Minnesota on My Mind

In his afternoon Water Cooler Lambert Strether devotes three paragraphs, the first of which can be found below, to liberal Minnesota's perplexing status as a tossup battleground state:

UPDATE Trump (R)(2): “An unlikely state tightens up” [Politico]. “Minnesota, which once looked like a vanity project for Donald Trump, is suddenly emerging as a critical test of his effort to turn his campaign around. Interviews with more than a dozen officials and strategists from both parties in recent days depict a state in which Joe Biden is leading, but where the president is making inroads in rural Minnesota. … In the run-up to the 2016 election, Minnesota seemed like a stretch for Trump. No Republican had carried the state since Richard Nixon in 1972, and Trump made minimal effort there. Even so, Trump came close to victory, carrying 78 of Minnesota’s 87 counties and losing the state by fewer than 45,000 votes. Following the election, Trump said he regretted not doing more. The state’s 10 electoral votes — the same number as neighboring Wisconsin — became an enduring source of infatuation for him. He’s still preoccupied with his near-miss four years later. ‘One more speech, I would have won,’ Trump told a crowd recently in Mankato, a small college town in southern Minnesota. ‘It was so close.'” • A Trump crowd in a college town? Can any Minnesotans comment on this?

It's hard to believe that the cradle of the Democratic-Farmer-Labor Party is going to swing to Trump in 2020, a year of social upheaval not unlike 1968, the year the Democratic Party standard bearer was vice president Hubert Humphrey, stalwart champion of civil rights and a former mayor of Minneapolis.

Humphrey carried his home state that year of course, but he also carried Michigan, a state which was a key to Trump's victory in 2016.

Sagaar Enjeti thinks Trump wins reelection if he carries Michigan, Arizona and Florida. The problem for Trump is winning all these battleground states in 2020 is going to be a lot different than how he won in 2016. In 2016 he won as a stealth candidate who very few analysts took seriously. That's not the case this year.

I prefer to look at 1988. If Michael Dukakis won Minnesota so will Joe Biden. On the other hand, Dukakis also won in Wisconsin and Iowa, states Trump won in 2016 and will likely win again.

Dukakis was the last losing Democratic Party presidential candidate for whom I voted. Shamefully, I voted for Clinton twice; voted Green until Obama; then voted Green again in 2016. After much internal wrestling I have decided to vote for Biden.

It's not a naive vote, nor a hesitant one. I am confident in the decision, and I can justify it based on several different arguments.

Let's take one that impacts me personally. Labor rights. The Mitch McConnell GOP castrated Obama after Scalia died in early 2016 and Obama's pick to replace him on the Supreme Court never came to a vote. Subsequently, Trump nominated Neil Gorsuch, who was approved and assumed office in April of 2017. Next year, in June, Gorsuch, voted with the majority in Janus v. AFSCME.

Janus vs. AFSCME allows public-sector workers, say, state department of transportation employees, to opt out of union membership. The initial fear among unions was that the Supreme Court decision would lead to a loss of upwards of 30% of their membership. Nothing like that ended up happening. As I believe I mentioned before, the overwhelming majority of union members realize that having a union and a collective bargaining agreement is a significant advantage.

Nonetheless, the low single-digit percentage of workers who do opt out creates an overabundance of administrative chores. And I am the person on staff for whom it falls to expedite those chores. It's a lot of correspondence and database work. I figure that each worker who opts out consumes about 20-30 minutes of my time. Since June of 2018  many hours of my worklife have been chewed up thanks to Janus.

Even if Trump loses in November, the GOP will hold a 5-4 majority on the Supreme Court for the foreseeable future. Nationwide right-to-work is rumored to be in the offing. I think a second term for Trump basically guarantees some form of private sector right-to-work. Trump is a bomb thrower. Though many in his base are rank'n'file trade unionists, I don't have to tell you that he would revel in diminishing their ability to make a living.

So there's one reason to vote for Biden. Labor rights. I'll include some more as we slouch toward election day.

Also, in the pipeline I have the second installment of The Republican Party Must Be Destroyed. It's a look at that hatemonger from yesteryear, the father of the Christ of the Ozarks, Gerald L.K. Smith.

The Sanders Collapse, or, the Spectacular Success of Russiagate

The collapse in support for Bernie's presidential campaign is difficult to comprehend. Yesterday Joe Biden easily won Michigan and Missouri. According to Shane Goldmacher's "5 Takeaways From Tuesday’s Democratic Primaries":

In Michigan, where Mr. Sanders had focused much of his attention in the last week, he was leading in none of the state’s 83 counties as of early Wednesday, and trailing Mr. Biden by double digits statewide. In Missouri, Mr. Sanders was also trailing in every single county in a state where he won dozens of counties in 2016. And in Mississippi, Mr. Sanders was getting thrashed, with Mr. Biden topping 80 percent of the vote.

To put the Sanders collapse in perspective, Nate Silver wrote yesterday:

Biden’s ascent has been so rapid that it’s hard to entirely grasp its scope. Biden’s rise in national polls over the past two weeks — from 15.4 percent on Feb. 24 to 51.7 percent today — has been perhaps the fastest in the history of the primaries. He has massive polling leads in states all over the map that were once expected to be competitive.

With Sanders recently having enjoyed a substantial advantage in national opinion polls, not to mention a robust record of state victories in 2016, his present predicament, 160 delegates behind Biden and fading, seems to me best understood as a massive hack of voter consciousness.

Remember, the Democratic establishment had been freaked-out and wrong-footed for the last year-plus. One neoliberal after the next -- Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Amy Klobuchar, Pete Buttigieg -- was pulled from the pot and tossed against the wall. None really took. All the while Bernie was building strength and, seemingly, broadening his base.

What happened? How did the hack work? I think the correct answer here is the Democratic Party's years-long, gigantic investment in Russiagate paid off. Bernie's post-Nevada wings were clipped by placing him on the wrong side of Russiagate. Putin wanted Sanders, the old Fidel-loving Vermont hippie, to win in order to lock in a second term for Trump, or so the story was told. There went the black vote. There went the suburban vote. There went the rural vote.

One thing I have come to realize over the years of producing this page is that a principal function -- if not the principal function -- of mainstream corporate mass media is to manufacture official enemies. By manufacturing official enemies -- Emmanuel Goldstein of 1984 -- the mainstream corporate press can control opinion.

From the first mention of Russiagate in the summer of 2016 the goal of its manufacture was to staunch the loss of credibility afflicting the Democratic Party. And basically it worked. The Democratic Party has a much more cohesive bloc of African-American and suburban voters now than it did in 2016.

Whether this bloc, with a wilting, addled machine pol as its standard-bearer, can best Donald Trump, with his limitless resources and his state-of-the-art digital attack, appears to me to be a long shot. But Trump was a long shot in 2016, and I didn't think he would win.

The Democratic Party has been reconfigured around Russiagate. It is a thoroughly xenophobic political construct at this point. I hope Bernie stays in the race as long as possible and inflicts as much damage to the organization as he can. If there is to be any hope, the Democratic Party must be destroyed.

Can Bloomberg Win 30% of Pledged Delegates on Super Tuesday?

Interestingly, The New York Times (see "Centrist Democrats Want to Stop Sanders. They’re Not Sure Who Can. Unless a moderate favorite soon emerges, party leaders may increasingly look to Michael R. Bloomberg as a potential savior.") is lining up with Matt Taibbi. As long as Democratic centrists fail to coalesce around s single standard-bearer Bernie will continue to collect the most delegates in the march to the convention in Milwaukee.

The question is whether 30% of the electorate in the various Democratic primaries is enough to win of majority of the 4,750 delegates. Lambert Strether, joining Nate Silver, sees a brokered convention as a distinct possibility:

Those who want Sanders to win on the first ballot must expect Sanders to start winning outright majorities. He’s not doing that. I doubt very much he will do that in Nevada (hat tip, Harry Reid), or South Carolina. If Sanders wins California, that will be an amazing achievement, but the California Democrat Establishment is as nasty as they come. I don’t believe that the Democrat Party establishment will ever roll over, and allow Sanders to be nominated even if he leads in the delegate count. Too many little Madisons need too many ballet lessons for the Democratic strategists, consultants, lobbyists, media assets, and party elites to simple concede power, even to the future of their party. So, I assume that the Sanders campaign is gaming this out. A point to consider is that the Milwaukee convention is currently an omnishambles (and perhaps, like IA seems to have, been, a chaos ladder?) If we end up with the Milwaukee equivalent of Grant Park in Chicago 1968, that would probably hand the election to Trump (something most Democrat elites, deep down, would be quite happy with), but more important, could destroy the “army” that the Sanders campaign so carefully put together, rendering it incapable of independent operation following the convention after a collapse in discipline and subsequent backbiting and recrimination. For some, that might not be a bad thing.

There's also a possibility that Sanders begins to pull away in the run up to Super Tuesday. Bernie wins both Nevada and South Carolina; then Bloomberg's half-a-billion-dollars in ads turn out to be a bust on March 3. That's a best-case scenario for Sanders, and it can happen.

Bloomberg is furiously buying the endorsements of congressmen like Queens' Gregory Meeks. In the wake of the resurfacing of Bloomberg's racist defense of stop and frisk (which Charles Blow explores today in "The Notorious Michael R. Bloomberg"), it is hard to see how purchasing an establishment that the voters despise is a sure-fire path to victory.

On Tuesday night NBC's Chuck Todd waxed on with stars in his eyes about who Jim Clyburn will endorse and better yet who the Kennedys will favor. This is the kind of clueless, cockeyed shit being peddled in the corporate media.

It was apparent to me in the Obama years that the elites in government, finance and the corporate media don't really have a connection to the earth; they float above it on a bubble of money. This makes it hard for them to figure out what's going on in the minds of all of us mud people grubbing away for our daily bread.

You would think Bloomberg could figure this out. We'll see. But right now I'm guessing he won't reach 30% on Super Tuesday.

Iowa Caucus: "Fraud for 100 Years"

The New York Times comes to the rescue of the Democratic National Committee with "How the Iowa Caucuses Became an Epic Fiasco for Democrats," a story which places the blame on last week's Iowa meltdown squarely on the Iowa Democratic Party and its chairman Troy Price:

Tom Perez, the chairman of the national committee, placed blame directly on the Iowa Democratic Party and Mr. Price.

“Troy Price was doing his best, but it wasn’t enough,” Mr. Perez said in an interview with The Times on Sunday, noting that while the national and state parties work in partnership, the Iowa Democratic Party is ultimately responsible for administering its own nominating contest.

The D.N.C. approved Iowa’s delegate selection plan, but left the state party to determine on its own how to collect and tabulate caucus results, Mr. Perez said, adding that the national party did not test the state’s app or set standards for training or preparation.

Mr. Perez said he was not responsible for what state parties and their leaders do.

“I do not conduct a performance evaluation of every party chair,” he said.

Asked whether the D.N.C. would increase its scrutiny of other caucuses run by state parties, including Nevada’s in less than two weeks, Mr. Perez said he would “implement all of the lessons learned,” but did not specify how.

This contradicts reporting from last week which said that the DNC played a critical role in the IDP's decision to go with the mobile app when it advised the state party not to report results by telephone.

Shadow Inc., the app developer, is portrayed as a well-meaning victim of IDP incompetence, having been been awarded its contract for the Iowa caucuses as late as the fall of 2019. The Times acknowledges that the company is the creation of former Clinton staffers, but it manages to airbrush Tara McGowan and ACRONYM from the narrative. By airbrushing ACRONYM, which has been the focal point for Lee Fang's reporting, as well as Max Blumenthal's, the bigger picture of the guiding influence of wealthy Democratic donors like Reid Hoffman and Seth Klarman is obscured.

Don't get me wrong. The IDP is much to blame too. At this point it seems likely that the true caucus winner will never be known:

In the Times review of the data, at least 10 percent of precincts appeared to have improperly allocated their delegates, based on reported vote totals. In some cases, precincts awarded more delegates than they had to give; in others, they awarded fewer. More than two dozen precincts appeared to give delegates to candidates who did not qualify as viable under the caucus rules.

The big takeaway from last Monday's caucus is contained in a quote from Jeff Weaver of the Sanders campaign:

“You always had to calculate these numbers, all we’re asking is that you report them for the first time,” Jeff Weaver, Mr. Sanders’s closest adviser, said he told Mr. Price on the call. “If you haven’t been calculating these numbers all along, it’s been a fraud for 100 years.”

The Sanders people suspected that they won the vote in Iowa in 2016 but there was no way they could prove it because there was no reporting requirement for the raw vote and then the vote totals after realignment, only the allocation of delegates. One of the post-2016 reforms that Bernie people pushed for was more transparency in Iowa, and in this they were successful.

Now come to find out, Iowa, the first vote of the presidential primary, is nothing but a Potemkin village. This is something that has been intuitively obvious and plain to see for my enter life.

I guess one positive outcome of the election year already is that the fraudulence of the Iowa caucuses has been undeniably exposed.

Bernie Surge Continues

It's hard not to come away from reading yesterday's Water Cooler thinking that Bernie Sanders is going to win the Democratic Primary. He's up in Iowa; he's up in New Hampshire; and he's seriously pulling away in California while Joe Biden's support plummets in the Golden State. The one handhold Biden maintains is South Carolina. But is South Carolina enough to turn things around for Obama's VP? No, I think not.

The downside to Bernie's front-running is that if there is an upset in Iowa or New Hampshire the corporate media frenzy it will kick off will be intense and deafening. I believe Bernie could weather a second-place finish in either of these first two states because he has built such formidable campaign operation -- Sanders is much better able to deal with setbacks than his Democratic Party rivals -- but under-performance after surging in the polls is not a good look.

The political establishment is beginning to line up its sharpshooters. A pro-Israel, pro-war-with-Iran Democratic Super PAC, "Democratic Majority for Israel," started anti-Sanders attack ads yesterday in Iowa. It's not that Sanders is anti-Israel; it's that he is anti-war and pro-Palestinian. For a candidate of either of the two major parties, these perspectives are not allowed. One could argue that Trump's big hustle in 2016 was convincing enough swing voters he was a legitimate anti-war voice. Trump will not be able to repeat that legerdemain in 2020.

The attack made by "Democratic Majority for Israel" is two-prong: one, Bernie is unelectable; and two, Bernie is too old and unhealthy, having recently suffered a heart attack. The first prong is the one that is going to get plenty of traction in the corporate media if the polls are correct and Bernie rolls along in February picking up Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. He'll be called the George McGovern of 2020.

In the back of my mind are the shocking December 12 UK general election results. Corbyn is an old anti-war campaigner like Sanders, and the Tories made mincemeat out of him.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Bernie has to make it through the primaries first. The fundamental reason why I think he will is that the Democratic establishment has not settled on any one candidate. First it was Kamala Harris. Then it was Beto Then it was Buttgieg. Then it was on-and-off-again with Warren. Then it was Klobuchar. It's always been Biden but also not-Biden.

The plutocrats who run the DNC cannot decide. On the other hand, Sanders has maintained his supporters from the last go-round while at the same time he has widened his base of support to include more Latinos and African-Americans.

Trump is pulling out the stops to make sure GOP caucus participation in Iowa is robust, while Trump surrogates attempt to buy black votes. It is going to be a fascinating and hideous election year.

Assessing a Third-Party Challenge: Four More Years of MAGA

Yesterday FiveThirtyEight published a round-table chat devoted to the possibilities of a third party in the 2020 U.S. presidential election, "Can A Third-Party Ticket Win In 2020? Maybe — but it probably won’t be Kasichlooper." ("Kasichlooper" is a Nate Silver neologism referring to a John Kasich-John Hickenlooper prseidential ticket.)

The conversation was disappointingly superficial. There was no discussion of the sky-high hurdles that exist to ballot access for third parties and independents; no meaningful probing of the impacts that third parties have had on the history of the United States; nor was there even a single mention of the super-historic third-way triumph this year in France when Emmanuel Macron walloped the chauvinist Marine Le Pen in the presidential election and then soon after his brand-new political party, En Marche!, swept parliamentary elections.

The end result of the FiveThirtyEight talk was the mocking, puerile conclusion that only a celebrity candidate like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson could mount a significant challenge to the major parties in 2020.

This doesn't mean that FiveThirtyEight round table failed to illuminate. One of Silver's interlocutors, senior writer Perry Bacon Jr., opined that

. . . Kasich/Hickenlooper is the kind of unity ticket that people in the Beltway and the media (like me) tend to think is appealing to voters: moderate in tone, more economically conservative and socially liberal. I think there isn’t any evidence that voters want this kind of ticket and there is a lot of evidence (the rise of Sanders and Trump) that voters don’t want this kind of candidate. I do think a third-party candidate can do well. I really do. But I suspect it’s more of an outsider/celebrity than a bunch of old pols who are somehow trying to split the difference between the two existing parties.

What Bacon doesn't acknowledge is that the entire U.S. political system is based on not giving the voters what they want. The FiveThirtyEight writers dismiss a Bloomberg candidacy because he is a cosmopolitan billionaire (who cares about gun control and climate change) without mentioning that he was ready to pull the trigger in 2016 if Hillary's Southern firewall was breached by Bernie on Super Tuesday. It wasn't. So Bloomberg didn't mount a third-party challenge.

The important takeaway is that Mike Bloomberg was ready to spend profligately from his personal fortune and launch a kamikaze third-party attack on the two-party system if a non-neoliberal took control of the Democrats. Bloomberg didn't throw down the gauntlet when Trump remarkably captured Bloomberg's Republican Party.

So the entire frame of the FiveThirtyEight chat -- that a third party will arise in 2020 because of Trump on the basis that 1) Trump himself is blocked from the GOP nomination and decides to run under an independent "MAGA" banner, or 2) that a "moderate" Republican like Kasich will stray from the GOP rez in search of suburban soccer moms -- is ass backwards.

The correct lens for a third-party challenge in 2020 is if Bernie Sanders, who will be 79 in three years, looks like he is going to win the Democratic nomination. Then we will see a billionaire-sponsored third-party candidacy emerge. It could be a corporate chief like Howard Schultz or a celebrity wax dummy like The Rock.

France proves that a zombie neoliberalism can still dominate the polls, and with tantalizing results for the plutocrats. The correct variables are required: a baleful xenophobe on the right; a social-democratic uprising on the left; a shocked, terrorized electorate.

Make no mistake. A U.S. Macron is a distinct possibility in 2020 (maybe even a female iteration). But s/he wouldn't win. S/he would merely guarantee that a social democrat wouldn't win.

Which means four more years of MAGA.

Bernie Blamed for GOP Baseball Bloodbath

Just when it appeared that The New York Times was tempering its obsessive adherence to neoliberal orthodoxy (see Monday's unsigned editorial "Emmanuel Macron’s Unfettered Powers"), we get Yamiche Alcindor's very yellow piece of journalism, "Attack Tests Movement Sanders Founded," and the answer from the Obama/Clinton camp to Bernie's second run for the White House:

But long before the shooting on Wednesday, some of Mr. Sanders’s supporters had earned a belligerent reputation for their criticism of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party and others who they believed disagreed with their ideas. Sanders fans, sometimes referred to derogatorily as “Bernie Bros” or “Bernie Bots,” at times harassed reporters covering Mr. Sanders and flooded social media with angry posts directed at the “corporate media,” a term often used by the senator.

The suspect in the shooting in Virginia put a new spotlight on the rage buried in some corners of the progressive left.

Mr. Hodgkinson filled his Facebook page with photographs of the senator and quotes from his speeches. Mr. Hodgkinson also wrote messages filled with expletives directed at the president, and a post in March said: “Trump is a traitor. Trump has destroyed our democracy. It’s time to destroy Trump & co.”

On Tuesday, Mr. Hodgkinson posted a cartoon on Facebook explaining “How does a bill work?” “That’s an easy one, Billy,” the cartoon reads. “Corporations write the bill and then bribe Congress until it becomes law.”

“That’s Exactly How It Works. ....” Mr. Hodgkinson wrote.

That is not far from Mr. Sanders’s own message. On Saturday, during a conference in Chicago filled with Sanders supporters, he thundered, “Today in the White House, we have perhaps the worst and most dangerous president in the history of our country,” to cheers from thousands. “And we also have, not to be forgotten, extreme right-wing leadership in the U.S. House and the U.S. Senate.”

Bernie Sanders is Running for President

It became apparent a couple of months into Trump's administration that Bernie Sanders was positioning himself for another presidential run, confirmation of which is received today in the form of an opinion piece in The New York Times, "Bernie Sanders: How Democrats Can Stop Losing Elections," a reworked stump speech from the 2016 campaign. Gone is any critique of the U.S. policy of perpetual war. Sanders has learned from Trump that even the mildest questioning of the national security state is rewarded with an "enemy of the people" label.

The NYT has published two stories in the last few days -- Monday's "Democrats in Split-Screen: The Base Wants It All. The Party Wants to Win," by Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin, and today's "Is Bernie Sanders, 75, Too Old for 2020? His Fiercest Fans Say No," by Yamiche Alcindor -- that illustrate the unresolved Democratic Party split between leadership and rank'n'file.

The split will be resolved when Sanders takes control of the party like Corbyn took control of Labour. It is going to be more difficult for Sanders because the Democratic Party is not democratic, not nearly as democratic as the Labour Party. 

Democratic Party leaders could still decide, as they did last year, to back a losing candidate who will not upturn the plutocratic apple cart; if so, there is no telling how deep the damage will be. The current state of the French Socialist Party comes to mind.

The difficulty for Democratic Party power brokers is that there is no one on the scene who can challenge Bernie Sanders -- except for Senator Elizabeth Warren. If Warren were to shoulder the burden, it would likely be a suicide mission. Her reputation (consider the irony of Elizabeth Warren accepting donations from Goldman Sachs) would be scarred beyond rehabilitation and the party would be further fractured. I doubt a young champion like Emmanuel Macron will materialize out of the mist for the Wall Street Democrats.