Democratic Party Continues to Bleed Out

UPDATE: I failed to read Patrick Ruffini's "Black Voters Aren’t Turning Out For The Post-Obama Democratic Party" which appeared Tuesday on FiveThirtyEight before posting my the comments below. Ruffini looks at the ballyhooed Ossoff performance in Georgia's 6th CD with a healthy dose of skepticism:

The special election in Georgia’s 6th Congressional District is the first major test of the Democratic resistance to President Trump. In one sense, the results of the first round in April were promising for the party. Thanks to an impressive Democratic turnout, Jon Ossoff, the Democrat who advanced to this month’s runoff, almost cracked 50 percent of the vote in a district that’s nearly 10 percentage points more Republican than the nation as a whole.¹

The result, moreover, was a reversal of some turnout trends we saw in 2016, when President Trump outperformed the polls on the back of higher turnout in Republican-leaning areas. And if the runoff election on June 20 features a similar electorate, the race will be too close to call.

But the Georgia 6 April primary was a continuation of some 2016 turnout trends too — trends that should worry Democrats. In 2016, turnout among whites was up across the country, and in highly educated areas like the 6th District in the suburbs of Atlanta. This redounded to Democrats’ advantage. At the same time, black turnout was down precipitously, from 66 percent in 2012 to 59 percent in 2016. This black-white turnout gap continued in the first round of Georgia’s special election, where the Democrats got impressive turnout levels from all races and ethnicities — except African-Americans.

Lower black turnout in 2016 might be explained as a reversion to the mean after that group’s historic turnout for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012. It’s possible that Clinton could never inspire black turnout the way the first African-American president could. But even if this shift is more of a return to the old status quo, Democrats will still have to grapple with these turnout levels going forward, and there are powerful lessons we can learn from the party’s failure to raise or maintain previous black turnout levels in 2016. Painting Trump as a bigot did not motivate more African-Americans to vote, in 2016 or in the Georgia 6th. Hope and shared identity seem to be much more effective turnout motivators than fear.

[snip]

In 2018, Democrats may be able to win over and turn out the kinds of white voters who showed up for them in Georgia’s 6th — educated, left-leaning, but usually unlikely to vote in midterms — even as “the resistance” fails to appeal to the African-American community that has been a major element of Democrats’ traditional base. But that strategy is more limited in 2020, when marginal voters are concentrated in African-American and other nonwhite communities, and no candidate has shown an Obama-like ability to reach them. 

Ruffini explains why blacks are so important for the Dems -- because they vote 90%-plus Democratic. That's 180-proof. Latinos show nowhere near that level of party loyalty. So it takes a lot more Latino voters participating and turning out to vote in elections to make up for the drop off in African Americans.

Yes, things are dire for the Democrats. The Obama Coalition is a thing of the past. If you can't nominate candidates like a Bernie Sanders or a Jeremy Corbyn, lifelong social democrats, then you had better nominate a black man (I don't mean Cory Booker) or a Latino who has some social-democratic credibility. Nominating an Elizabeth Warren is not going to do it. We learned in November that there is no gender solidarity among white women.

With Trump scoffing at the Green voter -- Dakota Access Pipeline, Keystone XL, now Paris -- it is time for Dems to shit or get off the pot. I expect neither.

****

A "March for Truth" is set for Saturday with a demand of  "getting to the bottom of Trump's ties to Russia and possible obstruction of justice." Would you give up your Saturday for that? I wouldn't. Why not demand impeachment for illegally bombing Syria?

The Democrats continue to bleed out with little hope on the horizon that the bleeding will stop. Hillary is in the news again for a talk she gave at the spooky Code Conference where she reiterated the belief that her loss to Trump was not her fault. Even Clinton's backers in the mainstream medium are growing tired of this tune. Apparently the final straw was her heaping scorn on the DNC's data operation.

Today Thomas Edsall in "Has the Democratic Party Gotten Too Rich for Its Own Good?" makes a convincing case for the irretrievably oligarchic character of the current Democratic Party:

Can the Democratic Party, as it is currently constructed, maintain its commitment to a redistributive agenda? Put another way, can a political party impose costs on its own constituents, especially those voters who make up the most influential faction of the party: the affluent and well educated?

The preliminary evidence from actual events is that demanding sacrifice poses major risks. Asking people to think of themselves as compassionate and to pay higher taxes is one thing — many Democrats have made that leap — but ask them to live in a mixed income neighborhood or ask them to have their kid give up her spot at Princeton, and you get a different response.

[Richard] Reeves [senior fellow at the Brookings Institution] . . . points to the Democratic uproar when President Obama proposed a relatively modest change in a tax-based mechanism to help pay college costs. The change in what are called 529 College Savings Plans was designed to make the program more advantageous to people with moderate incomes and less so for those with high incomes. An estimated 70 percent of the tax benefits of 529 plans currently go to families with incomes above $200,000.

The moment Obama suggested the reform, prominent Democrats from both the House and Senate were inundated with angry complaints from affluent constituents. They pressured Obama to drop the proposal. In less than a week, he did.

“The idea was sensible, simple, and progressive,” Reeves writes. “The episode was a brutal reminder that sensible policy is not always easy politics.” Reeves noted that two of the leading Democratic opponents of the 529 reform, Nancy Pelosi and Chris Van Hollen, who was elected Maryland’s junior senator in November but was a congressman when Obama proposed it, represented districts where “almost half their constituents are in households with six-figure incomes.”

Perhaps the most problematic issue for affluent Democrats are proposals calling for expanded construction of affordable housing in middle-to-upper-middle class neighborhoods.

When local officials and the courts pressed for construction of relatively small numbers of moderate income housing units in such upscale liberal bastions as San Francisco (Clinton 84.5 percent, Trump 9.2 percent) and neighboring Marin County, Calif. (Clinton 77.3 percent, Trump 15.5 percent), the groundswell of opposition was loud and clear.

Looking at the case of Marin County, Jonathan Rothwell, a senior economist at Gallup, first made the case in a July 2015 Brookings report, Zoning Out The Poor, that liberals have a moral obligation to support desegregation initiatives:

"Segregation is a disaster for the poor. It crushes upward mobility by cutting off resources to essential public goods like quality education. Yet, in almost every city and metropolitan municipality there is a strong entrenched group committed to using political regulations to perpetuate segregation. These people are more commonly known as homeowners."

When officials in Marin County — median home value $815,100, median household income $93,297 — began plans to build affordable housing, the reaction was immediate, Rothwell wrote:

"The Lucas Valley Homeowner’s Association was formed to oppose “high density development." Likewise, the Marin Community Alliance was formed “to protect and preserve the character" of the area."

The response, Rothwell continued,

"is sadly typical. Since zoning’s modern origins in the 1920s, homeowner associations and other groups have banded together to keep racial minorities and non-affluent people out of their suburban municipalities and neighborhoods."

Blaming Russia Fails to Persuade the Masses

Here is a gem from Lambert Strether's Water Cooler:

“Just one-third of Americans say they believe Russia influenced the 2016 presidential election, according to a new POLITICO/Morning Consult poll” [Politico].. Good proxy for the size of Clinton’s base. Not enough.

After a solid week, possibly more, of incessant haranguing about the evil genius of Putin-directed Russian hackers stealing the presidential election from poor victim Hillary, the mainstream media has largely gone silent on the topic. (The big story now is whether Congress will create a special select committee to investigate the hack or whether existing committees will handle the chore.)

By now New York Times editors, let alone Deep State power brokers, should be able to connect the dots and realize that the "Russians ate poor, poor Hillary's lunch" is a colossal dud. This isn't 1950. Joseph Stalin is long dead. The Democratic Party fosters a tiny fraction of the allegiance it did in the Truman era. Instead Dem stalwarts should get to work on the 2018 midterms -- which as Nate Silver argues in "Democrats Need To Win Elections, Not Flip Electors" could see a change in control of the House -- rather than moaning about Russian bogeymen.

But as I have opined before, blaming the Russians keeps the Bernistas at bay and forestalls any reckoning for the money bags who run the show; it also splits Trump from his own party, as John McCain's almost daily Strangelovian pronouncements make clear. So even if the "Russians did it" is a dud, it is a song that will likely be in steady rotation, both for the internal political ambiance it creates as well as its dulcet neocon tone for U.S. clients among the Gulf emirates.

There is some self-congratulation from the Gray Lady today. "How We Identified the D.N.C. Hack’s ‘Patient Zero’ , " according to a blurb, "[D]etails how [Eric Lipton] and his Times colleagues David E. Sanger and Scott Shane constructed a chronological narrative of one of the most famous hacks in history."

Marcy Wheeler pokes holes in this timeline in "THE DNC’S EVOLVING STORY ABOUT WHEN THEY KNEW THEY WERE TARGETED BY RUSSIA."

Maybe the sudden disappearance of the Russian hack story from the front page is due to a preponderance of evidence pointing to a leak, whether from someone within the Clinton/Democrat organization or the NSA, rather than a hack.

Texas in Play?

From an AFL-CIO honcho in the Lone Star State who replied (see below) to a question as to whether Texas was truly in play, as has been reported, emailed him (and shared with me) by a guy who works in my building:

In play? Yes and no.

Polls are close (3 points and up) and maybe the Latino vote is underestimated. Labor is certainly working it.

But we are not a "battleground," nor are we getting major resources.

If we win, it will be amid the worst GOP implosion since 1964.

So it's possible, but no one is predicting a win.

How big will Hillary win? This appears to be where we are at with about a week-and-a-half to go. Trump has been written off. He is done. Kaput. The debate now appears to be whether his supporters will pick up their muskets and pitchforks after November 8, or, the $64,000 question, "How long will Clinton's coattails be?"

I think both -- Trump's fascist revolution and a Democratic landslide -- are hype.

My sense, as I have said before, is that Hillary will have coattails that will barely cover her ass. The latest from Nate Silver is that the presidential polls are narrowing again:

We’ve reached the point in the campaign where there are so many polls coming in — state polls, national polls, tracking polls, one-off polls — that it’s really nice to have a model to sort out all the data. A couple of days ago, the model was beginning to detect tenuous signs that the presidential race was tightening. Now, that seems a bit clearer. Clinton’s lead over Donald Trump is now 5.7 percentage points in the polls-only model, down from 7.1 points on Oct. 17. And Trump’s chances of winning the election have recovered to 18 percent from a low of 12 percent. Trump’s chances in the polls-plus forecast are 21 percent, improved from a low of 15 percent.

Almost all the tightening is happening because Trump’s numbers have improved. Clinton’s share of the vote — about 46 percent in national polls— is still as high as it’s been all campaign. But Trump seems to have brought home some Republicans who were thinking about sitting out the election or voting for a third-party candidate. Libertarian Gary Johnson has fallen to 5 percent in our popular-vote forecast — his lowest point to date. (If Johnson finishes with less than 5 percent, the Libertarian Party would be deprived of federal matching funds for the 2020 election.) The undecided vote is also declining, although it remains high compared with recent elections.

Then again, I read a story today that said Darrell Issa (longtime GOP incumbent in California’s 49th CD) is dangerously close to being ousted. So I don’t know.

My prediction? Hillary is no LBJ. The electoral college might be a blowout. But the popular vote margin will not be more than five-six points (and it very well could be in the Obama-Romney range, which was four points). For Dems: House, no; Senate, it’s so tight you would have to be a precog to know the outcome. I think the third party totals will end up surprising us. Stein is at 2% in the national polls; Johnson, a little over 5%. Based on anecdotal evidence (people -- women of color -- I know who have never voted third party, voted for Jill Stein) I think Stein might do as well as Nader did in 2000, 2.74%. In other words, Stein could very well outperform her polls. Johnson appears to be bleeding. Hopefully, he'll hold on so that the anti-imperialist Libertarians can grab those federal matching funds.

Hillary Sews Up the Election + Podesta Email Hack an Answer to Panama Papers?

Last night's presidential debate was the worst of the three: a petty, redundant, ugly exchange where the Hillary we had grown accustomed to in the primary -- imperious, arrogant, a specialist in subterfuge -- reappeared, while Trump, bereft of the adrenaline provided by his "grab them by the pussy" bombshell, sleepwalked through the show. All in all a dud.

Fox's Chris Wallace dashed Trump's hopes for a comeback on November 8 by early on, I think it was the second question, asking about the candidates' position on abortion and their commitment to Roe v. Wade. Trump said that for all intents and purposes Roe v. Wade would be overturned if he were to become president. He danced around it a little, didn't want to come out and articulate a simple declarative sentence because he knows the issue locks in place the enormous gender gap Hillary enjoys in the polls, but the damage was done. The election was essentially decided right then and there,

The highlight for The New York Times is that "Trump Won’t Say if He Will Accept Election Results," which I suppose is the right headline given how bad the debate was and the status of the paper as a Clinton campaign organ. But the idea that Trump will lead some sort of insurrection after election day is ludicrous; like so much that Trump does, it is all petulance and bluster.

For me, the big takeaway from last night was Hillary's lunatic rant on Russia, as follows:

WALLACE: Secretary Clinton, I want to clear up your position on this issue, because in a speech you gave to a Brazilian bank, for which you were paid $225,000, we’ve learned from the WikiLeaks, that you said this, and I want to quote. “My dream is a hemispheric common market with open trade and open borders.” So that’s the question...

TRUMP: Thank you.

WALLACE: That’s the question. Please quiet, everybody. Is that your dream, open borders? 

CLINTON: Well, if you went on to read the rest of the sentence, I was talking about energy. You know, we trade more energy with our neighbors than we trade with the rest of the world combined. And I do want us to have an electric grid, an energy system that crosses borders. I think that would be a great benefit to us.

But you are very clearly quoting from WikiLeaks. And what’s really important about WikiLeaks is that the Russian government has engaged in espionage against Americans. They have hacked American websites, American accounts of private people, of institutions. Then they have given that information to WikiLeaks for the purpose of putting it on the Internet.

This has come from the highest levels of the Russian government, clearly, from Putin himself, in an effort, as 17 of our intelligence agencies have confirmed, to influence our election.

CLINTON: So I actually think the most important question of this evening, Chris, is, finally, will Donald Trump admit and condemn that the Russians are doing this and make it clear that he will not have the help of Putin in in this election, that he rejects Russian espionage against Americans, which he actually encouraged in the past? Those are the questions we need answered. We’ve never had anything like this happen in any of our elections before.

WALLACE: Well?

TRUMP: That was a great pivot off the fact that she wants open borders, OK? How did we get on to Putin?

WALLACE: Hold on — hold on, wait. Hold on, folks. Because we — this is going to end up getting out of control. Let’s try to keep it quiet so — for the candidates and for the American people.

How is Hillary's sidestep of the WikiLeaks material by invoking the Putin bogeyman any different from Tailgunner Joe McCarthy's "I have here in my hand a list . . ." of known communists?

When Trump kept repeating that Putin does not respect Hillary, that Putin is her better, I thought Hillary would go lupine. Her cheeks reddened, her eyes moistened, her mouth opened -- did her snout start to protrude?

This of course is no laughing matter. Hillary once again repeated her Syria no-fly/safe zone mantra. When Wallace reminded Clinton of Joint Chiefs Chairman Dunford's assessment that a no-fly zone in Aleppo Province means war with Russia, she absurdly sidestepped and said that, well, of course there would be negotiations first.

It came to me in an incandescent moment last night that if it is true that a Russian state agency is behind the hacks of Democrats that have ended up with WikiLeaks it is a proportional response to The Panama Papers, which like the White Helmets, has CIA written all over it.

Say what you will about Russia, good or bad, the pattern we have seen over the last several years is that the nation is mostly reactive -- Syria and Ukraine being prime examples. It is not instigating all this mayhem. That would be the United States and its various allies in the Middle East.

Out of the Closet in Yemen

The colossal stupidity of the United States Government was on display with its recent missile strikes on Yemeni radar sites. The USG is now publicly committed to protecting all Red Sea shipping in the Bab el Mandeb bottleneck. This from "Yemen Sees U.S. Strikes as Evidence of Hidden Hand Behind Saudi Air War" by Mark Mazzetti, Ben Hubbard and Matthew Rosenberg:

The United States has also kept warships in the region to guard a sea lane through which four million barrels of oil pass each day. There, in the narrow strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, the dizzying mix of warships, cargo vessels and insurgent forces this week yielded precisely what the Obama administration had spent 18 months trying to avoid. 

The American strikes, launched at rebel-held territory, came after two unsuccessful missile attacks on the Mason in four days, the Pentagon said Thursday, and were intended solely to protect American forces and other shipping in Bab el Mandeb, the strait separating Yemen from Eritrea and Djibouti.

More attacks would invite further retaliation, Peter Cook, the Pentagon spokesman, said Thursday. American and allied warships will continue to patrol the strait, he said, but “we don’t seek a wider role in the conflict.” 

That may be the case, but the United States now finds itself facing a dangerous situation in a narrow stretch of water where even small incidents run the risk of inciting a broader conflict. 

After the American strikes, Iran said it was sending two warships to the strait, presumably to support the Houthis, an indigenous Shiite group with loose connections to Iran. Saudi Arabia has portrayed the Houthis as an Iranian proxy force and has said that it needed to intervene in Yemen to protect Saudi national security by preventing the rise of a belligerent militia on its southern border.

This commitment to Bab el Mandeb  cannot be easily undone. The U.S. is now "out of the closet" in Yemen; at the same time, it is talking about a shooting war with Russia over Aleppo.

What is fascinating about this full embrace of total and perpetual war by the rulers of the "indispensable nation" is that it comes absent any evidence of support from the American masses. The organs of the mainstream media -- The New York Times, CNN -- have been cranking out noise directly from Central Intelligence, day in and day out, for months -- no, years. To no avail. People do not want to go to war with Syria, and definitely not Russia, no matter how many times little Omran Daqneesh's bloody face is flashed.

Combine this with the onrushing election of a president who is likely the most unpopular -- the only other contenders that spring to mind are Nixon 1968 and John Quincy Adams 1824 -- and you have a recipe for a lot of instability. Because you know Hillary is a warhawk.

The system is so rancid and distended I don't see how it can be maintained. A correction is called for pronto. And that is the point of politics, to provide such a correction. Is the GOP civil war correction enough? I don't think so.

Electorally, the best that could be hoped for would be record low turnout and 5% for each third-party presidential candidate, giving Greens and Libertarians federal matching funds. Militarily, there needs to be a singular, exemplary defeat along the lines of the fall of Saigon. Maybe in Kabul, or possibly a messy civil war between U.S. proxies in Mosul following the rout of the Islamic State?

Democrat Dark GOP Fantasy

From the big frontpager in The New York Times this morning, Alexander Burns and Jonathan Martin's "Split Over Donald Trump Threatens to Tilt Republican States":

The nightmare possibility for the party is that swing voters punish the party because of Mr. Trump, the anti-Trump Republicans stay at home and Mr. Trump’s base casts a ballot for him and then leaves the polls. Under those conditions, Senate races in places like Pennsylvania and North Carolina could fall to Democrats, while Senate and House races in places like Missouri, Arizona and Kansas could move to the center of the battlefield.

Already, Republicans view Mr. Trump’s sharp downturn in the presidential race as having jeopardized their majorities in Congress. A poll published on Tuesday by NBC News and The Wall Street Journal found Mr. Trump trailing Mrs. Clinton by nine percentage points nationally and drawing just 37 percent of the vote. No major-party nominee since World War II has received a smaller share of the vote. But in an illustration of the bind Republicans are in, the poll found that three-fourths of Republicans believed their candidates should stay loyal to Mr. Trump.

George H.W. Bush only received 37% in 1992. And it is instructive to note that Democrats actually lost seats in the House that election, while breaking even in the Senate. Bill was a lot more popular in 1992 than Hillary is today. So I think these "perfect storm" prognostications by The New York Times are more fanciful agitprop than political math.

Hillary will win because of the gender gap. But she is not popular, and her coattails will barely cover her ass.

The Black Swan is a Phoenix

I watched the second presidential debate last night, and I thought Trump won it convincingly. He was most effective toppling Hillary from her high horse as she droned on about the impropriety of his "locker room banter." Trump did this by pointing to women in the gallery, three of whom had been victims of Bill Clinton's sexual violence. The fourth woman, Kathy Shelton, a child rape survivor whose attacker Hillary defended in court, said Hillary had laughed in her face:

Shelton joined Twitter on Saturday, and immediately started firing off messages targeting the Clintons. 

'I may be Hillary Clinton’s 1st female victim. She ruined my life; defended my rapist & blamed me. I was 12 yrs old. Then she laughed at me,' one message read.

Trump repeated this at the outset of the debate. From then on Hillary was on her heels.

Trump won big on foreign policy -- Aleppo, Libya, Mosul -- and he scored impressively on Hillary's email abuses. Trump brought up WikiLeaks and scored big when Hillary attempted to blame the Russians.

Nate Silver didn't see a big Trump win ("The Second Debate Probably Didn’t Help Trump, And He Needed Help"). He saw a modest victory for Hillary that might end up turning into a Trump win after the electorate has a chance to digest the debate over the next few days. Silver's larger point is an important one I think: Even if we erase the Billy Bush Access Hollywood tape and last night's debate, Trump is in rough shape:

A CNN poll of debate watchers found that even though most voters thought Trump exceeded expectations, 57 percent of them nevertheless declared Clinton the winner, compared with 34 percent for Trump. A YouGov poll of debate watchers showed a much closer outcome, but with Clinton also winning, 47 percent to 42 percent.

These instant-reaction polls actually do have a correlation with post-debate horse-race polls: The candidate who wins the former usually gains in the latter. Perhaps Clinton’s win was modest enough that this will be an exception, especially given that the sentiments of pundits and television commentators (which sometimes matter as much as the debate itself) were all over the map.

So suppose that we call the debate a draw. Suppose, furthermore that the tape the Post published didn’t damage Trump. Instead, let’s say the polls look about the same a week from now as they do today, with Clinton holding a 5 or 6 percentage point lead. Maybe Clinton’s numbers were a little inflated after the first debate and Trump has even gained a point or two, somehow.

That’s still a fairly awful position for Trump with time running out, undecided voters getting off the sidelines, early voting already taking place in many states and little or no ground game to help provide a strong finishing kick. There’s the third debate, but without an extremely strong performance in that one, Trump is probably left hoping for an “October surprise” or a big polling error (not impossible, but it would have to be larger than the 4-point margin by which Brexit polls missed).

Or, obviously, things could get worse for Trump. And some “October surprises” — such as further leaks of tax returns or embarrassing comments caught on tape — could work against him. (They also wouldn’t be that surprising.) His attempt to make an issue of Bill Clinton’s past, which his campaign seems determined to pursue, could also backfire. 

I thought Hillary convincingly won the first debate. Trump convincingly won the second debate. Will he get the kind of bounce that Hillary got after debate #1? At the very least he saved his candidacy.

Hillary should refuse to participate in the last debate. She does better when Trump is left to his own devices and the mainstream media is gang-tackling him.

One interesting possibility that Silver does mention is the black swan: The polling error could be even bigger than the Brexit forecast.

The Black Swan has been Black Swanned

There is no recovering from this gaffe for The Donald. Not even Jesus Christ or Mahatma Gandhi would be forgiven for:

In the three-minute recording, which was obtained by The Washington Post, Mr. Trump recounts to the television personality Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood” how he once pursued a married woman and “moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there,” expressing regret that they did not have sex. But he brags of a special status with women: Because he was “a star,” he says, he could “grab them by the pussy” whenever he wanted.

The American electorate, H.L. Mencken's "Boobeoisie," knows one thing for sure, and that is smut. This broke yesterday afternoon, the Bermuda Triangle -- Friday after lunch -- of news coverage. It will seep into the collective consciousness over the weekend.

The party is over. Trump's gender gap is now officially unbridgeable. Welcome to Clintontime, part two.

It is hard to imagine how Trump will appear on the debate stage with Hillary tomorrow. His only hope is to make the problem even bigger and go low and blame Slick Willie for saying even worse on the golf course. What could that be? A salacious blow-by-blow of how Bill sodomized a Clinton Foundation staffer?

If Trump goes this route he will be disavowed by the GOP. Conversations are underway right now to force Trump to stand down in favor of Pence. That of course is the smart move for the Republicans down-ballot.

The Black Swan

With the first presidential debate tonight, it is interesting to note that Nate Silver, polling guru who made a name for himself successfully predicting both of Obama's robust victories, has basically punted when it comes to divining the outcome for 2016. The polls are too close and the trend lines are going in odd directions in swings states versus the nation at large. But what Silver is really saying, at least what I came away with, is that polling in this presidential election year is not reliable.

In other words, the polling guru is calling a black swan. Silver won't name it as such because his FiveThirtyEight web site, owned by ESPN, is part of the corporate media monopoly and is therefore all in for Hillary. But a significant part of this particular black swan is the corporate media monopoly itself. So Silver's elliptical reference to a black swan makes perfect sense. Self-censorship.

The black swan of which I speak is a Trump victory. Impossible based on the factoid that the candidate who is leading in the polls two weeks after the last nominating convention always wins. But who could have imagined in late August, after the daily pummeling Trump receives on the front page of the "newspaper of record" and the tens of millions of dollars Clinton has spent on unchallenged ads, that in late September Trump would be ahead in Ohio and Florida and that we would have a nail-biter on our hands?

Hillary's path to 270 electoral votes is easier to imagine because I don't see Trump winning in Pennsylvania or Michigan, states Trump needs to find a way to the White House. But there is also a small chance that no candidate gets to 270. This could happen if Trump wins Colorado, New Hampshire and one of the two electoral votes Maine apportions based on Congressional District. Assuming all the swings break according to the current FiveThirtyEight map, this would keep Clinton under 270.

Andrew Levine in "The Meaning of the Trump Surge," which was the featured piece on the CounterPunch web site over the weekend, thinks that after the debates Hillary will reattain her substantial post-convention lead. In this scenario, Levine thinks the best that can be hoped for is that the Jill Stein vote will reach five percent; at that threshold the Green Party will qualify for federal funds. This is a big deal. It was the unicorn we were after in 2000 with Nader-LaDuke.

If Nader-LaDuke couldn't do it, neither will Stein-Baraka.

On Saturday I participated in a 5K road race that is part of an annual community event in a working-class neighborhood in the northernmost reaches of the city. I go every year. It is my favorite run. I think it has something to do with its small scale. I like racing on the empty streets early on Saturday morning. What I noticed this year is that people still have their Bernie signs up. This is a phenomena I have noticed in the more inexpensive precincts of my neighborhood, something one would expect to see in apartment windows. But in the northern home-owning neighborhood of working-class Broadview it came as a surprise. No Trump signs. No Hillary signs. Only Bernie signs and Seahawks signs (and less of those than in years past).

What do these signs portend? It is hard to say. Were Kucinich signs still up in yards and apartments at this point in 2004?

I don't think every Bernie sign is a marker for Jill Stein. After all, Bernie has capitulated and is campaigning for Clinton. I think these signs are similar to Tibetan prayer flags and signify nothing more than the bleached aspiration of a weekend Buddhist living in a 'roided-out consumer culture. I think we need to start looking at the electoral map from the 2004 election.

Third Party Daydream

The latest frontpager about Hillary's email improprieties has to do with the FBI's discovery of 15,000 previously unreleased emails, "As a result, thousands of emails that Mrs. Clinton did not voluntarily turn over to the State Department last year could be released just weeks before the election in November."

No doubt these new emails will reaffirm the Judicial Watch findings that Hillary's State Department was an influence peddling arena for the Clinton Foundation. Foreign governments made substantial donations to the Clinton Foundation, and then Clinton Foundation officials made requests of the State Department on behalf of their donors:

The group [Judicial Watch] said that the 725 pages of documents it released Monday demonstrated efforts by the Clinton family foundation to leverage its influence with Mrs. Clinton. The emails, drawn from Ms. Abedin, included an appeal by Douglas Band, a Clinton Foundation executive, for Mrs. Clinton to meet with Bahrain’s crown prince, whose family had contributed millions of dollars to the foundation. 

“Good friend of ours,” Mr. Band wrote. 

Ms. Abedin, after expressing Mrs. Clinton’s reluctance to schedule a meeting “until she knows how she will feel,” then wrote back to Mr. Band to offer the crown prince an appointment the next morning. She encouraged Mr. Band to let the prince know, “if you see him,” though she said the State Department had also contacted him through official channels.

This is how government works. Businesses, wealthy foreign powers, buy access and influence policy. At this point it should be obvious to anyone that has followed Syria since the Arab Spring uprisings that U.S. foreign policy is dictated by the Gulf monarchies. The same goes for other Western powers. Notice this blurb from this morning's Situation Report:

Yemen

France may be lending military support to the Saudi-led coalition's war in Yemen, according to new satellite imagery. War Is Boring reports that hangars consistent with French designs show up in the latest Google Earth imagery of the United Arab Emirates-run Assab air base in Eritrea, which is used as a transshipment hub to support the war in Yemen against the Houthi movement. Little is known about what's in the hangars, but the distinctly French constructions follow a series of supportive recent statements from French leaders about the country's commitments to its Gulf allies.

One truly positive development that could come out of a steady stream of reporting about Clinton corruption -- now that it is apparent that Trump is headed for a huge loss in November -- is that third party vote totals will increase dramatically. Can we hope for 5-10 percent in the general election for Libertarians and Greens? I am skeptical. It would be the equivalent of the Second Coming. But as August comes to an end why not indulge a daydream?

Trump Needs a Miracle + Blows Against the Empire

This morning, the first post-convention Monday in the long march to the general election in November, is a good indication of why it will take a miracle for Donald Trump to win the White House. Stories with the most prominent placement are "Donald Trump’s Confrontation With Muslim Soldier’s Parents Emerges as Unexpected Flash Point" and "How Paul Manafort Wielded Power in Ukraine Before Advising Donald Trump." The former plays up Trump's bigotry and divisiveness; the latter, the new McCarythism. The media will tattoo Trump and the Trump campaign every day for the next three months. Trump will be unable to whittle down his disapproval rating and narrow the gender gap. Because the media monopoly has gone all in for Hillary, Trump is effectively in a box; absent the miraculous, there he will stay.

Then there is the issue of the daunting electoral map. Alexander Burns and Maggie Haberman in "Electoral Map Gives Donald Trump Few Places to Go" outline the harrowing journey ahead for The Donald. Basically he has to run the table on the big swing states -- Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida -- and hold North Carolina. Problem is, Trump is woefully underfunded at this point, not to mention that he has alienated a large part of the GOP machine. Even assuming a richly-funded, well-organized campaign, Trump's task ahead is Herculean. Given that he is having trouble raising money -- and it doesn't look like he is going to bankroll himself -- and his campaign infrastructure is skeletal, once again, a miracle is called for.

Nate Cohn limned the contours of this miracle in "Donald Trump’s Path: What Map Should Democrats Fear the Most?" Trump runs the big swings as well as the little swings -- Nevada, Iowa, New Hampshire -- and ends up tied 269-269 with Hillary. The election gets dumped into the House of Representatives where Paul Ryan anoints Trump il Duce. Far-fetched? Absolutely.

True, Trump has proven he is a real wild card and not one to be counted out, but I think as we get deeper into August his limitations are going to catch up with his campaign and Hillary will get back to her four-to-five-point lead.

While we are hypnotized stateside with the Trump circus, the U.S. Empire is about to absorb some big blows:

1) Some sort of rapprochement is underway between Russia and Turkey. Putin and Erdogan are to meet next week in St. Petersburg. Turkey appears convinced that the U.S. had a hand in the recent coup attempt.

2) The jihadis are surrounded in Aleppo. Pro-jihadi think tankers are already licking their wounds and looking for some sort of silver lining. That silver lining appears to be "Just wait until Hillary gets here."

3) Italy is on the verge of a full-blown banking crisis. Renzi is on the ropes. Another anti-EU party, M5S, is looking strong.

4) Britain will likely continue to trod a rocky road as it becomes apparent that Theresa May plans on screwing the white working class that voted for Brexit.

Get ready. Crisis time approaches.

Hillary's White House will be a Mausoleum for Neoliberalism

While it might be a stretch to label Hillary's "Get Out of Jail Free" card issued yesterday by FBI director James Comey a "Nixonian" moment, that is what it feels like to me. Certainly the powerless public is used to seeing the powerful skate. After all, how many times have we reminded ourselves that none of the "Masters of the Universe" behind the 2008 global economic meltdown spent time behind bars?

The difference here is that we were never asked to vote for Dick Fuld or Angelo Mozilo, at least not directly, as we are now being asked to vote for Hillary.

Nixon resigned in disgrace and was spared criminal prosecution, in what was almost assuredly a quid pro quo, thanks to a presidential pardon handed down by a successor Nixon himself selected. The public was enraged for a while, and it no doubt cost Gerald Ford a close election against Jimmy Carter in 1976, but it turned out that the whole Watergate Nixon resignation was a handy Judas goat scenario which allowed voters to think that the "good guys won" and the body politic had been healed.

Clinton is not going to bow out, and voters no longer believe that "good guys" serve in government. There is no wiggle room left, not anywhere near the space available to present-day elites as was nearby for those present at the creation of neoliberalism in the Carter years.

I say it feels like a Nixonian moment because we are at the threshold of the mausoleum. The mausoleum is the Hillary White House. Once we pass through it we will be in a different world.

Edsall in Pottstown, PA: For the GOP the 2016 Election is All About the Down-Ticket

I used to read Thomas Edsall's column every week. But then I switched employers, and I no longer had to while away the hours on the train. Consistently excellent, Edsall's reporting usually tells the story of a country wracked by inequality and economic dislocation while its major political parties struggle with how to win votes without doing anything to address the voters' concerns.

This week Edsall describes a visit to postindustrial Pottstown, PA, "Measuring the Trump Effect," where support for the presumptive Republican presidential nominee breaks down along gender lines:

My interviews this week with Pottstown voters in working and middle class white neighborhoods showed almost no support for Trump among women, but steady support among men.

“I like him because he is to the point, and it’s time for a change, I think he’s got the oomph to rattle some cages,” John Keyser, a nonunion employee at Universal Concrete Products Corporation, said. Universal Concrete is one of the few manufacturing facilities left in the area. Keyser told me that he usually votes for Democrats and thinks that Bill Clinton was “one of the greatest and best presidents we ever had.” But this year he supports Trump:

I’d rather have somebody who does get angry and has feelings than what we have had with politicians who don’t care either way. I like the emotional involvement.

In a number of cases, local support for Trump among white men was based as much on their animosity to Hillary Clinton as it was on their faith in Trump.

“I’d vote for the devil before I would ever vote for that woman,” said a man in his 60s who identified himself only as Keith. In a phrase repeated by at least three others, Keith said that Hillary Clinton “belongs in jail.”

Stacey Weinstein, a 53-year-old psychiatric social worker, reflected the opposite side of the coin: she distrusts Clinton, but sees Trump as by far the worse choice.

“I’m not terribly enthusiastic about her because I think she has done some very underhanded things,” Weinstein said, but “Donald Trump is a misogynist, and I don’t like misogynists.”

What stood out in the interviews I conducted on June 13 here and in an upscale development in East Goshen, 24 miles south of Pottstown, was that the Trump supporters were male, with one exception; Clinton backers were decisively (but not exclusively) women.

News consumers would be better informed if more reporters did what Edsall does in this week's column -- go to a town; describe briefly its history, both demographic and economic; and ask people what they think about the candidates. The interviews he quotes breathe fresh air and provide a slice of life we too rarely get to sample. It's too bad that Edsall only appears online and not in NYT's national print edition.

The rest of the story Edsall wrestles with the down-ticket ramifications of Trump's candidacy. This is the $64,000 question for the GOP and explains why party leaders have vacillated so when it comes to embracing or criticizing Trump. Basically the Republican Party is trapped and elders don't know what to do. Look at Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell. First, he said the party would run attack ads in select states against its own nominee if it ends up being Trump. Then he was one of the first high-profile Republicans in Congress to endorse Trump.

For the GOP it is all about protecting its majorities in the Senate and House, which means inoculating its down-ticket from any Trump backlash at the same time it grabs whatever ride is available on Trump's coattails. Maybe such a calculation is possible at the level of the individual race, but certainly not at the national level. That's why Congressional Republicans seem so adrift when it comes to Trump, and it is not something that is going to be solved between now and November. The GOP hope is to fudge things and not lose too many seats.

Liberals on the Precipice: Knowing that Neoliberalism has Failed while Pretending that Politics can Fix It

Eduardo Porter has a column every Wednesday on the business page of The New York Times. It is interesting because it records how a liberal is comings to grips with a bankrupt neoliberal economic paradigm. Lately Porter has been jousting with proponents of a universal basic income (UBI).

Today, "For Hillary Clinton, a Risk of Excess Caution in Economic Policy," Porter implores Hillary to go big in addressing the problems of today's economy, which he correctly identifies as the shrinking of the working class:

A big part of the problem is the erosion of America’s working class. It has been hollowed out as trade and technology have done away with most of the well-paid jobs once available to Americans without a college degree, tipping many of them into a service economy of low wages, uncertain hours and little job security.

He likes Clinton's emphasis on rebuilding the nation's infrastructure, but he thinks her proposal to do so is too stingy:

For instance, she is proposing $275 billion in federal infrastructure investment over five years. That is less than 10 percent of what the American Society of Civil Engineers estimates will be needed. 

Mrs. Clinton’s entire tax plan would raise only $1.1 trillion over the next decade, according to the Tax Policy Center, half a percentage point of the nation’s gross domestic product.

Porter then goes on to list some helpful liberal ideas on how to create a more equitable economy:

What about dismissing the deficit scolds who shape the outdated Washington Beltway consensus and borrowing $1 trillion or so to sharply increase the spending on infrastructure, letting states and municipalities select the investments and manage the job?

How about taking advantage of the cheapest oil prices in a very long time to propose a carbon tax? Or how about imposing a progressive wealth tax to tap into the good fortune of 160,000 American families at the very tip of the wealth pyramid, who are on their way to pass $12 trillion to the next generation, much of it untaxed.

The money could be spent on high quality and universal early education, providing the next generation a better shot at a level playing field. It could be spent on training, to provide workers with needed skills, or job search services to help match workers and jobs. These strategies have been successfully employed by other advanced nations but remain a rarity in the United States.

Mrs. Clinton, of course, is not the only candidate indulging in nostalgia. Witness Donald Trump’s bombastic appeal to white working class men uncomfortable in an America where one must dial “1” for English.

Still, she has a rare opportunity. If she wins, she may well come into office with the political wind at her back: a Senate returned to Democratic control and a divided Republican Party with only a tenuous hold on the House. [Some robust magical thinking here.]

Americans have just lived through perhaps the most progressive presidency [!] since the 1960s. President Obama raised tax rates on the rich and expanded health insurance for millions of Americans. Facing stubborn resistance in Congress, he leaned on his executive powers to improve working conditions.

Yet the nation’s enormous inequities just got bigger. The income of the richest 1 percent grew 27 percent from 2009 to 2014. The average gain for everybody else barely exceeded 4 percent. A future projected along these lines does not look promising.

Bernie Sanders talks about a revolution. Mrs. Clinton might want to try to deliver one.

Most liberals (they don't call themselves liberals anymore; if pushed, they call themselves progressives) are where Porter is at. They realize the economic paradigm is malfunctioning for the vast majority of people, but they are still attached to the delusion that the political system can address and solve the problem. It can't.

The idea that Clinton is going to have long coattails in November and sweep the GOP from control of the Senate, or even substantially reduce the Republican majority in the House, is fanciful. No fix is in store. And what will be interesting is the level of allegiance Hillary will enjoy from liberals who remained loyal to Obama even after it became apparent post-2012 election that he was not "the one we were waiting for." I suspect liberal loyalty will be at a minimum.

At least liberals like Porter are able to frame the question, as he did in last week's column on technology-induced unemployment, "Jobs Threatened by Machines: A Once ‘Stupid’ Concern Gains Respect":

Jeffrey D. Sachs of Columbia University has been working with a series of colleagues on an economic model of a world in which robotization both raises economic output and immiserates workers, pushing them out of their jobs. It is not a theoretical impossibility.

“The point for me is that these two scenarios — robots lead to nirvana and hell — can happen side by side,” Professor Sachs told me. “Generally capital wins and all labor can lose. It shows up as a fall in the labor share of national income.”

In that event, preventing a dynastic society of relentlessly growing inequality would require large-scale redistribution. It could even take the form of a universal income paid for with a hefty estate tax — using some of the vast profits accruing to the owners of robots to finance a living for everybody else.

Since most paid human labor would be pointless, the disincentive to work produced by a monthly check would be unimportant. People could devote themselves to unpaid creative affairs.

“Don’t destroy the robots,” Professor Sachs said. But recognize that “not everybody would be better off as a result of market forces. With redistribution everybody could be made better off.”

Many experts are not convinced. For every analysis like this one — forecasting that half of all jobs in the United States will be replaced by new technology — others point out that there is no evidence of humanity’s impending redundancy.

A research paper published last month by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development argued that even the occupations most at risk of being replaced by machines contained lots of tasks that were hard to automate, like face-to-face interaction with customers.

My sense is that given a choice between interacting with another human or a computerized machine, consumers will overwhelming opt for the machine. Look at the fate of the corner video store. Streaming home video had a lot to do with the demise of the mom-&-pop neighborhood video rental store, but not so much as the appearance of the Redbox movie kiosks in grocery stores and in front of 7/11s.

We have to give more weight to predictions of 50% job loss due to automation than a pie-in-the-sky-by-and-by faith that robotic efficiencies in the job market will trickle down and create other types of employment.

To this end, Porter concluded his column last week with a Larry Summers anecdote. And who doesn't love a story about the pompous economics guru ex-Harvard president?

Last November, Lawrence H. Summers — a former Treasury secretary under President Bill Clinton, a top economic adviser in President Obama’s first term and one of the youngest people to earn tenure on the Harvard faculty — strode up to the podium at the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington and made an unlikely admission: Perhaps economists were not always the smartest people in the room.

He reminisced about his undergraduate days at M.I.T. in the 1970s, when the debate over the idea of technological unemployment pitted “smart people,” exemplified by the great economist Robert Solow, and “stupid people,” “exemplified by a bunch of sociologists.”

It was stupid to think technological progress would reduce employment. If technology increased productivity — allowing companies and their workers to make more stuff in less time — people would have more money to spend on more things that would have to be made, creating jobs for other people.

But at some point Mr. Summers experienced an epiphany. “It sort of occurred to me,” he said. “Suppose the stupid people were right. What would it look like?” And what it looked like fits pretty well with what the world looks like today.

For large categories of workers, wages are inadequate. Many are withdrawing from the labor force altogether. In the 1960s, one in 20 men between 25 and 54 were not working. Today it’s three in 20. The population is generally healthier than it was in the 1960s; work is almost uniformly less demanding. Still, more workers are on disability.

“Maybe the stupid people weren’t quite as stupid as I thought they were,” Mr. Summers conceded. “This was at least a serious concern that had to be thought about.”

In a world in which many Americans do not work during large chunks of their lives, we might have to conceive of Social Security and disability much more broadly than we do today.

That, Mr. Summers said, “could start to look like a universal income.”

So this is where smart-set type liberals are now. They are the on the precipice. The economic system is clearly not working for the masses, and it promises to only get worse. Talk about solutions is headed in the right direction, but there is very little acknowledgement that the political system will address the problem in any significant way.

A political revolution is called for, but in the United States a political revolution is not on the horizon. So things are going to continue to get worse.

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.