So Senate Republicans have declared they will not consider any Obama Supreme Court nominee, and they will be very careful to not recess for the rest of the year. They aren’t even going to go through the motions.
So if another Democrat moves into the White House in January, what will be their excuse then?
See also Charles Pierce and John Cole.
UPDATED: Please read this more recent post on the Hillary Victory Fund, which I believe clarifies the issues quite a bit.
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.
Yes, this is perfectly legal. But, folks, this election is rigged. Legally rigged, perhaps, but rigged.
_________
Last year, reports say the DNC was starved for cash and falling way behind the RNC in fundraising. Here is an AP story from August 2015:
“Federal Election Commission reports tell a disappointing story for the party: The DNC collected $36.5 million in the first six months of the year and had almost no money in special accounts, including one designated for its convention. It had about $7.6 million in available cash and $6.2 million in debts and loans.
“The Republican National Committee, coming out of years in the red, posted $63 million in receipts through June, leaving it with $16.7 million cash on hand and $1.8 million in debts and loans. Party fundraising dominance has flipped: At this point before the 2012 election, the DNC was outpacing the RNC.”
When President Obama was elected in 2008 he instructed the DNC that they were not to accept PAC money or money from lobbyists. It was recently revealed that some time last year, Debbie Wasserman Schultz reversed that policy.
Here’s the kicker: Recently a lot of Clinton supporters have been crowing that Hillary Clinton has been raising money for down-ticket candidates, and Bernie Sanders has not. This seemed odd to me; normally presidential contenders don’t funnel money down-ticket until after they’ve locked up the nomination. But it appears Hillary Clinton’s generosity isn’t coming from altruism; the Clinton Victory Fund is directly benefiting from DWS’s change of policy in ways that the Sanders campaign is not.
The Clinton Victory Fund has made fund-raising pacts with 33 state Democratic organizations that benefit both the states and the Clinton campaign. The CVF is raising money for the Democratic Party, not the Clinton campaign. Major donors can give hundreds of thousands of dollars to the CVF, and from there the money is passed on to the state Democratic parties. After passing through the states, some of this money is kicked back to the DNC and to the Clinton campaign. The advantage to Clinton is that the money has been “laundered” in a way that she can use it as if it were a direct contribution. The strings that normally go with Super PAC money do not apply.
From Bloomberg News, February 3:
“Clinton’s move last year to lock in fundraising alliances with 33 state Democratic parties has already added $26.9 million to the mountain of hard money she has raised so far, a Bloomberg analysis of Federal Election Commission filings shows. Bernie Sanders, her competitor for the nomination, has inked one such deal, netting a total of $1,000.
The agreements, thanks to a 2014 U.S. Supreme Court decision, make it possible for major donors to give hundreds of thousands of dollars in hard money to a candidacy, amounts far greater than the $2,700 limit on contributions directly to a campaign.“At least 24 donors have given $300,000 or more to the fundraising vehicle, known as the Hillary Victory Fund, including Haim and Cheryl Saban, George Soros and Daniel Abraham, longtime donors to both Bill and Hillary Clinton’s political campaigns and the Clinton Foundation. The only other way to make such large contributions is through outside groups, such as super-PACs, which can take unlimited donations but can’t coordinate with the candidate.
“Under the agreements, the first $2,700 of a contribution goes straight to Clinton’s campaign, the next $33,400 to the Democratic National Committee, and the remainder is split evenly across the 33 often cash-strapped state committees. Unlike super-PAC donations, the money can be spent to directly support her campaign on anything from get-out-the-vote efforts to TV ads”
In other words, this enables Clinton to launder Super-PAC money in a way that allows her to use the money as if it were direct contributions to her campaign. And I’m sure Hillary Clinton wants you to know this is perfectly legal. And the national and state Democratic Party campaigns now have millions of dollars they wouldn’t have had otherwise.
See also the Washington Post, February 20:
“Establishing a victory fund the year before the election allowed the Clinton campaign and DNC to ask wealthy backers to give the $356,100 maximum annual contribution twice: once in 2015 and again this year. …
“…So far, the state parties have served only as a pass-through for their share of the funds. Campaign finance records show that nearly $2 million in donations to the fund initially routed last year to individual state party accounts was immediately transferred to the DNC, which is laboring to pay off millions of dollars in debt.”
But it appears this was a deal between DWS and HRC, which explains Wasserman Schulz’s obvious sabotage of primary challengers to Clinton, in particular the reluctance to schedule debates that might allow America to get a good look at those challengers.
In recent weeks Hillary Clinton has been wrapping herself in President Obama’s record. She promises to build on his accomplishments, and accusations that Bernie Sanders has been hostile to the Obama Administration (not true) have been swamping social media. Rather ironic that it’s Clinton who is responsible for dismantling Obama’s Super PAC policy.
(H/t Our Doug.)
I regret to say that not all of the derp is on the Republican side. For example, I’m seeing a lot of good ol’ irrational exuberance among Sanders supporters who believe he will win the nomination based on Sanders’s being ahead in some national polls. But the primary calendar and math are weighted against him. There is still a little room for hope, but very little.
I took some time to look at the primary calendar and the current polls. Very basically, most of the early primaries are in more conservatives states that are likely to vote for Clinton. IF Clinton were to sweep all the primaries and caucuses between now and March 15, she’ll have the nomination on March 15. In fact, there’s room for her to lose some smaller state primaries and still win the nomination by March 15. And if she’s almost there on March 15, she’ll likely have it by March 30.
On the other hand, if a Sanders nomination is still a mathematical possibility at the end of March, then the primary map moves into more states that will likely be more favorable to him.
This is probably why the Clinton campaign is throwing all the mud it can at Sanders. She needs to stop him before April.
Clinton and her supporters are twisting and mud-slinging with reckless abandon, pretty much lying about Sanders as fast as they can move their lips. I’ll get to the derp on the Clinton side in a moment, but you’ve probably noticed that Clinton is running the same kind of ugly, dirty scorched-earth campaign against Sanders that she ran against Obama in 2008. It sometimes sounds as if she’s just re-writing her old talking points against Obama to use on Sanders.
I’m seeing a lot of nastiness coming from supporters of both candidates, but the Sanders campaign itself has not been particularly harsh toward Clinton. He criticizes her on issues, but all along Sanders has refused to take cheap shots against Clinton on matters such as the email non-scandal. Clinton, however, appears to have no scruples whatsoever in what she’ll say about Sanders.
Looking at the March primaries: Right now, I understand, he is favored — sometimes narrowly — in Colorado, Minnesota and (of course) Vermont, March 1; Kansas and Nebraska, March 5; and Maine, March 6. He is losing narrowly in Massachusetts (March 1), but not by so much that it’s completely out of reach. He needs to win a big majority of delegates from those states to stay in the running, I believe.
But chances are he’s going to be slaughtered, so to speak, in South Carolina this week. Going into Super Tuesday (March 1), that’s not going to help. I’m running into Sanders supporters who don’t get that it may not matter if Sanders is beating the socks off Clinton in West Virginia, for example, because West Virginia doesn’t vote until May. Probably it will be over by then.
But now let’s talk about derp among the Clintonistas. Hillary Clinton has some utterly and passionately devoted supporters, many of them older women, who appear to devoutly wish for a Clinton win because, in their heads, that would be paypack for all the sleights and obstacles and disrespect they’ve suffered through the years.
And that’s why they want her to win. Issues? Income inequality? Election reform? The corruption (or, as Jeffrey Feldman calls it, “clientelism“) in government? Nope, not on their radar. She’s going to do so much for women! they gush. (If you point out that Sanders is a feminist, also, they don’t want to hear about it. A Sanders win would deny them their symbolic victory.)
This is from my man Feldman:
While not guilty of corruption in the explicit sense of quid pro quo, Clinton not only participates in, but actively cultivates patron-client relationships with Wall Street. In the clientelism that Clinton embraces and defends, she claims the American public to be the sole beneficiary via her representation, but she refuses to acknowledge how Wall St. benefits.  And yet, in a patron-client system, both the patron and the client always benefit. Always. That is how it works. In this case: Clinton gets resources to run for office, while Wall Street gets the guarantee that the candidate they gave so much money in one place (e.g., a speech) will tacitly if not explicitly support their views of economic reality in another place (e.g., The White House). It is a long term strategy for both. …
…Secretary Clinton, for all the good work that she has done, has built a career on the belief that she can control these patron-client relationships to benefit the powerless. Yet, she has done so by entering into reciprocal relationships with the powerful–who gain no advantage by legislation that helps the powerless.
To have such powerful clients as Goldman Sachs, who secure their relationships with unfathomably large payments for symbolic services–is to accept both the benefits and the limits of that clientelism.
Basically, Clinton functions by mediating between the interests of her patrons and those of the voters. If she can tweak a few bennies for the common folks without taking so much away from the Goldman Sachs crowd that they turn off the cash flow, she considers herself a great success. And apparently her fans think that’s just dandy.
And there lie the boundaries she will not cross; it’s why we can’t have nice things.
She’ll defend Obamacare as it is, probably, but she’s not going to try to make it better to cover those sill not covered. They both talk about Wall Street reform, but if you look at their proposals, Clinton seems fine with continuing to let the foxes run the henhouse. And so on. Sanders also has proposed more sweeping changes to the criminal justice system than Clinton has. See also “Why Hillary Clinton Doesn’t Deserve the Black Vote.”
And there we are. I believe I’ve already argued why the “Hillary is more electable” argument is bogus, and indeed I think I’m seeing a bit less of people trying to shame Sanders supporters into voting for Clinton so Donald Trump won’t be President. But they haven’t entirely given up on it.
Now, however, she’s spreading a rumor that Sanders is an enemy of Barack Obama and has dissed the POTUS on many occasion. None of the things he allegedly (but did not) say about Obama come close to the vile things Clinton said in 2008, but never mind. If enough people believe the lie it will help keep black voters from defecting to Sanders in South Carolina.
Yeah, lots of derp.
A federal grand jury in Nevada indicted Cliven Bundy and four others on 16 charges related to an armed standoff near his ranch in 2014 over unpaid grazing fees.
Sounds like ol’ Cliven shoulda stayed home on the ranch.
Cliven Bundy is accused of leading “a massive armed assault” of 200 followers to stop federal law agents who were rounding up about 400 of Bundy’s cattle on federal lands in April 2014, according to documents filed by U.S. attorneys Wednesday.
Upon learning of the roundup, Bundy said he was “ready to do battle,” with the Bureau of Land Management and that he would “do whatever it takes” to protect his property, according to documents.
The others allegedly organized and recruited followers and acted as leaders in the incident.
Meanwhile, back at the bird sanctuary — it’s going to be a sad spring for Oregon birdwatchers, as forensic examination and cleanup of the Malheur Wildlife Preserve is expected to take several weeks. Among the weirder discoveries, the occupiers left a “trench of human feces” on or adjacent to a Native American burial ground.
Also, excellent read: Can We Make Sense of the Malheur Mess?
Tom Friedman just vaulted into first place for the Marie Antoinette Privileged-class Obliviousness Award for 2016. And he’s set a high mark, folks. Can the perennial favorite, David Brooks, best him? Stay tuned!
Update: Catch the comments at the New York Times. Friedman is being skewered.
Steve Kornacki writes that the Sanders coalition isn’t just the collection of liberal millennials every assumes it is.
Sanders bested Clinton across virtually all regional and demographic boundaries in the Granite State, crushing her overall by 22 points. But he fared best with economically downscale voters and won over a number of blue-collar cities and towns that had been Clinton redoubts in her 2008 campaign. In so doing, Sanders essentially flipped the ’08 script, in which Clinton’s main challenger, Barack Obama, relied disproportionately on higher-income voters and those with college degrees.
For instance, among voters making less than $50,000, Sanders defeated Clinton by 33 points. By contrast, Clinton won those same voters by 15 points over Obama in ’08. Sanders’ margin was only half as big – 17 points – with voters making more than $50,000, a group that Obama actually won by 5 points. Similarly, Sanders rolled up a 36-point spread among voters without college degrees, while winning college-educated voters by only 13 points. In ’08, though, it was Clinton who won voters without college degrees by 8 points, with Obama taking college graduates by 5 points.
There’s also the geography of Sanders’ win. While he claimed almost every city and town in the New Hampshire, he didn’t fare much better than Obama in many of the state’s more upscale liberal areas. In Hanover, home of Dartmouth College, Sanders ran just 281 votes ahead of Clinton, a margin of 6.5 points. Eight years ago, Obama won that same town by 32 points, a plurality of more than 1,500 votes. In the coastal city of Portsmouth, another liberal enclave, Sanders performed only modestly better (a 12-point win) than Obama (6 points).
But it was a very different story in the state’s older, post-industrial cities and towns, where Sanders improved by leaps and bounds over Obama’s ’08 performance. Take Berlin, a struggling mill city in the North Country, where Obama actually ran third, behind John Edwards. Clinton was so strong in Berlin in ’08 that her vote total actually exceeded that of Obama’s and Edwards’ combined. But this time, she lost the city by 13 points to Sanders. Rochester, another blue-collar mill town, was another Clinton stronghold in ’08, where she ran up a 976-vote plurality over Obama – a 16-point margin. Sanders, though, won Rochester Tuesday by 21 points.
Interesting.
I’m just catching up on the New Hampshire primary. I don’t know what percentage of the votes are in, but most news outlets are calling it Sanders 58, Clinton 40. Not close, in other words. This was expected. I’ll come back to Sanders and Clinton in a moment.
On the Republican side, Trump is way ahead with 34 percent of the votes. Second is Kasich, at 15 percent. Toast! and Ted Cruz are currently tied at 12 percent. Little Marco, who was the establishment hope a few days ago, got only 10 percent. And Chris “Big Chicken” Christie, whose bashing of Marco possibly cost him a nomination, got 8 percent. Poor little Marco.
Kasich could be a genuine threat in the general, and he’s a nasty little right-wing toad, but I’m not sure he’s let’s-eat-bugs-on-toast crazy enough to win in the South.
Sanders was indeed expected to win New Hampshire, so this win should not be a shock to anybody, but the Clinton campaign seems to be taking it hard. The Editorial Board of the New York Times (which, I believe, has endorsed Clinton:
Eight years after she went over the line in attacking Barack Obama, Mrs. Clinton’s team, notably her husband and some prominent supporters, were making tone-deaf attacks on Mr. Sanders, who has proved a tougher opponent than they had expected but was the odds-on favorite in New Hampshire.
On Tuesday, Mrs. Clinton sent an email to her backers, thanking them, asking them for $1 and complaining that Mr. Sanders “went to the extraordinary measure of outspending us on the airwaves three-to-one here in New Hampshire.†Mrs. Clinton knew she was going to lose the first primary. But she has no reason to panic since she remains well ahead in the next few contests and has plenty to say about herself rather than allowing her campaign to attack Mr. Sanders and, especially, the motives of his supporters. …
… As the days ticked down to the New Hampshire vote, events resurrected bad memories of unsavory drama from Mrs. Clinton’s 2008 run. The Clinton campaign once hoped to hold Mr. Sanders to a single-digit win, but that looked impossible even before Tuesday morning, and rumors of a coming staff shake-up (candidates always blame the staff first for losses) struck a demoralizing blow to her team working long hours in New Hampshire.
At Mrs. Clinton’s get-out-the-vote rally on Monday night, Bill Clinton seemed to be second-guessing the campaign’s ground game. He joked, using a rather bizarre turn of phrase, that sometimes he wished he and Mrs. Clinton weren’t married, ostensibly so he could vent his spleen about her challenger even more than he has. On Tuesday, David Brock, the Clinton Svengali, said on CNN that because the senator from Vermont was from a neighboring state, he held some kind of automatic (read: don’t blame us) 15-point advantage, and made the dark prediction that “he’s going to be brought down to earth.â€
Meanwhile, the Clinton campaign worked to tar Mr. Sanders with news that he’d attended vacation retreats sponsored by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee — which, like most such committees, accepts corporate contributions — and “was even once spotted chatting sociably for close to an hour with a financial services lobbyist who was in a hot tub while the senator sat nearby.†Pressing that story seemed pointless, and probably damaging to Mrs. Clinton.
Over the past few hours social media has gotten absolutely toxic with the screechings of Clintonistas about the evilness of Bernie Sanders and how his supporters hate women and a vote for Bernie Sanders is a vote against Planned Parenthood, or something.
They’ve gone completely off the wall, in other words. I expect tomorrow to hear that Sanders used to keep slaves and likes to bite the heads off puppies.
Another interesting bit from the New York Times:
Senator Bernie Sanders beat Hillary Clinton among nearly every demographic group in the Democratic New Hampshire primary, according to exit polls.
He carried majorities of both men and women. He won among those with and without college degrees. He won among gun owners and non-gun owners. He beat Mrs. Clinton among previous primary voters and those participating for the first time. And he ran ahead among both moderates and liberals.
Even so, there were a few silver linings for Mrs. Clinton. While Mr. Sanders bested her among all age groups younger than 45, the two candidates polled evenly among voters aged 45 to 64. And Mrs. Clinton won the support of voters 65 and older. And, though Mrs. Clinton lost nearly every income group, she did carry voters in families earning over $200,000 per year.
Talk about lame spin. What I’ve seen from Clinton’s side is:
1. She’s the first woman to win the Iowa Caucuses! Yeah, and Ted Cruz was the first Latino to win the Iowa Caucuses. And Sanders would have been the first New York Jew to win the Iowa Caucuses. So? Somehow, this seems so … last century. If a rabbit had won for the first time, that would have been a story.
For the record, other than Clinton in 2008 I believe the only other woman to receive any votes at all in an Iowa Caucus was Shirley Chisolm, in 1972.
2. Yesterday a meme was circulating on social media — HRC’s photo with the words, “The people of Iowa gave her their trust.” The population of Iowa is 3.1 million. Of those, 171,109 participated in the Dem caucuses. We don’t know actual raw vote counts, but we know the votes must have been close to a tie. By my calculations, Clinton won the trust of roughly .0003 percent of the people of Iowa.
3. [Gloating] We Won. Suck it up, Berniebots. So endearing.
She’s a terrible campaigner. The woman has her strengths and virtues, but HRC to political campaigning is like Pat Boone to R&B.
Some of the Sanders supporters are not taking the near-loss well. Some of them seem to have expected Sanders would crush Clinton, even though pre-caucus polls mostly predicted she would win. There’s also a lot of grumbling that some precinct captains had their thumb on the scale for Clinton, so to speak, but frankly there is nothing to be gained by going there. The Iowa delegation will be nearly evenly divided between Sanders and Clinton delegates. Who “won” is not going to matter down the road.
The Sanders campaign reports that he received $3 million in donations in the 24 hours after the Caucuses. Now, there’s some good spinning for you. He is also refusing to concede defeat in Iowa (as close as it was, I don’t blame him) and he’s also pushing for more debates. Still, all the data suggest he’s going to be crushed in every primary after New Hampshire.
If Marco “baby cheeks” Rubio is the eventual GOP nominee IMO Clinton (presumably) will crush him. Next to her, he’s going to look like somebody who should be finishing up his homework before he can go to Little League practice. She’s also not going to hesitate in going after him for his hard Right positions on reproductive freedom. But it’s too early to count Trump out, I think.
Couple o’ things to read — Charles Pierce describes an interview of Hillary Clinton by Chris Matthews that sounds, well, horrible. When is Tweety going to retire already? Also, I don’t always agree with Matt Yglesias, but I think he nailed the problem with Democratic establishment here.
The New York Times has a fascinating graphic showing how much money each candidate has received and what percentage of it comes from PACs. Going by donations directly to campaigns, Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are running first and second, followed (at some distance) by Ben Carson. The Republican candidates aren’t getting anywhere close to the direct campaign money that the two Democratic front runners are getting.
PACs are something else. Toast! far and away has received the most PAC money, and from this he still has more cash on hand than any other candidate. Were it not for the fact that nobody likes him, he’d be in great shape for a general election campaign. All that money seems to be plunging down a very deep drain.
However, if we’re looking at cash on hand from the donations pool, Clinton and Sanders are both in much better shape than their nearest Republican rival, who would be Ted Cruz.
Two candidates still running have received no PAC money at all. They are Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Also Hillary Clinton has had to spend considerably more than Sanders to stay ahead of him.