables were turned and Republicans were trying to do something horrible in that state there would be an influx of help from the hundreds of conservative groups.
Democrats will hold their national convention in a PA city where the schools collapsed because they couldn’t get state funding under a Dem governor? I’m not blaming him- it’s an impasse and he was left with a mess but they can’t ignore states and be a viable national Party. It’s impossible. They have the same opportunity in Louisiana- big mess left by an R governor, new D governor struggling to deal with it.
Keith G
@NotMax: I get your Slate hate, but categorical thinking is often errant. There are first class writers working for Slate. Jamelle Bouie is one of those.
Baud
@Kay:
Same deal in Louisiana. Same thing Obama faced. Same old, same old.
Applejinx
@Tripod: Whose? Gore’s?
…
Given that Bernie’s a one-issue guy who’s been hammering the same income inequality thing from beginning to end, and when he does fill in around that it’s pure liberal justice (both racial and gender, both decidedly secondary to his main issue), It seems that when you say
you are either wrong or intentionally lying as hard as you can for partisan purposes.
And THAT doesn’t do much for helping a party keep hold of the issue-oriented voters who are themselves so worked up about their issue that they tend to shortchange other people’s concerns.
raven
@NotMax: And it’s not from cane fires?
Thoroughly Pizzled
@debbie: Oh, most definitely. He didn’t get much to work with, though. People liked both candidates, for the most part.
NotMax
@Baud
Eyes on the prize.
(An asterisk in the history books is kind of a prize, if one squints.)
;)
MazeDancer
@Kay:
So true, so right about Dems must run states.
State politics, as you so well know, are hard. They are not glam. They can’t be accomplished just by pontificating from an arm chair. They require people like you. Amazing people like you who are willing to do actual work are hard to find. May Hillary’s interest in all levels of the party help change that soon.
NotMax
@raven
Nope. Everything from the fluffy clouds above the tops of the mountains on down is a mantle of vog.
raven
@Currants: Here are the cinder cones on Maui and the Big Island in the background.
OzarkHillbilly
@Thoroughly Pizzled: How did that happen? I’ve never even been polled.
Baud
@raven: one of the top national parks I’ve been to.
Kay
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
I read conservative pundits on Twitter. Most of them are anti-Trump. It’s so funny how they approach it though because they assume the problem will be that faction of the Party won’t vote for Trump. They have a bigger problem. The faction of the Party that wants Trump and will be furious if they take it away from him won’t vote for Kasich or Rubio or Cruz, and the Trump faction seems to be bigger. They’re really profoundly undemocratic in some basic way. The flip side doesn’t even enter into their thinking.
NotMax
@NotMax
What winds there were blew from the southeast, pushing the volcanic plumes directly this way.
Baud
@Kay:
Hard to believe the people supporting voter suppression laws would have that attitide.
raven
@Baud: Did you read the plaque about Mark Twain’s camping trip?
Kay
@MazeDancer:
She’s saying it but Flint is the perfect example. Why were they wholly reliant on the federal EPA? Because they lost most of state government. Instead the federal candidates use it as a turn out mechanism- “we are the only thing standing between you and collapse”.
I look at what happened when Kasich won Ohio. His whole agenda came from national think tanks and advocacy groups and was promoted by them. Lynne Fucking Cheney was running an org out of Virginia pushing his anti-labor law. The ENTIRE Dem opposition was run by labor unions. Luckily, Ohio still has labor unions. Without them nothing would have happened. If national Democrats are going to rely on labor unions for all state action they better do more for labor unions, because there aren’t that many left. They better have a Plan B.
SFAW
@Applejinx:
Good Christ, the old Saint Ralph the Pure bullshit again? And the rest of your comment is borderline gobbledegook. But at least you got some of the right buzzwords (e.g., “and then you’ve got the fracking and payday loan people and Martin Shkreli and his ilk, and they are shoving as hard as they can in the other direction.”) in there.
raven
@NotMax: Morning fog from Haleakala
NotMax
@raven
Nature’s meringue.
raven
While observing a Haleakala sunrise, Mark Twain was quoted as exclaiming “I felt like the last man, neglected of the judgment, and left pinnacled in mid-heaven, a forgotten relic of a vanished world.”
Xboxershorts
The problem with Centrist Democratic governance is that they’ve continuously given in to corporate influence and well monied special interests such that the center today equates to the far right of 1959.
In other words, centrism has been death by a thousand cuts for America’s working classes.
And the idea that injecting millions of gallons of toxic fluids at extremely high pressure underneath our potable fresh water aquifers and that nothing bad could happen from this is ludicrous.
I live in the Marcellus and I can tell you that wherever they’ve been doing this, people have been injured.
That hole in the ground is going to be there for the life of the planet. They better have a maintenance plan.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@OzarkHillbilly: I signed up online and they called me yesterday afternoon. Couldn’t get us tickets for the town hall itself, the bastards.
Baud
@raven: No. Haven’t heard of that.
gogol's wife
@Applejinx:
I don’t think “hard right” means what you think it means.
Linnaeus
@Kay:
Have you read this essay by Alexander Hertel-Fernandez and Theda Skocpol? They make very much the same arguments that you are re liberals/Democrats and the states.
Kay
@Baud:
But they have an interest in making the governors successful and Democratic voters are different than GOP voters. Education is always 1, 2 or 3 on Democrats list of issues in national polling. That’s true again this cycle. It’s not true for GOP voters. Terrorism and immigration are federal, along with “religious liberty” and the Supreme Court.
Education is run by states. There has to be coordination between federal and state political actors and orgs, because Democrats care MORE about issues that are run by states than Republicans do. Democratic voters are literally looking to the wrong level of government on 90% of what they care about. It’s nuts for Clinton to say she will send a “swat team” into public schools. It’s not a bad idea, although her language was unfortunate, IMO. It’s just an idea a governor should have. Snyder DID send a “swat team” into Detroit schools. He set up a privatized system within the public system. It was an unmitigated disaster. His schools are actually worse than Detroit public schools. Everyone sitting in that room at the Flint debate knows that.
SFAW
@Applejinx: at #11
Awesome comment.
I believe the appropriate response is: “So fucking give up already, if things are so goddamn terrible and only going to get worse.” Seriously, you’re seeing — and apparently seeking — the End Times in everything. If you’re not, then you might consider not writing as if you are.
You might also look up the word “cogent.” Just a thought.
C.V. Danes
As I stated in John’s post, we need both sides to win. The best thing that Bernie has done is give liberals a prominent seat at the table. It is in both candidates best interests to keep us there, but after election day will come the day after the election, and liberals need to make sure we are still at the table, and not on it, when that day comes.
OzarkHillbilly
@raven:
On a backpacking trip in WY, another guy and I took a pre-dawn hike/climb to a couple alpine lakes for some early morn fishing, going from about 9K feet to 11.5K feet. It was… an interesting hike in the light of the full moon, losing the trail, climbing sheer cliffs with fishing gear in our hands, etc. Still not sure how we managed it without getting killed. Anyway, we topped out on the ridge line over the lakes just as the sun was rising over the peaks behind us and that quote captures almost exactly what I felt at that moment.
NotMax
Here’s hoping Dems get the lead out in today in Michigan (pun partially intended) and come out to vote.
Baud
@Kay: Candidates don’t like to say that someone else will solve the problem. Candidates these days barely like to acknowledge even that Congress has a role to play.
Betty Cracker
@raven: What do you think of the Lovie Smith hire?
OzarkHillbilly
@Thoroughly Pizzled: Is that all? I thought maybe you had to sell your soul or something. ;-)
SFAW
@Baud:
You mean you’re not currently?
As long as you don’t change your nym to “Right to Baud” or “Baud to Rise,” we’ll still love you. In a purely platonic way, of course.
Applejinx
@SFAW: Nader sucked. The only thing he had going for him was that he called out the total bullshit that was our American system.
Here we go again, since the problem didn’t go away, and this time the faction calling out bullshit and aligning behind a few VERY INTENSELY REPEATED points, is way way bigger than Nader could ever have hoped to be.
It is apparently still not enough, and we’re either going to give the government back to the same Third Way people for more slow death, or they’re not going to be able to muster enough enthusiasm to defeat Trump. Trump means the other side of the aisle has already lost their battle: Dems not sucking as bad means that Hillary has a very solid chance to be the Dem nominee. If we were, on the whole, worse, then Bernie would have wrapped it up by now.
Nader sucked. He would never have worked and was purely a protest vote. We are still protesting how bad things are, ever-louder, and still getting nowhere with it.
Bernie sucks less and is just as representative of the ‘STOP THIS BULLSHIT’ movement.
What, would you rather we improvise IEDs? This is America. We argue and vote. So far.
Applejinx
@SFAW: Will you pay attention to world events, global finance, the Eurozone, climate change, and the collapse through utter corruption of BOTH American political parties?
I would also point out we didn’t used to be able to frack. We now have the capacity to literally wreck our country for short term gain. Who seriously thinks desperate people won’t go for that, bigtime? If not, they haven’t been made desperate enough, and our system is working on that very very hard.
What the flying fuck do you want me to say? I can’t picture not voting against Trump. What more do you want from me, a happy song?
Chris
@Baud:
I assume you’ve heard the line “we’re a republic not a democracy” from Repubs? This is what it means. “I reserve the right to tell the popular vote to fuck off in any and all instances in which they don’t agree with me, and I’m disguising it as a deep commentary on political science.”
hueyplong
On my agenda today is to vote early in the NC primary.
Weeks ago, the idea was to cross over and vote for Bush to keep him alive in the Schiavo sense and to keep Right To Rise spending money in attacks on Republicans. That’s not longer an option.
The only two remaining possibilities for the Republicans are Trump and Cruz– anything else is a wasted strategic cross-over vote. I have decided that if I guess wrong and the repugnant scum I voted for actually becomes president, I won’t be able to live with myself.
I have decided on Hillary as my choice, so I’m voting Bernie to keep a leftward tack on her as long as possible before I start whining about her pivot to the center.
I welcome suggestions and angry criticism until about noon.
C.V. Danes
@Applejinx: Climate change is coming for us faster than planned, that much is true. And when the mass migrations start, all bets are off. The problem is that there will be nowhere to escape to. Everyone will be trying to come here. So better to plant your flag now instead of trying to escape :-)
Ultraviolet Thunder
I just woke up and read Cole’s post. Right on. I don’t 100% agree (maybe 89-96%) but it’s honest and reasonable.
On tap for today is walking down to the polling place to do my civic duty, then a few errands.
Baud
@SFAW:
That has Trumpian connotations.
SFAW
@Applejinx:
Gee, we agree on something.
He was a fucking blindered moron. He thought it sounded good to say that Bush and Gore were exactly the same, and that it would get him enough votes. And yet, after Bush was appointed by SCOTUS, Saint Ralph attempted to rationalize his complicity by saying that things would get so bad, there would be a Renaissance of liberalism, so (in effect) it’s all good.
The rest of your comment is not exactly coherent, but it makes it clear that you think the only way to Save America is to Vote Bernie, because anything else is just just aiding-and-abetting the destruction being pushed by the Rethugs. Which is back to Saint Ralph again.
You keep saying that Saint Ralph sucked, and yet you keep pushing his both-sides-are-the-same bullshit.
GregB
The unstated issue in the Hillary vs. Bernie fight is that one side is led by Stalin, the other side by Hitler.
We must choose wisely.
Applejinx
@C.V. Danes: ‘when they start’?
Oh, you mean when they start to reach HERE.
Eurozone is contending with this very much. I’m given to understand Germany is accepting many migrants, because demographically they’re aging and dwindling. It provides a tax base, new blood.
Kay
@Linnaeus:
It;s frustrating to me because we’re supposed to be the smart people, we know how process works, yet we can’t even “get” that most of our objectives have an absolutely crucial state component. It’s not like you can’t do both! That’s what “coordinated campaigns” are- they’re campaigns that combine federal candidates at the top of the ticket with down-ticket races.
My sense is, and I don’t know if this is true, but my feeling is DC Democrats are loathe to relinquish any of the power so we lurch along from (federal) cycle to federal cycle and the house is always burning down and it’s always an emergency and it’s always defensive. It’s exhausting to be part of. It feels manipulative and cynical at the ground level to activists. It’s like “oh, here they come again with the big emergency every four years where we have to keep them in power or DISASTER STRIKES when they’ve been absent from this state since the last cycle”. If politics is about relationships, and I think it mostly is, that’s a bad relationship. It only goes one way.
OzarkHillbilly
@Ultraviolet Thunder: He pretty much captured why I lean Hillary. I’ve got another week to think about it.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: It’s kind of cute that you think Bernie Sanders has fuck-all power to do anything about the things you profess to care about. And, as aimai pointed out above, you are lightyears beyond wrong about Gore and Social Security.
SFAW
@Applejinx:
Just tell us where you live, so that I can ship a fainting couch to you. (Or I would, if I had enough spare cash, which I don’t.)
Keith G
@Linnaeus: I wish that Theda Skocpol could be made to be required reading for this blog. Skocpol avoids the trivial and the static (as a leading thinker in political behavior must) and is able to construct eye-opening writing.
I second your endorsement.
SFAW
@Baud:
Good point.
No need to tell us how big your “hands” are, by the way.
Chyron HR
@Applejinx:
Literally nothing, but you keep on posting.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay:
My sense is that the only way to make a critical mass of liberals care about politics _at all_ is to present to them the notion that the stakes are national. And I’m saying that fully aware that it implicates me. I don’t know what’s going on locally. When Election Day nears, about a week beforehand I find out who local liberal bloggers are talking up and then I vote for them. It seems boring and small-scale. Conservative Republicans, especially the Christians and home-schoolers, constantly churn up new weirdos to run for school board and that sort of thing. Democrats will occasionally burp out a new “local business leader.” I’m not sure how to fix this but it seems very important to try.
Chris
@Kay:
Yep. It’s become cliche to talk about the obsession with the presidency, but dang it, it’s true. It’s why every new Democrat who’s even a little bit popular immediately finds him or herself targeted by people who want their new shiny politician in the White House. (Thank God, Elizabeth Warren was smart enough not to go for that).
Successful parties need infrastructure and institutions that will survive any individual national candidate (and that will allow the party to still exercise considerable power even when it’s not in the White House). Republicans understand this – it’s what the think tanks and media outlets, the grassroots church networks, and the big donor/lobbyist nexus are there for. Democrats used to have the labor unions, a lot of the political machines, and some other movements (i.e. the civil rights community) to fulfill the same purpose. Still not seeing an equivalent today.
SFAW
@FlipYrWhig:
What you and aimai failed to understand is that when Gore talked about a “lockbox,” he really meant “privatize.” The two words are anagrams.
No – palindromes.
No, Spoonerisms
Wait, they’re tautologies.
I mean they’re “exactly the same” – just like both major Parties.
Yeah, that’s it.
Baud
@FlipYrWhig: I agree. I am the same way.
Ultraviolet Thunder
@OzarkHillbilly:
I don’t know about his contention that she’s a nice person and inspires devotion in people. I’m not disputing that, I just don’t have evidence one way or the other. But I’ve seen her patience with nonsense like the numerous invented scandals when Bill was President (and Lewinsky, which was real and much worse), and with the Benghazi hearing. These have convinced me that she has iron in her spine. That’s a Presidential necessity.
Kay
@Baud:
Well, they should, because Democratic voters aren’t any “smarter” than GOP voters on process. Every single Sherrod Brown or Marcy Kaptur event I have ever attended there is at least one Democrat (and often more) who ask them why they haven’t done anything about A STATE LAW.
Arguably GOP voters are better at it. They seem to understand they need two fronts- that there is state law and federal law. They’ve been wildly successful there on everything from guns to abortion to voting rights- federal PLUS states. They manage to walk and chew gum.
Baud
@Chris: And I agree with this also.
SFAW
@Chyron HR:
Didn’t get the hint with my “cogent” thing, and I don’t expect any change.
FlipYrWhig
@SFAW:
Millenarianism (wiki)
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Kay: I agree that we can’t continue to ignore the importance of state and local races.
But a lot of the GOP success in the state and local races is a result of the way courts have ruled since ~ 1980. If Bush v Gore had gone the other way, if the VRA weren’t gutted, and the ACA Medicaid decision wasn’t the way it was, and rules about redistricting, rules about campaign finance and disclosure, and rules about class-action lawsuits, and rules about collective bargaining, and …, if all of those things hadn’t happened the way they did, then the playing field would be a lot more level. The federal courts have a huge impact on the way state politics turns out over time.
I think the tide has turned our way. We should help it along and win victories where we can. Yes, we need to do more in state and local races, but we can make a huge difference before then. Disillusioned people don’t want to participate, and there’s nothing that will build enthusiasm faster than a big victory on the national level.
Cheers,
Scott.
D58826
@Kay: Agreed. One other point that has to be made. In order to win in those states the democrats are going to have to support the blue-dog candidates that the left hates so much. Pennsylvania, for example, may be purple/blue at either end but in the middle it is solid red. In order to win in those areas you are going to need a moderately conservative candidate. I’m not talking a Louie Ghomert type fool but an Alan Greyson Democrat isn’t going to win.
Applejinx
@FlipYrWhig: And gee, why could that possibly be, in the event that he got the popular vote and won and still couldn’t do fuck-all?
Could it be that both parties (well, back in the day of Bush vs Gore) have such aligned basic interests that you literally can’t change them? That the popular vote means nothing as we are not represented in any sense?
And so, mentions of climate change, mentions of the Eurozone’s struggles with Grexit and Brexit and a massive wave of migrants, go nowhere. There is no discussion of how fracking is a new way to trade short-term money for massive devastation, a way that didn’t exist before. Nope! Mustn’t talk about any of these things when there’s Our Side to be cheered on to a win!
It’s nothing but ‘fainting couches’, and ‘STFU’, all the way down.
Some of you should be very ashamed of yourselves. You are enabling very bad things.
Linnaeus
@Kay:
One of the takeaways I took from the piece is that, at least in the past 40-50 years or so, conservatives and Republicans have been better at cultivating relationships and then using those to coordinate both a policy and a political agenda. Why that is, I’m not entirely sure – your explanation might be part of it.
currants
@raven: That’s a great photo. Thank you!
Baud
@Kay: Dem voters don’t want to give up being cynical about the party IMHO. I agree the GOP voters are better at it, because they have traditionally had a sense of community and civic duty about voting, whereas too many Dem voters have bought into the libertarian concept that voting is like purchasing goods in the marketplace.
Baud
@D58826:
50 State Strategy!
Purge the Blue Dogs!
50 State Strategy!
Purge the Blue Dogs!
FlipYrWhig
@Chris:
Well, there are things like Moral Mondays and the Fight for 15. But in a larger sense, I agree. And it doesn’t help that movements like Occupy and BlackLivesMatter seem to eschew the political process as a way of translating ideals into laws and policies–and that’s my sense of a lot of the Sanders campaign and somewhat of Sanders himself: that politics is icky and corrosive and you’re better off if you let as little of it as possible stick to your skin. You need zealous wonks, not people who are all one or all the other.
Linnaeus
@Keith G:
I agree that Skocpol is one of the best scholars of politics in this country today.
currants
@NotMax: Yes, it is…I went back and looked/read more carefully. Apologies.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: We’re in a secular version of the End Times, then. Repent! The end is nigh!
SiubhanDuinne
@SFAW:
They’re cinnamons.
Applejinx
@FlipYrWhig: Will you pay attention to world events, global finance, the Eurozone, climate change, and the collapse through utter corruption of BOTH American political parties?
Seems you’re handwaving that stuff too. Are you seriously suggesting everything is fine?
The Republican Party is collapsing because of how not-fine everything is, and you think it’s just a matter of electing Hillary?
Linnaeus
@FlipYrWhig:
You need zealous wonks, but I don’t think the Democratic Party has any shortage of those when they are in power. From the essay that I linked above:
I think that there may be something to that, and it’s something that Occupy and BLM are trying to address, even if it’s not explicitly what they say that they are doing.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Applejinx: Both parties are the same on stuff like climate change and you bring up Al fucking “Inconvenient Truth” Gore as an example?
SFAW
@Applejinx:
In your own way, you’re quite the example of performance art.
America’s dying because both parties are the same! Eurozone! Fracking! Shkreli! Soros! Balrogs in the woodpile! Immigrants overflowing from Europe into America! Fracking! Corruption! The telephone call came from INSIDE THE HOUSE!! And did I mention fracking?
Maybe you can do stand-up or a one-person show on Broadway. I’m sure there’s a market for it in NYC.
Just to be clear: most of us here take any number of the things you mentioned quite seriously. We just don’t feel the need to screech at the top of our (figurative) lungs that “nothing will get fixed unless” the political revolution that Bernie is allegedly leading actually succeeds.
It seems apparent that you believe incrementalism (or whatever you want to call it) is equivalent to complicity in destroying the country/world. You have the right to believe that, just as you have the right to believe that Bush and Gore were the same (except for Iraq, I guess) — just don’t expect any rational person to tell you you abso-fucking-lutely RIGHT you are.
SFAW
@SiubhanDuinne:
Outstanding!
C.V. Danes
@Applejinx: Not just when they get here, but in here as well. Most of Florida will be under water towards the end of this century. That’s a lot of pissed off people who are going to have to abandon their homes and relocate elsewhere. And they also happen to be heavily armed.
D58826
@Baud: Read E.J. Dionne’s latest book about how the Right went Wrong. After reading it I’m not so sure the right really did go wrong since they seem to be winning elections. What was interesting about the book is that this isn’t some new just since Obama. The right wing has been trying to reverse the new deal since 1935. They have been building an infrastructure at the state and local level, funding think thanks, starting a TV network etc for 3 generations. The Koch brothers are just the latest and most visible of this effort. The right wing billionaires build political institutions whereas the left wing billionaires fund specific causes, such as save the whales. The right has the advantage of ongoing institutions such as the Chamber of Commerce which they can use to plan long term projects. Sure George Soros gives to democratic candidates but when he passes from the scene there is no guarantee that his money will continue to go to liberal democrats. Whereas the Chamber is always recruiting new younger members to carry on their agenda.
SFAW
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
Well, sure, because Al Gore is/was fat.
JMG
@Kay: One problem for state-level Democrats is that if one is elected to the White House, he or she is naturally going to skim off the best party/policy activists they can identify to help run the enormous federal government. To take the most obvious example, Obama surely knew that appointing Senators/governors from red or purple states to be Cabinet heads was a huge political risk, but he had to have people he trusted running the store.
Jeffro
@Chris:
Yes…democracy is great…as long as everyone agrees with me. This is one of the more fun things to mock w/ the Rs.
On a another note, folks, sending a “Bloomberg’s not running…oh…too bad, so sad” email to certain friends and relatives today has already made my day. There went the next-to-last GOP somehow-the-party-will-emerge-unscathed scenario…
D58826
@FlipYrWhig:
Dionne made the same point in his book. The right understands that.
rikyrah
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 3/7/16
Cruz threatens to mess with Rubio’s do-or-die effort in Florida
Marc Caputo, senior writer for Politico, talks with Rachel Maddow about a strategy Ted Cruz seems poised to deploy in which he ties up Marco Rubio in Florida, potentially costing Rubio his home state and hurting Rubio’s chances of picking up delegates in other states in the coming week.
Betty Cracker
@D58826:
He ain’t gonna win Florida either, which is why I’m voting for the Blue Dog in the primary. Well, that’s one of the reasons. Grayson is a problem candidate in ways that have nothing to do with being a fire-breathing progressive.
SFAW
@Applejinx:
For someone who keeps spouting off about End Times shit going on in the world, you really have no clue about American politics.
Or was that just more of your performance-art thing?
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: I used to stay up late watching TV. I’d hate-watch this guy a fair amount: Jack Van Impe. His show consisted of his wife breathlessly reading headlines from the news, which Jack would then interpret as prophetic. Lately, that’s you. Stop.
Applejinx
@SFAW: Wait, Soros? What? Balrogs?
I guess you can win a blogument pretty well if you just make up stuff. Not my kind of fun.
And climate change is Gore’s saving grace, IMO. For all that he helped chase the right farther right by aiming more right than Clinton and making the even more rightwing Lieberman his running mate, all part of that Third Way thing which was pretty explicitly ‘What, more liberal? Fuck that. We need to make a special name for more right-wing, especially economically!” (bear in mind I was always and continue to be essentially a socialist keynsian demand-side economics guy and utterly at odds with Third Way)…
For all that, he’s correct on climate change. Bernie, too, has said climate change is the biggest problem, for the reasons we’re seeing discussed on this thread.
FlipYrWhig
@Linnaeus: I’m saving the article for later. Thanks!
Applejinx
@SFAW: Explain why Bush isn’t the nominee. Explain how Cruz is anywhere NEAR the nomination. The Republicans have fallen apart completely. Everybody sees it.
I would also call out the persistent implications of ‘End Times’ rhetoric. Are you joking? No sky-daddy is making this happen to save the elect. WE are letting it all happen, and I am fed up with it. WE made this, with triangulating and corporatism and bullshit, and no prophecy foretold it. It is nothing but avoidable human greed.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@SFAW:
He’s got a big house, too, and takes airplanes places.
Saul Alinsky!!!!!!
BillinGlendaleCA
@Baud: I love dogs and love the color blue, but I’m not sure they go all that well together.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: I thought Bernie said the biggest problem is campaign finance.
Also, the “Third Way thing” was hatched BECAUSE DEMOCRATS KEPT GETTING THEIR WHOLE ASSES KICKED EVERYWHERE. Not just for spite against imaginary hippies.
rikyrah
More hee hee for Marco:
THE RACHEL MADDOW SHOW 3/7/16
Outlook bleak for Rubio with everything on the line
Rachel Maddow reports on the state of the Republican race for the presidential nomination and notes that Marco Rubio’s base of support is weakening as his primary losses continue to pile up, and the senator has no job waiting for him if his candidacy fails.
cleek
Sanders’ biggest fault is that he energized the zealous leftier-than-thou purity pony brigades. now we have to listen to these thin-skinned, naive, armchair revolutionaries preen and pout.
BillinGlendaleCA
@D58826: I read Dionne’s book as well, good read.
D58826
@Betty Cracker: I think there are three points to be made about electing blue-dogs in red states.
1. If they tip the house blue then Nancy has the gavel and controls the agenda.
2. It may be heresy on BJ to say this but the blue dogs might have some good ideas or at the very least make the progressives think through their policy proposals.
3. Half a loaf on an issue with blue dog support might have greater political support in the country at large as opposed to something that is purely liberal. And once the policy is in place and working then it is easier to sell the other half.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@Applejinx:
Ned Lamont was such a smart move. Like nobody could have predicted the bite on the ass that was going to come from that primary challenge in staid Connecticut….
Applejinx
@cleek: Wow! That’s a name I haven’t seen in a while. Cheers!
As for the clashing: this thread is LITERALLY called ‘open thread clash of concepts’. Very appropriate place to get aggressive about these concepts, and clash about them.
FlipYrWhig
@cleek: To be fair, he was like that already. Barney Frank on Bernie Sanders in 1990-91:
SFAW
@Applejinx:
Gee, “for all that, he’s correct on climate change.” Yes, Gore was, and is, correct on climate change.
Outside of that, you appear to have no fucking clue regarding Gore, other than some silliness about how right-wing he was.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@D58826:
The Revolution is so inevitable it needs neither thought nor planning, so long as the vanguard decisively exerts the inexorable will of the Proletariat.
OzarkHillbilly
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
We had one of those in 2008. Really drove the enthusiastic turn out in 2010.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@FlipYrWhig:
Barney is just a corporatist neoliberal shill…
FlipYrWhig
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Seem to be a lot more of those around ever since Bernie Sanders entered the race.
Applejinx
@FlipYrWhig: So what you do is redefine ‘winning’?
Dems are getting their asses kicked in a rightward swing, therefore redefine Dems as right-wing wherever possible and count it as a victory?
I agree that happened. That’s what I’m saying, and that’s what got us here.
I do appreciate the game-theory, get-control-of-political-systems aspect, though. I just would suggest this: if you’re posturing as more right-wing to get votes, it might be nice to not internalize too much of the kayfabe.
Current example: the very idea that Trump will have options to position himself, in ANY way, to the left of Clinton to muddy the waters and confuse people, is an indictment of what Dems have become. That should be just plain impossible. Yet it’s a real threat.
I’ll know he’s full of shit, because he is, but he’s going to take Dem votes that way.
Xboxershorts
@Linnaeus:
We can look at the blueprint for corporate takeover outlined in the Powell Memo and the dissolution of the media Fairness Doctrine as underlying causes in the nature of the information much of us receive.
Liberal policy (i.e. new Deal Keynesianism) has been shamed and blamed for all the ills we face today but any honest policy examination of the past 75 years or so tells a quite different story. Add to that Nixon’s politically motivated War on Drugs which put institutionalized racism on steroids.
we were literally sold a “bill of goods” from our media which, as soon as the Fairness Doctrine was repealed began to turn on them dirty fucking hippies and Black Panthers. What’s happening now with the Sanders campaign is the beginning of the re-legitimization of Keynesian New Deal economics as well as an awakening of the horrific effects on Society that the War on Drugs has wrought.
I am incredibly grateful for Bernie Sanders’ campaign. It really IS changing the conversation and that very much needed to happen. But also, as the 2010 midterm catastrophe showed us, the States need to see the light as well. And without allies in our media with strong enough voices, that change at the state level will be very slow in coming. The Kansas’ and Wisconsins and Louisiana’s will need to face a fiscal reality that will get very very ugly before mindsets will change.
FlipYrWhig
@D58826: Blue Doggery, more or less, was how the Democrats supplanted the Republicans as the party of the yuppie-ish white suburbs. Which is not what the state of play was when I was first becoming politically aware in a relatively well-to-do overwhelmingly white suburb in New Jersey in the 1980s.
Amir Khalid
Cui bono? This is bad news for Ted Ctuz so it must be good news for somebody else, but I can’t figure out who.
Applejinx
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Barney Frank likes banks. Stands to reason he wouldn’t get along with Bernie. I’m sure Bernie’s yelled at him about stuff in the past: Barney Frank is specifically likely to have Bernie mad at him, because he’s a very mixed bag and Bernie gets hung up on isolated problems rather than being a big-picture guy prepared to forgive lots of offenses in the interests of politics.
SFAW
@Applejinx:
I would, but I don’t think you’d understand it, because it doesn’t fit with the narrative you’ve constructed in your head.
The only joke here is you, child. Your persistent End-Times rhetoric — whether there’s a religious component is more-or-less immaterial — is a hallmark of your posting in this thread.
Oh, please. You’re being willfully ignorant, or perhaps unable to understand anything that is not stated in the starkest, most explicit terms. But as far as making stuff up: do I really need to remind you of your “Gore wanted to privatize SS” and “Bush and Gore were the same” fantasies — yet again?
Chris
@Jeffro:
What’s wonderful about this is how shamelessly they’ll backtrack as soon as there’s an issue on which they think the public is with them. Chris Christie saying that the Civil Rights Act should have been put to a popular vote in the relevant states rather than passed by Congress. The various people saying that it was wrong for the Supreme Court to settle gay marriage instead of letting the people decide. The constant appeals to public opinion polls (whether or not they actually showed what the GOP said) during the health care debates. Etc.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: Why do you think Bernie Sanders is softer than a lot of Democrats are on guns? Because it’s what he believes deep down is correct, or because he thinks tacking “right” on an issue here or there helps keep him a viable champion for an array of other issues? If you are capable of understanding this when it comes to Bernie Sanders, and I’ll go ahead and assume that you are, you may also be capable of understanding it when it comes to the thousands more elected officials who are, regrettably, not Bernie Sanders.
Xboxershorts
@D58826:
I think it’s pretty fair to say that the political process told both groups go fuck themselves, many times. Even though both groups have very legitimate gripes
Betty Cracker
@rikyrah: I suspect he’ll end up at Fox News. Their audience will think he’s pretty.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: That’s a nice way of saying that Bernie Sanders is a self-important dick who grates on everyone and wears it like a badge of honor because he thinks it signifies integrity.
Thoroughly Pizzled
@Applejinx: In the last eight years we’ve gotten the ACA and Dodd-Frank amongst other things, but like Bernie (sad to say), you focus almost entirely on pre-2008 stuff because acknowledging the Obama administration undercuts the rationale for revolution.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@FlipYrWhig:
Clearly, we need 435 Darcy Burners in the House and 100 Russ Feingolds in the Senate.
Betty Cracker
@Amir Khalid: Hilarious. But really, if Cruz has any sense, he won’t court establishment Republican endorsements in the current GOP political climate.
SFAW
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class:
Boy, it’s a good thing you type fast, you beat Applejinx by that much (said while holding up thumb and forefinger).
FlipYrWhig
@Xboxershorts: Well, right, but the unsexy “slow boring of hard boards” part of politics is also indispensable. I said before that it seems like a slog to me, too, so it’s not fair for me to fault anyone else for not doing what I also don’t do. But, still, it’s a shame.
OzarkHillbilly
????? Really, demonstrably false statements like that are why it is not even worth engaging in discussion with AJ.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@OzarkHillbilly: Yeah, there was that. But given history, it actually could have been worse in 2010. The economy was still in the toilet, so of course it energized people on the other side.
I would like to think that we’re learning the lesson that “off-year” elections matter too. We’ll know if that’s the case by how much we hear the word “Redistricting” in the 2018 and 2020 campaigns…
We’ll see.
Cheers,
Scott.
Applejinx
@SFAW:
Beg your pardon? Citing End Times rhetoric is SPECIFICALLY invoking a religious component, as part of saying the whole ‘warning message’ is flaky imaginary sky-daddy bullshit. It’s invoking the image of a person saying ‘the end times are nigh, as prophesized, and it’s all because you’re wicked! Repent!’ but their arguments are incoherent or selfish or hopelessly tied to their wacky religion.
Suppose I said, ‘economic desperation, stoked by the investor class, pressures communities to grab quick money from fracking and other types of extreme technological resource extraction, after which the money goes away again leaving the land looking like Barad-dur‘.
What does that have to do with God? Other than being a pretty good argument we’re on our own with that stuff ‘cos God’s apparently rooting for the cockroaches at this point, and who can blame him?
FlipYrWhig
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: Russ Feingold didn’t support ending the filibuster, and didn’t want the phaseout of the “Bush tax cuts” on upper incomes before the 2010 election. So I think Feingold is unclean too. I think you need 60 Paul Hacketts, you know, the guy whose rightful place was usurped by machine product and neoliberal sellout Sherrod Brown in 2006.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: I’ll refer you to the definition of “millenarian” I cited above.
SFAW
@OzarkHillbilly:
It’s just AJ’s “spaghetti” tactic/strategery — throw up enough crap against the wall, see if anything sticks.
FlipYrWhig
@OzarkHillbilly: Barney Frank loves banks, Al Gore wants to privatize Social Security, the things everyone knows.
Marc
@cleek: Clinton is also not being served well by her online fanatics. Graceless in primary victory to people she needs in the autumn only makes sense if feeling superior to others is the main goal.
What was revealing to me was when Cole linked a long form article on Libya from the NYTimes and a large group of regulars here spent their time either trashing Sanders, even though the piece had nothing to do with him, or refusing to read it because of the Times being biased. The right doesn’t have a monopoly on echo chambers.
FlipYrWhig
@SFAW: Remember when he said he didn’t realize Tulsi Gabbard was a vice chair of the DNC, even though the whole reason why Tulsi Gabbard was in the news at all was because she was a vice chair of the DNC? It’s not an argument strategy. It’s what he actually thinks.
FlipYrWhig
@Marc: Yes, far be it from Bernie Sanders supporters to feel superior to others.
Jeffro
@Chris: Seconded on all those examples and then some.
I’m sure someone’s already written it up someplace, but it would be interesting to see an article or even book that described what America would look like if it were operating the way a majority of its citizens wanted it to run. The disconnect between what most people want and what we’re getting is pretty amazing
Ex 1:http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/princeton-experts-say-us-no-longer-democracy
Ex 2:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QPKKQnijnsM
Linnaeus
@Xboxershorts:
I would also ascribe some role to the media in the dynamic that Skocpol describes, but there’s a lot more going on as well.
D58826
@Xboxershorts: Your right. And the establishment kicked the NAACP and the unions and the progressives in the early part of the 20th century but they kept organizing and working the system till they won. If BLM/ Occupy/etc just go off in the corner and sulk then they will become irrelevant.
Xboxershorts
@FlipYrWhig:
Did you miss the point? There are assholes in both camps.
Last I knew, being an asshole was optional.
SFAW
@Applejinx:
As the kids (used to) say: “Whatevs.”
Here’s a concept that is probably beyond your comprehension, but: terms in popular culture do not always get used in strict compliance with their original usage.
So DO try to keep up, instead of hanging your hat on the idea that saying/writing “End Times” does NOT NECESSARILY MEAN THAT ONE IS TALKING ABOUT A “LEFT BEHIND” SCENARIO.
But if it makes you happy, and if for no other reason than to keep you from you another “look over there!, No THERE!” comment, I’ll try to remember to type “end of the world.” I may even add “as we know it,” although you’ll probably ask me what REM has to do with fracking, Eurozone immigrants, fracking, etc.
OzarkHillbilly
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: I really do not understand the “off year elections and Dem voters” thing at all. It is just beyond my ken. Obviously 2020 is the big one and fortunately it will be a Presidential election too, but I have real doubts. Sooner or later the economy is going to go into a recession, and we all know how that affects voters. Add to it, if Hillary wins this year, it would mean voting for 16 years in a row of a Dem in the White House, and that is a really steep hill to climb.
Applejinx
@FlipYrWhig: He’s a Vermonter. Yes, he’s siding with the hunters.
Disappoints me, but eh. Vermont’s experience with guns is NOT representative of the rest of the country. Bernie is wrong on guns.
I think there’s also a realism component. I’m all for Hillary banning all guns, woot. Let her try. The end result will be that all the gun-toting rightwingers actively go to war against all the rest of us, because we may be in a position to move against the ultra-wealthy but we are not in a position to move against the guns.
Do you think you can just take them away? We both seem to have our areas of ‘purity pony’. I think it would be convenient that Bernie’s wrong on guns should he be the nominee, because that’s another sticking point that will drive R turnout, and it goes off the table if neither candidate is interested in gun control.
I know Bernie’s kinda concerned about gun control but it’s weak sauce by some standards. No extended magazines kind of stuff, assault weapons. Some people would go waaaaay further. I’d vote for waaay further, but it would not work. I don’t care, I’d vote that way anyway.
I do NOT see Clintonistas in turn offering to vote for way further on economic issues even though that won’t work either. Suddenly it’s all triangulation and pragmatism and only wanting to vote for stuff so long as it wins. It’s the win that’s important to some, it appears. On guns, I would happily vote for an extreme position that could never actually work and might even be counterproductive, because it expresses a message.
SFAW
@FlipYrWhig:
Fixed.
FlipYrWhig
@Xboxershorts: My experience is that the Bernie Sanders people in my “real life” are smug, repetitive, and insufferable, so I like to put on a cloak of anonymity and be an asshole to their likewise smug, repetitive, and insufferable friends. That doesn’t do me much credit, I realize, but it’s a _very_ fun way to vent–by proxy.
Mike in DC
@Baud:
It does tread close to a political catch-22. To get a big enough majority to do things you have to dilute the purity of the ideological product(so the argument goes), but to the extent that you do that, you put the ability to do things at risk due to the less pure office holders diverging from the consensus, or possibly worse, pulling the consensus too far away from the ideal to create good policy outcomes.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@FlipYrWhig:
Ah, yes. Col. Hackett.
I’d forgotten all about that flake.
OzarkHillbilly
@SFAW: Sticks and stones may break my bones but words I never read are like farts on the wind.
BillinGlendaleCA
@Applejinx:
Message != Change.
FlipYrWhig
@Applejinx: Pat Leahy isn’t soft on guns. He’s from Vermont too. And Clinton has an exceptionally progressive agenda on economics and social policy, which you ignore in favor of reheating anti-Bill Clinton crud from 20 years ago. Because Team Bernie is hung up on Clinton as a pawn of Wall Street, for which there is virtually no substance, it waves away literally everything she has proposed or discussed.
Linnaeus
@FlipYrWhig:
That’s generally not the Sanders people that I know. YMMV.
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@BillinGlendaleCA:
I’m grateful for Applejinx – he’s restored my faith in the never-ending ability of emoprogs to clap louder while chanting “I do believe in fairies, I do, I do!!”
Applejinx
@FlipYrWhig: Don’t worry about it, it’s only blog-sport. I think some of us even feel the same way about you! :)
The whole crowd of us might get along fine together in a room. I like to try and remember that, especially when I’m poking the hornet’s nest real hard.
I like it when about five posters pile on to tell everyone exactly how much I suck, and mustn’t be listened to, and I’m such a blight on the blog and doubtless anyone I meet… while, other people get to talk about the same issues I’ve raised in a more measured fashion, without getting slimed. It’s a bit like being a rodeo clown. There are many occasions when I could be more measured (say, about Barney Frank’s shenanigans which are way more complicated than ‘he likes banks’), but why should I even be measured when it would take time and effort and (a) get the same ad hominem plus (b) not be as fun for the opposition?
I’m not exactly cautious about revealing stuff that gets used against me. Why should I be? Why should I even be careful? I got nothing to lose anyway, no big platform, and I’ll damn well say what I please.
As should you <3
Linnaeus
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class:
I don’t believe Paul Hackett was a colonel. Are you thinking of Hackworth?
C.V. Danes
@cleek:
Go it alone then. See how far that gets you this election.
Applejinx
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class: I think you mean ‘balrogs’ ;)
FlipYrWhig
@Mike in DC: I think that’s a useful summation of why it’s hard for the Democrats to act with the discipline of a party. The Republicans have undertaken a real-world experiment in the effects of imposing a fairly ruthless sort of party discipline, and the sad fact is that it’s proven to be not all that costly. There just aren’t enough “anti-establishment” liberals to take over the Democratic Party, and that means it’s always going to be a balancing act between down-the-line liberals, moderates with liberal tendencies, and moderates-leaning-conservative who believe at all in the project of self-government. What Berniacs should do with their excess energy is reinvigorate municipal, local, and statewide politics on the D side, building a farm team that eventually makes it to the big leagues–like Bernie Sanders himself did.
FlipYrWhig
@Linnaeus: According to Wikipedia, Hackett was a “Marine Reserve major.”
FlipYrWhig
@Linnaeus: Lucky for you. My coworkers and colleagues are overwhelmingly pro-Bernie and tend to presume everyone else around them inclines that way too.
FlipYrWhig
@C.V. Danes: I think I saw a poll result recently that said ~ 80% of Democrats reported they’d be satisfied with a Clinton candidacy. Let’s keep this in perspective.
cleek
@Marc:
it’s true: those corporatist, sell-out, no-imagination, right-centrist, status-quo-loving, racist, Wall-St-captured DINOs really need to tone down their mean rhetoric.
cleek
@C.V. Danes:
Sanders isn’t asking for martyrs.
Chris
@FlipYrWhig:
The nation is fully polarized.
Unfortunately, as in the years leading up to the Civil War, the polarization isn’t between the Hard Right and the Hard Left. It’s between the Hard Right and Everybody Else.
Xboxershorts
@FlipYrWhig:
Speaking of Farm Team, your comment made me go back to some of the most egregious acts of The Rove:
Project Save Justice, the persecutions of Karl Rove
Karl Rove and the Bush Justice department terrorized and imprisoned the Democratic farm team in the early 2000’s. Nearly 800 state and local prosecutions, 87% were democrats.
NotMax
@SFAW
The suspicion began when Applejinx was touting for Sanders by crowing about what a wonderful governor he had been in Vermont (an office Bernie never won nor held).
Since, it has solidified into a firmer supposition that he/she/it is DougJ.
When see the nym now, I keep on scrolling.
FlipYrWhig
@Xboxershorts: Ah, I had lost track of that — wasn’t that one of Josh Marshall’s hobbyhorses back in the day?
Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class
@Linnaeus:
My recollection was that Hackett was half a colonel.
C.V. Danes
@FlipYrWhig: @cleek: I have said repeatedly to not forget who the real enemy is, and its not the ‘Berniebros’ or the ‘Clintonistas.’ It’s whatever clown that the Republicans put forward, which right now looks like Trump.
If you think the Democratic party would be better off jettisoning the Bernie crowd because they believe in ponies or whatever, then good luck with that. See you after Trump gets sworn in. But my suggestion is that we make peace and focus on the real danger.
Linnaeus
@Botsplainer, Cryptofascist Tool of the Oppressor Class:
Major, from what I’ve been able to find. So, almost.
different-church-lady
I’ve been saying it all along: hard-core “Bernie Bros”* (and to a certain extent, Bernie himself) are like Johnny Rotten, but without the irony: “We don’t understand it — all we’re trying to do is destroy everything!”
*(This is the first time I’ve used the slur, having scrupulously eschewed it in the past. I now feel it fits. Certainly it doesn’t describe all Sanders supporters, but it does describe the specific type I’m talking about in this comment.)
different-church-lady
@Amir Khalid:
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@OzarkHillbilly: Things change. FDR and Truman had a very good run – it can happen again.
I think it is a lot of things.
1) Voting is a hardship for too many people. Taking time off work or making a big change to their morning or evening routine. (Kids, public transit, etc.)
2) Too many races aren’t competitive. Vote for the new guy/gal you know nothing about or the GOP person who smiles nice, says a few nice things, and has been there for 25 years?
3) Too many races aren’t advertised in ways that people actually understand the substantive differences. Flag burning and Abortion on Demand!!11 Too many people don’t understand that in voting for someone for Congress, you’re really voting for the party leadership in the chamber. Do you want Nancy or do you want Ryan?
I believe I’ve read that the off-year falloff is substantially less or vanishes in vote-by-mail places. That says it’s genuine barriers (of various kinds) to voting rather than pathological issues with people of a certain age that’s the issue.
Cheers,
Scott.
different-church-lady
@Applejinx: Did you take a lot of acid in the hippie days, Miller?
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Applejinx:
Barney Frank was my Congressman for many many years, and that’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever seen said about him. Barney Frank did more to further a progressive agenda than Bernie Sanders ever will, and by all accounts IN SPITE of Saint Bernard.
You’ve got quite a script running in your head.
ellie
@Aimai: Thank you. Gore was for protecting Social Security.
Peale
@SFAW: I believe that neoliberal is a nonsense insult which seems to be a cover for I hate the idea of profit.
different-church-lady
@Baud: What, no interest in the VP slot?
gwangung
@C.V. Danes:
I might believe in jettisoning those elements who won’t work with others or work the machinery to get the change they want (or, at least after making a good effort to get them on board). Just having the same goals aren’t enough…
Marc
@cleek: yup, Sanders supporters can be annoying. Does that require running around with a chip on your shoulder? Is it somehow useful to use the same tactics that annoy you on people whose votes you need in a few months?
different-church-lady
@Thoroughly Pizzled:
That’s a sign that they don’t actually believe she’s corrupt and untrustworthy — they’re merely parroting tropes they’ve heard, shallowly and unthinkingly.
Peale
@Aimai: the “investing in the stock market” is Bs, too. The idea has been bandied about for awhile to turn SS into more of a pension and investment in equity would be part of that, as it should be if SSA was told to build a diversified portfolio. I didn’t favor it because I don’t trust members of Congress to refrain from putting pressure on a pension board to purchase shares to support favored businesses. Clinton liked the idea. But that’s not the same as privatization or even close.
different-church-lady
@cleek:
He doesn’t need to ask for them.
cleek
@C.V. Danes:
well, i don’t think that. so…
SFAW
@Peale:
Perhaps, but I always thought of it as growing out of the DLC, and their “ethos.” Based on that (perhaps incorrect) assumption, it seems more in line with calling a Dem a “centrist.”
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@cleek:
Me neither, and no one who comments here does either, but yet there always seems to be a whiff of “I’ll take my ball and go home if you keep pushing back against those of us who insist that Bernie is the most wonderful person who ever lived”.
cleek
@Marc:
it’s not a chip on my shoulder if there are actually people on this very thread (and every other thread where Sanders’ name comes up) acting as i described. it’s an observation.
votes i need ?
see, this is exactly the problem. i don’t need their votes. i’m not running for office. it’s not about me. the entire fucking country needs their vote because the alternative is President Trump. again, Sanders isn’t asking for martyrs. and if they want to withhold their votes because i wasn’t sufficiently deferential, then they’re not just hurting me; they’re hurting me, themselves, and the entire country. why would anyone even think about doing that?
(edit: changed pronouns)
Marc
@cleek: and I’ve never said that I wouldn’t do these things. You’ve projected a bunch of crap that I didn’t say and don’t believe onto me because I observed that taunting Sanders supporters is stupid and counterproductive.
Piss people off enough and they’ll do things against their interest. That’s the only outcome of keeping this stuff up now that the nomination is basically decided.
gwangung
@SFAW: @SFAW:
Hm…there seems to be a conflation here of tactics which actually won elections back then with policies that are being proposed and with policies that are actually popular now.
One, it’s fair to wonder if Clinton will pursue policies that are less progressive than what is optimal. It is not necessarily fair to assume that she will automatically do so. She and her husband were successful politicians back then, but to be successful politicians now, I think you’ll have to lean more left (and doing so is NOT a sin; a successful politician reads the mood of their electorate).
Two, not everyone has the exact same priorities. The classic example of fracking is quite revealing on this. There are key states where fracking is an important issue, just like policing the black community is an important issue for other key areas. I was against ignoring the black community on racial issues; I’m also against tossing over Dems who might have good reasons for being for fracking. That is one of the prices of being in a coalition; that is why focussing on “purity” or “more progressive” is actively harmful to the actual coalition we actually have for the Democratic party.
Raven Onthill
Morning notes:
1. Almost no-one wants to be poor; inequality is an issue that almost everyone can agree on.
2. But, hey, it’s a single issue.
3. Brutality towards African Americans enforces economic inequality, because that’s the only way to maintain that inequality: Jim Crow, redlining, sundown towns, none of them would have been possible without brutality.
4. But intersectionality is not widely understood. It’s a case that has to be made, and probably can’t be made during a single campaign.
Raven Onthill
sfaw@118: “We just don’t feel the need to screech at the top of our (figurative) lungs that ‘nothing will get fixed unless’ the political revolution that Bernie is allegedly leading actually succeeds.”
Can you see any way the big environmental and economic issues are going to get fixed without a dramatic political transformation?
Xboxershorts
@Peale:
There, fixed that for ya.
“The origin of the world’s dumbest idea”
Raven Onthill
@gwangung: “Not everyone has the exact same priorities.”
True. But who wants to be poor?
FlipYrWhig
@Peale: IMHO most people who say “neoliberal” think that they’ve created a mashup of “fake liberal”/”Democrat in Name Only” and “neocon,” rather than realizing that “neoliberal” is an actual term from the poli-sci context where “liberal” means “market-oriented”/”privatizing” and “neo” means “kinder, gentler.” So “neoliberal” isn’t exactly wrong for describing many contemporary Democrats, but most of the people who use it as a slur don’t realize what they’re saying.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Raven Onthill:
Sure, that’s easy.
1) Replace the troglodytes on the SCOTUS.
2) Keep the White House in Democratic hands and flip the Senate.
3) Make incremental progress in flipping the House and in the States.
It doesn’t take a “political
revolutiontransformation”. It takes sensible people on the SCOTUS and incremental progress elsewhere.My $0.02.
Cheers,
Scott.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Raven Onthill:
It’s more than that overt kind of racism though – it’s systemic from top to bottom. Poor whites keep what little privilege they have by being white, by denying those people ANYTHING, in exchange for voting for tax cuts for billionaires. Any overt brutality administered by racist authorities is the cherry on their shit sundae.
Raven Onthill
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet: Sounds like a political revolution to me.
And, many Democrats believe neo-liberal economics, despite its dismal failure for the overwhelming majority, and do not yet feel the bite of environmental disaster. The Democratic Party is now the conservative baseline. “Flip the court, flip the Senate, work on the House” is a good start, but it’s not going to be enough.
cleek
@Marc:
true. and when i realized that, i changed the pronoun from ‘you’ to ‘they’.
SFAW
@Raven Onthill:
There’s a somewhat large gap between “dramatic political transformation” and what AJ is screeching about.
And “dramatic” is nebulous and subjective. Does it mean 75 Dem senators and 300 Dem reps? Does it mean 61 D senators and 240 D reps? Does it mean Hillary (or Bernie) winning with 332 EV? 365 EV? 450-plus EV? Does it mean execution of all Rethuglican traitors?
So, yes, I can see all sorts of ways things can get fixed, with or without Bernie’s “revolution.”
Raven Onthill
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: I think it’s more that the overt brutality backs all the smaller abuses and, yes, “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.” attributed to LBJ
SFAW
@Raven Onthill:
DougJ, is that you?
Because now I know you’re just trolling. Sorry I didn’t catch on sooner.
J R in WV
@SFAW:
Applejinx is a Republican troll, with no real interest except in pushing additional false accusations of Clinton’s corrupt nature, with no specifics, just an over-reaching fog of dread. When anyone asks for specifics he changes the subject for one post, and then is back to the same old Clinton’s Evil! bull.
I’m done with ‘jinx – just another troll. Like srv or ReadytoRise, no difference.
Raven Onthill
@SFAW: oh, fergawsakes, you think the big banks are just going to roll over? You think ExxonMobile is just going to leave the oil in the ground? “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” Yet the first is necessary to address inequality and the second is necessary for the future of human civilization.
SFAW
@J R in WV:
Thanks for reminding me. I think I made the same observation a month or so ago. But, being an old fart, I tend to forget things that I write here on DKos.
Raven Onthill
@SFAW: no, not deliberately trolling, just frustrated and croaking loudly. And can you deny what I say is true? Even if it is possible, it is not going to be enough to get a Democratic majority in Congress and the Supreme Court. That is only a place to start. Even if we get there we have to keep going.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Raven Onthill:
Then it seems like job one for revolutionary change is to work at the racism thing. 60% of whites vote GOP every election, whether it hurts them or not. Over 80% of everyone else not white/white males votes Dem. We’re pretty tapped out, so the biggest pool of votes to draw from for majorities to change things are whites/white males. Poor whites in the south vote 90% GOP. Nothing will change unless whites work on each other to point out how racism works, because whites defensively hand wave away #BLM and other groups that try to point out how white America’s racist system works against them.
SFAW
@Raven Onthill:
You forgot to mention the Illuminati, Doug.
And the TriLateral Commission.
And the Rothschilds.
Miss Bianca
@AnonPhenom:
I can actually speak to this issue, as a rural Dem. The majority of our coalition opposes fracking, but there is a vocal and articulate minority in favor of it – or, at least, not opposed. Their argument is that CO’s economy has always been based on the extractive industries, there are a lot of jobs in the extractive industries still, that pay much better than other jobs in our economy, and that they are favor of strict rules and regulations imposed on the activity, rather than banning. Significantly, Gov. Hickenlooper has adopted this “anti-anti-fracking” stance. he is an ex-oil and gas guy, ’tis true…but the reality is that in the rural areas we are split between pro- and anti-fracking forces, and we have to be able to thread the needle. Personally, I’m agin it, but I feel a need to be respectful of opposing views – particularly since I’m interested in getting Dems actually elected here some day!
SFAW
@Raven Onthill:
Now you’re just being trite.
SFAW
@the Conster, la Citoyenne:
Which, of course, makes those 80-percenters the real racists.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
Why doesn’t the Democratic Party do that? Sometime in the next month I will get a call from whatever earnest 25 year old the Clinton campaign has hired to organize this county. That person will be from Kentucky, or Michigan, or Indiana (the last three) and 100% of the time will be a recent college graduate. They will take me to lunch at Wendy’s, which is next to my office, and they will ask who they should contact in the county for Clinton volunteers. I know this is what they will ask, so I will have names. They don’t have any particular interest in the people in this county but they do know enough to know they need local people. They will be genuinely curious! They will ask about local issues, what do people care about, etc.
Why don’t the Democrats hire a local person? Why do they send people who are recent college graduates to organize a county where 75% of the Democrats didn’t go to college? If they want the skinny about what Democrats who work at the tire plant think, HIRE ONE instead of hiring someone from outside the area who will spend 6 months asking local people what the Democrats who work at the tire plant think. It doesn’t have to be 25 year old college graduates. They can hire a retiree or a single mother or an ordinary working person who would supplement their income. That person would remain in this county after the traveling circus presidential campaign heads back to DC.
Dropping in to swing states every four years isn’t going to work. What’s worse, it starts to be perceived as cynical and manipulative- they only contact these people when they need them. Why should I provide the names? Why doesn’t the Democratic Party know these people? Some of them have been loyal Democrats and small donors for 30 years.
There shouldn’t be a single paid Clinton campaign staffer working to organize Detroit unless they live in Detroit and it should be diverse- recent college graduates AND a 35 year old who works at the Pizza Hut.
Raven Onthill
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: Yeah. Tough problem. White women, maybe, can make a difference. Hence Hillary Clinton, though I wish she was more liberal. But I don’t have an answer. It’s way easy for people with small privileges to spook when those privileges are threatened and bolt into the illusionary safety of privilege and punching down and the past 35 years have been threatening.
Raven Onthill
@SFAW: those are paranoid fantasies: CitiBank and ExxonMobile are real. I think you’re avoiding the issue. Yes, we want to win this election, though it is not entirely clear what winning would look like. But if we do that, we have to keep going.
SFAW
@Kay:
If DWS were to suddenly get fired, or have an attack of conscience (hey, are those pigs I see flying over there?), would you be willing to take the job?
I’m only half-joking — I wish someone in Party HQ would read your comment, and have an epiphany.
SFAW
@Raven Onthill:
Spare me the sanctimony, Doug.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@Raven Onthill:
White married women vote GOP, white single women vote Dem. There’s a certain privilege to being a white married woman that keeps you less vulnerable. Single women don’t enjoy that same privilege. White people who don’t vote in their economic self-interest aren’t being stupid or irrational, they’re voting their interest, it’s just not necessarily economic. And it hasn’t just happened in the last 35 years – there hasn’t been a white majority voting Dem since 1964/1965. I wonder what happened then? Oh, yeah. Civil Rights and Voting Rights Act.
Raven Onthill
@Kay: I wish they would, but that’s Sanders’s sort of organizing; the Democrats don’t do it any more.
I am thinking of a particular e-mail I got when I dropped a national Democratic Party mailing list which, prior to that, had been nothing but solicitations for money and advocacy for conservative Democratic positions. Suddenly they were interested in what I thought, far too late. The Democratic leadership only notices the rank-and-file when they threaten to bolt, sort of like the clueless husband that only notices his wife is unhappy when she threatens to leave. Isn’t that why Sanders is doing so well to begin with?
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@SFAW: Doug J must be spinning in his man-sized safe after reading so many of these accusations.
I don’t think any of the recent trolls (or those accused of being trolls) here are him. The snark isn’t there, it’s with post-punk David Broder.
YMMV.
Cheers,
Scott.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay:
I’m with you. This sounds like a great idea. I don’t know why it isn’t done. I assume because of what we were talking about before: volunteers with fire aspire to making it to DC rather than staying local because local isn’t glamorous or rewarding, so there’s a conveyor belt getting people fed into the system with an eye on the national level, not so much the local level. But what I really meant was that if Bernie Sanders supporters are eager to do this themselves, they totally could, couldn’t they? Because 99% of politics is just showing up. Start showing up and eventually you’ll be vice president of something.
If I were a rich donor I’d be pleased to support a program of party-building for Democrats at the lower levels. Smart people are underemployed and need work: create a bunch of permanent jobs in local-level politics and organizing. Millions of dollars in TV ads aren’t going to build anything permanent. Millions of dollars in something else might.
SFAW
@Raven Onthill:
And Citi and ExxonMobil (not Mobile, get it right, will you?) are short-term issues, at most. If you were serious about this whole transformationy/revolutiony thing, you’d be spending a lot more time worrying about US industrial policy, and about China.
You do that, and get off your Citi/Exxon hobby horse, you might be taken more seriously.
J R in WV
@Applejinx:
You are as “essentially a socialist keynsian demand-side economics guy” as Lush Rimbaugh is!
You are a joke masquerading as a Republican office-holder.
You are a Republican troll seeking to eliminate the best Democratic candidate to clear the way for whichever loon wins the loony contests the Republicans have running this year.
Please stop doing that here, there are about 9,987 other places you can go and do that without getting in our way here.
FlipYrWhig
@Raven Onthill:
Not really, because his biggest problem is that the “rank and file” like his principal opponent better. Bernie Sanders’s voters _aren’t_ the rank and file of the Democratic Party. They’re newcomers and outsiders. Kind of the whole ethos, innit?
Raven Onthill
@the Conster, la Citoyenne: “they’re voting their interest, it’s just not necessarily economic.”
True. Their perceived interest, though; we are feeling the long-term consequences of that error in perception. But now they seek scapegoats, and the Republicans are only too happy to provide them.
Marx was wrong. To judge from recent history, not even starvation will compel people “to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and [their] relations with [their] kind.”
Anyhow, I’d better step away from the keyboard. I’m getting even more cranky than usual.
SFAW
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Oh, I know. The “Is that you, DougJ” is just a BJ-specific version of “Thanks, Obama.”
Kay
@Raven Onthill:
It just occurred to me in ’12. The best local volunteer was a single mother. Okay, she’s the same age as the recent college graduate they sent from Michigan, she’s working for 20 hours a week as a volunteer while the paid organizer works 50, she lives here, goes to county meetings, works at the largest employer- one of those two people is the expert on this county and it isn’t the Obama organizer, yet he gets paid and is the boss and she doesn’t and isn’t.
Why should I give them her name? I like her! I know her and her son. My son goes to the same school hers does. I think she should be the boss! Obviously. If they want “college” (although I don’t know why they would) they could HIRE from the community college. The position would be filled in 3 days. Then they wouldn’t need local people to tell them where it is.
C.V. Danes
@Kay: Exactly. Better yet, keep the ground game alive for the off season elections. No reason the local dog catcher shouldn’t be elected as a Dem too, and I’m being 100% serious when I say that.
the Conster, la Citoyenne
@FlipYrWhig:
Sanders hasn’t organized anything, as far as I can tell – he hasn’t even organized a voting bloc among his colleagues. It sounds like his career has been about being a purity pain in the ass and more of a gadfly than a change agent. He’s the Ted Cruz of the left. He caught a bit of a wave, and I think it’s surprising even him, but it doesn’t feel like much thought went into developing any kind of long game.
The Lodger
@Mustang Bobby: Or George! (Well, it’s too late for George. )
Or Ringo!
FlipYrWhig
@Kay: Do you think it’s because resumes come pouring in to the national campaign office, rather than to anyone local? Seems a bit like an HR problem. I feel like working for the local Democratic Party would be a pretty solid job. Does the Republican Party do that?
Kay
@C.V. Danes:
The way to keep the ground game alive is to engage them in something and it can’t just be “work”. People are social. They need some reason to get together.
This will provoke howls of outrage among the Clinton folks, and maybe it’s unfair because obviously Sanders hasn’t done any local organizing either, but when the Clinton supporters say “I’m with her” the Sanders supporters say back “he’s with us”. That’s a PROFOUNDLY different message. That’s the problem for the Democratic Party in a nutshell and it has been true for years so it isn’t about “Hillary Clinton v Bernie Sanders”. It’s about who does what for whom and paying too many PR people and marketers and not enough ordinary people. They don’t have to ask focus groups what people think. They could hire those people.
Raven Onthill
(Peering around while stepping down from my perch.)
@Kay: I believe you are describing class prejudice and sexism (and perhaps racism as well — is she black?) No answer, except to observe that these things are like water, and pervade our society and its politics. Now if Sanders could reach out to those people … he’d have something.
(really am going to leave now. supposedly I have work to do.)
FlipYrWhig
@Kay:
It may be a profoundly different message, but it’s marred by the fact that Sanders isn’t with anyone and doesn’t represent anybody. Sanders has done a good job of making people feel an us-ness, I suppose, but it’s SUCH a personality-driven campaign: rumpled honest Bernie who’s mouthy and pissed off. He didn’t start with what people said they were concerned about, he said the same thing that he’s said for 50 years, which is that the political system sucks and money ruins everything, and he uses that as an all-purpose answer to all political issues. Police brutality, Flint, health care, it’s all the same underlying problem, and the answer to them all is to decry corruption and claim that empowering the people will make Bernie-like views manifest themselves as the majority opinions they’d truly be if not for The Establishment. That’s like the inverse of “he’s with us,” IMHO, predicated upon an already-existing but latent Bernie-like “us.”
les
@Raven Onthill:
That seems to be broadly accepted here. The question is how it happens–with an organized party that includes folks with differing views and priorities, but that therefor precludes fast transformation, or a Great Man revolution, without broad organized support? Personally, I’ve never seen the latter work. The Republicans showed us a play book for trashing the country that works; I think the rebuild will have to work the same way, and I fear dems aren’t in for the slog. It seems obvious Bernie isn’t.
SFAW
@Raven Onthill:
Doubtful. More likely it’s the arrogance (or whatever) endemic to members of large organizations of persons who believe themselves “experts.”
SFAW
@les:
Why would they start now?
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
That may have been true in 1982 but with online job ads it isn’t true anymore. If they have resumes pouring in to a central location in DC and they are hiring people in 10 swing states then they have an incredibly archaic HR approach. Why would they do that? They could cast a much wider net and the organizer would live here. They don’t even have to do any of the housing bullshit for a job that lasts 9 months. Why am I housing a young woman from suburban Philadelphia who is horribly homesick when there are 50 they could hire here? They could even do teams. Give one job to 3 local community college students. It’s 60 hours a week. They each do 20.
They would end up with institutional, experiential understanding of these places after a couple of cycles, and build relationships with people. That’s hugely valuable. They can tap it for governors races or statehouses or campaigns to back federal legislation.
They’re essentially using a cheap labor approach- bring in the kind of people they’re comfortable with in DC – young, bright, earnest college grads- and treat them as temps- nothing they learn is cumulative. They start at zero every 4 years.
FlipYrWhig
@les: I think Bernie thinks it isn’t really a slog, because there’s an untapped reservoir of ignored liberals aching for someone to talk to them, so then they rise up and, voila. The People realize their power to make demands and The Establishment cowers before their mighty strength.
FlipYrWhig
@Kay:
That’s what I was trying to get at. I’m sure that this is exactly what happens. What kinds of paying jobs do the Democrats — or any major party, for that matter — have when there’s not an election just around the corner? I honestly don’t know the answer to that. You probably do.
Miss Bianca
@Kay:
I’m gonna be on the central committee of our local Democratic Party, and I’m going to be going to the state delegate convention. I think I’ll float this idea past the party apparatchiks I meet and find out what they think, where the money is for hiring organizers locally, and whether that money could go to a local person.
Kay
@FlipYrWhig:
It isn’t a paying job year round. They pay the presidential organizers about 32 k plus health insurance for say, 8 or 9 months. It’s a bad job, under any normal analysis, right? I’m not saying they have to hire permanent employees. If I were hiring one in this county for ’16 I would hire the retired electrician who canvasses every election and is on the local labor council. Pay him 32k for 9 months instead of asking me what his name is and whether he would be willing to tell the 25 year old how to do his job. They have to broaden how they think. Move on from Jack Kennedy and young intellectuals stuffing envelopes. I know Chris Matthews loves that but let it go :)
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
@Kay:
I don’t know the reason, but I can think of a few possibilities:
1) People who might be interested in working for the party on a campaign have no contacts with the local people. They don’t know how to get started.
2) Local party people don’t know who might be interested in volunteering, and might be leery of giving responsibility to some unknown Joe/Jane off the street. (Look at how MOM crashed and burned with his signatures to get on the Ohio ballot.)
3) Around here, the local party is pretty big but their on-line presence doesn’t scream for active participation – the Volunteer link points to MYNGP. They do good work, but they seem more of a social club. That’s not surprising because people struggling to survive generally don’t have time for activities like that. Maybe that’s the case elsewhere as well.
4) Lots of places want volunteers but can’t or won’t pay for that work. Or someone has to volunteer before they are considered for a paying position. Lots of enthusiastic people can’t work for free.
Getting a combination of someone who is willing and able to bend their schedule and offer their local expertise and willing or able to work for little no money must be very challenging. A national clearinghouse may be able to do that better than a local office.
I’m sure the DNC people would love nothing better than to have local experts breaking down the doors to work for them in Ohio and elsewhere. I don’t think it’s intended to be top-down, but has ended up that way.
But, as I said, I dunno.
Cheers,
Scott.
Kay
@Miss Bianca:
Thanks.
I can’t believe Kasich has managed to convince political media that his coming in 2nd in Michigan is a “win” but he has.
Do these people not know what “win” means? First Rubio, now Kasich.
Kasichmentum is not a good thing.
Kay
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
I don’t think it would be. Unfortunately “the new economy” leaves a lot of people patching together work.
Miss Bianca
@Kay:
I always really appreciate your ideas and comments, Kay. Always a lot to think about. If I ever become one of the apparatchiks myself, i’ll see if I can scrape up the funds to pay you to be one of my advisors. ; )
And BOOOO to Kasich-mentum.
C.V. Danes
@Kay: Exactly.
goblue72
Jesus H Christ. If the damn journalists can’t even bother to practice internal logical consistency within a single article they wrote, how the heck can their readership be expected to?
Either its possible for an ideological wing to take over the center of its party like the hard right did in the GOP or its not. There is nothing magical about the Democratic coalition that precludes the left from taking it over like the rightwing did for the GOP. You don’t get to have it both ways.
les
@FlipYrWhig:
Yeah, that’s how it looks to me, too. I have yet to have a Bernie supporter tell me how he/they get a Senate or House candidate on the ballot in KS for them to vote for. Assuming they can be bothered with little shit like, ya know, voting.
No One You Know
@Baud: It’s not too early to work on your book.
SFAW
@J R in WV:
Earlier today, I replied to your comment, and said something (in #241) about how I thought I had come to a similar conclusion about AJ. At some point afterward, I realized that it was “Thoughtful Today” about whom I had come to the “Repub troll” conclusion, not AJ.
Although I have to admit that I do not follow things closely enough to determine if AJ is just a new incarnation of TT.
Not a big deal either way, just wanted to correct my mis-statement.