There was a time in 2004 that if one were not totally in the tank for Howard Dean, one was a Republican shill. I remember writing some complementary things about Wesley Clark on a liberal forum and was promptly screamed off of it for selling out.

And don’t get me started on 2008. Supporting Barack Obama cost me some friendships I never got back.

And now social media seems entirely taken up with Clinton and Sanders supporters hurling juvenile insults at each other. Just from a social-psychological standpoint, it fascinates me that Hillary supporters are utterly unconscious that they are just as bad as the so-called “Bernie bros.” They seem to feel entitled to stoop to whatever kindergarten-level insult they want about Sanders and his supporters while patting themselves on the back for being mature and un-divisive. The Sanders people also indulge in cheap insults, but most of them (that I’ve seen) seem a tad more self-aware about it. Both sides are equally bad at over-simplifying issues, mindlessly repeating second-hand talking points and painting everything in black-and-white terms. There’s lots of political naïveté out there.

One actual difference that is emerging is that Clintonistas see themselves as pragmatic incrementalists, while Sanders supporters are calling for revolution. As I wrote earlier this week, there is a strong argument to be made for the incremental approach — call it half a loaf is better than none. On the other hand, a Sanders supporter recently commented that HRC is promising half a loaf, which means maybe we’ll get a couple of slices.

Sanders is calling for two loaves, and Clinton people doubt he can deliver even the two slices. On the other hand, maybe the time has come to stop accommodating our expectations to the power of the Right. Maybe the time has come to demand two loaves, because the Right ain’t what it used to be. Maybe now is the time to think big, while the Right is in chaos.

Just analyzing myself, I realized eight years ago that one of the reasons I supported Barack Obama over Hillary Clinton, in spite of the fact that their stands on issues were nearly identical, is that I resented the hell out of being told, over and over, from 2004 on that Hillary Clinton would be the 2008 nominee. No one else need apply.

Dear DNC: Don’t tell me who I’m supposed to support. In a democracy, I’m supposed to be allowed to make up my own mind. Thanks much.

And then, of course, Obama ran a very smart campaign, while Clinton did not. This rather put the lie to the claim that she was the only one who was “electable.”

Per Charles Blow, Clinton is repeating many of the mistakes she made in 2008. Not being able to learn from mistakes is not a good sign. See also Corey Robin on the basic dishonesty of Clinton’s current campaign.

On the other hand, without some backup from Congress Sanders possibly couldn’t deliver the two slices. And he seems weak on policy details, while Clinton is a super-wonk.

So there really is a serious debate to be had here about which of these two should be the nominee. It’s a shame we can’t seem to have it.

My sense of things is that this election is going to break some old molds. Already Nate Silver has been found to be out of his element. This would argue that we’re about to see a major shake-up in the political system.  We’ll know more once we see some primary results, I think.

I’ve been trying to wrap my head around the DNC voter database flap, and finally I found somebody who appears to understand what happened.

Basically, the DNC uses a creaky old voter database setup with firewalls between campaign staffs. Because of a glitch on the part of the database company, at least one Sanders staffer suddenly had access to Clinton data. He was supposed to immediately report this but did not. This was stupid on his part, because user activity on the database is monitored. Instead, it appears at least one staffer tried to access lists of donors. He or they  would not have been able to download these lists, according to the source linked above, but they would have been able to view valuable “topline” information. So, the Sanders staffer(s) behaved badly. The person deemed responsible for the bad behavior has been fired. There is no indication Bernie Sanders himself was involved.

There’s a broad consensus that actual damage to the Clinton campaign from this mishap was minimal. Would have been minimal, anyway, except other people behaved badly.

In a normal world, the DNC would have quietly gone to both campaigns, investigated the incident, and perhaps request that responsible parties be fired. However, this is not a normal world. In a massive display of bad judgment, and in a bare-assed attempt to put her thumb on the scale for Hillary Clinton, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz went public with this incident and made it a big bleeping deal.

Temporarily cutting off the Sanders campaign from the database was not an unreasonable thing to do while the glitch was being investigated and the firewall patched up. But DWS made it seem the DNC was punishing the Sanders campaign. And then the Sanders campaign felt compelled to threaten a lawsuit to get their access back (which has been restored). Maybe that was grandstanding; maybe the Sandernistas feared DWS was going to keep them locked out long enough to seriously shut down their funding drives.

The Clinton campaign has accused the Sanders campaign of theft, when IMO HRC and her people would have been better off stepping aside and letting Sanders and the DNC duke it out, especially since the beef all along is that the DNC is entirely in the tank for HRC.  This is at Vox:

The back-and-forth here is emblematic of a larger struggle between Sanders and the DNC, which has persisted since the beginning of the primary. The DNC has pretty openly lined up behind Hillary Clinton, pushing for her to cruise to victory without splitting the field, as happened in 2008. The Sanders campaign sees the severity of this punishment as driven by the DNC’s broader bias against their candidate.

Charles Pierce:

Let us stipulate a few things. First, the DNC, under the barely perceptible leadership of Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has greased the skids for Hillary Rodham Clinton. (A debate on the Saturday night before Christmas, when half the country’s on an airplane going to visit the other half? Please.) Second, yes, it’s true, if the situation were reversed, and it was the Clinton campaign that had breached the Sanders campaign’s data, The New York Times would be screaming bloody murder and talking about a “culture” of slicker, and where’s there’s smoke etc. etc. Third, it’s true that, if I wanted to throw the Democratic primary campaign into a little chaos to distract attention from the fact that Tuesday night’s Republican debate more closely resembled a casting call by Roger DeBris, this is exactly the kind of story I would want to have out there. And, last, it’s true that, if I wanted to distract from the fact that Sanders on Thursday was endorsed by the Communication Workers of America, and by Democracy For America, this also would be exactly the kind of story I would want out there. So, all your paranoid speculations are as well-founded as paranoid speculations can be.

 Josh Marshall believes this is going to hurt HRC and the Democratic Party more than it’s going to hurt Sanders.

Let’s be clear on one point: It may not look like it. But the DNC/Clinton campaign actually needs the Sanders Camp much more than the Sanders Camp needs them.

Here’s why.

The overwhelming likelihood is that Hillary Clinton will be the Democratic nominee. That means that 3 or 4 or 6 months from now her campaign and the DNC will need to unify the party. Whatever the data folks at the Sanders campaign did, by suspending their access the DNC will quite likely give a lot of Sanders supporters the idea that if they’d only had access to their data, Sanders might have won. At a minimum, many will be convinced that the game was rigged all along: that the DNC was operating as an arm of the Clinton campaign.

Now, Clinton is the candidate with overwhelming party establishment buy-in. We all know that the DNC and its apparatus is more friendly and inclined toward her campaign. But there is a world of difference before passive support or hopes for her victory and actively tipping the scales in her favor. If Sanders supporters get the idea the DNC and its chair are doing the latter, it introduces a toxic chemical into the bloodstream of the party. That could cause big, big problems down the line for Clinton and for the entire Democratic ticket.

Now, if that’s not depressing enough, read Andrew O’Hehir:

We have been told once again, for the 443rd time, that sooner or later all the leathery, old, white Republicans will wither away and Democrats will inherit the earth. Sounds good in theory, but I have two questions: What Democrats? And what earth? …

…Hillary Clinton is a symptom of a party that has lost its ideological moorings and more recently been eaten away from below by political termites. She is not the disease itself, and the Hillary vs. Bernie cage match, with its frequently unappetizing gender politics, is not the main event. This week’s report from the Center for American Progress, with its claim that the nation’s shifting demographics overwhelmingly favor the Democrats in 2016 and beyond, was hardly breaking news (least of all to Republican donors and strategists). One of the authors of that study, Ruy Teixeira, co-wrote the book “The Emerging Democratic Majority” — published in 2002. At least he doesn’t give up easily. But this time around, the report contains or conceals a grievous epistemological error: It assumes a bipolar universe of Democrats and Republicans, the traditional realm of traditional politics. And in this year of Trump and Sanders and generalized political madness, that universe is imploding around us….

…The demographic changes envisioned in that CAP report will take many decades to play out, and if you want to insist that the Democratic glass is half-full, you can see the Sanders 2016 campaign as the beginning of a badly needed internal process of reform or revolution. But all confident predictions of an endless future of Democratic hegemony involve a failure to observe the most obvious facts in American politics: Party identification is dropping to all-time lows, and outside the unique demographic leverage of a presidential election, voting is doing likewise. …

… The Democratic Armageddon of 2014 revealed a party with no fight, no strategy, no ideas and no soul. Its elected officials and Washington apparatchiks whined and wailed, blamed their own voters for accurately perceiving that they were clueless and defeated, and then capitulated and crawled away. That party still hopes to be rescued by the demographic advantage it has been promised for 25 years and counting. But it has done nothing to earn or deserve that advantage, has no idea what to do with it and, absent major change, will be sure to squander it if it ever gets here.

I can’t say he’s wrong.

We have no television here in the temple, and I’m not going to sit up watching a live stream. The Guardian usually has the best live blogging of these things. Feel free to add comments about anything.

Apparently over the weekend certain Powers That Be decided that Bernie Sanders needed to be taken down. Sanders has benefited from being mostly ignored by the GOP, which has focused its guns on Hillary Clinton. But in the past couple of days several rightie spokesmouths have spread disinformation on Bernie, and soon the MSM will follow suit (see Steve M).

The Wall Street Journal ran a screaming headline saying Price Tag of Bernie Sanders’s Proposals: $18 Trillion: Democratic presidential candidate’s agenda would greatly expand government. The wingnut war cry “Tax and Spend!” is ringing in my ears already.

The ever-sensible Paul Waldman debunks this by pointing out that he’s proposing things we are already paying for. Sanders wants to change how we are paying for them.  “We shouldn’t treat his proposals as though they’re going to cost us $18 trillion on top of what we’re already paying,” Waldman says. Further,

And there’s another problem with that scary $18 trillion figure, which is what the Journal says is the 10-year cost of Sanders’ ideas: fully $15 trillion of it comes not from an analysis of anything Sanders has proposed, but from the fact that Sanders has said he’d like to see a single-payer health insurance system, and there’s a single-payer plan in Congress that has been estimated to cost $15 trillion. Sanders hasn’t actually released any health care plan, so we have no idea what his might cost.

But this takes me to a long-standing gripe of mine. Whenever anyone talks about government subsidized health care, people get hysterical because they see their taxes going through the roof. What they don’t consider is that just about any taxpayer-supported national health care system would result in more money staying in their pockets, even if they are paying more in taxes. That’s because they wouldn’t be shelling out their own money to pay for medical care and health insurance. And a national not-for-profit system could save us all a ton of money through economies of scale.

The system we have now is wasteful, bloated and inefficient. We’re spending tons more money than people in other countries and getting less care for it.

See also “U.S. Healthcare Ranked Dead Last Compared to 10 Other Countries.”

Young folks complain about paying for Medicare, but they don’t consider that without Medicare they’d be stuck paying off their parents’ medical debts, which often will run into six figures.

And then there’s college. We’re choking off our future as a nation, IMO, by allowing a college education to be so prohibitively expensive. Sanders wants to make it free, which I support, but even making it reasonable will do. Let’s at least go back to the time in which people could put themselves through college with a part-time job. Which was as recently as 1979, according to this article, which is worth reading. (I would have guessed more like 1969, but I haven’t crunched numbers.)

People who don’t have children to put through college, or who aren’t interested in college, might balk at helping others pay for it. But it’s good for the country in the long run to encourage people to get as much education as they are capable of learning. A nation of under-educated yahoos will not remain economically competitive forever.

Back to health care. Waldman:

So let’s say that Bernie Sanders became president and passed a single-payer health care system of some sort. And let’s say that it did indeed cost $15 trillion over 10 years. Would that be $15 trillion in new money we’d be spending? No, it would be money that we’re already spending on health care, but now it would go through government. If I told you I could cut your health insurance premiums by $1,000 and increase your taxes by $1,000, you wouldn’t have lost $1,000. You’d be in the same place you are now.

By the logic of the scary $18 trillion number, you could take a candidate who has proposed nothing on health care, and say, “So-and-so proposes spending $42 trillion on health care!” It would be accurate, but not particularly informative.

And, again, with economies of scale, and reducing the profit-taking, we really ought to be able to get more medical bang for the buck than we have been these past many years. The ACA helped, but it was just a tweak compared to what’s really needed.

There’s something else to keep in mind: every single-payer system in the world, and there are many of them of varying flavors, is cheaper than the American health care system. Every single one. So whatever you might say about Sanders’ advocacy for a single-payer system, you can’t say it represents some kind of profligate, free-spending idea that would cost us all terrible amounts of money.

Put another way, most of the time when people talk about health care reform they are just talking about moving the bills around. You can pay for it through taxes, or through insurance, or out of your own pocket, but you’re still paying for it. The cost doesn’t go away unless you tackle the systemic reasons why there’s so much cost. The ACA partly does that; no Republican proposal ever does.

Meanwhile, Jeb! is promising more voodoo economics. Krugman:

The Jeb! tax plan confirms, if anyone had doubts, that the takeover of the Republican Party by charlatans and cranks is complete. This is what the supposedly thoughtful, wonkish candidate of the establishment can come up with? And notice that the ludicrous claim that most of the revenue effects of huge tax cuts would be offset by higher growth comes from economists who, like Jeb!, are very much establishment figures – but who evidently find that the partisan requirement that they support voodoo outweighs any fear of damage to their professional reputations.

See also the view from nowhere in the Washington Post: Jeb Bush’s new tax plan could cost $3.4 trillion over next decade.

I’ve been thinking about the Democratic presidential candidates and how it is we ended up with such a weak field. My impression is that in the past few years Dem party elites and the bigger contributors simply assumed it was Hillary Clinton’s turn, and that she was the strongest candidate who could take the White House. So few other Dems thought about running.

And now that assumption is not looking so good. Although she’s still a clear front runner, polls show support for her is falling. And the constant drumbeats about the email issue, even though I’ve yet to see a credible allegation she did anything illegal, could be hurting her. Some people on the Dem side are griping she’s not handling the email thing well. There are headlines about her campaign imploding.

I don’t think her campaign has imploded yet, but what if it did? This is what happens when you put all your eggs in one basket, Dems.

Joe Biden may jump in, and while he wouldn’t be my first choice, I think he’s a better campaigner and debater than people remember. Especially compared to whatever loony tune the Republicans eventually shove into the nomination, IMO Biden might strike most voters as a safe alternative.

However, given the realities of modern presidential campaigns, if Biden jumped in now he’d be millions of dollars and many months behind the rest of the field. That’s another argument for campaign finance reform, IMO. The current system forces everyone to commit too early, unable to switch gears if the one and only candidate stumbles.

As much as I love Bernie Sanders, asking America to vote for a “socialist” Jew for President is still too much of a gamble, IMO. I wish things were otherwise. Although in a sane world, considering the Republican field, the Dems ought to be able to elect a pastrami sandwich in 2016. Also, Martin O’Malley doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, although that could change once there are debates.

But, ultimately, if the Dems blow the 2016 election it’s going to be the fault of party leaders who didn’t encourage some healthy competition in the nomination process.

For another perspective on why the Dems can’t get their act together, see Charles Pierce.

I dimly remember, some eight or ten or so years ago, some progressive activists wanted LGTB activists to back off and wait for the “right time” to push their issues. We had the Iraq War and George W. Bush to focus on, after all. We don’t want to hand the Right more wedge issues. And the LGTB community said, bleep that, there’s no time but this one, and went on pushing.

And they were right.

We seem to be having a similar discussion today about how far to push the progressive agenda. The cautious side can be found in this Politico article about how Bernie Sanders is giving the Dem establishment the vapors:

“I applaud the people of Greece for saying ‘no’ to more austerity for the poor, the children, the sick and the elderly,” Sanders said in welcoming Sunday’s vote, even as it rattled world markets and provoked predictions of economic doom. The statement didn’t just align Sanders with left-wing Europeans; it aligned him with lefter-wing Greek socialists who are too radical for some of those left-wing Europeans.

Democratic primaries have always featured liberal insurgent candidates, but perhaps none quite so liberal or insurgent as the socialist senator from Vermont. Sanders’ comments are a reminder of just how far the second-place Democratic presidential candidate stands from the American mainstream on some issues, and the looming reckoning Democrats face with their party’s leftward drift. …

… It’s usually Democrats who play this game — as they did with Republican challengers to Mitt Romney in 2012, or with fringe characters like Todd Aiken. Now, it’s Republicans seeking to use the Sanders surge to portray Democrats as radical and out of touch.

And that’s making many Democrats nervous, said Joe Trippi, who ran Vermonter Howard Dean’s campaign in 2004.

“We can’t lose the presidency. We can’t take a risk by nominating somebody outside the comfort zone. That’s what’s driving the inevitable-ness” of Clinton, said Trippi, speaking about the party establishment’s thinking.

It’s not for nothing that Charles Pierce calls Politico “Tiger Beat on the Potomac.” (For those who don’t remember, Tiger Beat is a teen “fan” magazine about entertainment and fashion marketed to adolescent girls.)

Anyhoo, that’s the establishment thinking: We can’t take risks now. We have to stay in the comfort zone, or risk losing the election. Hillary Clinton is a known product; she is marketable.

So along comes Bernie Sanders, and no question Bernie has some obstacles. His age, his Jewishness, and his embrace of the word “socialist” are all huge factors against him in the general election. If he wins the nomination, could he win the White House? And I honestly don’t know. In some ways it does seem unlikely. But it’s not as if HRC doesn’t have negatives of her own, some self-inflicted.

And doesn’t this amount to letting the Right choose our candidates for us? We’re choosing the candidate we think we can slip past the Noise Machine, not the one we really want?

And going back to Tiger Beat — First, a whole lot of people, including some world-renowned economists (Krugman, Piketty, Stiglitz) agree that punishing the Greeks further with austerity measures serves no purpose whatsoever. Second, by many measures Sanders is the mainstream candidate; his stands on many issues align with the American majority. See Juan Cole, “How Mainstream Is Bernie Sanders?”

Sanders’s positions are quite mainstream from the point of view of the stances of the American public in general. Of course, the 1%, for whom and by whom most mainstream media report, are appalled and would like to depict him as an outlier.

Sanders is scathing on the increasing wealth gap, whereby the rich have scooped up most of the increase in our national wealth in the past twenty years. The average wage of the average worker in real terms is only a little better than in 1970; the poor are actually poorer; but the wealth of the top earners has increased several times over.

Some 63% of Americans agree that the current distribution of wealth is unfair. And in a Gallup poll done earlier this month, a majority, 52%, think that government taxation on the rich should be used to reduce the wealth gap. This percentage is historically high, having been only 45% in 1998. But there seems to be a shift going on, because Gallup got the 52% proportion in answer to the question on taxing the rich both in April and again in May of this year.

Bernie Sanders’ position is that of a majority of Americans in the most recent polling!

My question to Joe Trippi et al. is, when do we get to stop finessing the right by settling for the most “marketable” candidate, who may or may not fight for what we want? When do we get to articulate what we actually want?

Elizabeth Warren caught fire with progressives not because she had “new ideas,” but because she spoke out loud what we already were thinking. She beautifully articulated the progressive position, in a way that signaled she really got it. It wasn’t just words and talking points. And Bernie Sanders is doing the same thing now. But we’re being told we have to kick him to the curb because the Right is really, really scary.

And I say, bleep that. Let’s trust the process. Let’s let the candidates step forward and make a case for themselves. Let there be debates. Let’s allow the American people to get a good look at all the candidates, including Martin O’Malley, who might still move up if he could get some media attention. Let’s let the American people hear what they have to say.

And then, let’s see what happens. Isn’t that how it’s supposed to work? What happens if America hears the progressive message directly from progressives? They might like it. Imagine!

I say we push for the policies we want and support candidates who pledge to work for those policies, and stop settling for the “safe” candidate. It’s likely Clinton will get the nomination anyway, but maybe the Sanders challenge will give her a clue that she has to actually deliver for progressives and not just make speeches at them.

So HRC announced her candidacy today, as expected. We’ll see how it goes. Here is the video she released as her announcement:

It’s okay. Do I buy it? Um …

Nice analysis by Bill Curry.

On Friday, Clinton’s campaign let slip its aim to raise $2.5 billion; maybe that’s not the best way to say hello to a struggling middle class. Someone gabbed about the message of Hillary’s planned sit downs with average families, a sure fire way to make the families look and feel like props — and to make the whole, hollow exercise look and feel like a hollow exercise.

There are three problems that go far deeper than Hillary’s image or her campaign’s operations. Each is endemic to our current politics; all are so deeply connected as to be inseparable. You already know them. The first is how they raise their money. The second is how they craft their message. The third pertains to policy.

To get the money they think they need candidates who crook the knee to moneyed interests. They spend vast sums on polls, focus groups and data mining to find out what messages to send and to whom, and vaster sums to send them. The need to serve their donors keeps them from solving real problems. With so little to show for their service, they must rely even more on paid propaganda. The emptier their ads, the more of them they need.

Curry goes on to say that this works great for Republicans, most of whom want to maintain the status quo and are happy to be lied to.  But here Curry really nails it about Dems —

The opposite is true for Democrats. When they truckle to the status quo, they break sacred vows. Their base feels most betrayed , but everyone notices and no one likes what they see. Convinced by their consultants that politics is all about metaphors and emotion, they treat issues as landmines and do everything possible to avoid stepping on one. They skip real debates to pursue what Obama consigliere David Axelrod calls ‘the politics of biography.’ Trading real reform for public policy vaporware, they lose all sense of purpose — and eventually stop making sense.

Yeah, pretty much.

Barring a Jeremiah Wright-level crisis, a presidential candidate gets just two or three chances to make her case to a big audience. Her announcement is often her best shot. That Hillary passed on hers is unsettling. If she thinks she doesn’t have to make her case real soon she’s wrong. If she thinks she can get by on the sort of mush Democratic consultants push on clients she’s finished. On Thursday the Q poll released three surveys. In two states, she now trails Rand Paul. In all three a plurality or majority said she is ‘not honest or trustworthy.’ You can bet the leak about her $2.5 billion campaign will push those negatives up a notch.  …

… If she raises all that money it will ruin her. Fundraising nearly ruined her husband in 1996. He didn’t need all the money he raised then and God knows she doesn’t need all the money she wants to raise now. Even if raising the money doesn’t land her in hot water, if she spends it the way most Democrats do, that will ruin her.

Interesting. Thoughts?