Not sure what the estimated crowd is yet, but many saying they're disappointed by the turnout to see @BernieSanders. pic.twitter.com/XOfMRyTtY3
— Greg Neumann (@gneumann_wkow) April 3, 2016
Sen. Sanders has taken the podium at the Kohl Center. Crowd count is 4,400.
— UW-Madison Police (@UWMadisonPolice) April 4, 2016
Because I’m in a bitchy mood tonight. Yes, Bernie Sanders will win Madison in the Wisconsin primaries on Tuesday, and quite possibly he’ll win Wisconsin as a whole, albeit by a proportional percentage. But the only thing Our Failed Media Overlords love more than a winner is a “horse race”, and I’m thinking Sen. Sanders may be the next horse they choose to whip.
Just for funzies, I googled ‘Bernie fatigue’ and this was one of the first entries. Ezra Klein, at Vox, in late February:
… Some of the most important decisions the president makes are about how to run the processes that translate vision into policy. Those decisions include whom to hire, which advisers to listen to, which ideas make sense, which strategies are likely to work. The presidency is one damn decision like that after another. Obama, famously, is so exhausted by the decision fatigue of the job that he wears the same color suit every day so he has one less thing to decide in the morning.
This is one way in which campaigns give us insight into presidencies. Presidential candidates also have to decide whom to hire, which advisers to listen to, which ideas are truly good ones, which strategies are likely to work. To make those decisions well, they need a sound philosophy, yes, but they also need to want to hear good advice, they need to want advisers who will tell them when they’re wrong, they need to have good instincts for when something they want to believe is true simply isn’t, and they need to be realistic about the strategies that are likely to work and the ones that aren’t.
My worry about Sanders, watching him in this campaign, is that he isn’t very interested in learning the weak points in his ideas, that he hasn’t surrounded himself with people who police the limits between what they wish were true and what the best evidence says is true, that he doesn’t seek out counterarguments to his instincts, that he’s attracted to strategies that align with his hopes for American politics rather than what we know about American politics. And these tendencies, if they persist, can turn good values into bad policies and an inspiring candidate into a bad president…
Going to be interesting to see how Bernie’s results this Tuesday are spun by the mainstream media!
Tonight is the first time in a while that I've felt truly sorry for Bernie. What a poorly organized event. https://t.co/zpgNBPk21d
— AlGiordano (@AlGiordano) April 4, 2016
(Quick video clip from Mr. Giordano here. If you can’t afford to subscribe to his newsletter, his twitter feed is an education!)
BlueDWarrior
It’s one of the things that did concern me about Bernie’s campaign, though it wasn’t a first-order concern. I wonder if this is people outside of the rabble-rousers on the internet getting aggravated by the moderately negative tone of the campaign overall in the last two weeks, or just bad scheduling meaning most of his supporters can’t physically get to all of these events.
jl
It’s all minor piffle compared to the difference between the Democrats and the GOP.
An ideal candidate would be the wonky detail oriented policy planning of Clinton with the inspirational tone and vision of Sanders. But Bernally Clinters is not running.
Mnemosyne
@jl:
So a third term of Barack Obama? ;-)
Man, I’m going to miss the guy.
BlueDWarrior
@jl: That is the platonic ideal for a current-day Democratic candidate, and I would argue that Obama hit enough of those points early enough to where he could galvanize the level of support he did running against Clinton back when. He managed to marry inspirational rhetoric to some semblance of concrete policy well enough to where people could overlook the fact he only had a national profile for all of four years running against a two-term Senator and a First Lady who had a national profile for 20+ years (at the time).
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Obama beat Clinton by 18 pts in Wisconsin.
Chuck Todd says Sanders is outspending Clinton 6 to 1 in WI.
If Sanders can’t equal the benchmark set by the skinny black guy with a funny moooslim name while wildly outspending her then….
BlueDWarrior
@David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch: If the polling is accurate, Sanders will be lucky to win by 7+, and he can’t start eating into her lead unless he gets 15+ pt wins.
It’s almost as if he can sense the clock running out so he’s starting to press the issue, and you press in the wrong way, and what might have been a 12 pt loss in NY could turn into a 18 pt loss.
Amir Khalid
In the end, soaring rhetoric on the stump is just theatre. I try to listen past that when I listen to a politician. If you asked me to choose between inspiring and able, I’d pick able every single time. I guess I’d be one of those Hillaristas in the Washington Post story Anne Laurie linked in that earlier post.
David ?Canadian Anchor Baby? Koch
Judging from what I’ve seen the talking heads say they plan to focus on Trump’s defeat.
Cable news channels are freak shows – and there is no bigger freak than the wig wearing orange face buffoon. He’s their Kardashians (though I have to admit Kendal Jenner is really pretty – photo)
TheMightyTrowel
I’m going to use my blog-given right to go OT in this open thread. I’m having a shitty day largely due to my (crazy) head of school. Last wed I got an email from her asking me to meet for some “gratuitous mentoring/advice” with no further clarification offered. After 4 days of stress about that, we finally had the meeting in which she simultaneously accused me of being not sufficiently committed to supporting other women and living up to feminist ideals of sisterhood and also abrasive aggressive and a potential bully who puts herself forward too much and speaks too officiously and with too much bombast.
She wouldn’t tell me which or how many ‘senior women in our college’ had asked her nor would she give me any specific situations or examples of bad behaviour. She implied that I was edging into bullying junior women, but the only example she gave was an email report from a committee to a dude more senior than me and which I co-wrote.
My immediate supervisor (a dude. but also a feminist. a former squat-living crusty punk activist) was appalled and told me essentially that he hadn’t heard anything like this, that he was shocked she would speak to me like that and that he had my back.
I’m equal parts pissed and deeply confused. My head of school is the most committed feminist I have ever met, I can’t imagine why she thinks ‘dial down your feminism because ambitious women are abrasive’ is a good way to start a meeting with a junior woman.
John Revolta
Einstein wore the same grey pullover sweater all the time because, as he put it, “the fewer buttons and decisions the better’.
agorabum
Yes, but something something revolution!
Sanders actually did an excellent job at his original goal of discussing some issues that might have been otherwise lost. But the foot soldiers have gone so anti-Hillary without any push back from the top that it is a bit crazy.
Amir Khalid
@agorabum:
You have to wonder whether Bernie
(a) is oblivious to some of his supporters’ personal hatred of Hillary
(b) is helpless to rein it in
(c) approves of it to whatever degree
Elizabelle
Good morning all. Happy Monday to us.
Loved the haikus in last night’s Rooting for Injuries thread. Treat yourself and skim for the haikus. Lot of clever peeps here.
Betty Cracker
@TheMightyTrowel: That sounds really fucked up. The lack of specifics is completely unfair. How are you supposed to address alleged deficiencies without examples of where you supposedly went astray / failed to embody feminist ideals?
magurakurin
Whatever. The race was over on March 15. And that will be the final verdict by July when the autopsy is finished.
Secretary Clinton needs to get this done in November. I am confident she can and will. Anyone who wants to help will be welcome. Anyone who doesn’t want to help, well, everyone has to do what they think is best.
OzarkHillbilly
@TheMightyTrowel: Sucks to be you. Thank Dog I was a carpenter. We’d argue, we’d fight, then we went to work.
OzarkHillbilly
Happy Treasonous Racist Overlord Heritage Month everyone!
TheMightyTrowel
@Betty Cracker: truth. Nothing that homemade cider can’t fix though.
SuperHrefna
It says a lot about this year that I really wish Gaius Baltar was running….
qwerty42
@Mnemosyne: … Man, I’m going to miss the guy.
So say we all.
bystander
MSNBC Capehart was giggling and pointing at Clinton for calling Sanders a carpetbagger. He is. He is not a Democrat. He has no ideas that are even remotely going to be translated into law. His record in the Senate shows exactly that. The Bernistas are as obdurate as the trumpensteins when it comes to talking reason or facts. The good news is that they seem to be differentiated by having exactly opposite values.
maryQ
@Amir Khalid: I don’t understand why anyone is giving him the benefit of the doubt that he has any goal other than preventing Clinton, or any establishment Democrat, from being President. His goal seems to be to disrupt the Democratic Party. He conveniently uses the party as his vehicle.
debbie
@jl:
At last! A worthy VP for the Baud! 2016 capaign!
maryQ
@bystander: I don’t think “exactly opposite” is right. Maybe different marginal tax rates, different free stuff, and some of the out groups to be penalized are non-overlapping. But both want a strong man, yes, man, with little regard for process, telling them that they are not going to be pushed around by “those people” anymore.
Iowa Old Lady
@TheMightyTrowel: What a pain. I’m glad your supervisor has your back but this is hard to live and work with.
maryQ
When Sanders launches his Independent candidacy some time in June, and a yuge enough margin of his supporters shock all of the well-wisher Overton-window makes-her-a-better-candidate crowd by cheering loudly for the death of the Corporatist Democrat Party, I’ll take next to no comfort in having been right about him.
TylerF
Just had a conversation at a party with someone who had just made her first political contribution ever and was really excited. She’s a stay at home new mom. The fifty bucks isn’t going to kill them, but it also is not going to help Sanders win. It’s BS that he is not being honest with his voters and donors about that.
He knows he has lost and yet he still asks small donors for money. That is ahh . . . what’s the difference between him and Ben Carson at this point?
Miss Bianca
@TheMightyTrowel:
Possibly dead thread but I just wanted to extend you all my sympathy. I’ve been there and it sucks. I just had to leave a job last year because my (male) supervisor was completely in thrall to a couple of women who latched onto power they didn’t actually possess and used it to persecute and sabotage other women employees they just flat-out didn’t like. I sometimes find it hard to reconcile my deep commitment to feminism and the potential sisterhood of all women with the behavior of actual, real women in the workplace – and I’m sure some of the ones I say that about wouldn’t hesitate to say it about me.
different-church-lady
@Amir Khalid: He is playing the flip side of what the GOP did with Palin. To use a cliche, it’s like the force: Bernie’s the light side, Palin was the dark side, but it’s the same thing.
But this is reality, not Star Wars. Bringing all that passion to bear is a good thing, but it can’t just all be passion. By its very nature passion is a thing that runs its course.
different-church-lady
@maryQ:
Not going to happen. He’s not an idiot and he’s not an asshole.
Luther M. Siler
Also, these things have deadlines. Deadlines that have passed.
There will be no independent candidacies, on either side. Stop talking about them.
coin operated
@different-church-lady:
LOLWUT? With you on the first point…totally lost me on the second.
different-church-lady
@coin operated: Only an asshole would do an independent run knowing it would scuttle the chances of someone he mostly agreed with, while virtually ensuring someone who is 180 degrees opposed to everything he wants for the country wins.
coin operated
@different-church-lady: Only an asshole would hijack a party he’s NEVER been a part of. Until he states in unambiguous language that he’ll support Hillary in the general, I see him as a 3rd party threat. Man’s got an ego just fractionally smaller than Trump…
maryQ
@different-church-lady: I hope he is not enough of an idiot or enough of an asshole to do it, but there is ample evidence of his idiocy and assholery.
Tripod
I don’t believe he’s ever given much thought to his political branding & labeling outside of the personal, and I don’t know that it would matter anyway…..
He’s caught what’s left of the Jacksonian\Bryant Democrats, and by temperament and ideology is wholly unsuited to lead them.
Matt McIrvin
@Luther M. Siler:
In most of the states there’s still some time left to get on the ballot as an independent, if they start collecting signatures now. Texas is probably a lost cause, but Bernie Sanders wouldn’t do well in Texas anyway.
I’ve seen zero indication that Sanders wants to do that, though. He’s repeatedly indicated he’ll support the party nominee, in much more vehement terms than, for instance, Donald Trump ever expressed.
Matt McIrvin
…Also, Sanders clearly is still trying to win the Democratic nomination and shows every sign of staying in until the convention. That makes it nearly impossible for him to get ballot access as an independent unless he’s secretly plotting it behind the scenes already.
Southern Beale
I don’t know anything about presidentin’ but I have had serious issues with how Bernie plans to translate his lofty vision into actual policy from the get-go. And it’s a major reason I just can’t support him. It’s one thing to rail against Citizens United, quite another to claim your Supreme Court nominee will repeal it on day one. I also have some serious issues with his universal healthcare plan and how that will be implemented and paid for. I’m tired of people telling me Bernie’s higher tax rate for me and my family — $16,000 a year more, according to one calculation — will be offset by my savings in health insurance premiums, when I like most people don’t pay out of pocket for that anyway. It’s an earned benefit. So how do I realize that savings? Are they assuming we’re all going to get a raise?
Bernie increasingly looks like an empty suit to me. He talks but he’s got nothing to back his talk up, and he’s a lot like Trump in that regard.
Jade
The Bernie supporting are equally turned off by the Clintonistas. #NeverHillary is real. She can’t win without the Sanders supporters. Your hate filled screeds are driving more of them to #NeverHillary. You won’t beleive it until it happens and then it will be too late.
Good luck with that strategy.
Jade
@Amir Khalid: Bernie cannot control the Hillary Hatred. Most of us hated her before we even knew Bernie was running. Her unfavorables are huuuge so it is not a fringe feeling.
Barbara
@TheMightyTrowel: I’m sorry. It’s scary how embedded anti-feminist views are in our society, such that even feminists bear them out when they judge other women. Something similar happened to me early in my career, when I was assigned to a supervisor who had been the first woman to do this, and the first woman to do that, and whose goal in life seemed to be to make sure that she would remain the only woman to ever do it as well, by actively undermining other women. It wasn’t just my experience — one of my other mentors (male) told me that this was her M.O. with every woman he had ever assigned to her, but that she always seemed to have glowing praise for the men who worked for her. You can’t even call these people out. Literally, they will deny it because they are so overtly vested in the movement they just can’t see their own actions as having been compromised by the hated other side.
Jade
@magurakurin: Hillary’s post mortem will be: “done in by overconfidence, overtly stacking in the deck with insiders and lobbyists, insufferable to the very people I needed to win. Hopefully she won’t keep running each cycle. We will live through President Trump.
Jade
@coin operated: Funny how no one complained all the years he was part of the Democratic Caucus helping to pass important legislation. I can’t wait to see your salty tears of defeat in November.
Ella in New Mexico
@Mnemosyne:
Feeling grateful for and appreciating Obama and his classiness and his intelligence and the fact that I can have total confidence that there is a grown-up in charge of my country is where I go whenever I simply can’t read one more ugly food-fight between the Clinton and Sanders supporters here.
it’s my place of peace. :-)
different-church-lady
@Jade: So, we can count you into the “scorched earth” camp, I take it?
Jade
@different-church-lady: @different-church-lady: Yes, I was a #NeverHillary the first time she ran. A lot of people who I know would have voted for her in November if she was the nominee. However, the social media conduct of her supporters and the DNC (knowing you need the Bernie people to win, are posts like these helpful, or do you just need to vent even if it means defeat) has driven potential supporters to #NeverHillary.
nutella
@Jade:
Hey, Susan Sarandon comments here!
Susan will live through President Trump since she’s stinking rich. The rest of us maybe not.
different-church-lady
@Jade: Yeah, well have fun with your hobby. But we’ve seen this film before.
elftx
What happened Saturday in NV is hopefully a wake up call that many Bernistas are no different than Papa Paul’s players were on his attempted run. It was pretty disgusting especially after seeing that idiot camp herself on the floor expecting all to join in on We Shall Overcome knowing full well she was in the wrong.
Matt McIrvin
@Ella in New Mexico:
Before there was Bernie vs. Hillary, there were Friedersdorf’s dealbreakers and Matt Stoller saying progressives should support a Romney win because drones, and before that there were PUMAs. Obama’s a great politician but the only reason he’s not square in the middle of this is term limits.
kc
Why should we follow Giordano when you post all of his tweets here?
chopper
@TheMightyTrowel:
that is mighty confusing. my first thought would be that someone is gunning for your job and putting negative rumors and complaints out there to help make it happen.
chopper
@Jade:
get help.
nastybrutishntall
@Jade: Nach Trump, Uns! Prepare to Feel the Burning of the Constitution, immigrant bodies, and crosses on lawns just to prove we’re pure!
goblue72
@maryQ: Fuck you with your “free stuff” and “Sanders supporters are authoritarians” bullshit.
THIS kind of crap is why a sizable number of people loathe Clinton and her supporters.
Tegdirb
@Jade: Consider growing up.
Elie
Bernie is 74 years old. He is tired. His true believers, alas, will need to accept the fact that he is not the Messiah. Just a human being who is old and undertaking a grueling campaign for which he probably had no idea would be this intense. We are not even through the primary season and Jade thinks he is going to have the energy it would take to mount a true insurgency — a third party bid against the Democrats? Speaking about insanity. He would ruin his life and probably be completely worn out at the end of a process that will heap contempt on him and his family, the likes of which you cannot imagine. Nope, there are NOT enough true insurrectionists in his supporters to be happy to see Trump or Cruz win.
I truly hope that this is not how Bernie wants to end his career. He has many other positive things to offer, but if he goes the Nader route, he will fare horribly, as will our country. I personally would consider him a traitor the likes of which would compete with Jefferson Davis — you know, of the Confederacy….
Jade
@Elie: Jade does not think he is going to run third party. He has said he wont and he is honest not a pathologic liar like HRC. I never ever said he’d run 3rd party.
smintheus
So first you quote this assessment directed against Sanders
and then you quote … Al Giordano … sneering at how he “felt truly sorry for Bernie” over a moderately under-attended event. Because you’re turning to Giordano as, what, a voice who would challenge your natural tendency to see everything about Sanders’ campaign in the negative?! Giordano, who has never said a positive word about Sanders, now pretending to feel saddened for him. Yikes.
Elie
@Jade:
I misinterpreted the #NeverHillary to mean that you actually supported “never Hillary”. and then the “We will live through President Trump. ”
Nevermind…. Your bitterness is not positive and helpful… that you would be so flippant about “living through Trump” is quite a sad statement for you.
different-church-lady
@smintheus: Yes, it is more than a bit trolly.
Nerull
Neverhillary hate isn’t helpful, but there is plenty of vindictive hate to go around. Hillary supporters hate Bernie supporters, and Bernie supporters hate Hillary supporters. 30% of Bernie supporters say they wouldn’t vote for Hillary. This proves Bernie supporters all hate women. Before the 2008 election, 50% of Hillary supporters said they would never vote for Obama. This proves Hillary supporters are racist. Blah, blah, blah.
Everyone is gleefully searching for reasons to hate each other. That is fucked up. People like to blame ‘the system’ for why elections are so screwed up in this country, but those people will happily shiv people they agree with on 99% of issues because they prefer the wrong candidate. I don’t give a fuck who anyone supports, but if you’re one of the people salivating over the next thing you get to blow out of proportion to attack other progressives with, you need fucking help.
Betsy
@TheMightyTrowel: She sounds like a head case. You already know she’s manipulative, passive-aggressive, and ready to use vagueness to make you work against yourself. Don’t fall for it! Dot your i’s and cross your t’s — and no appeasement, or the bully will go at you doubly. Chances are good she’s a coward at heart and will move on from you to an easier victim. (Tough for whoever that person is and unfair, but you can only handle yourself.)