Hillary Wins

Any doubt should be put to rest this morning about Stathis Kouvelakis' statement mentioned a couple weeks back, that with the erosion of support for major parties throughout the West the corporate media has filled the void to prevent a more precipitous collapse of the status quo. On the eve of the final day of primary voting, the Associated Press preordained the outcome and announced that the Democratic nominee would be Hillary Clinton (Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy, "Hillary Clinton Has Clinched Democratic Nomination, Survey Reports").

Based on the polling, it did not appear as if Hillary was in any serious danger of losing California to Bernie Sanders, particularly given the fact that last week she received the endorsement of longtime California Governor Jerry Brown. So this AP "rush to judgment," as the Sanders campaign is calling it, seems like paranoid overkill. Possibly the intent is to create a situation in the six states voting today where Hillary will walk away with enough pledged delegates (the AP report had to do with superdelegates) to prevent Bernie from contesting the nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia. Sanders has predicted that Hillary will not have enough pledged delegates after today's vote, and that, on this basis, he will march his children's crusade to Philly.

One thing is certain, to me at least. This primary campaign has illuminated the extent to which U.S. society is a closed one. It took a billionaire schooled for decades in the most brutal, omniscient media market on the planet to break through. But, if last week is any indication, Trump will be sliced and diced before August is over.

Hillary, competing in her fourth presidential campaign, did several things well, given how tarnished a candidate she is. Though her Super Tuesday "Southern strategy" did not work exactly as planned, because it was designed to knock Bernie out of the race, it will likely end up providing her the margin of victory she needs in pledged delegates; also, it cemented the narrative that black voters overwhelming favor her. Most importantly, Hillary proved an adroit manager of Democratic Party machinery, including the big international unions, and the corporate media monopoly.

No Hand-wringing Necessary: Clearly Trump Will Not Win

Since Memorial Day the frontpage of The New York Times has been a miserable place for Donald Trump.

Monday "Can Donald Trump Win? These Battleground Regions Will Decide" laid out the daunting electoral map for Trump in a general election against Hillary Clinton. Basically, the best Trump can do is capture North Carolina and Ohio. He is going to lose Florida and Virginia. And that should be it for any hopes he has of occupying the White House. Heading out West, the election turns into a rout. Hillary might even win Arizona.

Tuesday dawned with an enjoyable puncturing of Trump's acumen as a real estate tycoon. In "Donald Trump Soured on a Deal, and Hong Kong Partners Became Litigants," Farah Stockman and Keith Bradsher deconstruct a Trump boast that “I beat China all the time. I own a big chunk of the Bank of America building at 1290 Avenue of the Americas that I got from China in a war. Very valuable.”

It turns out that The Donald wooed a couple Hong Kong billionaires to bail him out when, in the 1990s, he could not make the payments on a 77-acre property known as Riverside South near Manhattan's Lincoln Center.

Trump went into partnership with the Chinese developers, Henry Cheng Kar-shun and Vincent Lo, but the relationship turned litigious a decade later when Trump tried to scuttle the sale of the property. Trump alleged that he was not consulted and could have got a higher price. He lost the suit. So the Chinese plan to use the proceeds from the sale of Riverside South to purchase Bank of America buildings in New York and San Francisco went forward with Trump as a passive investor. The properties have appreciated greatly. That's Trump's business savvy for you. He didn't win. He actually lost. But he ended up benefiting, through no fault of his own, anyway.

Wednesday's "Former Trump University Workers Call the School a ‘Lie’ and a ‘Scheme’ in Testimony," by Michael Barbaro and Steve Eder, is the most damaging frontpager of the week so far. In a response to a request from the Washington Post, the judge in a federal lawsuit against the for-profit Trump University ordered last Friday that court records be unsealed, which happened on Tuesday.

The court records show Trump University to be a shabby outfit stocked with high-pressure salesmen seeking to fleece the rubes who harbored fantasies of getting rich quick while rubbing elbows with the TV star of "The Apprentice." Basically a prequel of Trump's presidential campaign.

Today's anti-Trump frontpage offering is more conventional but nonetheless nauseatingly illuminating about how Hillary plans to best Trump now that Jerry Brown has effectively ended any hope that Bernie Sanders has of pulling off an upset on Tuesday. Amy Chozick's "Hillary Clinton to Portray Donald Trump’s Foreign Policy Positions as Dangerous" is an oddly lengthy preview (almost like we were being prepped for a state of the union address) of a speech Hillary is to deliver in San Diego today warning soccer moms (though I think now they are being called "megachurch moms") that electing Donald Trump will blow up the world.

What is revelatory about Chozick's piece is that it confirms that Hillary plans to swing to the right in order to beat Trump:

Mrs. Clinton will deliver the address on her final campaign swing before California holds its Democratic primary on Tuesday, when she is widely expected to reach the threshold of delegates needed to secure her party’s nomination. But in choosing to raise concerns about Mr. Trump’s foreign policy stances, she will be speaking to swing voters in general election battleground states who have doubts about a Trump presidency.

While Mrs. Clinton must be cautious not to alienate liberal Democrats who oppose some of her hawkish foreign policy stances, her campaign says national security could be the catalyst that drives independents and wavering Republicans to support her this fall.

Roughly 21 percent of independent voters and 32 percent of Republican voters said the most important issue this election was terrorism and national security, compared with 16 percent of Democrats, according to a Suffolk University/USA Today poll conducted last month. At the same time, 61 percent of registered voters said a Trump presidency would make America’s image in the world worse, according to the latest New York Times-CBS News poll.

“There are many Republicans concerned about this,” R. Nicholas Burns, an American ambassador to NATO during the George W. Bush administration who also served on Bill Clinton’s National Security Council, said of Mr. Trump. “They find his policy positions beyond the pale, and they’re also turned off by his vulgarity.”

To that end, the Clinton campaign and its outside advisers have embarked on an effort to reach out to prominent moderate Republicans who could endorse Mrs. Clinton, largely making the case for foreign policy sure-footedness.

Those calls have included to an aide of the 2012 Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, and to Nicholas F. Brady, who served as secretary of the Treasury under Mr. Reagan and the elder Mr. Bush, with plans to reach out to James A. Baker III, a White House chief of staff to President Ronald Reagan and secretary of state under President George Bush.

Very bad news for all those Bernie supporters looking for a reason to vote Hillary in November.

Universal Basic Income and the Heroin Epidemic

Two stories caught my eye recently. One appeared last week in the business page, Farhad Manjoo's "A Plan in Case Robots Take the Jobs: Give Everyone a Paycheck"; the other, Katherine Seelye's "Heroin Epidemic Increasingly Seeps Into Public View," on yesterday's front page.

There is a prescription painkiller and heroin epidemic in the United States and people are regularly overdosing in public. At the same time, according to Manjoo, we are in the midst of a robot revolution in this country:

[W]ithin in two to three decades we’ll have morphed into the Robotic States of America. 

In Robot America, most manual laborers will have been replaced by herculean bots. Truck drivers, cabbies, delivery workers and airline pilots will have been superseded by vehicles that do it all. Doctors, lawyers, business executives and even technology columnists for The New York Times will have seen their ranks thinned by charming, attractive, all-knowing algorithms.

How will society function after humanity has been made redundant? Technologists and economists have been grappling with this fear for decades, but in the last few years, one idea has gained widespread interest — including from some of the very technologists who are now building the bot-ruled future.

Their plan is known as “universal basic income,” or U.B.I., and it goes like this: As the jobs dry up because of the spread of artificial intelligence, why not just give everyone a paycheck? 

Imagine the government sending each adult about $1,000 a month, about enough to cover housing, food, health care and other basic needs for many Americans. U.B.I. would be aimed at easing the dislocation caused by technological progress, but it would also be bigger than that. 

While U.B.I. has been associated with left-leaning academics, feminists and other progressive activists, it has lately been adopted by a wider range of thinkers, including some libertarians and conservatives. It has also gained support among a cadre of venture capitalists in New York and Silicon Valley, the people most familiar with the potential for technology to alter modern work.

Rather than a job-killing catastrophe, tech supporters of U.B.I. consider machine intelligence to be something like a natural bounty for society: The country has struck oil, and now it can hand out checks to each of its citizens.

These supporters argue machine intelligence will produce so much economic surplus that we could collectively afford to liberate much of humanity from both labor and suffering.

In theory this is true. But in actuality technology has concentrated wealth in the 1%. The current vogue of the UBI is a version of the "workerless factory" of the first half of the 20th century. The idea was that the working class would have to toil less as technology was integrated into the job site. The reality has been the exact opposite. People have to struggle harder, work longer at less stable employment, to earn less than what they made before. Look at a chart of the productivity gains since the early 1970s, a fraction of which has gone to the working class.

Hillary beat reporter Amy Chozick had a line in a story, "Clinton Offers Economic Plan Focused on Jobs," the other day that summed it up: "This is the latest revision to the corporate tax code Mrs. Clinton has proposed in an effort to create jobs and lift wages, which have been virtually stagnant for 15 years even as the costs of college, child care, housing and health care have soared."

We live a precarious, stressful. "no future" life these days. The rich would sooner see the vast majority slaughtered than guarantee a basic income. This hopelessness, a rudderless moral destitution, is part of what is fueling the heroin binge.

Who Won the Hispanic Vote in Nevada?

As to be expected, The New York Times is tattooing the Sanders campaign as a sure loser following Hillary's solid victory on Saturday in the Nevada caucuses. Nevada was important for Bernie, and in many ways it seemed ready-made for his anti-establishment candidacy, given the state's higher-than-average union density and its long suffering since the 2008 financial meltdown. But Hillary beat him, and she beat him handily in Clark County, home to Las Vegas and its heavy Latino population and its union casino workers.

And herein lies a mystery. Based on entrance and exit polling, Bernie won the Latino vote in Saturday's caucus by eight points. Then how is it that Hillary beat him by 11 points in Clark County? This has created a kerfuffle with number-cruncher Nate Cohn, "No, the Polling Doesn’t Prove Bernie Sanders Won the Hispanic Vote in Nevada," rejecting the polls. Charles Blow summarizes in his anti-Bernie column, "Bernie Sanders Hits a Roadblock":

According to the entrance poll, Sanders also won the Hispanic vote, but this is where some prominent poll watchers took exception to the poll’s accuracy. 

The New York Times’s Nate Cohn tweeted: 

“Based on the results in Clark, the precincts in ELV, and the overall entrance poll error, I do not believe Sanders won the Hispanic vote.” 

ELV, or East Las Vegas, is the largely Hispanic part of Clark County, by far the most populous county in the state, where actual results showed Clinton winning handily. 

Nate Silver tweeted support for Cohn’s analysis: 

“We share @nate cohn skepticism about entrance poll finding that Clinton lost Hispanics in Nevada.”

I think this anomaly can be explained by a passage from the post-election dispatch written by Amy Chozick and Patrick Healy, "Hillary Clinton Beats Bernie Sanders in Nevada Caucuses":

Her support among labor also ran deep, even though the Culinary Workers Union, which represents 57,000 members, many of whom are Latino, declined to endorse a candidate. But on Thursday, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who also remained neutral, said in an interview he had spoken to D. Taylor, the head of the union’s parent group, to make sure its members could have paid time off to participate in the caucuses, a move that operatives in the state believed helped tip the race in Mrs. Clinton’s favor. 

She overwhelmingly defeated Mr. Sanders in the caucuses that were held at six major Las Vegas casinos, including Harrah’s, the Wynn and New York-New York, which heavily drew working-class minority voters.

Caucuses are not secret ballots. Leadership of the Culinary Workers Union, despite a professed neutrality, got time loss for its members to caucus for Hillary. The members did so, but many on the way in and on the way out identified as Bernie supporters. That is why there is a disconnect between the polling and the actual outcome in Clark County.

What does it all mean? Certainly not how Team Clinton is spinning the win this morning as somehow foreshadowing an inevitable triumph in the primary. Hillary won 19 delegates to Bernie's 14. That's it. Even Cohn sees the Nevada results as proof that the Sanders campaign has reason to hope he can diminish Hillary's advantage among people of color:

The actual election returns in Las Vegas’s Clark County hint at a different story. Analyzed neighborhood by neighborhood, they suggest that Mrs. Clinton might have won the Hispanic vote by a comfortable margin. She won about 60 percent of delegates in heavily Hispanic areas, a result that calls the finding of the polling into question.

There is not much evidence, though, that Mrs. Clinton won Hispanic voters by the sort of landslide margin that she did eight years ago. That’s a good sign for Mr. Sanders, who needs to make up for the huge swing among black voters, who have gone from uniformly for President Obama to uniformly for Mrs. Clinton.

So we need to take with a grain of salt Patrick Healy's frontpage headline this morning, "Delegate Count Leaving Bernie Sanders With Steep Climb." There is plenty within the guts of Healy's story which should give the Clintonistas pause:

Mrs. Clinton has 502 delegates to Mr. Sanders’s 70; 2,383 are needed to win the nomination. These numbers include delegates won in state contests and superdelegates, who can support any candidate. She is likely to win a delegate jackpot from the overwhelmingly black and Hispanic areas in the Southern-dominated Super Tuesday primaries on March 1, when 11 states will vote and about 880 delegates will be awarded. 

Since delegates are awarded proportionally based on vote tallies in congressional districts and some other areas, only blowout victories yield large numbers of delegates. And Mrs. Clinton is better positioned than Mr. Sanders to win big in more delegate-rich districts, like those carved out to ensure minority Democrats in Congress, where she remains popular.

“She could effectively end the race in less than two weeks’ time on Super Tuesday,” said David Wasserman, a top analyst for The Cook Political Report, who has been closely tracking the delegate race. 

Of course, politics is unpredictable, as this cycle’s presidential campaign has demonstrated. Mrs. Clinton will face questions about her candidacy, including the outcome of an F.B.I. investigation into the use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. And Mr. Sanders has shown an ability to create grass-roots excitement in surprising places.

Still, while Mrs. Clinton is far from reaching 2,383 delegates, she is poised to create the sort of mathematical quandary for Mr. Sanders that she faced in 2008. That winter, Barack Obama used an 11-state winning streak to establish a lead of 100 delegates that Mrs. Clinton was never able to surmount. While a similar streak is unlikely this year, advisers to Mr. Sanders concede that Mrs. Clinton could generate a significant delegate lead now that she has momentum from her Nevada win. But they say they are not out of the running. 

“The Clintons can get a delegate lead quicker than we can, and they have a way to gut out the delegate fight,” said Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders. “We have to turn victories in state after state into big momentum that can change the numbers.” 

Mrs. Clinton already has a huge lead over Mr. Sanders in support from superdelegates — elected officials and party elders who each count toward the magic number of 2,383. But superdelegates could switch candidates if Mr. Sanders is the overwhelming choice of regular voters. 

For now, Mrs. Clinton is focused on building her lead among so-called pledged delegates — those awarded proportionally by congressional districts from primary and caucus results. Mr. Sanders is aiming to score wins in states like Massachusetts and Minnesota while holding Mrs. Clinton to narrow wins elsewhere. Small margins of victory keep delegate allocations roughly even. A New York Times analysis found that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders are tied in the pledged delegate count, at 51 each.

The support for Bernie is not going to evaporate. It is hardcore. It provides a solid foundation of funds and grassroots all across the country. For example, I attended a "Labor for Bernie" rally yesterday at 4 PM -- this is 4 PM on a Sunday afternoon, a time when a lot of people are doing grocery shopping and getting ready for the work week -- and the hall was packed. More chairs repeatedly had to be hauled in to accommodate the overflow. Several state legislators were in prominent attendance. This is not a Howard Dean type of movement that is going to suddenly collapse. This is a long haul operation of people who want to tear down a system that is multiplying wars and planetary destruction faster than most can track.

The fight is just getting started. What happens, as Healy alludes, when the FBI comes back with evidence of wrongdoing? How about the transcriptions of those Goldman speeches? Hillary's corpse might appear reanimated but the stench is still there.

As for Trump, only the most committed dead-enders can deny the obvious: After Super Tuesday the GOP nomination will be Trump's.

The fantasy being peddled by Republican apparatchiks is that the race will turn into a two-way contest between Rubio and Trump, and Trump, who has never proven that he can muster much more than 30%, will fall to the more centrist candidate. This is all summarized in Nate Silver's "Trump Optimists And Trump Skeptics Are About To Go To War."

The problem with this analysis is that it assumes Cruz is going to get out the race, and he is not. He's got too much money.

Iowa Post-Mortem: GOP's Boy Wonder Appears, Trump Actually Does Quite Well and Signs of Clinton Meltdown

The tendency will be to say the big takeaway from the Iowa caucuses is that Donald Trump shit the bed, coming in second as he did to the vile Ted Cruz, and not necessarily by a minute margin either with the Texan champion of the GOP Tea Party makeover beating the Manhattan real estate mogul 27.7% to 24.4%.

But that is not my takeaway. My takeaway is that the Iowa caucuses offered a smorgasbord for Republicans, giving every significant segment of the fractured party a reason to crow. For starters, evangelicals proved once again that victory for a GOP candidate in Iowa is dependent on their faith-based network. Cruz joins Mike Huckabee (2008) and Rick Santorum (2012) as winner of the caucuses thanks to the Christian vote. And as Huckabee and Santorum managed to linger on after Iowa without ever dominating the race again, so too will be the fate of Ted Cruz.

For the party establishment, Iowa delivered the joyful verdict that Marco Rubio is indeed a player. Rubio came in third, just a little more than a point behind Trump. For months Rubio has been puffed as the future of the party, the bright, new face of the GOP, and he came through after really only spending January in the Hawkeye State. Reince Priebus must be tickled pink this morning. If Rubio performs well again next Tuesday in the New Hampshire primary, while Bush, Kasich and Christie underperform, the pressure from on high will be for the also-rans to get out of the race and fall in behind Norman Braman's page-boy.

For Donald Trump, all is not lost. In fact, I would say, if not "mission accomplished," then "one helluva job." An all-time record was established for participation in a Republican Iowa caucus, with 46% showing up to his/her first caucus (roughly equal to Bernie's draw in the Dem caucuses, though not up to the 57% Obama drew in 2008). And Trump had basically no ground game to speak of. This is from the frontpager in today's New York Times, Jonathan Martin's "Ted Cruz Wins Republican Caucuses in Iowa":

Turnout was about 185,000, a record, according to Edison Research, which conducted entrance polls at precincts across the state. Mr. Trump’s success had been expected to hinge on whether he could mobilize his supporters. But the turnout was not enough to deliver him a win, even though 46 percent of those who turned out were participating in a Republican caucus for the first time. 

Instead, Mr. Trump paid the price for building only a rudimentary political organization in the state: The brew of energy and anger powering his candidacy did not fully translate into votes.

This lack of ground game will not be a problem in the upcoming primary states. Trump is unsinkable; his loss to Cruz is of very little importance. What should be very troubling to Trump is the emergence of Rubio as a candidate with comparable heft. As long as Rubio remains in the frame, come convention time the party will do everything in its power to deliver the nomination to him.

When it comes to the Democratic results in Iowa, the tie between Hillary and Bernie is almost as good as a victory for the Sanders camp. Clearly the Clintons were anticipating a victory and the spate of "Go home, Bernie; you're a fringe candidate after all" stories to follow. Now the opposite is happening. Take the opening to this morning's frontpager by Patrick Healy, "Little Separates Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton in Tight Race in Iowa":

The close results were deeply unnerving to Mrs. Clinton and her husband, former President Bill Clinton, as well as her advisers, some of whom had expressed growing confidence in recent days that they had recaptured political momentum after weeks when Mr. Sanders was drawing huge crowds and rising in the polls. The Clintons had appeared optimistic at rallies over the weekend, thanking Iowans for their support as much as urging them to turn out to vote.

The close vote means that Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Sanders are likely to split Iowa’s share of delegates to the Democratic convention, and Mr. Sanders will be able to argue that the Iowa result was a virtual tie.

The Clinton team was counting on its huge, well-trained army of volunteers, covering all of Iowa’s 1,681 voting precincts, to counter the enormous enthusiasm of voters who jammed into events to hear Mr. Sanders. But his well-financed Iowa organization was able to convert the energy of his crowds into voters on Monday night, as he drew huge numbers of first-time caucusgoers, young people and liberals who responded to his rallying cry against the nation’s “rigged economy.”

The virtual tie between the two candidates instantly raised the stakes for their next face-off, the primary next Tuesday in New Hampshire. Mr. Sanders holds a solid lead in polls there and has the advantage of being from Vermont; candidates from neighboring states have won the state’s primary in recent decades, and Mr. Sanders is admired in the state.

Clinton advisers said late Monday night that Mr. and Mrs. Clinton were discussing bringing on additional staff members to strengthen her campaign operation now that a pitched battle may lie ahead against Mr. Sanders. The advisers said they did not know if a significant staff shakeup was at hand, but they said that the Clintons were disappointed with Monday night’s result and wanted to ensure that her organization, political messaging and communications strategy were in better shape for the contests to come.

Even more damning is Clinton beat reporter Amy Chozick's "Tight Democratic Race in Iowa Unnerves Clinton Campaign." Campaign manager Robby Mook appears to be headed for the chopping block:

Even before Mrs. Clinton finished her brief remarks to her supporters late Monday night, discussions were underway among her outside advisers and donors about the need to bring in longtime Clinton aides and diminish the role of Robby Mook, her young data-driven campaign manager. Asked about such discussions, Nick Merrill, a spokesman for the campaign, grew irritated. “Are you serious?” he said tersely to a reporter. 

Next to a commanding five-point win, Bernie could not have asked for anything more. Mook is the guy who was saying from the outset Hillary could return the Obama coalition to the polls. I'm sure at this point Slick Willie has put his foot down and told John Podesta to get serious.

Hillary Swings to the Right + Clock Running Out on Afghan Extra-Legal Government

There is a good piece this morning by Gaius Publius, "The Clinton Campaign Speaks to the New York Times," which combs through a Patrick Healy story, "Clinton Campaign Underestimated Sanders Strengths, Allies Say," that appeared in the Sunday edition of the paper. One of the interesting points sussed out is that the Hillary brain trust is fearful of a "wave election," which means that the Clinton campaign, contrary to its publicly stated position that it plans to win by returning the Obama coalition to the polls, is actually now running against the Obama coalition; hence the attacks on Sanders' "Medicare for All" from the right. According to Gaius Publius,

A “wave election” is one where a very large number of new voters attempt to make big changes. Very large numbers of new voters. Now go back up to the Healy comment gleaned from the Clinton campaign. Ms. Clinton is “unnerved by the possibility that Mr. Sanders will foment a large wave of first-time voters…” 

How would a “wave of first-time voters,” which would heavily drive Democratic base turnout, not be very good for the Democratic Party, as in, 2008-good. The Healy passage basically says that Hillary Clinton would trade away all of that to-the-party benefit to become the nominee, that she would be willing to seriously weaken the party so long as she could then lead it. This is almost the definition of destructive ambition. Is that a fair characterization? I think we’d have to ask Patrick Healy, as the quoted passage is his. 

Don’t forget that the quoted passage add the phrase “and liberals” to the “large wave of first-time voters” that Mrs. Clinton and her husband are “unnerved by.”Are Mr. and Ms. Clinton really “unnerved” by “liberals”? Again, the phrasing is Healy’s, but the sentiments are claimed to be those of the Clintons.

Just as the Republicans are struggling with a "wave election" of their own in the form of Donald Trump, so too are the Democrats. At this point the two hands of the duopoly are trying to beat down a democratic uprising. In the case of Hillary, her campaign team now regrets not resorting to fearmongering earlier ("A vote for Sanders is a vote to raise your taxes"; "Sanders is unelectable"). Amy Chozick outlines this in an illuminating piece that appeared yesterday, "Hillary Clinton Gets Set for a Long Slog Against Bernie Sanders," the most revealing passage of which I found to be the prediction of where the Clinton campaign's current rightward drift will end up:

Even if Mrs. Clinton wins in Iowa, where she maintains a slight lead in most polls, Mr. Sanders could receive an outpouring of small donations if the outcome is close that would help him compete in subsequent states. Mr. Sanders, a small-state senator who has never run for national office, has shown surprising fund-raising muscle. Many of his donors have yet to give him the maximum individual contribution of $2,700, meaning they could be tapped repeatedly if the contest remains close. [Good point.] His campaign raised $33 million in the final quarter of 2015, just $4 million less than Mrs. Clinton.

Mrs. Clinton’s aides say they expect to win Iowa and New Hampshire [happy talk] and are ready for the grind. A giant whiteboard on the wall of the campaign’s headquarters maps out where staff members would be sent depending on the outcomes in the early states.

“We just game out a bunch of different scenarios,” Mr. Mook said. “It’s kind of like ‘choose your own adventure.’ ”

This is not the adventure the Clinton team would have chosen.

A prolonged primary campaign against an opponent widely popular with the party’s liberal base could exhaust donors who will also be asked to contribute to an expensive campaign to defeat the Republican nominee. A contentious race against Mr. Sanders could also weaken Mrs. Clinton’s standing among Democratic voters she would need in November.

The last sentence is the obvious one, the one that loomed large last year but has yet to be given the prominence it deserves. Now it is all the more prominent because Hillary is attacking from the right. After months of this, how are you going to drive turnout among the progressive Democratic base come November? You're not.

The pro-Hillary people are hoping that a defense of the Democratic status quo -- Obamacare, for instance (see Krugman's hopeless Monday column, "Health Reform Realities") -- will allow the Clinton campaign to muddle through. But while this might be a 50%+1 strategy to win the Democratic nomination, it basically guarantees a loss in the general election (unless the Republicans manage to concoct an even more perverse strategy to nominate an Establishment-friendly alternative to Trump).

One story that is worth taking a look at is Mujib Mashal's "Afghan Panel Sets Election Date, Drawing Government Criticism." Afghanistan and the United States are intimately linked. At the end of the 1970s when neoliberalism -- the eradication of social democracy -- was taking root in a post-Vietnam, post-Watergate America, a robust militarist accompaniment was called for. Afghanistan provided it with Charlie Wilson's War, the U.S.-led, Saudi-funded proxy conflict against the Soviet Union. Then there was the post-9/11 occupation, which remains to this day despite many announcements of the end of combat operations.

 In 2014 the U.S./NATO puppet government was in danger of splitting apart because of the fraudulent election of Ashraf Ghani over his opponent Abdullah Abdullah. Secretary of State John Kerry jetted in and cobbled together an "extra-legal" agreement enshrining a unity government that made Ghani president and Abdullah chief executive.

That agreement had a sunset date, this October, and some caveats, two of which are that parliamentary elections be held before October and that a loya jirga be convened, none of which has happened. According to Mashal,

The Afghan unity government, brokered by the United States after the bitter election dispute between Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah in 2014 threatened to tear the country apart, is in a race against time to meet the requirements of the political agreement it was founded on, set to expire in October. 

That agreement requires the government to hold local elections, which are already months overdue, by the time it completes two years in office in October. It is also supposed to have convened a grand assembly of elders from across the country by October to amend the Constitution and create the position of prime minister for Mr. Abdullah to move into. 

Pressure from political opposition groups has been increasing on Mr. Ghani and Mr. Abdullah in recent months. Some of the groups have warned that the government, severely pressed by Taliban offensives across the country, will lose its legitimacy if it does not hold the elections soon. Other groups have given up on the current government entirely, calling for early presidential elections to bring in a new administration.

The problem is even if there were a decision by all in government to hold elections immediately there would likely not be enough time, with war raging in Helmand Province and Islamic State on the rise in Nangarhar Province, to have elections by October.

The October surprise in the U.S. elections could be the collapse of the quisling government in Afghanistan.

Trump Sitting Pretty

I woke up last night thinking about Donald Trump's ever-present "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN" cap. Trump wears it whenever he is outdoors to protect his elaborate comb-over from a troublesome gust of wind. Could Trump's pomposity bear a flapping in the breeze of a comb-over revealing the baldpate of an aged man? If Trump ends up in the White House will he shun the Rose Garden? If he goes to Arlington National Cemetery to lay a wreath at the Tomb of the Unknowns will he do so with "MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN" firmly secured to his head?

Then I asked myself, "Why am I thinking about this?" Though it did feel like a revelation, much other significant news is aborning. There is continued movement to jump start peace talks on Syria. Jejune Saudi defense minister Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud could be proving his naysayers wrong as the Houthis appear to be on the run in Yemen.

But the news dominating the coverage in the United States is of the 2016 presidential election still half-a-year off.

At this point I don't see how Trump can be beat. Over the weekend he released his plan to deal with immigration. It is being roundly criticized in the press. There is a particularly cogent piece, "Donald Trump’s Claims on Immigration: A Reality Check," and it is short too, in today's paper by longtime Mexico reporter Julia Preston. She lists the plan's many contradictions and failings before concluding with an acknowledgement of its political potency:

Yet among Mr. Trump’s populist proposals are some that could attract support from Americans in the beleaguered middle class. He went further than his rivals calling for changes to the temporary work visas known as H-1B, to raise the wages paid to immigrants and tighten requirements for employers to search first for Americans to fill jobs.

This is an issue that resonates with many voters across the political spectrum. The digital economy is creating pockets of amazing wealth which is not trickling down to the "soccer mom" suburbs. The go-go growth is in the urban core and the jobs appear to be going to foreigners from Indian. Trump can demonize Mexicans at the low end and Indians and Pakistanis at the high end, and he'll laugh all the way to election day.

Hillary on the other hand is not laughing. In fact, she should be crying (though Nate Silver gives her an 85% chance to win the Democratic nomination; Nate Cohn, the Gray Lady's Nate Silver simulacrum, basically agrees, without quantifying the odds).

An interesting longer story today by Amy Chozick and Eric Lichtblau, "Facing Money Gap, Hillary Clinton Slowly Warms to ‘Super PAC’ Gifts," gets at why both Silver and Cohn think that Hillary will have a tough time in the general election. The GOP is raising a lot more money in million-dollar-plus Super-PAC contributions, and this money is being used by both top-contenders like Jeb Bush and also-rans like Carly Fiorina to pummel Clinton in the here and now:

Republican contenders have used their overflowing coffers to bash one another, but the money has also helped finance months of attacks on Mrs. Clinton.

In mid-September, Right to Rise, a super PAC supporting Mr. Bush, plans to spend at least $10 million on television ads in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina, said Paul Lindsay, a spokesman for the group. Last month, Mr. Bush’s two PACs, which raised a record $108.5 million, reported spending $100,000 on online ads in early primary states in part opposing Mrs. Clinton.

And a super PAC supporting the Republican candidate Carly Fiorina, which recently trumpeted a “fiery new attack ad aimed squarely at Hillary Clinton,” received about $1.6 million, nearly half its funding, from a single donor: A. Jerrold Perenchio, a Los Angeles billionaire who made his money in media investments. 

Mrs. Clinton’s donors have taken notice. “Over the last two months, they’ve seen in real time what’s actually happening on the other side and the severe attacks Hillary is under,” Mr. Cecil said, “and the reality that when it comes to how campaigns are won, the ground underneath us has changed.”

Romney was a weak candidate. But what 2012 proved in terms of presidential electioneering is that if you drive up a candidate's negatives sky high early on then that candidate is most likely doomed come November. This is what Hillary is up against. Sanders is going to rough her up as well.

Chozick on the Hillary Reboot: The Triangulator Triangulates Obama as He Attempts a TPP Triangulation of His Own

Amy Chozick has worked the Clinton beat for two years now. Chozick acts as midwife for the public relations campaigns launched one after the next to reinvent the bloated power broker we have come to know as Hillary, but Chozick can also be a stealthy critic as well.

An example can be found in last Saturday's repackaging ("Hillary Clinton Embraces Her Mother’s Emotional Tale") of Hillary as a loving daughter to a mother with a hardscrabble, emotionally-harrowing working-class story. If Hillary had a privileged, stable Illinois upbringing, her mother did not. Here is how Chozick sums up the Hillary reboot in a tidy four paragraphs that open the story:

Dorothy Howell [Hillary's mother] was 8 years old when her parents sent her away. It was 1927. Her mother and father, who fought violently in the Chicago boardinghouse where the family lived, divorced. Neither was willing to take care of Dorothy or her little sister. 

So they put the girls on a train to California to live with their grandparents. It did not go well. Her grandmother favored black Victorian dresses and punished the girls for inexplicable infractions, like playing in the yard. (Dorothy was not allowed to leave her room for a year, other than for school, after she went trick-or-treating one Halloween.) 

Unable to bear it, Dorothy left her grandparents’ home at 14, and became a housekeeper for $3 a week, always hoping to return to Chicago and reconnect with her mother. But when she finally did, a few years later, her mother spurned her again.

It took a long time for Hillary Rodham Clinton to fully understand the story of her mother’s devastating childhood. But now, four years after her death, Dorothy’s story is forming the emotional foundation of her daughter’s campaign for president, and will be a central theme in her big kickoff speech on Saturday.

Chozick, a media reporter before taking on the Clinton beat, explains to her readers why this reboot is important:

A sympathetic tale of her mother’s struggles could help Mrs. Clinton convince a struggling middle class that she understands their problems, aides said. A CNN poll released on June 2 showed that 47 percent of voters thought that Mrs. Clinton “cares about people like you,” down from 53 percent last July. Mrs. Clinton’s campaign aides have publicly shrugged off such polls as evidence that voters distrust Washington and politics in general, but privately they are strategizing about how to reframe the conversation.

The task at hand for the Clinton campaign is enormous, almost akin to an alchemical squaring of the circle: How to convince people that Hillary is not what she is? -- a member of the "Davos elite," a powerful, jet-setting celebrity that accepts gargantuan checks from sheikhs and moguls and cares less for ordinary working people than an antebellum plantation owner would for one of his infirm slaves. Hence, we have Hillary piggybacking on her dead mother's backstory.

Hillary came out swinging last Saturday (Amy Chozick, "Hillary Clinton, in Roosevelt Island Speech, Pledges to Close Income Gap") on Roosevelt Island, the long spit in the East River between Manhattan and Queens, promising to fight for the truck drivers and nurses. Chozick couldn't help getting in the dig that

For as much as the content of the speech mattered, the theater of it was equally important. For a campaign criticized for lacking passion, the event gave Mrs. Clinton the ability to create a camera-ready tableau of excitement.

The Brooklyn Express Drumline revved up the crowd assembled on a narrow stretch at the southern tip of the island. And Marlon Marshall, the campaign’s director of political engagement, rattled off statistics about the number of volunteers who have signed up and house parties held in the early nominating states. A section with giant screens set up for an overflow crowd stood nearly empty. 

But a crowd of supporters and volunteers from the staunchly Democratic New York area does not exactly represent the electorate writ large. The real test for Mrs. Clinton and how the speech was perceived will be in Iowa, where she was to travel on Saturday evening for several events. Iowa, the first nominating state, shunned her the last time she sought the presidency, in 2008.

The Clintons when they occupied the the White House in the 1990s were known for something called "triangulation," which was a way of running against your own party by cherry-picking policies from the opposition. Tony Blair made a career out of it in the UK as well.

As Obama's attempt at triangulation to get the Trans-Pacific Partnership through Congress has exploded in a ball of flames, it is interesting to note that at the core of Hillary's messaging is the triangulation of the Obama presidency. According to Chozick and Patrick Healy in today's story "Hillary Clinton’s Vows to ‘Fight’ Evoke a Populist Appeal and a Contrast With Obama":

In a roughly 45-minute speech on Saturday, Hillary Rodham Clinton made 14 references to herself as a fighter. 

She said she would “fight” back against Republicans, “fight” climate change, “fight” to “strengthen America’s families” and “fight” to “harness all of America’s power.” She used the verb in many of the same ways at her first major rally in Des Moines on Sunday, adding that she would “fight” for Midwestern values. 

The presidential campaign’s effort to define Mrs. Clinton as a fighter is, on the surface, a way to persuade middle-class voters that she is on their side. But it is also helping to convey a more subtle message: When it comes to political combat and perseverance, Mrs. Clinton is not President Obama. 

The theme is emerging just as Mr. Obama has suffered a major setback on trade, one that many in Congress say reflects his weaknesses, namely his standoffishness and his inability to forge coalitions for an agenda.

It is a hall of mirrors. Obama is working with Republicans to surreptitiously reintroduce Fast Track while Hillary is positioning herself on the corpse of Democrats' hopes that Obama was a transformative politician.

This cannot end well. Hillary has not put Benghazi and the email issue behind her, let alone successfully relaunching herself as a working-class champion. I am still of the belief that absent the GOP nominating Ted Cruz Hillary cannot win.

Hillary Cannot Win in 2016

After watching about 14 minutes of Hillary Clinton's email apologia the only thing that was apparent to me was that she has next to no chance of winning a presidential election.

Whatever the precise details of whether the State Department reviewed Hillary's email account while she was Secretary of State or why she was allowed to use her personal email instead of a .gov email pales in comparison to the obviously unappealing nature of the woman.

Hillary reminds me of Bette Davis in her Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? (1962) renaissance period: an imperious postmenopausal woman who terrifies males and offends females.

Nate Cohn had a piece, "Hillary Clinton Is More Vulnerable in 2016 Than You Think," in yesterday's paper that provides the big picture polling numbers to back up my gut reaction to Hillary's UN press conference. Hillary has never been very popular:

Her ratings started out high as first lady in 1993, as is often the case with that role, but dropped to the mid-40s when she pursued health reform. Her ratings surged during the Monica Lewinsky scandal, but returned to the mid-40s once she ran for Senate, and remained there through her 2008 presidential campaign. Her ratings recovered again after she withdrew from the 2008 race and was no longer active in day-to-day politics. 

There is little about Mrs. Clinton’s electoral history that suggests she’s a stronger candidate than these ratings. As a Senate candidate in New York in 2000, she ran well behind Al Gore’s presidential election numbers in New York that year. Few defend her performance in the 2008 presidential primaries. If anything, the extent to which she was criticized by the left has largely been forgotten. As Slate’s Alec MacGillis put it, there is “a sort of collective amnesia among Obama supporters when it comes to their former estimation of Clinton — a reluctance to reckon fully with their aversion to her then and what has come of it since.”

The New York Times is critical of  Hillary's showing before the media yesterday. Michael Schmidt's "Questions Regarding Hillary Clinton's Personal Email Use"; "Hillary Clinton Tries to Quell Controversy Over Private Email" by Amy Chozick and Michael Schmidt; and Scott Shane's "No Classified Emails by Clinton? Some Experts Are Skeptical" all blow holes in Clinton's defense.

After watching Hillary I was mollified by her argument that she was following the precedent established by former Secretaries of State in using a personal email account. Apparently John Kerry is the first Secretary of State to exclusively use a .gov email. And while I am in general agreement with MoveOn.org's position that saturation coverage on Hillary's email is a sideshow, reading The Times' coverage this morning does re-frame the email issue in its larger political context, which is a tendency of the 1% to feel as if they don't have to abide by the laws that govern the 99%. Hillary, or staff who works for her, is the one who is determining which emails are personal and which are private and what can be released for public consumption. Her statement that her emails never dealt in classified information is risible.

One of the questions that Hillary dodged had to do with why, if she is such a champion of women's rights (which ostensibly was why she was appearing at the United Nations to begin with), the Clinton Foundation takes money from Saudi Arabia and other Gulf nations -- states who adhere to a primitive view of gender roles.

In any event, my takeaway was clear: Hillary cannot win, and Democrats are experiencing some sort of dementia, some sort of pre-death fever in thinking she can. Hillary needs to be dumped pronto. Jim Webb or Martin O'Malley seem to me at this point to be a much better standard bearer for the Democrats. I'm not endorsing their candidacies. I'm just saying if the Democrats want to win and try to prevent a WWIII from happening (as the GOP continues its soft coup in Congress) they would be wise to dump Hillary, ditch the "Draft Warren" campaign (it would tough for her to win) and get real.

Personal Encounters with New York City Policing

I lived in New York City for five years beginning in the late 1980s. This was when the city had yet to undergo its surge in gentrification that really got rolling under Giuliani; for instance, Times Square was still a squalid strip of peep shows, adult bookstores and rundown steak houses. 

I had my run-ins with the police. One time, when I was living in a neighborhood of Dominicans and Hasids tucked up against the eastern entrance to the George Washington Bridge a white undercover cop accosted me as I was crossing 181st Street on my way back to my apartment. He demanded to see some identification; he wanted to know what I was doing. He puts his hands on me and went through my pockets. I told him I lived in the neighborhood and was on my way home.

The cop was incredulous. He couldn't imagine a white rock'n'roller young man living willingly among blacks and orthodox Jews. The neighborhood was notorious for being the preferred destination for suburbanites to acquire street drugs. It is a narrow part of northern Manhattan conveniently bisected by Interstate 95.

Finally, I defused the situation by inviting him up to my apartment. I told him something like, "If you don't believe me, come on up. I'll show you where I live."

He dismissed me with the imperative to stay out of trouble, warning me that he would be watching.

I wasn't really upset by the encounter, more dumbfounded than anything else. It seemed ludicrous, comical that undercover police could bodily search and interrogate a person in broad daylight on a busy thoroughfare with zero cause besides falling within the parameters of an overly broad profile. Nonetheless I can vividly recall the encounter more than twenty-years on.

This was not my only run-in with New York City's finest. I actually got into an altercation late one Friday night with a Transit Authority police. The location was 136th Street 1-line subway stop. The cop ended up calling for backup. A gang of undercovers arrived and frogmarched me at high velocity up a long flight of subway-station stairs and threw me in the back of their cruiser. Off I went at breakneck speeds with sirens wailing to a Harlem police station to spend the night locked up.

What had I done? I asked why the Transit Authority police was hassling my friend for having an unlit cigarette on his lips. Smoking is not allowed in the subway but he wasn't smoking. The Transit Authority police responded to my inquiries by telling me to "Shut the fuck up and put your hands above your head."

My retort? "Fuck you!"

And that's when the altercation began. The people on the platform -- all black and Latino -- formed a circle around me and the Transit Authority cop as we grappled and chanted, "Police brutality! Police brutality!"

I had forgotten about this incident until this week when the Garner grand jury refused to indict the undercover policeman, Pantaleo, for homicide.

Not all of Gotham's constabulary are Gestapo types. During my residence in the Big Apple I came across several, particularly the ones who were my age, in their 20s, who were approachable, more so than your typical big city West Coast police who affect sort of a sterile haughty professionalism.

The Garner murder has struck a chord. It is a stain on the credibility of the U.S. You'll be less likely in the immediate aftermath of the ongoing #BlackLivesMatter protests to witness John Kerry climbing up on his high horse to hector other nations about good government.

Something has shifted from business-as-usual patterns. Even Hillary, who anticipates success by roping crackers into the Democratic Party at the same time keeping the "Obama coalition" loyal, is sounding off about racial justice. According to Peter Baker and Amy Chozick's "Some Conservatives Say Deadly Force Used to Subdue Garner Didn’t Fit the Crime":

. . . Mrs. Clinton drew broader conclusions. “Each of us has to grapple with some hard truths about race and justice in America,” she said, speaking at a conference in Boston. “Because despite of all the progress we’ve made together, African-Americans, most particularly African-American men, are still more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes and sentenced to longer prison terms.” 

Mrs. Clinton endorsed Mr. Obama’s decision to form a task force to review police tactics and praised the Justice Department’s decision to investigate Mr. Garner’s death. She called for changing police tactics, overhauling the prison system and demilitarizing police departments. At times, she struck the personal tone some had expected of Mr. Obama. 

“The most important thing each of us can do is to try even harder to see the world through our neighbors’ eyes,” she said. “To imagine what it is like to walk in their shoes, to share their pain and their hopes and their dreams.”

For Hillary to take this stand you know it has been vetted by campaign operatives and focus-group tested. The politics of outrage over racial injustice have gone mainstream.

The Gray Lady's editorial board bears this out. Over the last two days some of the best items written on the Garner homicide can be found in the unsigned editorials. Two things stand out in "It Wasn’t Just the Chokehold: Eric Garner, Daniel Pantaleo and Lethal Police Tactics." First:

But among the many needed reforms, there is one simple area that risks being overlooked. Besides the banned chokehold used by Officer Daniel Pantaleo, who brought Mr. Garner down, throwing a beefy arm around his neck, there was lethal danger in the way Mr. Garner was subdued — on his stomach, with a pile of cops on his back. 

This breaks a basic rule of safe arrests, especially for people who, like Mr. Garner, are overweight and have medical problems like asthma. When the New York medical examiner’s office ruled Mr. Garner’s death a homicide, it cited “compression of neck (choke hold), compression of chest and prone positioning during physical restraint by police.” 

As early as 1995, a Department of Justice bulletin on “positional asphyxia” quoted the New York Police Department’s guidelines on preventing deaths in custody. “As soon as the subject is handcuffed, get him off his stomach.Turn him on his side or place him in a seated position.” 

As Michael Baden, a former chief medical examiner of New York City, told The Times: “Obese people especially, lying face down, prone, are unable to breathe when enough pressure is put on their back. The pressure prevents the diaphragm from going up and down, and he can’t inhale and exhale.” 

Which is exactly what Mr. Garner was trying to tell the officers who were on top of him.

 Next:

The Garner killing must lead to major changes in policy, particularly in the use of “broken windows” policing — a strategy in which Officer Pantaleo specialized, according to a report in September by WNYC, which found that he had made hundreds of arrests since joining the force in 2007, leading to at least 259 criminal cases, all but a fraction of those involving petty offenses. The department must find a better way to keep communities safe than aggressively hounding the sellers of loose cigarettes. 

And while defenders of the police like to point to thousands of nonfatal misdemeanor arrests as evidence that officers are acting in a way that is reasonable and safe, there can never be a justification for any lethal assault on an unarmed man, no justification for brutality.

The outrage in New York, echoed by anguished protesters in Ferguson, Mo., and in Cleveland, where the Justice Department has found a pattern of excessive force by the police, is based on a genuine fear of aggressive, abusive cops.

A Snapshot of the Clinton Psychosis

This morning I had to stop my audit of the newspaper abruptly. Once I had completed Amy Chozick's "Midterms, for Clinton Team, Aren’t All Gloom" I had to comment.

It was entirely predictable that the big-money players who control the Democratic Party were going to respond to the midterm debacle by banging the drum for Hillary's presidential candidacy rather than address obvious voter concerns, foremost of which is an economy that is as unequal as any going back to the 19th-century era of the Robber Barons.

"Psychosis" is a general psychiatric term signifying "a loss of contact with reality," and this is what is on full display in Amy Chozick's frontpage story.

Chozick provides an insider account of  the "Hillary for President" campaign readying to launch from the smoking rubble of the Democratic Party's collapse. The Hillary exploratory committee will wait until after Mary Landrieu's political corpse is ushered to the charnel house on December 6, the date of the runoff election in Louisiana against Republican Rep. Bill Cassidy.

The first passage from the Chozick piece that has to be mentioned regards the staging of a "listening tour" as a way for Hillary to reintroduce herself to a miserable, sullen electorate that now consistently polls at super-majority levels of disapproval for government and concern over the economy:

But before any campaigning begins, Mrs. Clinton will first embark on a listening tour that echoes what she did first as a candidate for the Senate in New York and then as a freshman senator, gathering ideas and advice from a cross-section of influential people about their concerns.

“She’ll slow down a bit, get off the radar, get ready for this, and ready includes being a good freshman senator, with a legal pad and lots of conversations,” said one person with direct knowledge of her plans who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans have not been made public. 

Meanwhile, the people around Mrs. Clinton will speed up their efforts to vet potential campaign aides, casually connect with donors and begin to help Mrs. Clinton craft a clearer message, especially on the economy. Although Mrs. Clinton’s midterm campaigning schedule took her to Iowa, Pennsylvania, Colorado, North Carolina and other important 2016 states, she did not spend much time getting to know the specific concerns of voters, something she would need to do ahead of a presidential campaign.

So what we are to understand is that Hillary, who has been barnstorming across the country for candidates during the midterms, is unaware what "specific concerns of voters" are. It is hard to take seriously. In fact, it can't be taken seriously. It is all just part of the dramaturgy of repackaging a bloated, tired, wealthy, famous defender of the Deep State as somehow concerned with what voters think. Hillary knows what voters want. They want jobs, and they want an end to interminable foreign wars. But Hillary has no intention of giving the people what they want; hence, the necessity of the listening tour to create the impression, the optics of a leader solicitous of the governed.

The next absurdity immediately follows from where the last quote leaves off:

Exit polls from Tuesday are being pored over for signs about what voters’ opinions could mean for Mrs. Clinton’s message and approach. Midterm voters expressed frustration with government, but also economic unease. 

“One of the questions for 2016 is: Which of those will 2016 be about? Will it be about the size and cost of government, or will it be about who the economy works for?” Mr. Garin asked. “If it’s an election about who the economy works for, then the Democratic nominee will be in a much better position to win,” he added.

Really? I thought that's what Obama's low approval rating was all about. People have given up believing he is going to do anything about economic inequality. "Obama bamboozled us for two elections. He ain't gonna bamboozle us anymore," the thinking goes. How is Hillary going to make people believe that she -- a rich old mean white lady -- is going to be any better?

Then, to return to the underlying theme of pychosis, what was Clinton's track record during the midterms? As highlighted in the first quote block, Hillary actively campaigned in bellwether states of Iowa, North Carolina, Pennsylvania, and Colorado, not to mention Arkansas and Kentucky. In Kentucky she worked for Clinton family friend Alison Lundergran Grimes in her attempt to unseat the ghoulish Mitch McConnell; in Arkansas, for Clinton family friend Senator Mark Pryor. All Hillary had to show for her effort was failure, not a clarion call for 2016:

During the midterm campaign, Mrs. Clinton raised more than $10 million for Democrats, and she and former President Bill Clinton attended at least 75 events on behalf of more than 30 candidates, building and rebuilding the relationships she and her husband are known for. 

The Clintons worked hard on behalf of Alison Lundergan Grimes, a candidate for Senate in Kentucky, and Senator Mark Pryor of Arkansas, and were somewhat startled by their double-digit losses. But it was former Gov. Charlie Crist’s loss to Gov. Rick Scott of Florida that carried the biggest implications for a 2016 presidential campaign, as the Clintons had hoped for Democratic leadership in a critical battleground state.

Chozick, a smart cookie who used to cover the media industry for the Gray Lady prior to receiving the assignment of exclusively reporting on Hillary, no doubt relished writing this story; intended by Hillary backers as a whetting of the public appetite, it comes off, thanks to Chozick's skillful construction, as a study in perverse delusion.

Take Chozick's last paragraph. (A few paragraphs prior she had described Sean Wilentz's assistance to Hillary. The odious faux-left academic historian was deployed during Hillary's 2008 presidential run to accuse Obama of race-baiting, and he is now helping her to craft her stump speech.)

As the outline for a campaign is drawn, Mrs. Clinton’s supporters describe what they envision as a “New Clinton Map” that they believe could create a winning coalition for 2016, drawing on the white working-class women who have long supported Mrs. Clinton and the young voters and African-Americans who helped elect Mr. Obama.

Yes, that's right. The Clintons, as guilty of playing the "negrophobia" card as any other politician (think Sister Soulja), are relying on black people and students to turnout in 2016. (Remember, it was Hillary who shepherded through the favorable EIS on Keystone XL when she was head of the State Dept.) That's chutzpah.

If Democrats buy this load of malarkey there might be some substance to the thought that the party of Jackson will crater sooner rather than later, an outcome favorable to the future of the planet.