Democrat Primaries/Caucuses Discussions, Jokes, Predictions

[pErvinalia]

Robert Reich's take on Bern and the media.

This week's essay:

Why The Major Media Still Marginalize Bernie

“Bernie is doing well but he can’t possibly win the nomination,” a friend told me for what seemed like the thousandth time, attaching an article from one of the nation’s leading newspapers showing how far behind Bernie remains in delegates.

Wait a minute. Sanders just won Wisconsin by double digits. He won 78 percent of the vote in Idaho and 79 percent in Utah. He took 82 percent of the vote in Alaska, 73 percent in Washington, and 70 percent in Hawaii.

Since mid-March, Bernie has won 7 out of the 8 Democratic contests with an average margin of victory of 40 points.

As of now, Hillary Clinton has 1279 pledged delegates and Bernie has 1027. That’s still a sizable gap – but it doesn’t make Bernie Sanders’s candidacy an impossibility.

Moreover, there are 21 states to go with nearly 42 percent of pledged delegates still up for grabs – and Sanders has positive momentum in almost all of them.

Hillary Clinton’s lead in superdelegates may vanish if Bernie gains a majority of pledged delegates. That’s what happened in 2008, when the superdelegates who initially supported her later flipped to then Senator Barack Obama.

Bernie is also outpacing Hillary Clinton in fundraising. In March, he raised $44 million, a new high for his White House bid. The campaign’s previous fundraising record was February, when it raised $43.5 million, compared to Hillary Clinton’s $30 million. And most of Bernie’s money has been in small donations – so far, more than 6.5 million contributions from 2 million individual donors.

By any measure, the enthusiasm for Bernie is huge and keeps growing. He’s packing stadiums, young people are flocking to volunteer, support is rising among the middle-aged and boomers. Last Thursday he packed 18,500 into a rally in the South Bronx. In Wisconsin, he won the under-30 vote by 60 percent, and the 30 to 44-year-old by two to one.

In Idaho and Alaska he exceeded the record primary turnout in 2008, bringing thousands of new voters. He did the same thing in Colorado, Kansas, Maine, and Michigan as well.

Yet if you read the Washington Post or the New York Times, or watch CNN or even MSNBC, or listen to the major pollsters and pundits, you’d come to the same conclusion as my friend.

Every success by Bernie is met with a story or column or talking head whose message is “but he can’t possibly win.”

Or the media simply disregard Sanders. Early on, the prestigious Columbia Journalism Review noted that his candidacy had been ignored by the mainstream media “as nearly as they could a sitting U.S. senator who entered the presidential race.”

Some Sanders supporters speak in dark tones about a media conspiracy against Bernie. That’s baloney. The mainstream media are incapable of conspiring with anyone or anything. They wouldn’t dare try. Their reputations are on the line. If the public stops trusting them, their brands are worth nothing.

The real reason the major media can’t see what’s happening is because the national media exist inside the bubble of establishment politics, centered in Washington, and the bubble of establishment power, centered in New York.

As such, the major national media are interested mainly in personalities and in the money behind those personalities. Political reporting is dominated by stories about the quirks and foibles of the candidates, and about the people and resources backing them.

Within this frame of reference, it seems nonsensical that Bernie Sanders could possibly win the nomination. He’s a 74-year-old Jew from Vermont, originally from Brooklyn, who calls himself a Democratic socialist, who’s not a Democratic insider and wasn’t even a member of the Democratic Party until recently, who has never been a fixture in the Washington or Manhattan circles of power and influence, and who has no major backers among the political or corporate or Wall Street elites of America.

But precisely because the major media are habituated to paying attention to personalities, they haven’t been attending to Bernie’s message – or to its resonance among Democratic and independent voters (as well as many Republicans).

The major media don’t know how to report on political movements. Movements don’t fit into the normal political story about who’s up and who’s down. And because Bernie Sanders’s candidacy is less about him than about the “political revolution” he’s spawned, the media are at a loss.

The major media have come to see much of America through the eyes of the establishment. That’s not surprising. After all, they depend on establishment corporations for advertising revenues, their reporters and columnists rely on the establishment for news and access, their top media personalities socialize with the rich and powerful and are themselves rich and powerful, and their publishers and senior executives are themselves part of the establishment.

So it’s understandable that the major media haven’t noticed how determined Americans are to reverse the increasing concentration of wealth and political power that have been eroding our economy and democracy. And it’s understandable, even if unjustifiable, that they continue to marginalize Bernie Sanders.

[Forty Two]

All good points. Hillary is the establishment candidate, and that's why the media support her. He has made some remarkable gains, which I would not have thought possible a couple of weeks or so ago.

[Forty Two]

. She's [Hillary is] already held to a much higher standard than any of her male counterparts. We just expect more from Hillary.

What's the evidence for the higher standard? The male candidates are getting slammed in the press across the board, except Kasich, but that's because he's irrelevant. Hillary is clearly protected by the media, who steadfastly refuse to report negatively on her.

[piscator]

The NY Daily news is an equivalent to the Daily Mail. Not exactly known for their journalistic integrity...

The New York Daily News is a substantial newspaper that has won Pulitizers for journalism, is owned by Mortimer Zuckerman (who also owns US News and World Report), and is the 6th largest circulation newspaper in the US. It's editorial position is typically left of center, usually in opposition ti the New York Post, who you may have been thinking of when you mentioned the Daily Fail.
The Daily News does have a big loud front page and a vertical fold like a tabloid, but that's about where the similarity ends - It's a good paper.

The Daily News did jump the shark and endorse Romney in 2012, but they've since been contrite about it. It's highly unlikely they'll come out for Bernie after this. Expect the Daily News to endorse Hillary, like they endorsed Obama in 2008.

[Forty Two]

Other than leaning Left, why is it a good paper again?

[piscator]

. She's [Hillary is] already held to a much higher standard than any of her male counterparts. We just expect more from Hillary.

What's the evidence for the higher standard? The male candidates are getting slammed in the press across the board, except Kasich, but that's because he's irrelevant. Hillary is clearly protected by the media, who steadfastly refuse to report negatively on her.

She goes to these same interviews with editorial boards, and handles them with the same confidence, dignity, and aplomb with which she handles a televised Senate hearing. Maybe that competence and experience is why she seems so "Protected" by the press, especially in comparison to Trump and Bernie, who are both in over their heads?

[piscator]

Other than leaning Left, why is it a good paper again?

Journalism, recent editorial content, feature reporting, reliability. That's enough, but...

"Following the 2015 San Bernardino attack, in which 14 people were shot dead, the NYDN December 3, 2015 front page displayed "GOD ISN'T FIXING THIS"..."

[piscator]

I am a progressive, I like Hillary Clinton and I do not feel remotely conflicted about that.
BY Sady Doyle



In In These Times' Hillary vs. Bernie roundtable last July—oh, what a faraway, innocent time July was—I was aware that I was making nice rather than making my case. My reticence was due to a fear that I voiced at the end of the conversation: that “Sanders vs. Clinton will become ugly, and we’re going to get to the finish line unable to get behind the nominee, and then I am going to wake up one day and Ted Cruz will be president.”

Now, the ugliness has arrived. So here comes my full-throated case for Hillary Clinton for president of the United States.

First, it is impossible to analyze Clinton—her policies, her career path, her hair—without understanding how gender bias operates. Bias plays a role in all of our reactions, no matter how feminist we are. As progressives, it is our duty to resist these stereotypes, and, if we are journalists, to help our readers understand how gender bias operates at an unconscious level.

When you hear that Hillary Clinton is unlikable, be aware of the study that shows competent women are generally seen as unlikable; when you hear that Hillary Clinton is dishonest, know that this same study shows women in power are generally seen as dishonest. And know that when the same imaginary job candidate is presented to two groups, with the only difference being a male or female name at the top of the résumé, the female candidate is seen as less trustworthy than the man. In each study, these biased reactions were found in both women and men.

And realize that when women seek power—for example, by running for the nation’s highest office—a Yale study reports that “participants experienced feelings of moral outrage (i.e. contempt, anger, and/or disgust) towards them” and that “women were just as likely as men to have negative reactions.” In the very same Yale study, when “participants saw male politicians as power-seeking, they also saw them as having greater agency (e.g. being more assertive, stronger and tougher) and greater competence.”

That is not to say that there cannot be specific, convincing arguments against Hillary Clinton, or that there are not arguments against her. It is to say that people who criticize Hillary Clinton, especially from the Left, should be aware of how these stereotypes may distort our perceptions, and how we can frame criticisms without feeding into the very real misogyny that has dogged Clinton throughout her career—an antipathy once expressed in a “Hillary Clinton dismemberment doll,” complete with detachable limbs.

Once one cuts through that misogyny, one is forced to confront the reason the GOP has fostered hatred against her: For much of the early portions of Clinton’s career, beginning when she arrived on the national stage in 1992, Hillary Clinton was presumed by the Right (and many Democrats) to be too far left to be in politics. She was Bill Clinton’s left-wing liability, a Saul Alinsky-hugging, Children’s-Defense-Fund-working, non-cookie-baking, mouthy feminist, attacked on the stage of the Republican National Convention for supporting “radical feminism” and “homosexual rights.”

It was in part because of this hatred that Hillary Clinton became the person we know today: a candidate defined by her caution and her frustrating selfcontradictions, seemingly torn between challenging the power structure and gaining enough credibility within that power structure to survive. Clinton believes that you need to be in the system in order to change the system, and I think that is true. Clinton’s path has given her tremendous impact, and in many ways, her politics—left sympathies combined with a survivor’s instinct for using the system, and a lawyer’s love of the fine detail—are reminiscent of Obama’s. While leftists have critiques of Obama, too, I think he’s been the best president in my lifetime, which started with Reagan. I also remember that second Bush a little too well to ever believe that the two parties are “basically the same” (though I have been told this many times).

When I hear claims about Hillary Clinton, the money-grubbing shill for Wall Street who thinks just like a Republican, I don’t recognize the woman who once snapped at her husband for not fighting hard enough for universal healthcare, telling him, “You weren’t elected to do Wall Street economics.” Similarly, I see no shifty dishonesty in the Hillary Clinton who, in 2005, pushed for a 9/11-style commission to investigate the Bush administration’s failure to respond to Hurricane Katrina, and who today is the woman making the administrative negligence in Flint, Mich., central to her campaign.

Similarly, the Hillary Clinton who traveled to Beijing in 1995 against the wishes of her husband’s administration to declare that “women’s rights are human rights” is entirely recognizable as the Secretary of State who helped to create the Office of Global Women’s Issues and declared that “the United States must be an unequivocal and unwavering voice in support of women’s rights in every country on every continent.” In short, this is the same Hillary Clinton who is today stressing equal pay for women as a racial justice issue, given that the women who are most penalized by the pay gap are black women and Latinas.

And the Hillary Clinton who is “Republican lite,” “more like Reagan than FDR” and “to the right of Nixon” does not seem remotely the same Clinton whose votes aligned with Sen. Bernie Sanders’ 93 percent of the time during the two years they overlapped in the Senate. They famously parted ways on the 2002 decision to authorize the war in Iraq—a vote that Clinton acknowledges was a mistake. That doesn’t undo the war, or make her right in retrospect, and it doesn’t even defuse the idea that she voted for the war specifically to protect her reputation; many Democratic politicians with presidential aspirations, from John Kerry to Joe Biden, made that same vote. I respect that for a serious and thoughtful person, the Iraq vote might rule Clinton out; it ruled her out for me in 2008. But this is not 2008, and this year, her opponent’s lack of interest or expertise in foreign policy worries me more than her record. We got into Iraq—a quagmire that has lasted, literally, for my entire adult life—not only because of U.S. interventionism, but because the commander in chief didn’t understand the region well enough to know how profoundly we would destabilize it, or how that would trap us in a conflict that would last for generations. I may not always agree with Clinton, but at least I believe she knows her stuff.

So, yes. There are problems with her record, and I recognize them. I could also criticize Sanders. I could go on about, for instance, his tendency to bring every single question back to economic inequality (an outdated, single-axis analysis that, as Andrea Plaid noted in these pages, is as myopic as #whitefeminists trying to make everything “all about gender”). But I won’t. I want to talk about the woman who has survived 25 years of misogynist hatred and GOP attacks, and came out unbroken and unbowed.

I want to talk about the woman who, knowing full well how bad it gets, signed up for anywhere between a few months to another decade of hideous treatment. It doesn’t hurt that she was the first candidate to advocate overturning the Hyde Amendment on the campaign trail, or that she has been vocal and insistent on equal pay and reproductive rights, or that she has responded to pressure for her campaign to demonstrate a serious commitment to racial justice by reaching out to women affected by police brutality and giving lengthy public statements about the need for white people to recognize their own privilege and take part in resisting and ending racism.

I do not believe she would do all this if she simply wanted personal power. We’ve seen what a candidate who wants personal power looks like: Donald Trump. If you are a narcissist, ways exist to make people like you; a lifelong career as a highly visible feminist is, trust me, not one of them. Working for a legal fund that provides free defense to the poor, or going undercover as a civil rights operative to uncover racial discrimination in schools, are not things the power-hungry do, but Secretary Clinton has done them.

I am a progressive. I like Hillary Clinton and I do not feel remotely conflicted. The qualities she’s exhibited over her long career—practicality, resilience, the ability to use the system to improve the lives of the least powerful within it, the ability, above all, to survive—are not just admirable. They’re exactly what progressives need if we are to carry the White House.

http://inthesetimes.com/article/18942/w ... ry-clinton

[pErvinalia]

Tl;dr. Hillarious is neoliberal-lite. That's all you need to know about her views on progressivism. A vote for Hillary is a vote for the furthering of the takeover of your democracy by corporations and the wealthy.

[piscator]

Republifucks hate her because she's a Leftist. Superficial Berniebros hate her because she's too Right.


Just right.

[pErvinalia]

And a rational analysis shows she a corporatist.

[Tyrannical]

Hillary's pledged super delegates could always change their mind and vote Bernie. The delegate count now without the super delegates is 1301 to 1089 which is only 212. California is a massive 694 delegates, and I hear Bernie is surging there.

[pErvinalia]

It sounds like New York and California will decide it. Bern's got the young vote sown up. He's got the independent vote sown up (are New York and California open or closed cauci?). He's surging in latino's and blacks. I hope it is enough to make the Hillary-bots and the msm to shut their fucking status-quo holes. Probably not, though.

[Tyrannical]

New York is closed, only registered Democrats can vote. California allows independents to vote in the Democratic primary, Republicans aren't.

[piscator]

When Bernie is mathematically out of the race and still can answer basic questions about implementing any of his ideas by June, the red will be worn off the lollipop...



Bernie-bros need to quit being guided by the Republicans like Tyrannical.