Why the Democratic Party Is in Bigger Trouble Than It Realizes

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Regarding the perpetual complaint that young voters don’t turn out for midterm elections, which gives Congress to Republicans — yeah, I used to complain about that too. But try to imagine what the Democratic Party must look like to younger voters.

I’m old enough to remember when Harry Truman and Eleanor Roosevelt were still alive and still influential in party politics. I was in middle school during the Kennedy Administration. For all his flaws regarding Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson initiated genuinely progressive domestic programs. I was in high school when Bobby Kennedy ran for President and was assassinated. I cast my first vote for POTUS for George McGovern. So that’s the Democratic Party I remember — flawed and messy, but still a vehicle for doing the right thing, at least part of the time.

But that party died a quiet death some time back. I’m not sure that other people my age realize this. The Democratic Party now is closer to where the Republicans were during the Nixon Administration than they are to being the party of Truman, Kennedy or even LBJ.

But at least the Nixon Republicans sort of stood for something. You knew where they were coming from. The current party Democratic Party stands for nothing.

I’m not sure when it happened, exactly, but sometime between the McGovern blowout in 1972 and the election of Bill Clinton in 1992, the party of FDR, Truman and Kennedy died. Clinton ushered in a fundamental change in the Democratic Party that made it about winning elections on the Right’s terms. It became the party of lowered expectations, learned helplessness and “at least we’re not as bad as they are.” But what does it actually stand for any more, as a party?

I recently got into a sad discussion about how the party abandoned the legacy of FDR. I mentioned FDR’s great 1941 State of the Union address — the “Four Freedoms” speech. This encapsulates what the party should still stand for, I said. A Clinton supporter dismissed this as ancient history. You want to have it both ways, she said. You keep saying it’s not 1972 any more, and now you want to go back to 1941. The Democrats have moved on.

So I quoted this portion of the speech:

Certainly this is no time for any of us to stop thinking about the social and economic problems which are the root cause of the social revolution which is today a supreme factor in the world.

For there is nothing mysterious about the foundations of a healthy and strong democracy. The basic things expected by our people of their political and economic systems are simple. They are:

Equality of opportunity for youth and for others.

Jobs for those who can work.

Security for those who need it.

The ending of special privilege for the few.

The preservation of civil liberties for all.

The enjoyment of the fruits of scientific progress in a wider and constantly rising standard of living.

These are the simple, basic things that must never be lost sight of in the turmoil and unbelievable complexity of our modern world. The inner and abiding strength of our economic and political systems is dependent upon the degree to which they fulfill these expectations.

Personally, I think anyone who wants to call himself a REAL DEMOCRAT ought to memorize that passage and recite it daily.

FDR continued:

Many subjects connected with our social economy call for immediate improvement.

As examples:

We should bring more citizens under the coverage of old-age pensions and unemployment insurance.

We should widen the opportunities for adequate medical care.

We should plan a better system by which persons deserving or needing gainful employment may obtain it.

And we’re still working on that stuff. Maybe we’ll always be working on that stuff. As technological and economic conditions change, we’ll have to keep adjusting. But it’s hard to even talk about some of these things now, never mind work on them. We’ve done something about health care, although we need to do more. But looking ahead I don’t see any plans from most Dems except to try to stop what we have accomplished from being further eroded.

Roosevelt went on to say that people would be required to pay more taxes to make these things happen. He was re-elected later that year anyway. And no, Pearl Harbor hadn’t been bombed yet.

In the future days, which we seek to make secure, we look forward to a world founded upon four essential human freedoms.

The first is freedom of speech and expression–everywhere in the world.

The second is freedom of every person to worship God in his own way–everywhere in the world.

The third is freedom from want–which, translated into world terms, means economic understandings which will secure to every nation a healthy peacetime life for its inhabitants–everywhere in the world.

The fourth is freedom from fear–which, translated into world terms, means a world-wide reduction of armaments to such a point and in such a thorough fashion that no nation will be in a position to commit an act of physical aggression against any neighbor–anywhere in the world.

That is no vision of a distant millennium. It is a definite basis for a kind of world attainable in our own time and generation. That kind of world is the very antithesis of the so-called new order of tyranny which the dictators seek to create with the crash of a bomb.

Compare/contrast to right-wing calls for carpet bombing the Middle East to get rid of ISIS. For that matter, compare/contrast to Hillary Clinton’s “vision” of dealing with ISIS. It’s all about military and anti-terrorist options. There’s no vision there.

Now, some would say that Pearl Harbor and the subsequent war proved FDR hopelessly idealistic. I don’t think so. These ideals lived on in programs like the Marshall Plan, which helped secure a lasting peace in western Europe and which is the sort of thing that would never get past a right-wing Congress today, and which the current Democratic Party would never even dare propose. And FDR was a great war president and hardly a pacifist weenie, btw.

We have to acknowledge that FDR didn’t always live up to his own ideals — the Japanese-American internment, for example — but that doesn’t mean the ideals themselves were wrong.

As I’ve written elsewhere, there’s a good argument to be made that in 1992, Clintonian “triangulation,” moving Right to finesse the Reaganites on their own turf, was the only way a Democrat could have won the White House. But it’s time to drop that strategy now, because it’s holding us all back. The current Dem establishment, never mind Hillary Clinton herself, is stuck in the past and ignoring the realities of the current political climate, which is that the Republican Party is falling apart and the young folks are hungry for a more assertively progressive left-wing party that actually stands for something other than technocratic responses to whatever problems arise. Which is all Hillary Clinton knows.

And when some of us start talking about a real progressive vision, the Clintonistas dismiss us as naive “purists” who don’t understand what’s practical. I guess by their definition FDR wasn’t practical (see: New Deal; victory in World War II).

But y’know what? We’ve complained for years about how younger voters don’t turn out for midterm elections and let the Republicans take over Congress. I’ve complained about that, too. But try to look at the Democrats through their eyes. They don’t remember Truman or Eleanor Roosevelt or even George McGovern or Hubert Humphrey.  They remember the Clintons. They see Democrats in Congress that sell out liberal values a large part of the time, and who can’t effectively push back against right-wing craziness. Even President Obama — who has done a lot more good than he’s given credit for — has disappointed them often by trying to make “Grand Bargains” with the Right that would have compromised essential “safety net” programs. And his foreign policy hasn’t been all that great, which is largely Clinton’s doing, IMO.

From that perspective — what’s there to vote for? Why bother?

Again, I always do trudge out and vote, if only because the Dems are not as bad as those other people. But the Dems have been coasting on we aren’t as bad as they are way too much and way too long. It’s like they’re using the Republicans to hold us hostage — vote for us or they’ll shoot your dog. And then most of them go about being way too compromised by money and lobbyists and not really responding to the people.

No, they aren’t as bad as the Republicans. But maybe the young folks are right for not settling. And if the Democratic Party doesn’t change, I wonder if it can survive.

Unify This

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“Unify” is the verb of the hour. Can the Dems unify in November? More specifically (the usual question goes) can Sanders supporters unify with the Democratic Party and vote for Clinton?

People are pushing Sanders to drop out now mostly because he’s causing Clinton to burn money and time that could be used against the Republicans. But the primaries aren’t over yet, and the two candidates aren’t that far apart in pledged delegates — 275, I think. It keeps changing, because various state election boards keep making “adjustments,” but that’s the most recent number I could find. Clinton has 1428 pledged delegates and needs 2383 to win the nomination. There are 1633 delegates up for grabs in the remaining primary states. So the raw numbers tell me nobody’s got it sewn up.

Of course, of you add in Clinton’s 502 superdelegates (versus Sanders’s 38) she’s a lot closer to winning than he is. She’s also ahead in the polls in the remaining states. Is it over?

Not so fast — she’s only up by 2 percentage points according to the most recent poll in California. Indiana is close, also.

However, the  primaries for this coming Tuesday are in Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Pennsylvania, with a total of 452 delegates. Maryland is a sure thing for Clinton. She could sweep the other states as well, but some will be close.

But this means that it’s very possible (by my calculations, which you should always regard skeptically) that after Tuesday, adding the 502 superdelegates, she’ll go over 2383 delegates. And then the calls for Sanders to capitulate will become deafening.

But he’s not going to quit before California, I don’t think, unless Clinton somehow gets enough pledged delegates to win without the superdelegates.  In fact, there’s a remote chance he could sweep the June 7 primaries and get a majority of those 783 delegates up for grabs. That would be a kick in the butt going into the convention, huh?

In short, while it is possible Clinton will end the primary season with enough pledged delegates to clinch the nomination, I think it’s also possible she won’t.

In which case, things will get messy. I am honestly not sure what Sanders will do. I don’t think he’s going to catch up to Clinton in pledged delegates, unless he has a landslide win in California, which is unlikely.  I understand his campaign manager is trying to flip superdelegates, but that’s not going well. The party will want him to concede to Clinton before the convention.

I’ve already written that I don’t think he will try a third-party run in the general election. I’m good with this; we’ll need him in the Senate. But the Dems had better be careful how they handle him if they want any unifying. Sanders supporters feel the Democrats are their enemy right now. If Sanders is shoved aside too unceremoniously, especially if Clinton can’t win with pledged delegates, it’s going to cost the Dems votes in November.

I believe the Democrats assume that once Sanders is clearly defeated he will make a nice concession speech, and his followers will be mollified and vote for Clinton as they are told. But I don’t think it’s going to be that easy. In fact, my sense of things is that some of the Sanders’s supporters are so angry they could  turn on him if he’s too conciliatory to Clinton.

If I were him, and it came to the end of the run, I’d tell the supporters to vote their conscience in November — adding that in my estimation Secretary Clinton would be the better choice compared to the Republican — and I’d also put forth a list of progressive Senate and House candidates and ask that the supporters put their energies into getting them elected in November. And then I’d take a long vacation before going back to Vermont to campaign for my Senate seat.

The Dems will be outraged if Sanders doesn’t give Clinton an unequivocal endorsement, but I don’t think he can without absolutely crushing a large part of his supporters, because Clinton has come to symbolize everything they hate about the Democratic Party and the election system generally. And then the revolution would be over. I think the best he can do is simply say the Republican would be worse.

The Dems had also better give him a prime-time speaking slot and a big say in the platform.

Would the Sanders supporters vote for Clinton in November? Some will, some won’t. I have no idea in what proportion. Clinton is going to have to work for it, though. She can’t take those votes for granted. And I’m not sure she knows that.

People look to the absolutely vicious 2008 campaign and note that the rough primary season didn’t cost Barack Obama the election. But there’s a difference — Barack Obama is nice. He always struck me as being very genuine. Unless you’re a racist, the more you see of him, the more you like him. Clinton … not so much. And I don’t think that the 2008 primary season left any  of us with such a sense of disgust with the Democratic Party itself, that I remember.

So whether the Dems can “unify” for the November election depends on many factors, assuming Clinton is the nominee. These are:

  1. How big of a jerk Clinton makes of herself between now and the convention, or whenever Sanders concedes. Likewise Clinton’s surrogates and supporters.
  2. How big of a jerk the Democratic establishment makes of itself between now and the convention, etc. The convention itself could be handled in a way to soothe the Sanders people, or not. We’ll see.
  3. Whether the Republican nominee is horrible enough to make Clinton look good. This is possible.

Clinton is probably going to be the Dem nominee, and she’s probably going to win the White House in November, but I don’t think Sanders supporters are going to put this election year behind them and embrace the Democratic Party afterward. So winning, maybe; unifying, not so much.

No to Third-Party Presidential Runs

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Now that the Democratic nomination is nearly out of reach for Bernie Sanders, a lot of his supporters are feverishly calling for him to run as an independent candidate. He’s not going to do that, because he’s smart enough to know better. But I thought I’d explain why, knowing I’m going to be ignored as some cranky old stick-in-the-mud by the young folks.

One, there have been eleven significant third-party presidential runs in American history, plus I don’t know how many obscure candidacies.  Most of the time the third-party challenger won so few votes it made no difference to the outcome. The most successful third-party challenges caused the two most popular candidates to split the majority vote, and the third most popular candidate won the election (see 1912, which was good or bad depending on how you feel about Woodrow Wilson). Note that the winner-take-all with no runoffs way we run elections makes this outcome nearly inevitable if a third-party candidate attracts significant numbers of votes.

Over the years there have been a great many third-party contests for governorships and congressional seats, and only a tiny fraction (about 2 percent) of the independent challengers have won.

Of presidential third-party candidates, the most successful were —

  • Theodore Roosevelt, 1912, Progressive Party, won 27.39 percent of the vote
  • Millard Fillmore, 1856, American Party, won 21.54 percent of the vote
  • Ross Perot, 1992, Independent, won 18.91 percent of the vote
  • Robert LaFollette, 1924, Progressive Party, won 16.62 percent of the vote
  • George Wallace, 1968, American Independent, won 13.3 percent of the vote
  • Martin van Buren, 1848, Free Soil Party, won 10.13 percent of the vote

(I left out 1860 because it was such an anomaly. The demise of the Whigs in 1854 and the split in the Democratic Party between northern and southern factions made the whole thing a chaotic mess. The chaos benefited Abraham Lincoln, who won with less than 40 percent of the vote. The remaining 60 percent of the votes were split among the two Democrats and the candidate of the Constitutional Union Party — sort of the “Third Way” of its day. Although there have been several multiple-candidate elections, I believe the 1860 election was the last one in which more than three candidates split electoral college votes. You might also remember that the 1860 election had some, um, interesting repercussions.)

See also: Abraham Lincoln Was Not a Third Party Candidate

The remaining candidates finished in the single digits. Anyway, I submit that unless we institute some kind of run-off election system, a candidate outside of the two-party system has no chance. If Teddy Roosevelt couldn’t do it, ain’t nobody gonna do it. People genuinely loved Teddy.

Might a third party presidential run, even if unsuccessful, play any role in building a lasting movement? Again, I don’t see it. It hasn’t happened yet. Note that Teddy’s Progressive Party of 1912 was an entirely different organization from Bob LaFollette’s Progressive Party of 1924; they just happen to share the same name. Ross Perot tried again in 1996 with a Reform Party, which he and others had hoped to turn into a permanent movement. It may still exist in some form, actually.  Other than the election of Jesse Ventura as governor of Minnesota in 1998, they don’t appear to have accomplished anything.

So, there’s nothing in history to show us that there’s anything to gain by attempting a third-party presidential run. Such an attempt most probably would use up a lot of money and energy and accomplish nothing.  Plus, I must gently suggest that if Sanders couldn’t win enough votes to secure the nomination — however that happened — he’s not exactly a sure thing in the general, much as we might wish otherwise.

Note that Bernie Sanders himself would probably argue that he didn’t run because he wanted to be President, but because he wanted to push the country Left. Eyes on the real prize, folks.

Another option is to build a party from the ground up that might someday displace one of the other two. That’s happened once before, when the Republican Party stepped into the niche vacated by the Whigs in the 1850s. Given the current state of affairs it’s not impossible that something like that could happen again, so I wouldn’t put that option completely off the table. But it’s a long shot.

And the other option is to keep organizing and supporting progressive candidates running as Democrats, and eventually taking over the party. This is possible. But it won’t happen overnight.

However, I do hope a sustained organization can come out of this election, because I think there will be much political upheaval in the next few years that might offer opportunities if we are ready. And please note that I’m not talking about doing anything violent. But if the Democrats continue to be weakened by their internal issues and stubborn resistance to acknowledging the will of the people, opportunity might arise.

Having said all that, I know some will want to ignore me and will prepare all kinds of charts and data to show that Bernie really could win the general election as an independent candidate.  If you live long enough, eventually you learn that not everything you want to believe really is true.

Re-explaining Why the Hillary Victory Fund Is an Issue

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It appears, from comments here and on Facebook, that I failed utterly to explain my concerns about the Hillary Victory Fund yesterday. So I’m making another attempt.

The Hillary Victory Fund is a joint fundraising effort set up with the Clinton campaign, the Democratic National Committee and the Democratic parties of 33 states.  It’s essentially a PAC. Individual donors can give up to $356,100 per year, and since this was set up in 2015 some have given this maximum for two years, for a total of $712,200. Of course, a lot of donations are smaller.

All the money raised by the HVF goes to the Clinton campaign first. I had previously read that she gets to keep the first $2700 from each individual per year, or $5400 for contributions made in 2015 and 2016. But I just read that is for the primary only; she can keep another $2700 per each individual contributor for the general election fund.

Since the money goes to her first, she can always keep the maximum amount allowable. For example, if the donation is $2700 she keeps all of it. This money can be treated as individual donations, with no strings attached; the Clinton campaign can do whatever it wants with it. And this is completely legal. We can quibble about whether it is ethical, considering the fund is being touted as some altruistic effort to raise money for down-ticket Democrats. But let us put that aside for now; it’s not part of the newer allegations.

What Clinton cannot keep goes to the DNC, where it is allocated by a joint committee that includes Clinton campaign staff. The DNC keeps $33,400 of each individual donation per year, which is the biggest portion. That’s where the spending issues get murky. I’ll come back to this in a bit.

And then the portion the DNC cannot keep goes to the state Democratic parties in chunks of $10,000. It appears that by then what’s left over amounts to crumbs. Again, this is legal, but it burns me whenever somebody chirps about all the millions of dollars Clinton is raising “for down ticket Democrats.” The largest portion of the money stops with the joint committee at the DNC.

There are also huge ethical questions about whether this is, in effect, turning these state Democratic party organizations into arms of the Clinton campaign committee. As long as she’s in the race, the crumbs keep coming. This would be a huge incentive for them to “help” Clinton win primaries and for their superdelegates to remain loyal to Clinton, corrupting the primary process. Similar kinds of joint fundraising operations have been set up before, but not until after a candidate had secured the nomination. This is the part about the fund I’ve complained about before. It’s legal, yes, but it still stinks.

However, the new allegations are about something else.

Let us go back to the DNC and the joint committee allocating the funds passed on to them by the Clinton campaign. Here is where the new allegations come in. The joint committee, as I’ve said in earlier posts, includes Clinton campaign staff. Its treasurer is Clinton’s chief operating officer. The joint committee also includes DNC officials, I assume, who have reason to be loyal to Clinton because the HVF saved their financial asses and hauled the DNC out of the red last year.

The money passed on to the joint committee by the Clinton campaign is not supposed to be used by the Clinton campaign any way it wants. There are legal strings attached. Are we all clear on that?

The new allegation is that this money being allocated by the joint committee is mostly being spent in ways that help the Clinton campaign, either primarily or exclusively. This is where the legal issue gets sticky. Instead of keeping a wall between Clinton money and DNC money, which I believe is what the law calls for, it appears the money is being treated as something fungible that is still mostly being spent according to the wishes of the Clinton campaign.

This takes me back to what I wrote yesterday that nobody seemed to get. The Sanders campaign said,

The financial disclosure reports on file with the Federal Election Commission indicate that the joint committee invested millions in low-dollar, online fundraising and advertising that solely benefits the Clinton campaign. The Sanders campaign “is particularly concerned that these extremely large-dollar individual contributions have been used by the Hillary Victory Fund to pay for more than $7.8 million in direct mail efforts and over $8.6 million in online advertising” according to the letter to the DNC. Both outlays benefit the Clinton presidential campaign “by generating low-dollar contributions that flow only to HFA [Hillary for America] rather than to the DNC or any of the participating state party committees.”

This seems to me a legitimate beef, yet no one in media is taking it seriously. There was a segment on Rachel Maddow in which Maddow and Andrea Mitchell sat around and talked about what a mistake it was for the Sanders campaign to make an accusation like that, since the Hillary Victory Fund is perfectly legal, and Mitchell said she had talked to the DNC, which had told her nothing was amiss.

Yes, of course the DNC would say that. Duh.

Steve Benen also wrote a post at the Maddow Blog that is being widely linked to as a rebuttal of the Sanders charges. But Benen doesn’t seem to me to address what the charges actually are.

Now, I would be the first person to confess I don’t have a head for numbers. But as I wrote yesterday, this Politico article seemed alarming:

Yet, during the first three months of the year, the $2 million transferred by the Hillary Victory Fund to various state party committees paled in comparison to the $9.5 million it transferred to Clinton’s campaign committee or the $3.5 million it transferred to the DNC.

Is this saying that the joint committee is just donating the money back to the Clinton campaign?

And the Hillary Victory Fund [meaning the joint committee] also spent $6.7 million on online ads that mostly looked like Clinton campaign ads, as well as $5.5 million on direct marketing. Both expenses seem intended at least in part to help Clinton build a small donor base, an area in which Sanders has far outpaced her.

Knowing Clinton, she probably does have some team of lawyers keeping an eye on this to be sure there’s at least a fig leaf of legality stuck to this operation. But does this not seem questionable?

Update: You can click on this link to see the list of participating states and the amount of money each has received as of the end of March. As you can see, the states are getting peanuts compared to what the Hillary Victory Fund has taken in.

 

Following the Hillary Victory Fund Money

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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.

A lawyer for the Sanders campaign has formally complained to the DNC about the Hillary Victory Fund and possible violations of campaign finance law. Most news outlets are pooh-poohing this as a stunt. Let’s take a look.

This is what the Sanders campaign is complaining about:

Unlike Clinton’s presidential campaign committee, Hillary for America, the joint committee may accept large donations of up to $356,100. The first $2,700 of this amount is eligible for transfer to the Clinton campaign, $33,400 can be transferred to the DNC, with any remaining amount, up to $10,000, to each participating state party. According to public disclosure reports, however, the joint Clinton-DNC fund, Hillary Victory Fund (HVF), appears to operate in a way that skirts legal limits on federal campaign donations and primarily benefits the Clinton presidential campaign.

The financial disclosure reports on file with the Federal Election Commission indicate that the joint committee invested millions in low-dollar, online fundraising and advertising that solely benefits the Clinton campaign. The Sanders campaign “is particularly concerned that these extremely large-dollar individual contributions have been used by the Hillary Victory Fund to pay for more than $7.8 million in direct mail efforts and over $8.6 million in online advertising” according to the letter to the DNC. Both outlays benefit the Clinton presidential campaign “by generating low-dollar contributions that flow only to HFA [Hillary for America] rather than to the DNC or any of the participating state party committees.”

The questionable outlays “have grown to staggering magnitudes” and “can no longer be ignored,” Deutsch added.

True? This was in Politico last week:

The fund comprises Clinton’s presidential campaign committee, as well as the Democratic National Committee and 32 state party committees. As a result, it can accept checks as large as $358,000 per person — a total determined by the maximum donation to each of its component committees ($5,400 to the Clinton campaign, $33,400 to the DNC and $10,000 to each of the state parties).

…

Yet, during the first three months of the year, the $2 million transferred by the Hillary Victory Fund to various state party committees paled in comparison to the $9.5 million it transferred to Clinton’s campaign committee or the $3.5 million it transferred to the DNC.

Numbers baffle me easily. But if the Clinton campaign can only take the first $2,700 off the top of each donation (and cannot exceed $2,700 from one person in a given year), and the rest of these large donations go to the DNC and the states, how can the Clinton campaign end up with the lion’s share of the Hillary Victory Fund money?

And the Hillary Victory Fund also spent $6.7 million on online ads that mostly looked like Clinton campaign ads, as well as $5.5 million on direct marketing. Both expenses seem intended at least in part to help Clinton build a small donor base, an area in which Sanders has far outpaced her.

Keep in mind that the Victory Fund is managed by Clinton campaign staff, and its treasurer is Clinton’s chief operating officer, according to this Washington Post story from last February.

With the caveat that I’m not an election law attorney — it’s my understanding that the Clinton campaign can only use the first $2,700 of any donation any way it wants. How is it that so much of this money is being spent in ways that appear to benefit only the Clinton campaign? And keep in mind that Hillary’s followers praise her effusively for raising money for “down ticket Democrats.”  A lot of them were outraged today that anyone would question what’s going on with this money.

And why isn’t news media at least taking this seriously?

I Understand the Intense Loyalty to Hillary Clinton. Really, I Do. But I Can’t Share It.

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I believe we all pretty much choose our candidates because of murky things lurking in our subconscious, and we come up with the talking points later.  (See “The Emotional Dog and the Rational Tail.”) Sometimes the distance between the murky things and the talking points is short, and sometimes it is long and convoluted. But few of us form opinions based on reason first.

Looking at followers of the two Democratic candidates, I can see all kinds of murky things leading them around. Certainly some Sanders supporters just plain don’t like Hillary Clinton and see Sanders as the anti-Hillary. That’s not true of all of them, though. Some of us really do see Sanders as a means to push American politics leftward. (Of course, we’d had the same hope with Barack Obama. While there is much about the man I admire, and much that he accomplished,  the overall results were less than satisfying.)

So what murky things are going on with the Clintonistas? They aren’t all alike, of course, but here’s my generalized analysis:

Let’s go back to 1992. With the exception of the one-term Jimmy Carter Administration, we’d had Republican presidents since 1969. (And while I genuinely admire Carter as a human being, he fell short in many ways as a President. His economic policies in particular were like a prelude to Reaganism.)

So it had been a frustrating 20 plus years for Democratic presidential politics. Electing a strong Democratic president seemed like an impossible dream. And then along came the Clintons. In the political climate of a rising conservative movement that was dominating all political discourse, the Clintons found a way to finesse the Right and seize the moment while playing on their turf. It was brilliantly done, even though they had to throw a lot of liberal values under the bus to do it (see: Sister Souljah).

And then we had the eight solid years of witch-hunts and an unhinged Right trying to take down the Clintons by any means necessary. They were particularly vicious toward Hillary Clinton. She was a strong, assertive, feminist, not-traditional woman, and that made lots of murky things in the Right-wing id sit up and start screaming.

I believe were it not for Big Bill’s relationship with Monica L., the Right would have come up completely empty; well, empty of anything indictable. Most of the allegations against the Clintons were nonsense. For those of us who identified as Democrats, it was like watching our champions being perpetually hounded by a pack of rabid hyenas.

Also in the later 1990s, the economy was pretty darn good (not as good as the 1960s, but for most people way better than the 1970s and 1980s). Those who were not doing so well (see Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994; welfare reform) were invisible to a lot of us, I regret to say.

The Clintons left the White House in 2001 and the “mostly pretty darn good 1990s were it not for Clinton derangement syndrome” gave way to the Dubya years. The Clinton Administration took on a golden haze of paradise lost in comparison.

Reflecting on that bit of recent history, I can fully appreciate why the Clintons command a loyal following among so many people who strongly identify as Democrats. And I also appreciate why loyalty to Hillary Clinton is especially strong among middle-age and older women.  We older ladies can identify with her.  We’ve all been held back and harassed by various types of rabid hyenas.

So what’s the problem? Why am I Not With Her? In no particular order:

It’s not the 1990s any more. Movement conservatism and the Reagan Revolution have run their course. The Right probably hasn’t been in this much chaos since the Franklin Roosevelt Administration. We don’t have to play on their turf any more, and it’s time we stopped. But I see no indication that Hillary Clinton intends to pivot away from the old triangulation game.

C’mon, folks, say it loud — we’re lefties and we’re proud.  We have a rare opportunity to actually stake a claim that America is not a center Right nation. In four or eight years, the Right might very well be reorganized and on the upswing again.

If you really care about the future of the Democratic Party, please, don’t vote for Hillary Clinton. She’ll hold the party back.

Neoliberalism needs to go.  Bill and Hillary Clinton are the quintessential American centrist neoliberals. American centrist neoliberaism isn’t as far Right as the European neoliberalism George Monbiot complains about. Call it soft neoliberalism. But it’s still neoliberalism, and it still feeds into income inequality.

There are a lot of different definitions of neoliberalism, but ultimately it’s about sacrificing the standard of living of working-class men and women for the sake of global corporate profits. For more on this, please read: “How Neoliberal is Hillary Clinton?” And see especially Naomi Klein, “The Problem With Hillary Clinton Isn’t Just Her Corporate Cash. It’s Her Corporate Worldview.”

Hillary Clinton is a hawk. I realize now I wasn’t paying enough attention to her while she was Secretary of State. I might quibble at calling her a “neocon” (others do not) but she’s definitely a hawk.  More wars we don’t need. See Michael Crowley, “Hillary Clinton’s Unapologetically Hawkish Record Faces 2016 Test.”

On Israel especially, Clinton is stuck in the “no daylight between the U.S. and Netanyahu” mode, while Sanders offers a completely different perspective. See Roger Cohen, “Bernie’s Israel Heresy.”

She’s on the wrong side of climate change. Hillary Clinton may be hard on the Palestinians in Gaza, but she’s soft on fracking. Clinton wants to push incremental baby steps to save the planet, and it’s too late for that. Again, Sanders wants to push harder for renewable resources and energy.

On some issues, notably women’s reproductive rights, I trust Clinton. I also trust Sanders. I think they’re both on the same page there. Sanders’s big weakness is gun control, although he’s evolved in the right direction. But on many big issues (see above) I do not like Clinton’s record or positions. I am much more in sync with Sanders’s positions.  So, I’m voting for Sanders. I realize he’s a long shot, but he’s got my support.

History Repeating Itself

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Yesterday Amanda Marcotte published an article at Salon titled Just like a Bernie Bro, Sanders bullies Clinton: Brooklyn debate confirms Sanders campaign is sticking by sexist “ambition witch” stereotype. As the title suggests, the article is something of a primal scream of outrage at the way the Vermont Senator’s disrespect for Secretary Clinton in their recent debate in Brooklyn just dripped with sexism, although somehow Marcotte was unable to provide a persuasive example.

One example she gave of something the Senator actually said was,

“Does Secretary Clinton have the experience and intelligence to be president? Of course she does,” Sanders replied when asked about it. “But I do question her judgment.”

It wasn’t clear to me why that was sexist, but someone explained in the comments:

What this article is talking about is less about Hillary Clinton and more about historical attitudes and the use of certain phrases to disqualify women from the political sphere. Specifically, the concern and the underscoring of whether or not a candidate has the temperament and judgement. The argument was deployed against women during the suffrage movement…women do not have the temperament or judgement  to vote. It is a phrase that has been employed against women running for governorships, the House, and the Senate.

To which I responded,

OK, so we can’t use the “j” word in regard to Secretary Clinton, because the “j” word is sexist. But what if her j… I mean, her, um, you know, that thing where you make decisions about stuff that has consequences … what if she’s really bad at that thing? I mean Libya, come on. And Honduras. And the Iraq vote, of course. I could go on. But we’re not allowed to say anything about this if we use the “j” word. So how about … perspicacity? There’s a good word. Her record tells us that Clinton falls really short in the perspicacity department. Can we say that?

I didn’t get an answer. Oh, well.

What Marcotte wrote in this article turns the ideals of second-wave feminism on their head. Back then we knew that we could not demand equal opportunity and gentler treatment at the same time.  Sanders is not criticizing Clinton for her gender, but for her record. Marcotte seems to be saying that because Clinton is a woman, aggressive challenges of her record are out of bounds. Um, no.

But we’ve been through this before. I give you Michelle Goldberg, New Republic, June 25, 2008, 3 A.M. for Feminism.

Hillary Clinton has lost the nomination, but some of her most ardent female backers seem unwilling to accept it. A strange narrative has developed, abetted by Clinton and some of the mainstream feminist organizations. In it, the will of the voters was thwarted by chauvinistic party leaders in concert with a servile media, and Obama’s victory represents a repeat of George W. Bush’s in 2000. It’s a story in which Obama becomes every arrogant young man who has ever edged out a more deserving middle-aged woman, and Clinton, hanging on until the bitter end, is not a spoiler but a feminist martyr.

This conviction, that sexism cost Clinton the nomination, is likely to be one of the more toxic legacies of this primary season. It is leaving her supporters feeling not just disappointed but victimized, many convinced that Obama’s win is illegitimate. Taylor Marsh, a blogger and radio host whose website has become a hub for Clinton fans, says she gets hundreds of e-mails from angry Democrats pledging not to vote for Obama. She’s started running posts from such readers under the headline DEMOCRATIC STORM WARNINGS. “I’m not saying that this is a huge voting bloc,” she says. “I’m just saying that there is a huge amount of talk and I’m convinced it’s a reality that needs to be addressed.”

Goldberg reviewed the 2008 and noted that the notion that Clinton was losing because of sexism became more and more entrenched.

By the spring, the Clinton campaign and the cause of women’s rights were joined in the minds of many. Second-wave activists chided Obama-supporting women for not getting on board and began interpreting any attack on Clinton as a slight against their gender. The seating of delegates from Michigan and Florida started to seem like a feminist cause célèbre.

The movement coalesced in mid-May, when members of Clinton’s finance committee, including Susie Tompkins Buell, sometimes described as one of Clinton’s closest friends, and Allida Black, editor of the Eleanor Roosevelt Papers at George Washington University, formed WomenCount PAC. The group ran full-page advertisements in The New York Times, USA Today, and other newspapers addressing the country on behalf of “the women of this nation.” The ads proclaimed, rather grandly, “Hillary’s voice is OUR voice, and she’s speaking for all us.” Their story was featured on the “Today” show, “Good Morning America,” CNN, and Fox, and they joined other volunteers in organizing the rally at the DNC.

Meanwhile, Clinton, who’d previously avoided presenting herself as the woman’s candidate, brought gender to the forefront of her campaign as never before. On May 19, in a Washington Post interview, she spoke out for the first time about the sexism she’s faced throughout the race, calling it “deeply offensive to millions of women.” The press, she suggested, had failed to decry “incredible vitriol that has been engendered by the comments by people who are nothing but misogynists.” She began injecting feminist and civil rights language into her arguments for seating the Michigan and Florida delegates. Piously invoking Seneca Falls and Selma in a May 21 speech, she pledged to “carry on this legacy and ensure that in our nominating process every voice is heard and every single vote is counted.”

More and more, she was tying her campaign to the grand narrative of women’s emancipation. “I am in this race for all the women in their nineties who’ve told me they were born before women could vote, and they want to live to see a woman in the White House,” she wrote in a letter to superdelegates on May 28. “For all the women who are energized for the first time, and voting for the first time. For the little girls–and little boys–whose parents lift them onto their shoulders at our rallies, and whisper in their ears, ‘See, you can be anything you want to be.’ ”

Mainstream feminist organizations joined calls to seat the two states, with leaders of NOW and the Feminist Majority Foundation participating in the rally at the DNC. Some have suggested that the DNC’s reluctance was in itself a sign of covert sexism. “There’s a strong feeling that this would have been handled differently if Hillary Clinton hadn’t won [those] states,” says Kim Gandy, president of NOW.

Except Clinton really didn’t win the Florida and Michigan delegates. If you don’t remember that sorry episode, click here, then come back.

Of course, Clinton has encountered straight-up misogyny–lots of it. At the same time, anger at obvious instances of sexism has expanded to encompass every setback she’s faced, every jab thrown her way–the cut and thrust of any normal campaign. Several of her feminist defenders, for example, interpreted calls for Clinton to drop out, lest she cause a party rift, as expressions of condescending gender bias. “The first woman ever to win a presidential primary is supposed to stop competing, to curtsy and exit stage right,” Ellen Malcolm, founder and president of Emily’s List, wrote in The Washington Post on May 10. But that wasn’t anti-woman or even anti-Clinton; it was just Democratic politics. Similar worries were aired about Edward Kennedy in 1980–a Christian Science Monitor story claimed his “to-the-bitter-end candidacy already may be irreparably splitting the Democratic Party”–and about Jerry Brown in 1992, once Bill Clinton came near a mathematical lock on the nomination.

We’ve reached that stage now, even though it’s earlier in the campaign and even though Clinton is still favored to win. Every criticism of her is interpreted as sexism.

But let us go back to 2008. Obama wins the Dem nomination; John McCain wins the GOP nomination. And he picks for his veep — Sarah Palin. And it wasn’t long before every criticism of Palin was being called sexist by the Right.  And given the example of Clinton, I don’t really blame them. It’s hard to tell what’s sexist and what isn’t with those two. I wrote in August 2008,

There’s a lot of talk about what we can and cannot say about Sarah Palin. There are some who seem to think any criticism at all of Palin amounts to sexism, an attitude that strikes me as sexist. It says that women can’t be taken seriously in the political world and treated the same way men are treated. It’s like the high school coach who puts girls on the boy’s varsity team not because he thinks they are good players, but because he thinks the opposing team will hesitate to rough them up. (Which, come to think of it, might explain McCain’s choice of Palin.) …

… There’s a difference between criticizing people professionally and criticizing them personally. Criticizing Palin’s stands on issues, yes. Discussing her record as a mayor and a governor, yes. Pointing out her lack of experience, yes. Ridicule of her appearance, family or personal lifestyle choices, no. I hope we’re clear.

It’s unfortunately the case that a lot of numbskulls can’t express themselves without dragging in ridicule of appearance, etc., and I see that all over social media.  On all sides. No group can claim the moral high ground in this.

I also wrote in 2008,

I said a few weeks ago that if second-wave feminism weren’t already dead, Hillary Clinton’s campaign would have killed it. And may I say it was exactly this sort of self-absorbed whining that strangled feminism lo those many years ago.

Yes, Hillary Clinton got hit by a lot of really ugly sexism, but it wasn’t why she lost the nomination. If anything, the sympathy vote was her biggest asset. And it would be really great if people could just address the sexism issue without wrapping themselves in the gloriously self-indulgent mantle of victimhood. I could also do without the self-pity, the score-settling, and the denial of Clinton’s own bad behavior during the primaries. Thanks much.

I also frequently expressed amazement that these self-absorbed feminists were so completely oblivious to the treatment Barack Obama was receiving as the first potentially viable black presidential candidate.

Now, back to 2016. The social media nasty swarm has been all over itself ridiculing Sanders’s speaking at the Vatican. Jeffrey Feldman wrote,

So, there’s that. I can’t say I picked up on that, but I’m often oblivious to things. Unfortunately I don’t think it would help Bernie to wallow in victimhood as Clinton and her followers are doing.

Of course, Clinton didn’t lose in 2008 because of sexism; she lost because she was a less compelling candidate than Barack Obama. I wrote in June 2008,

As a generic choice I don’t much care whether the First President Who Is Not a White Man turns out to be a black man or a white woman, or for that matter a woman of color were one running this year. When I look at senators Clinton and Obama, my questions are which one of these two gets it? Which one sees the possibility of creating a new political culture friendly to progressivism? Which one is more likely to walk through that door?

And the answer I come up with is Obama. I cannot say whether he will succeed. He is human and imperfect, not political Jesus. But his words and background and the way he has run his campaign tell me he sees the opportunity that I see and will, at least, try.

However, I don’t believe Senator Clinton sees the opportunity. My belief is based in part on her performance in the Senate, which on the whole has been disappointing, and on the way she has run her campaign, which has been the same old “finesse (but don’t challenge) the Right and divide the Left” politics. All her formidable political skills mean nothing if she doesn’t see that open door.

Yes, electing Hillary Clinton would make a grand statement for feminism. But then we’d sweep up the popped balloons and confetti and go back to Old Politics Business as Usual. And nothing substantive would change. Maybe I’m wrong, but that’s how I see it.

That’s still how I see it. And I think that’s how a lot of other people saw it, and that’s why she lost. Gender had nothing to do with it.

And this year? Clinton probably will win it this time. But it’s interesting that Taylor Marsh, who for a time in 2008 was seeing anti-Clinton sexism in every shadow, this year is calling Clinton “the George H.W. Bush of 2016.”

Winning and the Eye of the Beholder

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I couldn’t bring myself to watch last night’s Democratic debate, because Wolf Blitzer. I had little hope it would be anything but a disaster.  I mostly followed it on the Guardian live blog, which at least was witty. Also the Brits tend to be a little more objective about our colonial politics. What I read there suggested that both candidates scored points but that Sanders came off a bit better.

Alan Rappeport of The New York Times called the contest a draw, which means Hillary must’ve screwed up somehow.  On the other hand, Josh Marshall’s commentary clearly favored Clinton over Sanders.

Dylan Matthews at Vox called the debate a big win for Sanders.

The whole debate saw Clinton on defense and Sanders on offense. When she did attack, he deflected easily and went back to landing punches.

In terms of topics, the focus was consistently on economic justice, and when it wasn’t, Sanders successfully spun it in his favor. Better than that, he spun it such that his standard economic attack lines still applied. He didn’t just accuse Clinton of being weak on climate change: he accused her of being weak because she’s in hock to billionaires and corporations, a natural extension of his existing narrative.

On Clinton he wrote,

There was a particularly bleak moment in the closing statements, after Sanders concluded, as the audience chanted, “Bernie! Bernie! Bernie!” for a good 15 seconds as Clinton stood quiet, lightly smirking, waiting to speak. Here she is, in a state that elected her to the Senate twice, and she’s very much not on her home turf. The crowd is definitely not with her. And she’s on defense.

Most disturbingly, she was on defense even on issues where she should be dominating. The wrap on Sanders is that he can’t cover issues outside of base economic matters. But he got the better of her on mass incarceration, on Israel, on climate change. Her previous strategy of pivoting to areas where Sanders is weaker doesn’t appear to work anymore.

Isaac Chotiner at Slate:

During CNN’s Democratic debate on Thursday night, while the candidates ricocheted between discussions of global warming as the primary threat to America and whether to raise the minimum wage to $12 or to $15, it was hard not to feel that Sanders had won a battle almost as large as the race to be the 2016 nominee.

“I want white people to recognize that there is systemic racism,” Clinton stated Thursday night in one of many statements that would cause a time-traveler from the 1990s to stare with open-mouthed astonishment. Indeed, the debate functioned as a fascinating window into Democratic politics in 2016. Even a mere eight years ago, Obama and Clinton often struggled to outflank each other on the right. (Think of the skirmishes over the individual mandate.) But on nearly every domestic issue, both candidates went left, strongly so, and from health care to college tuition to Social Security, Clinton played on Sanders’ turf. Even her critiques of Sanders’ spending focused not on the deficit but on Sanders’ general sloppiness with numbers.

More critically,

The irony of his campaign is that the septuagenarian Sanders is probably four or eight years ahead of his time, rather than behind it. In some ways Sanders was lucky in his opponent. He wound up getting paired against someone who happens to be on the wrong end of the prevailing trends in the party—hawkish; friendly to Wall Street; an almost perfect embodiment of that otherwise nebulous term, the establishment.

Jack Mirkinson at Salon wrote that Sanders was wobbly at first but got better as the debate  wore on:

Eventually, though, Sanders hit on a strategy that worked over and over again: He started acting like a hectoring journalist, repeatedly pointing out Clinton’s garbled answers on issues ranging from the minimum wage—where she got completely tied up in knots about whether or not she supported the Fight for $15 movement—to Social Security to climate change.

The most extraordinary part of the night, however, came when the debate shifted to a discussion about Israel and Palestine. This is usually a dispute-free zone in American politics: everyone, on both sides of the aisle, fights about who can pledge fealty to Israel more fervently. Sanders, though, has suddenly morphed from a candidate who seemed not to want to be caught dead talking about the issue to one who actually managed to win an exchange about it in a debate in New York City—and to win it from Clinton’s left. He asked Clinton, over and over again, why she hadn’t mentioned Palestinians during a recent speech before AIPAC. He said that Palestinians should be treated with dignity and respect. He called Israel’s invasion of Gaza in 2014 “disproportionate.” Clinton gave perhaps her most passionately hawkish replies of the night in response to all of this.

Clinton maintains a substantial lead in New York, however, and whether this debate will change anything is questionable. Still, one can hope. New York’s primary is closed to all but registered Democrats, which favors Clinton. However, there’s no early voting here, which may favor Sanders.

Misadventures in Media

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Charles Pierce on John Kasich’s misadventures in New York:

On behalf of every single Christian all the way back to James The Just, I would like to apologize to our Jewish brothers and sisters on behalf of John Kasich, who knows not what he does, and in a big way, too.

After touring a matzo bakery and a Jewish bookstore in Brooklyn on Tuesday, Kasich delivered a speech on the sidewalk about the importance of Passover, in which Israelites put lambs blood on their door posts as a signal that the Angel of Death should pass over their homes. “It’s a wonderful, wonderful holiday for our friends in the Jewish community—the Passover. The great link between the blood that was put above the lamp posts…The blood of the lamb, because Jesus Christ is known as the lamb of God. It’s his blood, we believe…”

Lamp posts? There are no lamp posts in the Passover story. There weren’t even lamp posts in The Ten Commandments. There were door posts and lintels, the latter of which Kasich may believe is something you put in soup.

The primary is Tuesday, so we don’t have votes yet. But I suspect Kasich would have done better to not have come to New York at all.

This’ll cheer you up — Rush Limbaugh is, finally, about to be dumped off the gravy train. And his downfall is a classic tale of capitalism eating itself.

Limbaugh’s paychecks come from iHeartMedia, a company formerly known as Clear Channel Communications. Back in 2008, when Limbaugh was riding high, Clear Channel Communications gave Limbaugh an eight-year contract worth $400,000. By the following year, already Clear Channel was struggling under the weight of the contract, laying off thousands of employees.

On top of that Clear Channel was taken over by Bain Capital in a leveraged buyout deal. Yes, children, our dear Mittens’s old outfit.

As a result, Clear Channel/iHeartMedia has been sinking under an unmanageable amount of debt.

How bad was the deal? Monumentally bad:

In 2007, the company, then called Clear Channel, reported a net income of $939 million. In the years since the LBO, the company has reported losses of between $220 million and $4 billion per year. For 2015, it reported a loss of $738 million.

Now Limbaugh’s contract is up, and even if iHeartMedia wanted to renew it, it cannot.

Is this a company that can continue to fill wheelbarrows full of cash and pay Limbaugh $38 million annually, and bless him with another $100 million signing bonus? No way.

In fact, iHeartMedia’s too busy putting out other raging fires right now — like trying to stay solvent.

What sparked the sudden specter of bankruptcy was an allegedly deceptive move made by iHeartMedia: Shifting money from one division of the business to another instead of paying debts owed to creditors.

The creditors went to court and sued. They “believe the stock transfer constitutes a default and might call their debt within 60 days,” Billboard reported. iHeartMedia sought an emergency injunction, stressing that if creditors won their “default” claim, the dominoes would instantly fall and iHeartMedia would face an avalanche of bond defaults totaling $15 billion to a long line of creditors. Those are payments the company simply cannot make, which would mean bankruptcy for iHeartMedia.

We weep and we mourn. Meanwhile, Rush’s ratings are way down and his demographics get older and deader. It’s not impossible that some other media company will pick him up. It is impossible he’s going to be paid in the manner to which he is accustomed.

Finally, here’s a fun little story about some climate change deniers who got onto Bill Nye the Science Guy’s Facebook page to make disparaging remarks about NASA data. Lo and behold, NASA got into the act and corrected the deniers. Reminds me of the Marshall McLuhan scene in Annie Hall.