Tag: primaries

Primaries and a quick book #review

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics, Reviews3 Comments

white-privilege-350.gif.pngTwo primaries today, Kentucky and Oregon.  Both states are 88% white, therefore Sanders will win both.  I’ve seen a couple of reports of a poll out of Oregon that shows Clinton in the lead but I can’t actually find it anywhere and the reports were on Twitter and didn’t include links.  I came across an article on NPR this morning that discusses whiteness in our politics in an interesting way, but while it talks about the astonishing reluctance of most mainstream punditry to even mention racism in connection with Trump’s support, there’s nary a word of the 85% rule.

(Oh, and also: there’s nothing from keeping Trump’s supporters from being both idiots and racists.  Half the problems Republicans see with this country literally do not exist.  There is plenty of room for these people to be stupid and racist at the same time.)

But anyway.

51czyF4FFRL._SX322_BO1,204,203,200_.jpgI finished Tananarive Due’s My Soul to Keep yesterday, a book I read in three big gulps over just a couple of days.  It’s the first book of her four-book African Immortals series, and I think it’s probably the most unapologetic horror novel I’ve read in quite some time.  It’s further evidence that “horror” isn’t really a genre on its own anymore so much as something that infiltrates other genres; the book is equal parts paranormal romance, urban fantasy, and horror, and Due’s writing appears to be what would happen if Anne Rice and Stephen King wrote a book together.

That’s a compliment.

The book I read before this one was Sofia Samatar’s A Stranger in Olondria, and I wrote a rare Goodreads review for it to explain my star-rating.  Samatar is a gorgeous writer; her prose is something I couldn’t equal if my life depended on it, but the story in Olondria kind of left me cold.  Due’s prose is much less flowery and lyrical than Samatar’s is (I could have written My Soul to Keep, which sounds like shade but isn’t; I just think Tananarive Due and I are similar writers) but it’s in service of a much stronger story, one that got in my head and fucked with me something fierce while I was reading it.  As a reader I’m much more likely to respond to strong story and utilitarian writing than I am lyrical writing and a serviceable story– I am, myself, a pretty utilitarian author.  As such I loved the hell out of My Soul to Keep and only enjoyed Stranger in Olondria.  You may feel free to adjust the amount of salt you take with my review if your own preferences are different.

I continue to believe that “no more than 25% books by white dudes” was a great way to structure my reading this year, by the way.  I would never have found this book had I not gone looking for it.  Feel free to check out my Goodreads shelves if you want to see some of the other books I’ve read this year.

Some post-voting #INPrimary thoughts

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

voting_rights.jpg

I didn’t get a goddamn sticker.

Let’s start with some general stuff:  demographically and politically, Indiana ought to be an easy Sanders win.  Not only is the state 86% white, which should all by itself indicate a Sanders win (he’s only won three states less than 85% white, and twelve of thirteen more than that) but we’re an open primary, meaning that whoever wants to pick up a Democratic ballot can do so.  Somehow, though, every poll I’ve seen so far has Clinton ahead, although none by an especially impressive margin.

Also interesting is that Hillary appears to have completely ignored the state, or at least ignored the northern media markets.  Sanders, Cruz and Trump have all had rallies in my city in the last week.  Clinton, as far as I know, had one small event a few towns over and that was the closest she ever got.  I’ve heard radio ads for Sanders, Cruz, and Trump, and seen commercials for Sanders, Cruz, and Trump.  My neighborhood was canvassed by volunteers for Sanders, Cruz, and Trump.  I’ve seen yard signs for Sanders, Cruz, and Trump.  It’s like Hillary’s not even running.  If ever there actually was a silent majority, Hillary Clinton supporters in Indiana are it.

(Note, for the record: every adult I know save one who has told me their preference and lives in Indiana is voting for her.  I know that’s anecdata, but I know Hillary’s people are out there, they’re just being really quiet.)

Cruz’s yard signs are square and weird, by the way.  I’ll update with a picture if I manage to spot one I can actually photograph. Trump’s going to win the state something huge; Cruz was done the second he uttered the phrase “basketball ring” and an endorsement by our enormously unpopular governor is not going to help him.  I don’t think anyone, anywhere should be voting for Trump but I can’t say I mind being a citizen of the state that finally drove a stake into that asshole’s heart.

More specifically, now, and hopefully I do have some readers from elsewhere in the state who can let me know what else is going on:  I voted at about exactly 9:00 in the morning and was voter #128 in my precinct.  There was a line of about a dozen people ahead of me, which has never happened before, and that voter number is higher than usual by quite a bit too.  Our state (maybe just the county? no idea) has switched with this election to using “PollPads” which is basically an iPad app that scans your driver’s license and verifies your address and then  you have to tell it which ballot you want.

With just twelve people in front of me, at 9:00 in the morning, the following happened:

  • One voter was not in the system.  When asked, he said he’d been living at his address for 3 years but– wait for it– had not updated his registration.  This is a clear case of voter dipshittery and the guy was old enough to bloody well know better.  He threw a fit anyway.
  • Two different voters, both elderly, were clearly unused to using iPads for anything and chose the wrong political party.  The poll worker was also elderly and hadn’t been confirming people’s choices with them before hitting the final “accept” button.  They were both told to call a number to get it fixed and wait 20 minutes or so while something got changed in “the system,” and the old man threw a fit, meaning I witnessed two old man fits in less than fifteen minutes.  He flatly refused to call any damn phone number because this was a democracy.  I am not sure what those two things have to do with one another.  At any rate, he got his ballot for the right party (you get two guesses which one, and the first one doesn’t count) and voted without making the call, at which point the poll-worker-in-chief chewed out the poor lady who was handling the iPad right in front of God and everybody for not verifying the parties.  I’m not sure what happened with the other lady.
  • Maybe we train our poll workers better?  The dude was an asshole for yelling at the poll workers but he’s not wrong that they should be double-checking shit, and the notion that you should have to wait 20 minutes for someone off-site to adjust your party choice before you vote is ridiculous.
  • There was one registration iPad.  I don’t know what happens if it crashes.  Polls close at 6, so that last hour is always hectic as hell as people get off work and streak for their polling place.  The lines are going to be fucking ridiculous.
  • Maybe we test this system on a year when there isn’t a Presidential primary, guys?
  • Oh, wait, Republican governor, I’m not surprised at all.  And I’ve also heard from a friend of mine who works polls at a tiny precinct in Amish country that they have two of the damn PollPads.  Gee, I wonder why a small polling place in Amish country might have two and a busier one in the city might only have one?

So.  Yeah.  Potential clusterfuck in the making, here.  We’ll see how it goes.

Why I’m voting for Hillary Clinton today

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics10 Comments

This post is adapted from my comments on this thread at James Wylder’s website.  source-hillary-clinton-will-announce-her-2016-campaign-this-weekend-660x400.jpg

I spent the majority of the primary season formally undecided between the two Democratic candidates.  I officially “endorsed” Hillary Clinton, if I can pretend I’m important to be able to use that word, about a month ago.  But if you read that post you will note that it’s mostly a post about why I’d decided not to vote for Bernie, as opposed to a post about why I was voting for Clinton.  And after some prodding on the matter by James Wylder, I figured that a more affirmative post was something worth writing– and if I’m going to write such a thing, why not post it on the day my state actually votes in the primary?

So, yeah:  by the time you read this, I will either be about to cast my vote for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary, or I will have already done so.  (Also, for those of you local enough for it to matter, Lynn Coleman, Dan Cruz, and Randy Magdalinski.)

I have said some terrible things about Hillary Clinton. If my 2008-era blog were still online, I could point you at some of them. Despite that, I’ll be proudly voting for her today. There are a bunch of reasons why that’s the case; I’ll touch on several of them. And I’ll say this right now: there will be people who can look at my reasons to vote for her and see them as reasons to not trust her. I’m aware of that, but these are MY reasons, so I don’t have to care.

My first reason to be happy to vote for Hillary is one that I know is probably going to catch me some crap: I am deliriously happy to be able to cast a vote for a woman for President. Period. We can argue about whether identity politics are “good reasons,” but ultimately I don’t care. We elected Obama; now I want a woman President. I want the stranglehold white men have on the corridors of power in this country broken, and this is another big crack in that foundation. Others may feel differently; that’s fine.

Second: one of the things I was very likely to tell people in 2008 about Barack Obama was that they should watch his campaign to see how he would govern. Obama ran a master-class campaign in 2008. Clinton did not, and she paid for it. She has– and this is a theme with her– watched and learned from her mistakes, and she is a VASTLY better candidate in 2016 than she ever was in 2008. People give her crap about changing her opinion, and only adopting more leftward positions when forced to. I see someone who’s willing to change her mind and learn from her mistakes. She’s running a clean, leak-free, no-drama campaign for office this year, and her advisors and the people close to her are all competent and doing their jobs. I was LIVID at some of the bullshit her campaign manager and some of her prime surrogates were pulling in 2008, and I know this isn’t about Bernie, but one of my problems with him is that he’s not controlling his people. I know the candidate can’t control their base, but they CAN tell their campaign staff to shut their yaps and do their jobs.

Third, and again this was a reason I frequently cited when I voted for Obama: I want the President to be clearly and obviously smarter than I am. Obama has spent his Presidency being the smartest guy in the room, and when I hear Clinton talk, while I don’t think she’s at his level (very, very few are, I think) I hear someone who is in full command of the details and the minutia of policy and someone smart enough to know their own mind and understand the nuances of what they’re trying to do. This has hurt her in the past (one of the big complaints about her health care bill was how complicated it was) but I need that from a Presidential candidate. She’s got the facts and figures and numbers at her fingertips, and she earned a reputation in the Senate of being 1) a very hard worker and 2) someone who was not afraid to get into the weeds of a new subject rather than rely on advisors. I want that type of person in the Oval Office, and I think she’s the only person in the race who IS that type of person. Maybe Cruz, actually; there are lots of reasons to vote against him but “he doesn’t know what he’s doing” is generally not one of them.

She’s a team player. I was very, VERY worried in 2008 about the PUMAs not coming home to Obama after the convention– much, much more worried than I have been about Bernie’s supporters. And then Hillary waded into the crowd at the floor of the convention and called for Obama to be nominated by acclamation. That was the first moment I’d been personally inspired by her, and it immediately revised my opinion of her up several points. She lost, she got over it, and she immediately went to work for her former opponent. No drama. She has worked hard to fund-raise for down-ticket Democratic candidates and she understands something that I think is critical for this race– that the President can’t do it alone, and if we want real change, just holding on to the White House isn’t enough– we HAVE TO change Congress, and we have to recapture more of the states. If she had lost this election, I have absolutely no doubt that she’d have worked as hard to get Sanders elected as she did for Obama.

Finally, and this ties in with my first point, I find a lot of the reasons people cite to not vote for Clinton to be, frankly, unconvincing.

I do not care about speaking fees. I care about results. I do not believe that Hillary Clinton, to pick one example, would not to work to rein in campaign finance because something something Wall Street. I’ve literally laughed at people for suggesting she doesn’t want Citizens United overturned. Citizens United existed so that right-wingers had a clever way to call Hillary Clinton a c*nt.

Is she ambitious? Absolutely. This is true of every single Presidential candidate in the history of forever. I think that she catches more crap for it than she has any reason to because she’s a woman. Is she untrustworthy? I don’t think so, and, again: “untrustworthy” and “ambitious” are words men use to describe powerful women. I want to be clear; I don’t think everyone voting for Sanders or against Hillary is a sexist, but I DO think sexism very much plays a role in the way we describe her.

Is she warm, empathetic, kind? Maybe. Sometimes. And I feel like she’s, again, done a much better job during this campaign of letting her personality out and being less outwardly controlled. But I don’t need the President to be my mother, or my drinking buddy, or my personal moral exemplar.  I need her to be President.  We’ve got countless examples of male politicians where “I’m a hardass” is virtually their entire reason for their candidacies; I do not need a female Presidential candidate to be huggable.

(Obama ran into a similar thing. He couldn’t ever be angry, because he knew that as soon as he got genuinely mad about something it would get turned back against him because he was a black man. Hillary is in a similar spot.)

I also find accusations that she’s a warmonger to be unconvincing. Is she more hawkish than Sanders? Sure. So am I. But the idea that she’s going to start six wars the day after she enters office is flatly ridiculous, ESPECIALLY in a context where her opponents on the other side have literally and unapologetically threatened to glass the entire Middle East as if it wasn’t a big deal.  She might be slightly more hawkish than Obama, but not much; say what you will about drones, but I’d rather have drones than another goddamned land war.

(You’d rather not have drones either?  Cool.  I ain’t mad atcha.  But your choices are “drones” or “nuclear weapons and land war.”  Trump and Cruz are both openly and obviously itching to use nuclear weapons.  Choose.)

I’ll post a picture of my sticker if I get one.

I’m not going to get a sticker again, am I?

In which I endorse

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

ClintonDEAL_WITH_ITddd.png

I’ve been leaning for a while, so it’s not as if this is likely to surprise anyone, but at this point I’ve officially made a decision, and I will be voting for Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.  The primary itself isn’t until May 3rd, but I tend to vote early– possibly as soon as next week, since I’ll be downtown a fair amount.  I fully expect to also vote for Clinton in the November election, as I’ve expected her to get the nomination for a while now (and will continue to do so regardless of the results of the Wisconsin primary tonight; Sanders will win, but not by enough to make a difference) although I will happily vote for Sanders in November if it turns out that I am wrong about that.

That said, Sanders’ interview with the New York Daily News’ Editorial Board was what convinced me that my vote belonged with Hillary.  In general, in Democratic primaries, my vote tends to go to the candidate who pisses me off the least during the primary.  Pete Buttigieg earned my vote in his first election, by example, by being the last person in a field of several acceptable candidates to do something I found personally annoying.  And, again: should Bernie get the nomination somehow, I’ll vote for him.   I would vote for a half-eaten mayo and banana sandwich or something I scraped off the bottom of my shoe before I would allow any of the current Republican candidates anywhere near the White House, honestly.

But this interview.  Holy fuck, this interview.  It’s bad enough that it should end his candidacy, honestly, and it calls his readiness to run into question in some very serious ways.  It’s really, really, really bad.  I don’t have time to fisk the whole thing– the post would be ten thousand words long, easy, but here’s a few choice bits:

Sanders: So I think we need trade. But I think it should be based on fair trade policies. No, I don’t think it is appropriate for trade policies to say that you can move to a country where wages are abysmal, where there are no environmental regulations, where workers can’t form unions. That’s not the kind of trade agreement that I will support.

Daily News: So how would you stop that?

Sanders: I will stop it by renegotiating all of the trade agreements that we have. And by establishing principles that says that what fair trade is about is you are going to take into consideration the wages being paid to workers in other countries. And the environmental standards that exist.

This is far from the most egregious part of the interview, but scrolling through it again it was the first thing that jumped out:  this man is in the Senate.  If he’s not fully aware that “I will renegotiate every trade agreement that we have” is a bunch of crazy nonsense, nonsense I would expect to hear from Donald Trump or Sarah Palin, then … God, I don’t even know.  How, exactly, are you going to do that?  Because that’s batshittery of the highest order.

It’s the bit about the banks that’s the scariest.  It’s a bit too long to excerpt properly, but again, you need to read this interview.  Hating on Wall Street is Sanders’ entire schtick, and he reveals in this interview that he doesn’t have the faintest idea what he’s talking about, by his own admission:

Daily News: Okay. Well, let’s assume that you’re correct on that point. How do you go about <breaking up the banks>?

Sanders: How you go about doing it is having legislation passed, or giving the authority to the secretary of treasury to determine, under Dodd-Frank, that these banks are a danger to the economy over the problem of too-big-to-fail.

Daily News: But do you think that the Fed, now, has that authority?

Sanders: Well, I don’t know if the Fed has it. But I think the administration can have it.

Daily News: How? How does a President turn to JPMorgan Chase, or have the Treasury turn to any of those banks and say, “Now you must do X, Y and Z?”

Sanders: Well, you do have authority under the Dodd-Frank legislation to do that, make that determination.

Daily News: You do, just by Federal Reserve fiat, you do?

Sanders: Yeah. Well, I believe you do.

He doesn’t know if he has the authority to break up the banks.   He doesn’t know if the Fed has the authority to break up the banks.  And, as he reveals later:

Sanders: You would determine is that, if a bank is too big to fail, it is too big to exist. And then you have the secretary of treasury and some people who know a lot about this, making that determination. If the determination is that Goldman Sachs or JPMorgan Chase is too big to fail, yes, they will be broken up.

Daily News: Okay. You saw, I guess, what happened with Metropolitan Life. There was an attempt to bring them under the financial regulatory scheme, and the court said no. And what does that presage for your program?

Sanders: It’s something I have not studied, honestly, the legal implications of that.

He “hasn’t studied the legal implications” of what is probably a test case for his entire reason for existing as a candidate.

How do we break the banks up, an astonishingly fucking complicated task?  Underpants gnomes.

underpants-gnomes-scheme.png

This bit here is fun too:

Sanders: No, I wouldn’t say they were in the tank. I’m saying, a Sanders administration would have a much more aggressive attorney general looking at all of the legal implications. All I can tell you is that if you have Goldman Sachs paying a settlement fee of $5 billion, other banks paying a larger fee, I think most Americans think, “Well, why do they pay $5 billion?” Not because they’re heck of a nice guys who want to pay $5 billion. Something was wrong there. And if something was wrong, I think they were illegal activities.

Daily News: Okay. But do you have a sense that there is a particular statute or statutes that a prosecutor could have or should have invoked to bring indictments?

Sanders: I suspect that there are. Yes.

Daily News: You believe that? But do you know?

Sanders: I believe that that is the case. Do I have them in front of me, now, legal statutes? No, I don’t. But if I would…yeah, that’s what I believe, yes. When a company pays a $5 billion fine for doing something that’s illegal, yeah, I think we can bring charges against the executives.

“I believe,” “I suspect.”  This man is running for President.  How the fuck do you not know?

And then, later on, there’s this:

Daily News: Do you support the Palestinian leadership’s attempt to use the International Criminal Court to litigate some of these issues to establish that, in their view, Israel had committed essentially war crimes?

Sanders: No.

Daily News: Why not?

Sanders: Why not?

Daily News: Why not, why it…

Sanders: Look, why don’t I support a million things in the world? I’m just telling you that I happen to believe…anybody help me out here, because I don’t remember the figures, but my recollection is over 10,000 innocent people were killed in Gaza. Does that sound right?

Daily News: I think it’s probably high, but we can look at that.

Sanders: I don’t have it in my number…but I think it’s over 10,000. My understanding is that a whole lot of apartment houses were leveled. Hospitals, I think, were bombed. So yeah, I do believe and I don’t think I’m alone in believing that Israel’s force was more indiscriminate than it should have been.

I’m sorry, guys: he spends most of this interview sounding like a more articulate version of Donald Trump.  And, to be clear, that’s not a compliment, at all.  This interview is awful, awful in every way, and it reveals that Sanders just is not prepared right now to take on this job.  Is he better than the Republican alternatives?  Abso-fucking-lutely, which is why I’ll vote for him if he wins the primary.  And, for that matter, he’ll win the general if he somehow gets past Clinton.  But he’ll be a one-term President, and not a good one.

(Also: genuinely pissed about the fact that he’s refusing to help down-ballot Dems.  That’s basically coming as a coda at the end of a longish piece, and it doesn’t quite fit thematically, but he’s already got little enough chance to get his agenda passed with a Democratic Congress, and he’s not trying to get a Democratic Congress.  That’s political malpractice.)

So.  Yeah: #Imwithher.

 

It’s Big Mega Hoopty-Doopty Tuesday!

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics3 Comments

electionsMore primaries today!  Let’s wantonly speculate!  I’m not getting paid for this, so it doesn’t matter if I’m right!

  • The Republican race is what it is.  I hear Kasich might come in first in Ohio, with Rubio winning in fourth.  Whatever.  That race is their problem; I’m not worrying about it right now.
  • Now, obviously, I’m basing just about all of this on the polls, and the polls shit the bed last week in rather spectacular fashion in Michigan.  It will be very interesting to see if they’re useful today or not.  I suspect part of the problem (PART!) with Michigan was Democrats who thought the election was in the bag for Hillary crossing party lines to vote against Trump.  I’m fully aware that anecdotes are not data, but my own aunt did precisely that, voting for Kasich; I’m sure she was not the only one. There was also probably a real late surge in people either switching to vote for Bernie or committing late.  One way or another, I don’t expect the first effect to be as strong this time around so I’m suspecting the polls to reflect reality a bit more closely.  But we’ll see.
  • Also, keep in mind that the nature of polling guarantees that occasionally it’s gonna shit the bed.  99% chance of yes means 1% chance of no.  That ain’t likely but it’s still gonna happen once in a while.
  • That said, if I wasn’t looking at polls, I’d say Hillary was in for a sweep today.  The Democrats vote in Illinois, Ohio, Florida, North Carolina, and Missouri, which are all underneath the currently 86.2% white threshold where Bernie does best– he’s only won two contests in states with fewer white people than Minnesota.  Hillary has won eleven.  Illinois is 77.7% white, Ohio 83.2%, Florida 78.1%, North Carolina 71.7%, and Missouri 83.7%.  Further, Hillary is from Illinois, so I’d expect her to do quite well there.
  • That said: right now it looks like Hillary is going to win Florida and North Carolina quite handily.  Ohio and Illinois are both leaning toward her but are closer, and Missouri looks to be in tossup territory.  Illinois surprises me.  Best guess:  most of the Dem votes in Illinois are going to come out of Chicago, obviously, and Chicago’s a pretty young town.  Hillary tends to win young black millennials, but Chicago may prove to be the exception here.  We’ll see.
  • Every single poll aggregate shows motion in Bernie’s direction lately.
  • Now, here’s the thing:  CNN and the rest of the idiots will pay attention to the number of states won here, but this is all proportional.  All of it.  If Hillary rolls up big margins in FL and NC and it’s close, regardless of the winner, in the other states, that means Hillary wins.  Bernie has a gap of about 220 delegates to close, and that’s without counting the superdelegates, who are still hugely in Hillary’s corner but will move if the momentum switches.  If Bernie loses two states big and ties or wins slightly in the other three, he still ends the night farther behind.  And we’re taking three big-delegate states off the map today.  Looking ahead, I see no chance that Bernie wins New York, so that leaves him Pennsylvania, California and New Jersey as states where he could potentially try and run up big margins to catch up.  The rest of the states don’t have the delegates to produce big swings in his way even if he wins them.  I don’t see how it happens.
  • But I am wrong all the time.
  • I just don’t think this will be one of those times.  The math really, really isn’t in his favor.  But we’ll see how today goes.

Wheeeee!

On Michigan

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics4 Comments

z49021.pngFirst of all: Wow.  Polling actually is a science, guys, despite how much people like to gripe about it, but crazy shit can and will happen anytime measuring people happens.  And hooooly shit did they get Michigan wrong.  Congratulations to Senator Sanders on the big win.  A combination of facts and wanton speculation follows:

  • How have I lived in Indiana and Illinois for my entire life, visited Michigan frequently during that time (I have a fair amount of family up there) and I don’t recognize their state flag?  Also, that’s a crazily complicated state flag.
  • Independent voters were about a third of both the Democratic and Republican vote.  On the Republican side they mostly voted the same way the Republicans did, but there was a clear split on the Democratic side– registered Democrats voted for Hillary by about the margin predicted by the polls, but independents went 71-28 for Bernie.  That right there is probably the difference.
  • You may think “Oh, he’s going to gripe that the real Democrats voted for Hillary now!”  Nope.  I’ve said “Them’s the rules” to enough Bernie supporters this election (and, notably, to a ton of Clinton supporters in 2008) and now it’s Clinton’s turn.  Them’s the rules.  Independent voters get to vote in Michigan.  Deal widdit.
  • I felt like Bernie won the debate on Sunday night, but didn’t think it was a blowout victory, and his worst moment (“Whites don’t know what it’s like to be poor”) was worse than her worst moment (hemming and hawing about fracking.)  That said, it clearly created some serious momentum for Sanders.  I do think the independents were what propelled his win, but he also did much better than previous states among black voters (30%) and he won solidly in Dearborn, indicating that Arab & Muslim voters are choosing the candidate who hasn’t been killing their relatives back in the old country recently.  There are a lot of “OMG Arabs voted for a JEW!” articles floating around; they’re dumb and presumptuous– as if every Arab is automatically an anti-Semite.  It’s not hard to understand why the Muslims might choose the more dovish candidate, guys.
  • CNN appears to not have polled on when people decided who to vote for, which is too bad.  I’d love to see how much of a break toward Bernie there was among late deciders, and how many there were.
  • All that said, and while the win is certainly a reason to celebrate for the Sanders fans among us: Sanders is now farther behind than he was last week, because he never bothered to go to Mississippi at all and Clinton ran up the score something scary there.  When Bernie Sanders gets beat in the 17-29 age group by 62-37, he’s gotten clobbered, and while winning Michigan is definitely a good thing, he won close, and the delegates are awarded proportionally.  Even if he ends up closer in the big three states on the 15th, or even if he wins one or two of them, he’s still got 200+ delegates to make up before we worry about the superdelegates.
  • Shut up about the superdelegates.  If he manages to generate enough momentum that he closes that gap (and I still think it’s virtually impossible) they’ll come around.  Same thing happened in 2008.
  • Hillary’s campaign, while mostly well-oiled, has shown the occasional tendency to panic.  She should probably try her damnedest to reign that impulse in this week, and make sure all of her spokespeople keep their damn yaps shut and don’t say a bunch of dumb shit either.  If Lynn Forester de Rothschild is still alive, tape her mouth shut and drop her in a ditch somewhere until after the primary is over.
  • (Fact: two of her three most assholish surrogates from 2008, Harriet Christian and Geraldine Ferraro, actually are dead.)

I’ll add more stuff later if something else comes to mind.  For now, yell at me in comments if you feel so inclined.

A quick history lesson for Bernie Sanders supporters

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics15 Comments

bernie_2.jpgOnce upon a time, there was a guy named Barack Obama.  You may have heard of him.  No one outside the great state of Illinois had any idea who Barack Obama was until 2004, when he delivered the (brilliant) keynote address at the Democratic National Convention.  I lived in his district in Illinois at the time, and I spent a couple of hours on the phone after that speech telling everyone I knew that Obama would be the first black President so that I would get credit.

“You wait,” I said.  “2012 or 2016.  He’ll be President.”

You may see my mistake already.  In 2007, when Obama first declared that he was running for President, I was, with no trace of hyperbole, one of his biggest fans.  How do I know?  Because, again, virtually no one outside of Illinois knew who he was, and as someone in his district as a state Senator and Illinois Senator, someone who knew where his house was, I’d been following his career for a while.

And I wasn’t sure he was ready to be President.  Somebody else was running.  You may also be familiar with her: her name was Hillary Clinton, and her nomination was widely believed to be unstoppable.  (There was also John Edwards, but for the purposes of this conversation he’s irrelevant.)

I started off as a Clinton supporter, who felt that Obama would be a good President, would certainly grow into the job, but didn’t think he was ready.  It was the campaigns that convinced me otherwise.  Clinton displayed a startling talent to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, and Obama’s team out-hustled and out-thought hers at every available opportunity.  Obama won Iowa, and got crushed in New Hampshire.  For the most part, especially early on, most of his victories were at caucuses.  Why was he winning the caucuses?  Because he out-organized Clinton, and eventually he was winning enough that that inevitability argument got punctured, and it was only a matter of time after that.

You may have heard something about superdelegates, and you may think it’s unfair that Secretary Clinton is so far ahead in delegates right now.  You may have even used the word “corrupt” to describe the system.

How many superdelegates do you think Barack Obama started off with?

How many do you think he had by the end of the primaries?

You are aware that these people are able to change their minds, right?  From what I’m hearing, Bernie Sanders supporters tend to be young people, a phrase I can no longer apply to myself.  It is possible you are not aware of these things.  Superdelegates have been a part of the process for a long time, and convincing them to vote for you is part of running for the Democratic nomination.  If Bernie Sanders was not aware of them already, and if he does not have a plan to (eventually) win their support, he is doing this wrong.   It is not as if these rules were decided behind his back, or were hidden from him somehow.  And, again, if he wins contests, they’ll come around.

“But the people are behind us!” you say.  Well, some of them.  Some of the white ones, anyway.  The rest of us haven’t had a chance to vote yet.

Speaking of voters of color.

You may be under the impression that Barack Obama was able to coast to these victories mostly on the strength of the black vote.  You may not be aware that the initial knock against Obama was that he was not black enough to court black support.

Go read that article.

I’ll wait.

Not only was Obama mixed, not only was he young, not only was he relatively unknown, not only was his middle name Hussein when we’d been fighting against Iraq for most of the previous administration, but he was running against Hillary Clinton, the wife of a man who was declared by no less a black luminary than Toni Morrison herself to be the first black President.  There is a good argument to be made that the Clintons do not deserve that support, but the fact is especially in 2007-08 black voters loved Bill Clinton and Hillary was widely believed to have inherited that support.  Obama was not supposed to be the candidate of black voters.  Clinton was.

Your candidate, Bernie supporters, is also perceived as having a problem with minority voters.  I’m using the word “perceived” intentionally, because insofar as the problem is real, it’s fixable.  But he’s going to have to acknowledge it, and he’s going to have to do it now.  Black voters– and Latino voters and Muslim voters and Asian voters and and and and and– are not monolithic and they’re not dumb.  They’re not going to vote for Hillary Clinton because they liked Bill.  Obama proved that.  Sanders can too, but he’s going to have to try.

Whining about a corrupt system and superdelegates is not going to get your man the nomination.  Whining about women voters going to Hillary is not going to get your man the nomination.

Whining, in general, is not going to get Bernie Sanders nominated for President.

Hillary Clinton is a lot of things.  Unfortunately for her, one of her previously displayed qualities is the ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  She is not inevitable.  She is beatable.  But the Sanders people are going to have to put in the work, and they’re going to have to engage with voters of color and with women voters in a serious way, and they’re going to have to convince the superdelegates– who are, in case you don’t know, mostly Democratic elected officials— that he’s the right man for the job.  Convincing the superdelegates might be difficult, seeing as how Sanders has only been a Democrat for, what, a year or two?  One of Clinton’s strengths is that she’s perceived as much more able to have coattails– to bring in other Democratic elected officials behind her, to alter the balance of power in the House and the Senate so that some of these nice things both candidates want to do become possible.

Is Bernie going to be able to do that?  Is he trying?

He probably ought to start.

See y’all in South Carolina.

In which I was up too late last night

On By Luther M. SilerIn Politics1 Comment

So at 5:30 yesterday I tweeted this:

I was both right and wrong in this prediction; I was at the time under the impression that the big blizzard that is supposed to hit Iowa tonight was supposed to be there yesterday, so I thought weather would be a much bigger issue for the primaries than it turned out to be.  However, it turns out that Trump’s people still didn’t turn out the way people thought they would even without being able to use the weather as an excuse, so it’s a wash.

I figured Hillary and Bernie would be within a couple of points of each other; I’m going to call myself right here because as of last I saw Hillary did have more votes/delegates than Bernie did but it’s basically a tie.  Sanders still managed to massively outperform what everyone thought he was going to do a couple of months ago, and (again) from what I’ve been seeing his lead in New Hampshire is substantial, so we’re going to have to see what happens once the race moves to states where there are actual black people, and see if Hillary’s massive lead among people of color still holds up.

(Don’t count Sanders out here.  I’ll keep saying this until people listen: the early knock against Obama was that he wasn’t black enough, and that since the Clintons were always so popular with black voters, Hillary would hold on to them in the primaries.  Once black people started voting for Obama as much as the young white liberals were, the narrative immediately shifted to accuse them of only voting for him because he was black.  I see no reason why Bernie can’t manage the same flip, given Clinton’s historical precedent for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.)

Now, that said: Trump’s lead in New Hampshire is also fairly substantial, but I will be very surprised if we don’t see that lead erode quite significantly if not disappear altogether by the time the voting actually happens.  People talk about Hillary as the candidate of inevitability but Trump’s entire thing is that he’s a winning winner who only wins and never loses.  Well, he just lost– hell, he almost came in third— in a place everybody expected him to win, and he lost to a guy whose biological humanity is in serious doubt and who everyone hates.(*)  His aura as the Big Winner, for all that it was a massive lie to begin with, is now officially deflated.  He may still win New Hampshire, but if he does he’ll be limping across the finish line and I don’t think he’ll last much longer after that.  If he loses New Hampshire, he’s done.

Expect the birther attacks against Slither to ramp up quite a bit next week.  That said, he’ll be picking up a huge chunk of Carson’s people, who have got to be done with him by now, and the folks who were voting Trump just because he was the big swinging dick in the room will probably swing his way too.  Rubio, for whatever reason, is perceived as having all the momentum right now, so he’ll probably scoop up a lot of the lesser-rans.  The polling is going to be really interesting to look at.

All right.  That’s enough for now; after a Sunday night where my sleep was most accurately measured in minutes and not getting to bed until past midnight last night, I am officially crashed out and don’t really have any ambitions beyond maybe getting some reading done today.  If I manage any fiction it’ll be a miracle and a bonus and I’m not gonna worry about it.

(*) How can Slither have won when “everybody hates him,” you ask?  He got about 52000 votes in a state with a voting population of roughly 2.25 million people.  That’s 2.3 percent of Iowa voters.  This is not the roaring endorsement he wants you to believe it is.  Trump, who was leading for the entire race, was also the most despised candidate in the race, managing to be the frontrunner and the guy with the highest negatives at the same time.   He crowed and crowed during his speech about having gotten more votes than any Republican candidate ever; I submit to you that there were 171000 Democratic caucusgoers, implying that both viable Dem candidates beat his vote total by a wide margin.

One more thing: did anyone else, watching Hillary’s speech, get distracted by the thought that Bill looks really seriously unhealthy right now?  CNN didn’t show his introductory speech, since Slither was talking at the time, but the open-mouthed, vacant gaze he had going behind Hillary during her entire speech was both alarming and creepy.  I’m hoping it was just an artifact of being on stage and, I dunno, lights in his eyes and not actually being the person everyone was supposed to be paying attention to, but god damn he did not look good last night.