DES MOINES — Eight years ago this month, then-Senator Barack Obama began his evolution from political phenom to presidential contender with his first-ever trip to New Hampshire, a visit that attracted 2,500 voters, 150 journalists and a comparison by the state’s governor of Mr. Obama to the Rolling Stones.
Last week, in the side room of Java Joe’s coffee shop here, the liberal group MoveOn.org took the first step to propel Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, on a similar path, holding a rally to encourage her to get into the 2016 race.
Yet there were only about 75 people present, some of them local political professionals engaging in a bit of reconnaissance and recreation, and just a handful of reporters. The highest-ranking official there was the Iowa Senate president, who carefully avoided stating her support for a Warren candidacy.
Not that there is such a thing: Ms. Warren herself was not here, and she has repeatedly stated in public that she is not running for president. In private, according to several Democrats who have talked with her, Ms. Warren, 65, has also indicated that she would not challenge Hillary Rodham Clinton.Martin goes on to depict the potent force, juggernaut-like, of Hillary's candidacy:
A Des Moines Register-Bloomberg poll in October showed Mrs. Clinton leading Ms. Warren by 43 percentage points. In New Hampshire, where Mrs. Clinton led Mr. Obama in a Granite State Poll at the outset of the 2008 race by 14 points, she was beating Ms. Warren by 49 points last month in a Bloomberg-Saint Anselm College survey.
“There is only a very small segment of the party this time around that’s looking for an alternative,” said Jim Demers, a New Hampshire Democrat who backed Mr. Obama in 2008 and is now supporting Mrs. Clinton.The bold red quote above by Jim Demers is absurd. It is not a "very small segment of the party" that does not want Hillary; it is the activist base, the ones who volunteer to knock on doors and who pay attention to current events. As I see it, Elizabeth Warren is the only politician who has enough legitimacy on issues of Main Street vs, Wall Street to keep enough of the Obama coalition -- Latinos, blacks, youth, women -- engaged and on the reservation to secure a presidential victory for the Dems in 2016. Democrat strategists have said they plan to win by having Hillary turn out the Obama coalition.
It is possible that Hillary Clinton could muddle through if the GOP nominates Scott Walker, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. But at this point I think Jeb Bush, if he can weather the storm of the Republican primaries, beats Hillary in a general election. At this point I won't even rule out the possibility that Mitt Romney could triumph over Hillary.
To get a sense of just how bad things are -- for both parties -- a must-read article is "Americans Are Sick to Death of Both Parties: Why Our Politics Is in Worse Shape Than We Thought" by academics Walter Dean Burnham and Thomas Ferguson. Burnham and Ferguson describe a Democratic Party in denial of how historic -- historically poor -- its performance was in the 2014 midterms:
[O]ur cautious guess is that turnout in this year’s Congressional races will finally weigh in at around 36 percent of the potential electorate that had legal rights to cast a ballot.
That’s a shocking statistic. Put aside for a moment all talk of 1942 and absolute levels of turnout. Instead focus on changes in turnout between presidential elections and the next off-year election. Across the whole sweep of American history, the momentous dimensions of what has just happened stand out in bold relief. The drop off in voting turnout from the presidential election of 2012 to 2014 is the second largest of all time – 24 percentage points. Only 1942’s decline from 1940 was bigger – 29 percentage points. But then there was an excuse. Millions of Americans were hurriedly fanning out across the globe to wage total war. (World War I showed a similar pattern – turnout in the off year elections of 1918 fell 22 points from 1916’s presidential race, marking the fourth largest decline ever. Which leads naturally to the question of the third largest. Read on.)
Now cast a glance at the actual levels to which turnout in many states sank this year. In the last generation, turnouts in the many formerly industrialized states in the Northeast, the Mid-Atlantic region, and parts of the Midwest have bounced around, with one or another state sometimes touching historic lows in a particular election. But this year the decline is broad and to levels that boggle the mind – rates of voting that recall the earliest days of the 19th century, before the Jacksonian Revolution swept away property suffrage and other devices that held down turnout. Turnout in Ohio, for example, fell to 34 percent — a level the state last touched in 1814, when political parties on a modern model did not exist and it had just recently entered the Union. New York trumped even this: turnout in the Empire State plunged to 30 percent, almost back to where it was in 1798, when property suffrage laws disenfranchised some 40 percent of the citizenry. New Jersey managed a little better: turnout fell to 31 percent, back to levels of the 1820s. Delaware turnout fell to 35 percent, well below some elections of the 1790s. In the west, by contrast, turnout declined to levels almost without precedent: California’s 33 percent turnout appears to be the lowest recorded since the state entered the union in 1850. Nevada also hit a record low (28 percent), as did Utah at 26 percent (for elections to the House).We are witnessing levels of voter participation that go back two-hundred years to the days when suffrage was synonymous with property ownership. This is a collapse the size of which is truly sublime.
And what is the Democratic Party -- the party nominally committed to the "little guy," to working men and women -- doing about this crisis of legitimacy? They are telling us to line up behind Hillary Clinton, the spouse of the man who brought us NATO expansion and the war against Yugoslavia as well as the repeal of the Glass-Steagall.
This will not end well. People can no longer stomach the lies. Voters made their way to the polls in two consecutive presidential elections, giving Obama huge margins of victory in both 2008 and 2012, and for what? The benefits of the economic recovery, what of it there is, have all gone to the wealthy. Unions and pensions are less secure. We do have a new market-based system of health insurance that can count the expansion of Medicaid as an achievement. But we also have a new iteration of the Cold War and war in Iraq and Syria, both of which are largely due to the U.S. and its allies in the Gulf Cooperation Council.
A recent example of an indigestible lie: USG has cleared the way for the delivery of military helicopters to Egypt, helicopters that have been put on hold since the Egyptian military ousted the elected president Mohamed Morsi in a coup the summer of 2013. Morsi is in prison along with more than 10,000 imprisoned this year alone. Egypt is a massive police state. Yet neither the USG nor Congress will sanction the generals of Egypt and Thailand like it has sanctioned Venezuela and Russia.
And right on cue there is evidence of the U.S. police state kicking back against the Black Lives Matter protest movement by waving the bloody tunics of two police officers murdered in their squad car this past Saturday in Brooklyn. As Liz Robbins and Nikita Stewart report in "At Demonstrations, a Change in Tone After Officers Are Killed": "After the killings on Saturday, the protest motto of 'Black Lives Matter' was joined by a chorus of 'Blue Lives Matter' on social media, in support of officers."
This was all predictable. As soon as police died in the line of duty their deaths would be used as a political cudgel to beat down the Black Lives Matter movement, which has been maintaining its momentum. There are Black Lives Matter actions all over the country all the time. The precedent here is when CIA agent Richard Welch was murdered in Greece at the height of the Church Committee revelations of national security state lawlessness, his death was used to kill off calls for sunlighting the Deep State.
The police are going to be called on in short order to maintain control as the political parties continue to lose the allegiance of the people.
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