The Establishment's Apologia for Hillary

A guy walked into the office the other day. He is the AFL-CIO's local representative. I asked him what he thought about the recent Bernie Sanders surge in Iowa. He replied that his mother loves Hillary. I asked him if he saw the story about Sanders, a non-Democrat, appearing before the Democratic National Committee to the sound of cheers. He said Hillary has a lot of support among African-Americans.

So it goes. The establishment is still hitched to Hillary as she continues to rapidly bleed out. For a distillation of the establishment point of view, which mirrors the guy from the AFL, go over to FiveThirtyEight and read Harry Enten's "We Got Berned." Sanders' run up the polls can no longer be denied. But Clintonites hang their hat on the loyalty of blacks (and super-delegates). As Enten proffers:

So why do I still think Sanders is a factional candidate? He hasn’t made any inroads with non-white voters — in particular black voters, a crucial wing of the Democratic coalition and whose support was a big part of President Obama’s toppling of Clinton in the 2008 primary. Not only are African-Americans the majority of Democratic voters in the South Carolina primary (a crucial early contest), they make up somewhere between 19 percent and 24 percent of Democrats nationwide. In the past two YouGov polls, Sanders has averaged just 5 percent with black voters. Ipsos’s weekly tracking poll has him at an average of only 7 percent over the past two weeks. Fox News (the only live-interview pollster to publish results among non-white voters in July and August) had Clinton leading Sanders 62-10 among non-white Democrats in mid-July and 65-14 in mid-August. Clinton’s edge with non-whites held even as Sanders cut her overall lead from 40 percentage points to 19.

There are other indications that Sanders is unlikely to win the nomination. He hasn’t won a single endorsement from a governor, senator or member of the U.S. House of Representatives (unlike Obama at this point in the 2008 campaign). Sanders is also well behind in the money race (again, unlike Obama). These indicators haven’t changed over the past month.

But even if you put aside those metrics, Sanders is running into the problem that other insurgent Democrats have in past election cycles. You can win Iowa relying mostly on white liberals. You can win New Hampshire. But as Gary Hart and Bill Bradley learned, you can’t win a Democratic nomination without substantial support from African-Americans.

Nonetheless the narrative is beginning to shift. No longer is Hillary seen as an unstoppable political juggernaut. Now she is perceived as a juggernaut in reverse, forever on the defensive, hemorrhaging constantly. An example of this is David Brooks' column this morning, "Hillary Clinton, the Great Defender":

Hillary Clinton has obviously had a bad summer. She’s losing in New Hampshire to Bernie Sanders, even among women. She’s barely leading him in Iowa. In a Quinnipiac poll of potential general election matchups, she’s beating Donald Trump by only four points, 45 to 41, and she’s beating Marco Rubio by only one point. 

The conventional Democratic muck-a-muck view is that she horribly mishandled the private email server issue. That’s part of it, but the polling shows a much more pervasive personal set of weaknesses. In an AP/GfK poll, only 40 percent of Americans think she is compassionate. Only 30 percent say she is honest. In a variety of polls, many voters say she just doesn’t get people like them, usually the key Democratic strength.

Not all of these troubles are her fault. It’s tough to run as a member of the establishment in this time of popular disgust with establishments (ask Jeb Bush). But Clinton’s campaign nonetheless has a distinct aura. Maybe next to Michael Dukakis’s, it is the least romantic, poetic and uplifting Democratic campaign in decades.

***

We live in anxious times. You can respond to those times with a more radical political program, as Bernie Sanders is doing. You can answer with an anti-establishment burn-down-the-house campaign, as Donald Trump is doing. Or you can create a resurrection story, a creative narrative that builds a working majority on new grounds. 

When Clinton was secretary of state it wasn’t clear whether she could go on offense and define a creative initiative in an open field. She hasn’t done that yet in this campaign, either. She hasn’t given voters a sense of an epic quest, an exodus to some promised land. 

She’s still the prohibitive favorite to get the nomination, but we have yet to see if she can play offense. Campaigns do have to have some creative romance to them, an uplifting mood if not a new agenda. So far Clinton has not creatively defined a new field in front of the country. Instead, she’s left a void others are filling.

If Brooks, the troubadour of the mythical "soccer mom," a champion of lily-white country club exurban America, is beginning to hedge his Hillary bets, watch out. The levee is about to break.

Having just finished The Speech: A Historic Filibuster on Corporate Greed and the Decline of Our Middle Class, the book made out of Sanders' filibuster speech that he delivered at the end of 2010, I'm confident that the more people hear his rap -- the rich are sucking up all the wealth in the country; we need to put people to work rebuilding our dilapidated infrastructure -- the more his support will grow. As it is now, Sanders' campaign is having a hard time adding staff to keep up with his ballooning popularity.

While Sanders is garnering press for his rise in the polls and his swelling campaign organization, Hillary is in the news for her emails. The State Department released a tranche of Hillary emails yesterday with more to follow. More salacious, gossipy tidbits to create an aura of negativity, of squalor.

The Democratic primary might be nearing its tipping point. Even if Sanders' path to the nomination appears blocked because of an absence of support from African-Americans; the more attention he grabs and excitement he generates, the less likely it is Hillary can win a general election.

War Criminal Compares Trump to Bearded Lady

I don't normally read Frank Bruni's column. His opinions are usually superficial. I'll read the disingenuous, bilious David Brooks before Bruni. But Bruni's column yesterday I did read.

"To Trump or Not to Trump?" is a description of a telephone conversation Bruni had with corporate Democrat Bob Kerrey, a Vietnam war criminal and discredited president of the New School. The goal of the column is to deride the presidential campaign of surging Donald Trump:

Bob Kerrey served in the Senate with John McCain, is also a Vietnam veteran and has run for president, so he has been asked incessantly over recent days to appear on television and weigh in on Donald Trump’s vile besmirching of McCain’s military record.

He accepted only one of those invitations, from a friend. Otherwise he mostly stayed mum, lest he abet Trump’s ultimate goal, which is to turn his name into a news media mantra: Trump, Trump, Trump.

But on the phone on Tuesday, Kerrey’s frustration — no, let’s call it disgust — boiled over, and he, too, talked about Trump, Trump, Trump. I recount our conversation because I think Kerrey speaks for most Americans and because his comments capture what a conundrum many of us face.

If we discuss Trump, as I’ve done in several columns, we reward his bad and transcendently self-serving behavior, no matter how negative our assessments of him or how many larger truths we engage.If we don’t discuss him, we ignore something real, in a fashion that’s irresponsible.

By something real, I mean the fact that Trump has measurable support, at least for now. In a nationwide ABC News/Washington Post poll of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents that was released Monday, he was in the lead for the party’s presidential nomination, the favorite of 24 percent of respondents. The next closest contenders were Scott Walker (13 percent) and Jeb Bush (12).

Why not discuss the fact, reported in Bruni's own paper, that Bob Kerrey, as a former Navy SEAL in Vietnam, stands accused of mass murder and mutilation, including children and pregnant women, in the village of Thanh Phong? According to a display devoted to the incident at the War Remnants Museum in Ho Chi Minh City:

From 8PM to 9PM February 25th, 1969, a group of Seal Rangers [sic] (one of the most selective rangers of U.S. Army) led by Lieutenant Bob Kerry [sic] reached for Hamlet 5, Thanh Phong Village, Thanh Phu District, Ben Tre Province. They cut 66 year-old Bui Van Vat and 62 year-old Luu Thi Canh's necks and pulled their three grandchildren out from their hiding place in a drain and killed two, disembowelled one. Then, these rangers moved to dug-outs of other families, shot dead 15 civilians (including three pregnant women), disembowelled a girl. The only survivor was a 12-year-old girl named Bui Thi Luom who suffered a foot injury. It was not until April 2001 that U.S. Senator Bob Kerrey confessed his crime to the international public.

Instead we get Kerrey delivered up as some sort of sage of what passes for permissible political discourse in the United States:

“This is not a national primary,” Kerrey said, noting that Trump’s 24 percent has dubious predictive power for a consequential handful of individual contests in early states that aren’t exactly mirrors of America. “So who the hell cares what his numbers are nationally?”

“He’s not going to do that well in Iowa,” Kerrey continued. “There’s nothing about Trump that indicates that the evangelical community there is going to embrace him. And does anyone seriously think he has the kind of ground organization in New Hampshire to turn people out to vote?”

“He’s got no ground game,” Kerrey continued. “It’s all up in Donald’s head! Everything’s in Donald’s head. It’s the political version of ‘Being John Malkovich.’ ”

I'm sure Trump will do better in Iowa than Kerrey did in his home state of Nebraska. In 2012, he lost the election to the U.S. Senate to state senator Deb Fisher. Kerrey squeaked by in the two largest counties, but he lost all the rest except for three. I guess he didn't have a ground game either.

What we are witnessing now, and Bruni's column is an example, is the media's attempt to deflate or harness the Trump boom that it has helped create. Trotting out stale, past-the-sale-date corporate politicos like Bob Kerrey to take pot shots at The Donald is weak stuff:

But for all Trump’s antics and nonsense, he placed second to Bush in a New Hampshire poll late last month. In a more recent Iowa poll, he trailed only Walker. 

Kerrey conceded: “I don’t think you can really ignore it. But you have to evaluate, with some expertise, what his odds of being the Republican nominee are. And they’re practically zero.” 

“Yeah, 5,000 people showed up at your event,” he said. “I could get 5,000 people to show up at the bearded lady. He is, in his way, a freak show.”

The obvious that goes unmentioned is that Trumps' popularity tracks back to a large segment of voters who have lost all trust in politicians like Bob Kerrey (who voted for the repeal of Glass-Steagal when he was in the U.S. Senate). People would sooner burn the whole motherfucking political charade to the ground than back a Bush or Clinton yet again.

People are angry. Trump is a vehicle for that anger. That is why his popularity spiked when he went after Mexican immigrants.

People want to hate. When a leader arrives on the scene and says, "Yes, it is okay to hate. Go grab your pitchforks and your torches." Of course people will take note. It worked for Hitler and Mussolini, and it worked for Ronald Reagan when he played up black welfare mooches.

The Fourth Estate is going to continue to hack away at Trump. But at this point The Donald's candidacy might have achieved critical mass and is beyond the control of the Fourth Estate. One thing is for sure: A cadaver like Bob Kerrey will not harm Trump at all.

Sham Elections in the United States

As one ages, meaning, when one leaves youth behind and moves into midlife, attention to the basics becomes paramount. And what I mean by the basics are diet, exercise and rest. If you are attentive to these details of your life, you can successfully counteract some of the decreases in energy that result from the loss of youth.

Along with this wisdom regarding the basics, age also brings an appreciation of a central bias of U.S. reporting on foreign elections and election processes. The bias is that U.S. electoral democracy is cleaner, fairer, more open than other countries.

Putin's United Russia party swept Russia's elections on Sunday. David Herszenhorn reports in
"Russia: Putin’s Loyalists Dominate Vote" that "Candidates loyal to President Vladimir V. Putin won elections for governor in all 30 regions that held elections on Sunday, as balloting reflected the Kremlin’s total domination of political opponents and its iron grip on the country’s political system."

Neil MacFarquhar had a story yesterday that criticized these elections because of recent changes in ballot access requirements and the outsize influence of money in the process. This was said without sarcasm in the flagship newspaper of a nation that has the most complex, antiquated, money-dominated electoral system on the planet.

The same day as MacFarquhar penned his critique of Russian elections, Hillary Clinton made an appearance at the Harkin Steak Fry in Indianola, Iowa. There is now no doubt that the American electorate is going to be force fed a Hillary candidacy for president.

Presidential elections in the United States are based largely on the performance of candidates in two small, lily white non-urban states -- Iowa and New Hampshire -- that occur early in the primary season. Third parties don't figure in the process. Iowa and New Hampshire are classic Potemkin villages,

The system is rigged. Ballot access laws prevent any third-party candidate from reaching the people. 

I'll be dealing with this issue more in the future. I saw it up close as a member of the Green Party during the last decade, specifically as a Nader supporter. What the Democratic Party did to Nader in 2004 is very instructive. Democrats basically sued -- successfully -- the Nader campaign to keep it off the ballot in several key states. You won't find the Gray Lady inveighing about it in her editorial pages, but Nader 2004 proves beyond question that the United States does not have a fair election system.

And then there is role of money. After Citizens United there is no longer any question that elections are now a contest between who has the biggest pile of money. I don't think, post-Citizens United, that the sham can continue much longer.