Category Archives: Democratic Party

What’s Happening Now

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Charles Pierce reports on a RICO suit filed against Michigan governor Rick Snyder. The suit takes Snyder at his word that he is “running Michigan like a business” and accuses him of racketeering in Flint. In particular, the suit says, he committed fraud by charging the people for the contaminated water they were receiving, representing it as safe to drink.

Ted Cruz, who criticized Donald Trump by saying he has “New York values,” is so not welcome in New York.

Bernie Sanders has been invited to speak at the Vatican. “The April 15th event, which will be hosted by the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences, is scheduled to cover a number of the Democratic presidential hopeful’s signature campaign issues, including income inequality and the environment.”

Note that the New York primary is April 19. He is scheduled to debate Hillary Clinton on April 14 — he’ll have to get on the red eye right after, I bet. There’s a big rally in Washington Square April 13. He’s a busy guy.

Speaking of which, there’s a Sanders rally near me today, and I plan to take a bus there and try to get in. I’ll let you know if anything fun happens.

Clinton’s Resume Vs. Reality

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The New York Times reports that Hillary Clinton is campaigning in upstate New York, a region that helped her win the Senate in 2000.

Hillary Clinton’s political ascent can be traced to the time in 1999 when she expressed her support for dairy farmers in the upstate New York village of Endicott. And the summer that year when she shunned Martha’s Vineyard to vacation in Skaneateles, and promised voters in the depleted industrial city of Schenectady that as a New York senator she would revive the upstate economy.

The strategy helped Mrs. Clinton win her 2000 Senate race by double digits, a victory fueled by the unlikely support of white working-class voters in upstate New York who had previously voted Republican but were won over by the first lady’s attention to their underserved area.

But there’s a problem.

Now, 16 years later, Mrs. Clinton is again promising to bring jobs back to the region as she courts the people who helped secure her first election victory….

…But Mrs. Clinton’s critics say that she failed to deliver on the centerpiece of her 2000 push — a promise to bring 200,000 jobs to New York — and many cities upstate have higher unemployment than when she became a senator. The number of private-sector jobs in upstate New York remained virtually stagnant in the eight years Mrs. Clinton served in the Senate, according to state Department of Labor statistics.

Fool me once, shame on you, etc.

To combat Mr. Sanders’s message, Mrs. Clinton and a lineup of influential New York surrogates, including Senator Kirsten E. Gillibrand and Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, plan to take voters down a memory lane of proposals, from the quirky to the conventional, that she advanced to spur the upstate economy.

And, you know, she really can list a number of jobs initiatives she brought to the region.  And when you see all these initiatives on a piece of paper, it looks pretty impressive. But her initiatives amount to tweaks when the region needed an overhaul. And Hillary doesn’t do overhauls. She tweaks. Instead of rebuilding broken systems, she works within the limitations of the broken system. Which is why she fights and fights and fights and doesn’t deliver all that much.

Robert Hockett, a professor of law at Cornell who specializes in financial regulation and is supporting Mr. Sanders, said his anti-trade message would resonate as it has in other economically ravaged areas.

“Upstate New York is the classic Rust Belt on the one hand and the classic working-poor rural population on the other hand,” Mr. Hockett said. “The things Bernie wants to do are things this population generally agrees with.”

Christopher Ryan, president of the Communications Workers of America Local 1123, which represents Verizon and American Red Cross workers in Syracuse, said that he backed Mrs. Clinton in 2000 but that the area had been eviscerated by jobs moving overseas. He plans to vote for Mr. Sanders, whom the union has endorsed.

“You see the weeds growing through the parking lots at factories,” he said.

Bottom line, all of Clinton’s heartfelt little tweaks that created a few jobs here and there couldn’t override the damage done by trade deals.  She’s repudiating trade deals, you say? She loved ’em when she wasn’t running for office. And if you think she won’t push for more trade deals once she’s POTUS, you aren’t paying attention.

Is the Hillary Victory Fund a Fraud?

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UPDATED: Please read this more recent post on the Hillary Victory Fund, which I believe clarifies the issues quite a bit.

 

Awhile back I wrote about Hillary Clinton’s fundraising apparatus, the Hillary Victory Fund, that is (allegedly) raising money for down-ticket candidates. She is frequently lauded for this altruistic effort, in news and social media, and last week Rachel Maddow asked Bernie Sanders when he might start fundraising like that, too. However, as I wrote earlier, there is something profoundly, um, fishy about the whole “Victory Fund” apparatus.

Some background, from what I wrote in February:

Executive Summary:  In brief, here’s how it works: The Hillary Victory Fund is a joint fundraising committee for Hillary for America, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic committees of 32 states and Puerto Rico. It was set up in such a way that the Clinton campaign and DNC could ask wealthy backers to give the $356,100 maximum annual contribution twice: once in 2015 and again this year.

The money passes through the state party organizations, which do benefit, but the Clinton campaign gets “kickbacks” that she can use as direct campaign contributions without the strings usually attacked to large contributions. And the DNC, which was in debt late last year, has received nearly $2 million of those dollars so far. This explains why Debbie Wasserman Schultz created a debate schedule that effectively denied national exposure to Clinton challengers.

Now some other folks finally are asking question, too. And it turns out that the money allegedly going to those timeserving down-ticket candidates may be going somewhere else entirely.

Mike the Mad Biologist does a good job of pulling information together. This is from a Washington Post article from February that I missed, somehow.

… the states have yet to see a financial windfall. Meanwhile, Clinton’s campaign has been a major beneficiary, getting an infusion of low-dollar contributions through the committee at a time when rival Bernie Sanders’s army of small donors is helping him close in on her financially. The fund is run by Clinton campaign staff, and its treasurer is Clinton’s chief operating officer.

Do tell.

The early, expansive use of a jumbo-size joint fundraising committee shows how the Clinton campaign has worked to maximize donations from wealthy supporters, seizing on rules loosened by the Supreme Court.

Many states were wary of joining the effort, worried that such a partnership would be perceived as an endorsement of Clinton and might interfere with their efforts to raise money from home state donors. But campaign officials — including Marlon Marshall, Clinton’s director of state campaigns — emphasized that this was a way to strengthen the party at its roots, a message Clinton echoed in the speech she delivered at the Minneapolis meeting to DNC members.

Makes you wonder how many of those superdelegates were bought.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” said Lawrence Noble, a former general counsel of the Federal Election Commission (FEC) who is now with the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center. “Joint victory funds are not intended to be separate operating committees that just support a single candidate. But they appear to be turning the traditional notion of a joint committee into a Hillary fundraising committee.”

Of the $6.4 million the Hillary Victory Fund spent on operating costs last year, two-thirds went to two Washington, D.C.-area vendors that also work for the Clinton campaign: Bully Pulpit Interactive, which received $1.9 million for online ads, and Chapman Cubine Adams +Hussey, which was paid $2.4 million for direct mail solicitations, Federal Election Commission records show.

The victory fund also sponsors Clinton’s online store, allowing donors who have already given the maximum to her campaign to purchase Hillary lapel pins, caps or car magnets, with their money benefiting the party. It’s similar to the way President Obama’s online shop was run in his 2012 reelection.Aides to Sanders, whose joint fundraising committee with the DNC has not yet been active, said the Hillary Victory Fund appears to be functioning as an arm of Clinton’s campaign.

Meanwhile, on social media, today I ran into a nest of Bernie supporters who wanted to tell the world about Hillary Clinton’s old Travelgate scandal from 1993. What can one say, but argh.

Now Margot Kidder (that Margot Kidder? I think yes) writes in Counterpunch that some screwy things are going on with the money at state level.

The Alaska Democratic party, in its end of the year filing with the FEC, said it raised $43,500 from the Hillary Victory Fund with 10,000.00 dollar donations from Clinton friends and billionaires, including hedge fund manage S Donald Sussman, and Hyatt Hotel heir JB Pritzker. ( two of the several $10,000  donors to the Montana State Democratic Party) . But in the same report it said it transferred the same amount of money, $43,500 back to the DNC – .  a technically legal move that effectively obliterates federal limits on donations to the national committee.

“It just becomes a way to funnel more to the DNC to support the Clinton Campaign”, said Paul S. Ryan, deputy executive director of the Campaign Legal Centre, which advocates for campaign finance reform. “It’s effectively Hillary Clinton’s team soliciting Hillary Clinton’s supporters for much bigger checks than they can give to the campaign.”

The same thing happened with the Maine State Democratic Party with many of the same billionaire donors. Maine attracted many of Clinton’s biggest donors. But the contributions didn’t stay in Maine either, or in any of the other state democratic parties to which Hillary Victory Fund donations have been funneled.  In October and November two transfers totaling 39,000 from the Hillary Victory Fund to the Maine Democratic party sat for less than 48 hours before the same amounts were transferred to the DNC in Washington.

What the bleep is going on? Kidder goes on to say that Barack Obama had a similar deal gong on in 2008, but only after he had secured the nomination. Making these arrangements before the nomination makes it a very different thing —

The Democratic spokespeople for the17 states that refused to go along with the Clinton campaign’s plan, even though many of them were as broke as the Montana State Democratic Party was  (Nebraska springs to mind), were clear that it seemed less than democratic to be choosing sides in a primary that hadn’t happened yet.  That the very purpose of a primary was to let the people choose which candidate they wanted to represent them and to not let the party establishment load the dice in their own favour. They made it obvious that they were choosing democracy over kick-backs.

“A joint fundraising committee linking Hillary Clinton to the national Democratic Party and 33 state parties is routing money through those state parties and back into the coffers of the Clinton campaign and all its PACS and Funds … It is a highly unusual arraignment if only because presidential candidates do not normally enter into fundraising agreements with their party’s committees until after they actually win the nomination. And second, Clinton’s fundraising committee is the first since the Supreme Court’s 2014 McCutcheon v FEC decision eliminated aggregate contribution limits and congress increased party contribution limits in the 2014 omnibus budget bill” said Paul Blumenthal, a writer for The Huffington Post.

A loud article in the NYT in March proclaiming that elected officials in 22 states would not support Bernie Sanders conveniently left out that those 22 states had signed agreements with the Hillary Clinton campaign and the Hillary Victory Fund.

This stinks out loud, and is worse than I had imagined. Kidder’s piece is quite good and deserves to be read all the way though, btw. It ends with a list of the states involved in the Victory Fund. The superdelegates of those states may require scrutiny.

Clark County Brawl

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Yesterday I saw some headlines from dubious sources exclaiming that Sanders had won the Nevada caucus (formerly won by Clinton) because of a “recount.” I couldn’t find anything about this from standard media sources, so I shrugged it off.

However, some kind of shit went down in Nevada yesterday that probably needs attention paid to it.

After encountering a Clinton supporter outraged about Sanders “stealing” Nevada, I thought I’d look into What Actually Happened. Here’s what I’ve got so far:

According to this article, the Nevada Democratic Party has a three-part system for choosing delegates to the national convention. This is not the first year they’d used this three-part process.

The first step is the caucus, which happened in February.  Clinton won the caucus with 52.7 percent of the vote.  This gave Clinton 20 delegates and Sanders 15 delegates. This has not changed, nor has that vote been challenged as far as I know.

What happened yesterday was the second step, county conventions. The counties hold conventions to choose delegates to the state convention, which will be held in May. The state convention allocates 20 more delegates. From the Nevada state website:

On caucus day, Nevadans in each precinct elect delegates to their respective county conventions, but the winner of the caucuses will be the candidate who accrues the most delegates.

Any caucus participant may stand for election as a delegate to the county convention.   Anyone who wants to be elected a national delegate must participate in the precinct caucuses, and each subsequent event –county convention on April 2, 2016, and the state convention on May 14 and 15, 2016.

So, caucus participants are supposed to show up at the count convention to be considered for the national convention. But if they fail to show up, alternates may be chosen. Kathy Gill explains,

Both campaigns had fewer delegates and alternates show up for the event than were elected in February. But Clinton had a greater drop-off than Sanders.

Delegates pledge to attend the next meeting; otherwise, why would anyone vote for them?

So what causes a drop-off? Arm-twisting in February? Maybe. A change of heart since February? Maybe. Getting sick, unexpected need to work, sudden disinterest, family emergency, called out of town? All possible. That’s why there are alternates — when a precinct delegate doesn’t show up, the alternate takes that slot so that the “vote” isn’t lost. …

…Both the February and April events were non-binding presidential preference caucuses. Delegates selected in April can change allegiance before the June vote.

Seems to me that if the Clintonistas want to blame somebody, it would be the Clinton caucus delegates who failed to show up.

So, it is possible the state convention could give the state to Sanders, but it hasn’t happened yet. And, apparently, the February caucus was never meant to be the final word on how delegates are to be allocated.

The Clark County convention apparently was a near-riot. Clark County is home to Las Vegas, so it’s the big enchilada in Nevada. I am hearing all kinds of rumors about people being told to show up at the wrong place (so they couldn’t vote) and bus loads of homeless people being given the other candidate’s T-shirts and told how to vote to get a hot meal. Until I get some solid corroboration for those rumors, I am ignoring them.

And reporting on this event has been sparse and sloppy, so even news story “facts” are untrustworthy. I can’t tell from articles if the convention yesterday was all of the counties’ conventions, and they were all held in Clark County (which makes no sense) or if they are really just talking about the Clark County convention.

This is the news story that, apparently set off alarm bells:

Nearly 9,000 delegates were elected on caucus day in late February, but only 3,825 showed up to Saturday’s convention. An additional 915 elected alternates and 604 unelected alternates also turned out to support their favored candidate.

The final delegate count was 2,964 for Sanders and 2,386 for Clinton. That means the Sanders campaign will send 1,613 delegates to the state convention, while the Clinton campaign will send 1,298.

“We pretty much won Nevada,” said Sanders’ state director, Joan Kato, smiling as the results were announced.

What that means is the delegates from Clark County — along with the delegates selected by Nevada’s other counties Saturday — will attend the state convention in May, where they will help select delegates to go to July’s Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. But, because of the way delegate-selection rules work in Nevada, they will only get to decide the proportion of 12 delegates — five pledged party leaders and elected official delegates and seven at-large delegates — that go to each candidate.

So, Sanders may or may not get enough of those additional 12 delegates to pull ahead of Clinton in Nevada. We won’t know until May. No doubt yesterday went to his advantage, though.

Anyway — part of yesterday’s issue was that the chair of the Clark County credentials committee, Christine Kramar, was removed from her position because of a demand from the Clinton campaign. Kramar is known to be a Sanders supporter, but she insists she was being neutral.  The Clinton campaign accused her of violating rules in a way that hurt the Clinton campaign.

This blog post has a letter allegedly from Clinton lawyers regarding Kramer. The letter says Kramar exposed Clinton “campaign information and data by unilaterally adding a representative of Senator Sanders’ campaign into a chain of email correspondence between [Hillary for America] the Clark County Democratic Party and the Nevada State Democratic Party. ”

Whether these charges are true or not, I do not know.

This video shows Kramer being removed from an “emergency meeting” that allegedly was made up of Clinton supporters.

I understand she also had to be removed from the convention floor later, but that’s not clear. Anyway, Clinton supporters are pointing to Kramer as evidence the vote was rigged, but it appears the real problem was that Clinton delegates were AWOL. And the rules don’t bind convention delegates to the caucus votes.

And, y’know, sometimes people change their minds.

The Clinton-Sanders Divide and Moral Foundation Theory

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I am fond of Moral Foundation Theory. It isn’t a perfect explanation for everything that people think, but it explains a lot.

Moral Foundation Theory was developed by social psychologists to explain how people arrive at moral judgments. In brief, few if any of us simply think what we’re told to think by religion or by our cultures. Well, we do in a way, but it’s more complicated than we might think. Instead, our moral judgments arise from deeply subconscious intuitive orientations, and the social psychologists believe we are born pre-wired with these orientations.

Life experiences and cultural conditioning determine how our orientations develop. But someone who is pre-wired to be a prude, for example, is unlikely to completely escape being a prude no matter how he is raised. Judgments happen when we get emotional cues from the subconscious, and then we seize upon a narrative or some explanation for why we think the way we do.

When applied to politics, the Moral Foundations people list six orientations:

  • Care/harm
  • Fairness/cheating
  • Liberty/oppression
  • Loyalty/betrayal
  • Authority/subversion
  • Sanctity/degradation

A longer explanation:

1. Care/Harm — Being kind, gentle and nurturing and protecting people from harm.

2. Fairness/Cheating — Treating people with equality and justly, in proportion to their actions.

3. Liberty/Oppression — Giving people freedom and protecting them from tyranny.

4. Loyalty/Betrayal — Being patriotic, self-sacrificing and loyal to one’s group, family and nation.

5. Authority/Subversion — Respecting leadership, tradition and legitimate authority.

6. Sanctity/Degradation — Living in an elevated, noble way and avoiding disgusting things, foods and actions.

As the chart suggests, if your wiring causes you to value care and fairness over authority and sanctity, you are a liberal. Vice versa, you are a conservative.

Conservatives and centrists tend to value loyalty much more than liberals, and I’ve noticed that loyalty comes up a lot in arguments Clinton supporters make for their candidate. It’s very important to them to be loyal to the Democratic Party, and they are upset that Sanders is “not a real Democrat” but an independent who caucuses with Democrats. I hear this over and over again. Per Moral Foundations Theory, this pegs them as centrists if not conservatives.

They even argue that closed primaries are a better indicator of who should be nominated, because we shouldn’t be allowing independents to choose the Dem nominee.  The notion that we should nominate the candidate with the least appeal to independents rather flies in the face of common sense, to me, but I hear that one all the time.

Note also that Loyalty/betrayal rather quickly segues into Authority/subversion. We’re wading pretty deeply into conservative orientation at this point.

To Sanders supporters, this is a stupid argument. Who gives a hoo-haw whether Sanders is a “real Democrat”? The Democratic Party is a big part of the problem, anyway. Again, this is a common orientation for a liberal, who doesn’t place a high value on group loyalty for its own sake.

Sanders supporters are quick to accuse the Clinton camp of cheating. Given the messiness of many of the primaries and caucuses, this would be expected of liberals, who place a very high value on fairness and not cheating. They sometimes do go overboard, IMO, such as in the current flap over election, um, irregularities in Arizona. Everything I’ve read about it traces the problem to some incompetent Republican appointees; I haven’t seen anything that connects the problem to the Clinton campaign.

But then there were the PUMAs, die-hard Clinton supporters from 2008, who also charged the Obama campaign of stealing votes from Clinton. They were a fascinating crew. This article is from 2015:

The PUMAs–which, depending on the temperament of the person asked, stood for People United Means Action or, more likely, Party Unity My Ass–were a group of disillusioned, mostly Democratic voters who protested the nomination of then-Senator Barack Obama as the Democratic Party nominee in 2008. In their view, party leadership machinations (remember the “super delegates?”) robbed Clinton of the nomination.

In the weeks between Obama surpassing the delegate threshold and his formal nomination at the convention, these PUMAs appeared dozens of times on cable news to defend Clinton and to promise mischief at the nominating convention and in the general election. Their anger epitomized a wider unrest that has been mostly forgotten as Obama went on to win two general elections: In the days before the convention, only 47 percent of Clinton supporters said they were certain to vote for Obama.

I get a kick out of posting this whenever some Clintonista lectures Sanders supporters on how they are stupid if they won’t vote for Clinton in November. See above about more than half of Clinton supporters thinking about not voting for Obama. Somehow, he won anyway.

The PUMAs believe they were being cheated, but Obama supporters saw Clinton as the chief cheater. Remember the flap over the Michigan and Florida delegates? If not, see this article from 2008 that explains it pretty well. Very simply, Clinton attempted to skirt rules to claim delegates from Florida and Michigan who were not rightfully hers. Here are more articles touching on this controversy from the Maha Archives from 2008 that are fun to read in retrospect:

“Win, Lose, Draw,” January 16, 2008

“Over the Line,” January 25, 2008

“Just Say No,” May 22, 2008

“He Said No,” May 22, 2008

“Votes on the Votes,” May 31, 2008

“The Last Dog,” June 1, 2008

While the PUMAs believed they were being cheated, they were blind to the outrageous cheating that Clinton herself attempted in order to claim the nomination in 2008. In their own minds, apparently, whatever Hillary Clinton was justified … because why? She was the leader? Kind of a mash-up of Fairness/cheating and Loyalty/betrayal. I’d like to think most Obama supporters would not have been so blind if he had attempted such a thing.  Of course, he did not, so we will never know.

Anyway, I offer the hypothesis that the biggest cause of the divide is that Clinton supporters tend to be centrists and Sanders supporters, for the most part, are genuine lefties. So we’re all operating out of entirely different moral foundations. I see a lot of stupidity in both camps; some of the denser Sanders supporters tend to dredge up old, discredited right-wing smears of Clinton, for example, which of course is both stupid and counterproductive.

But it’s fascinating to me that Clinton supporters refuse to acknowledge issues from her actual policy speeches and record that ought to give any liberal pause. The AIPAC speech comes to mind, for example. And they won’t look at it; they won’t acknowledge there might be a problem. Perhaps that would be disloyal.

The Candidates Respond to Brussels

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july4whitebackgroundAs a public service, I’ve put together a quickie primer on how the five remaining presidential candidates responded to the terrorist attacks in Brussels. Let’s start with the Republicans.

First off, let us acknowledge that Republicans are weenies. Charles Pierce reminds us that all three Republican candidates wet their pants over the Ebola terror, for example. After the attacks in Brussels, Kasich and Cruz nonsensically called for President Obama to cut the state visit to Cuba off short and fly to Brussels, as if he had any business there and wouldn’t just create more security problems. One suspects there are telephones in Cuba and that the President has communicated with European leaders as needed.

Otherwise, regarding Brussels, Kasich has been the soul of moderation compared to Trump or Kruz. In fact, I found no substantive difference between Kasich and Hillary Clinton on this issue. I’ll come back to this in a bit.

Trump and Cruz, of course, both went into crazy overdrive. Trump continues to believe that Islamic terrorists (like the Ebola virus) are swarming across the U.S. Mexican border, and that the first order of business must be closing that border, along with banning Muslims from entering the country anywhere. He also promises to do lots of waterboarding and has not ruled out using nuclear weapons on ISIS (which Juan Cole tells us we should be calling “Daesh”).

But who knows what Trump would do? Here’s a snip of a recent interview with the Washington Post, courtesy of Mother Jones:

RYAN: You [MUFFLED] mentioned a few minutes earlier here that you would knock ISIS. You’ve mentioned it many times. You’ve also mentioned the risk of putting American troop in a danger area. If you could substantially reduce the risk of harm to ground troops, would you use a battlefield nuclear weapon to take out ISIS?

TRUMP: I don’t want to use, I don’t want to start the process of nuclear. Remember the one thing that everybody has said, I’m a counterpuncher. Rubio hit me. Bush hit me. When I said low energy, he’s a low-energy individual, he hit me first. I spent, by the way he spent 18 million dollars’ worth of negative ads on me. That’s putting [MUFFLED]…

RYAN: This is about ISIS. You would not use a tactical nuclear weapon against ISIS?

[CROSSTALK]

TRUMP: I’ll tell you one thing, this is a very good looking group of people here. Could I just go around so I know who the hell I’m talking to?

The word deranged does come to mind.

Ted Cruz famously promised to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized.” Like treating innocent people like criminals wouldn’t radicalize them. Like Trump, Cruz thinks the southern border must be closed to prevent Muslim terrorists and their Ebola virus allies from entering the country, because obviously there is no other way for them to get in other than to sneak across the Rio Grande. It’s not like we have other borders or international airports or anything.

He also declared that “for years, the West has tried to deny this enemy exists out of a combination of political correctness and fear.” It is an article of faith on the Right that President Obama refuses to acknowledge that Daesh and other radical jihadist groups even exist. But, of course, the Right is wrong. (See also.) Wingnuts think that fear itself has power and that hysterical rhetoric and ignorance make one stronger, which is why they don’t know what to do with President Barack “the Ice Man” Obama. And which is why their approach to terrorism would be a disaster for the entire planet.

Here is Cruz’s statement, in full:

“For years, the west has tried to deny this enemy exists out of a combination of political correctness and fear. We can no longer afford either. Our European allies are now seeing what comes of a toxic mix of migrants who have been infiltrated by terrorists and isolated, radical Muslim neighborhoods. We will do what we can to help them fight this scourge, and redouble our efforts to make sure it does not happen here. We need to immediately halt the flow of refugees from countries with a significant al Qaida or ISIS presence. We need to empower law enforcement to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods before they become radicalized. We need to secure the southern border to prevent terrorist infiltration. And we need to execute a coherent campaign to utterly destroy ISIS. The days of the United States voluntarily surrendering to the enemy to show how progressive and enlightened we can be are at an end. Our country is at stake.”

In short, booga booga booga.

Both Clinton and Kasich emphasized strengthening alliances and working with strategic partners to root out terrorism. Kasich (who, notably, did not mention Islam):

“Along with every American, I am sickened by the pictures of the carnage, by the injuries and by the loss of life,” said Kasich in a statement sent to reporters. “The wave of terror that has been unleashed in Europe and elsewhere around the world are attacks against our very way of life and against the democratic values upon which our political systems have been built. We and our allies must rededicate ourselves to these values of freedom and human rights. We must utterly reject the use of deadly acts of terror. We must also redouble our efforts with our allies to identify, root out and destroy the perpetrators of such acts of evil. We must strengthen our alliances as our way of life and the international system that has been built on our common values since the end of the Second World War comes under challenge from these and other actors of evil.”

Clinton:

Former Sec. of State Clinton said in a statement, “Terrorists have once again struck at the heart of Europe, but their campaign of hate and fear will not succeed. The people of Brussels, of Europe, and of the world will not be intimidated by these vicious killers. Today Americans stand in solidarity with our European allies. Our thoughts and prayers are with the families of those killed and wounded, and all the people of Belgium. These terrorists seek to undermine the democratic values that are the foundation of our alliance and our way of life, but they will never succeed. Today’s attacks will only strengthen our resolve to stand together as allies and defeat terrorism and radical jihadism around the world.”

However, here is where Clinton fell short, and where I would have wanted a more substantive answer. On the Today Show, she was asked explicitly what she might do about the “root causes” of terrorism.

Clinton responded that we need to tighten our security, bringing up a “visa system and passenger record system” she advocated as secretary of state. She also said Europe needs to fall in line behind the US in adopting our surveillance measures:

“When I was secretary, we often had some difficulty with our European friends because they were reluctant to impose the kind of strict standards we were looking for. After Paris, that has changed, and we need to do more to tighten things up.”

She did not address any of the actual root causes of terrorism.

I believe President Obama would have had a better answer.  This blind spot in Clinton is  worrisome, especially considering her record as a “regime change” hawk.
Finally, we come to Bernie Sanders:

We offer our deepest condolences to the families who lost loved ones in this barbaric attack and to the people of Brussels who were the target of another cowardly attempt to terrorize innocent civilians. We stand with our European allies to offer any necessary assistance in these difficult times.

Today’s attack is a brutal reminder that the international community must come together to destroy ISIS. This type of barbarism cannot be allowed to continue. (see also)

He went further talking to Jimmy Kimmel (because news media ignore him):
‘”I think people get afraid, and for good reasons. ISIS is a disgusting, barbaric organization. We’ve seen what they’ve done in Paris, what they’ve done in Brussels. People are afraid of an attack in the United States. But I think what we have to understand is we’re not going to undermine the Constitution of the United States of America in order to effectively destroy ISIS. At the end of the day, we cannot allow the Trumps of the world to use these incidents to attack all of the Muslim people in the world. That is unfair. To imply that if somebody is a Muslim they’re a terrorist, that is an outrageous statement.”
Sanders generated a lot of derision when he linked terrorism and climate change awhile back, but lots of experts say it’s a serious contributing factor. Drought in Syria has a lot to do with migration into Europe and elsewhere.
Like Clinton and Kasich, he has emphasized international cooperation regarding security. I believe he has gone further than Clinton or Kasich in declaring that the United States isn’t the world’s police and that other nations, especially those in the Middle East, need to step up. He also has pledged to not use military force except as a last resort.

Unintended Consequences

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Even the major news outlets are calling out Hillary Clinton for bad behavior. This is the editorial board of the New York Times:

Even with a double-digit lead before the primary, she failed to avoid the type of negative tactics that could damage her in the long haul. A new Washington Post-ABC poll says that nationally, Mrs. Clinton’s margin over Bernie Sanders has shrunk: she polls at 49 percent compared with 42 percent for Mr. Sanders; in January her lead was more than double that. If she hopes to unify Democrats as the nominee, trying to tarnish Mr. Sanders as she did in Michigan this week is not the way to go.

Mrs. Clinton’s falsely parsing Mr. Sanders’s Senate vote on a 2008 recession-related bailout bill as abandoning the auto industry rescue hurt her credibility. As soon as she uttered it in Sunday’s debate, the Democratic strategist David Axelrod registered his dismay, tweeting that the Senate vote wasn’t explicitly a vote about saving the auto industry. Even as reporters challenged her claim, she doubled down in ads across the state. As The Washington Post noted, “it seems like she’s willing to take the gamble that fact-checkers may call her out for her tactic Sunday — but that voters won’t.”

Charles Pierce made the same call.

During Sunday night’s debate, HRC hit Bernie Sanders with something of a cheap shot—David Axelrod’s term, and mine—regarding the auto bailout. (In merciful brief, Sanders supported a bill bailing out the auto industry as a stand-alone measure. The auto bailout eventually got folded into the release of the second part of the Troubled Asset Relief Program and Sanders voted against that, on the grounds that the Wall Street bailout included in the TARP program lacked sufficient government oversight, which it did.) At the time, the argument was considered something of a well-timed coup for the Clinton campaign, blunting Sanders’ ferocious attacks on Clinton-era trade policies.

But, as I talked to more and more people around Flint, I got the sense that the resonance of the exchange was not what HRC and her campaign thought it would be. The UAW members I talked to clearly considered HRC’s use of the auto bailout against Sanders to be at best a half-truth, and a cynical attempt to win their support, and they were offended by what they saw as a glib attempt to turn the state’s economic devastation into a campaign weapon. These were people who watched the auto industry flee this city and this state, and they knew full well how close the country’s remaining auto industry came to falling apart completely in 2008 and 2009. They knew this issue because they’d lived it, and they saw through what the HRC campaign was trying to do with the issue. I have no data to support how decisive this feeling was in Tuesday night’s returns, but it seems to me to be one of the more interesting examples of unintended consequences that I’d heard in a while.

James Hohmann of the Washington Post writes that Clinton was making downright reckless charges against Sanders in last night’s debate. He sides with “minutemen” militia? He is a tool of the Koch brothers? WTF? You should really read this whole thing.  I’ll just quote this bit:

By coming at him from all sides, Clinton’s overarching message was mushy and discordant. What’s so baffling is that Clinton did not need to go this route. Despite Tuesday’s setback in the Midwest, she’s marching toward the Democratic nomination. Because of her huge margin in Mississippi, she actually received more delegates. Even if she wanted to attack, a lot of this dirty work is best left to surrogates – or even paid advertising.

I keep saying this is the only way she knows how to campaign, and it reveals something flawed in her character.

Gail Collins: “Hillary Clinton is by far the best qualified candidate for president. But at this point in the campaign, you can understand why some people feel that voting for her against Bernie Sanders is like rewarding Washington for its worst behavior.”

Charles Blow had an interesting observation:

As I have been saying on social media, both Clinton and Sanders had electoral hurdles that they had to clear. Clinton’s was to win by large margins in states not in the Deep South that are reliably Democratic or that are swing states in the general election. Sanders’s hurdle was to demonstrate that he could win in states where the portion of nonwhite Democratic primary voters was greater than a quarter of the whole.

Only one person cleared his hurdle Tuesday: Bernie Sanders.

I said awhile back that if Sanders can survive March, he gets more competitive in the later primaries. March 15 is going to be a hurdle for him. Michigan may have been a fluke, or it may have been a turning point. We’ll see.

Oh, Wait …

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Yesterday’s upset in Michigan has the FiveThirtyEight crew reeling. The polls said that Hillary Clinton would take Michigan by at least 20 percentage points, if not 30. But she lost. The algorithm gods were wrong.  I dare say Nate Silver and crew have never been off by that much. “Sanders’s win in Michigan was one of the greatest upsets in modern political history,” said one.

And I must say I was surprised, too. During the two Michigan pre-primary debates/town halls/whatever, Hillary Clinton had attempted the Karl Rovian trick of saying  Sanders had voted against the auto bailout bill, leaving out the part about it being part of the TARP bill. Clinton did carry Flint and Detroit, but, glory be, the rest of electorate didn’t fall for it.

It’s possible Michigan was a fluke. It’s also possible that what happened in Michigan could happen in Ohio and Illinois next week. If the Dem establishment were smart — and I don’t think they are that smart, frankly — they would be paying attention to what Sanders supporters want, and taking it seriously.

I like what D.D. Guttenplan wrote in The Nation:

…what Michigan shows is that Bernie’s voters are every bit as important to a Democratic victory as Hillary’s. Especially if, as the Michigan results also suggest, those voters include an increasing number of African-American voters. Perhaps instead of telling Sanders voters to “get in line” behind the inevitable nominee, Clinton supporters should tell their candidate to stop telling lies.

We’ve all read thousands of words about how Bernie needs to respect Hillary, and how the Bernie Bros need to lay off Hillary supporters (much of which I agree with). And as the veteran broadcaster Salim Muwakkil pointed out recently on Facebook, Sanders needs to keep listening and learning to correct his racial blindspots—“and his supporters must not rush to keep [those] blinders intact.”

But we also need to say clearly that the Hillary supporters need to stop denigrating Bernie as a racist or sexist when he clearly isn’t, stop condescending to his supporters for wanting fundamental, rather than cosmetic, change to our rigged economy and corrupt politics, and stop using the kind of underhanded, Nixonian tactics that seem designed to keep Sanders voters home in November.

Meanwhile, as Sanders pulled off what was arguably a historic upset, the cable news networks were glued to Donald Trump’s utterly surreal victory speech. In a way I don’t blame them; it was so bizarre it was hard to not watch. Here’s just a bit:

And Mitt got up — and he really shouldn’t have done it, it wasn’t becoming, honestly — and he talked about the water company. Well, there’s…

Trump steaks — where are the steaks? Do we have steaks? We have Trump steaks. He said the steak company, and we have Trump steaks. And by the way,…

We have Trump Magazine. Let me see the magazine. He said Trump Magazine is out. I said, it is? I thought I read one two days ago. This comes out and it’s called The Jewel of Palm Beach and we…

So — and the airline, by the way, I sold the airline. You know, he said Trump Airline. Well, I sold the airline and I actually made a great deal,…

And by the way, Trump University, it’s — we’re holding it. When I win the lawsuit, which I’ll win, the — they did an ad — Rubio did an ad…

And I’m — I just want to explain. I — and the United States should be this — I don’t settle lawsuits, very rare, because once you settle lawsuits,…

So when I saw the different things — and by the way, the winery, you see the wine, because he mentioned Trump vodka, it’s the largest winery on the…

And so I just want to — so I want to put that to rest. So you have the water, you have the steaks, you have the airline that I sold. I mean, what’s…

That’s copied directly from the CSPAN transcript. He went on like that for nearly an hour.

Hillary Clinton: “Shame on You, Barack Obama”

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Hillary Clinton really cannot learn. The longer her campaign goes on, the more it seems like a re-run of 2008 against Barack Obama.

Example: In his rallies Sanders has been calling Hillary Clinton the “outsourcer in chief” because of her past support of trade deals such as NAFTA and the TPP. She very recently changed her tune on TPP — her pollsters must have told her it’s not a popular position. (In one of the debates, Anderson Cooper accused her of “political expediency.”)  And now she’s playing one of her classic victims games to say she’s being smeared.  “Bernie Sanders stoops to desperate tactics” her surrogates shriek.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give you a blast from the past. Here is a moment from the 2008 campaign against Barack Obama.

Sen. Hillary Clinton, needing wins in delegate-rich Texas and Ohio to overtake Sen. Barack Obama in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination, ramped up her criticism of Obama Saturday, accusing his team of negative campaign tactics “straight out of Karl Rove’s playbook.”

Clinton addressed two mailings the Obama campaign distributed in Ohio – one that lambasts her position on the North American Free Trade Agreement, which her husband, former President Bill Clinton, signed into law, and another that criticizes her proposed health-care plan.

“I have to express my deep disappointment – he is continuing to send false and discredited mailings with information that is not true to the voters of Ohio,” she said, shaking the mailings to punctuate her remarks.

The NAFTA mailer accuses Clinton of switching her position on the trade agreement, saying the senator from New York was a “champion” for NAFTA while first lady, but now opposes it. …

…

The mailers are “blatantly false and yet he continues to spend millions of dollars perpetuating falsehoods. That is not the new politics that the speeches are about,” she said. “It is not hopeful; it is destructive.”

She added, “Shame on you, Barack Obama – it is time that you ran a campaign consistent with your messages in public. That is what I expect from you. Meet me in Ohio and let’s have a debate about your tactics and your behavior in this campaign.”

Obama spokesman Bill Burton denied Clinton’s assertions that the mailers were false.

Her pattern is to just love those job-killing trade bills until she’s running for the presidency, and then she suddenly realizes they were a bad idea after all — until the next job-killing trade bill comes along later.

Here’s another one, from another 2008 news clip.

Hillary Clinton accused Barack Obama of stooping to “desperate” tactics, as polls put her on track for a solid, morale-boosting win in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania presidential primary. …

…

The New York senator argued in an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer that despite trailing Obama in nominating wins and elected delegates, she was still the most likely Democrat to beat Republican John McCain in November.

“He can be elected; I will be elected,” Clinton said, and accused Obama of resorting to sharply negative tactics in the final hours of the battle for Pennsylvania, which heralds the end-game of the contentious White House battle.

“I think he’s doing what candidates do when they get desperate at the end of an election,” Clinton said. “He is now undermining his message. He has spent all this time crossing Pennsylvania talking about how he runs a positive campaign, except when he gets pressed, and he starts throwing … the ‘kitchen sink’ at me.” …

… She argues that only she can capture big states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, by wooing socially conservative blue-collar voters that Democrats need to piece together a route back to the White House.

Clinton’s people also are pushing for Sanders to get out of the race, as she has a nearly (but not completely) insurmountable lead. This is rich, coming from someone who didn’t concede to Obama until June, and even then was spectacularly ungracious about it.  Read this post by Chris Suellentrop from the New York Times, June 4, 2008:

Maybe it was her night after all: Hillary Clinton decided not to withdraw from the presidential campaign tonight, and the liberals in blogville are not happy about it, to put it mildly. Matthew Yglesias of The Atlantic begins his blog post on Clinton’s speech by writing, “I probably shouldn’t write any more about this woman and her staff. Suffice it to say that I’ve found her behavior over the past couple of months to be utterly unconscionable and this speech is no different.” He continues,  “I think if I were to try to express how I really feel about the people who’ve been enabling her behavior, I’d say something deeply unwise. Suffice it to say, that for quite a while now all of John McCain’s most effective allies have been on Hillary Clinton’s payroll.”

At The American Prospect’s Tapped blog, Dana Goldstein calls Clinton’s speech “troublesome.” “The more I think about it, the more it seems that Hillary’s entire speech was manufactured to rile up her supporters — instead of priming them to shift their allegiance to Obama,” Goldstein writes. “Yes, there’s a situation with Michigan and Florida. But is it really fair for Clinton to claim that her 18 million supporters nationwide have been made “invisible?” Who’s supposed to be the bad guy here, scary Howard Dean? Clinton is offering more fighting rhetoric. But the fight should be over. Hillary tonight was a woman standing down more than half her party’s supporters and practically the entire Democratic establishment.”

The New Republic’s Jonathan Chait uses even tougher language. “I’d say that anybody on her staff who cares about their party has a moral obligation to publicly quit and endorse Obama,” he writes at The Plank, TNR’s staff blog. Chait also writes of the speech:

Incredible. She justifies her continuing the campaign by saying that she finished the campaign. She doesn’t concede that Obama has a majority of delegates, let alone that he’s won. She repeats her bogus popular vote argument. She congratulates Obama’s campaign on its “achievements,” but barely musters a single good word about him.

Chait’s colleagues at The New Republic are almost as exercised. Isaac Chotiner, also writing at The Plank, calls the speech “combative and petty” and headlines his post, “A Total Disgrace.” He concludes, “If Clinton wants people to believe that she cares more about the Democratic Party than her own career, she is failing badly.”

There’s a lot more to that. It’s not pretty.  I guess a lot of people have forgotten this; I have not.

My Advice to the GOP Establishment Regarding Donald Trump

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Hoo boy, this is rich:

Mitt Romney and John McCain Denounce Donald Trump as a Danger to Democracy

Yeah, I’m sure the baggers supporting Trump will see this and say, “Really? Gosh, I didn’t know, but if Senator McCain and Governor Romney say so, it must be true!”

Snort. Baggers hate McCain, and I assume they don’t have a lot of use for Romney, either.

Oh, wait; I just did a quickie tour of some right-wing blogs. Reactions to Romney’s speech today denouncing Trump ran the gamut from derision to more derision.  However, one fellow pointed out that the GOP candidates are debating in Michigan tonight. Romney’s father was a governor of Michigan and remembered fondly, I understand, even if there is less love lost for Mittens. This might have an impact in the upcoming Michigan primary.

From Matt Yglesias at Vox:

And Romney isn’t alone. A bevy of prominent Republican foreign policy hands — most though by no means all hardcore neoconservatives — signed a letter today in which they slammed Trump’s honesty, his trade policies, his commitment to torture, and his views on Russia while stating plainly that “as committed and loyal Republicans, we are unable to support a Party ticket with Mr. Trump at its head.”

I agree with Steve M that the Establishment hopes that Trump will still be short of delegates needed for the nomination at convention time, and then of course no one would mind if the convention ignores the will of voters and settles on someone else.  Right? All those Republican primary voters will just fall in line behind anyone the GOP chooses, right?

Actually, they might. The headline of Yglesias’s column is “Trump needs to unify the GOP to win in November. This week suggested he can’t.” No, he probably can’t. But there is someone who can.

Hillary Clinton.

The baggers would trip all over themselves rushing to the polls to vote for the Devil himself to prevent Hillary Clinton from being President. She could prove to be the Great Uniter of the Republican Party.

There you go, GOP establishment. Go ahead and broker your rigged convention, and give the nomination to whomever you please. Then make sure Hillary Clinton is the Democratic nominee.  Problem solved.