« March 2016 | Main | May 2016 »
Smart politics:
If I were Donald Trump, I'd write a $1 billion check to a super PAC in support of a Sanders third-party run — whether or not Sanders ran as a third-party candidate. If nothing else, write him in! — especially of you live in Ohio, Virginia, or Florida.
I'm as puzzled as Krugman, since a sumptuary soda tax — given its merits in battling obesity, which has overtaken smoking as America's #1 health risk — could be vastly beneficial to the working poor:
So Sanders and Clinton are arguing about soda taxes — Clinton for, as a way to raise money for good stuff while discouraging self-destructive behavior, Sanders against, because regressive….
[I]t does seem worth pointing out that progressivity of taxes is not the most important thing, even when your concern is inequality. Notably, Nordic countries — very much including Denmark, which Sanders has praised as a model — rely heavily on the VAT, which is a regressive tax; but they use that revenue to pay for a strong social safety net, which is much more important.
If we add in the reality that heavy soda consumption really is destructive, with the consequences falling most heavily on low-income children, I’d say that Sanders is very much on the wrong side here.
Sanders' side is, however, the ideological side, and that helps to resolve our puzzlement.
Ideological thinking is religious thinking; it is ecumenical in scope and thus all-answering. Those in its intellectually tranquilizing embrace are unbothered by fussy, complicating factors. In the case of a soda tax, just say "regressive" and any problematic thinking is at an end. Meanwhile, the poor you wish to give a helping hand up are dropping from diabetes — but first they're racking up exorbitant medical costs, which you promise to bring down.
Bernie Sanders is not always ideological, though. He does make heroically pragmatic exceptions, such as in arguing that his superior polling against Trump should award him the Democratic nomination — the ideological basis of democracy be damned. This is perhaps the only pragmatism one can find in Sen. Sanders, but isn't the personal exception admirable?
This clown really bugs me. He wouldn't so much were I myself not a democratic socialist. But to see that vague ideology (infused as it is — as it must be — with loads of pragmatism) so sullied makes me do a slow bern.
Of all the rhetoric spewing from Bernie Sanders in his town hall meeting with Chris Hayes last night — the latter of whom, sorry to say, spewed barely inquisitive softballs — I found the senator's inexplicable indifference to his fellow revolutionaries the most intriguing.
The intrigue emerged from the plight of one John Fetterman, the militantly progressive mayor of Braddock, Pennsylvania who's now obscurely running for the U.S. Senate. "Obscurely," for his fellow, high-profile revolutionary has failed to assist. Chris Hayes: "I had him on the show, an interesting guy. The town has had a really hard time because of trade, because of the steel industry essentially dying. He endorsed you. He says he feels basically like he's sitting there with a corsage, waiting for the Sanders mutual endorsement."
Sen. Sanders? Well, he couldn't be bothered: "Well, I honestly don't know John and I've heard just a little bit about him. What we are trying to do now, we have endorsed and gotten some money to some candidates and I hope they win. I just don't know enough about John, to be honest with you." And that ended that.
Yet more than a week before, Slate's Michelle Goldberg and others among the progressive commentariat were learning and writing about Mayor Fetterman. Here's Goldberg:
Sanders often says that his audacious agenda depends on a political revolution, one that would sweep progressives into office behind him. So far, however, he’s done notably little to make that happen. It’s not just his failure to support Fetterman; he hasn’t gotten involved in any Senate races. He made his first congressional endorsements just last week, sending out fundraising emails for three female House candidates.
Sanders's notable little-ness in fostering the very revolution his program purports is as confounding as it is intriguing. It's also as audacious as his agenda. Whenever the senator is cornered (a rarity) on the unavailing congressional possibilities of his program, he rails about the latent power of the forthcoming political revolution. And whenever he's cornered (a rarity) on his sizable failure to materially support that revolution, he mutters vaguely about "some money" and "hope." He then launches into more platitudes about the evils of campaign finance — against which he could strike a blow, were he to spread more of his own money around.
It's a shell game — which Mr. Hayes, disappointingly, allowed Sanders to once again play. For Hayes wouldn't want to annoy his progressive viewers who are feeling the Bern. That's a ratings = money thing; and there are, it seems, as many limits to bold progressive journalism as there are to Sen. Sanders's material magnanimity.
The rest of the Sanders interview was such a study in circumlocution, it makes one wonder why the Berners despair of triangulating Clintonesque gibberish. Paladin-of-the-People Bernie essentially told democracy to go blow; even though he'll lose the popular vote to Hillary, his would still be "the stronger campaign in taking on Donald Trump," thus the nomination should be his. He could work with Republican legislators, he said, for he knows how to compromise, so yes his revolutionary agenda would have some real life; yet in a subsequent segment he conceded that he'd encounter the same obstructionism that President Obama has. He answered a question about his most-regretted congressional vote mostly by offering a litany of votes he's most proud of, while slamming Hillary for those she should be ashamed of. And he "answered" Hayes' question about ultimately endorsing Clinton like a Philadelphia lawyer — the evasive contortions of which are too lurid to repeat in polite society.
I'm no political revolutionary, but it seems to me that any progressive revolution should begin by being honest and straightforward with those it urges to revolt. Rather than inspiring an entire generation of inveigled pseudoprogressives, the shell-gaming should be left to pseudoconservatives.
Politico is rather blunt:
"Sanders is too strong to concede, but too weak to win"; nonetheless, "His online money machine continues to pump along."
David Plouffe is blunter:
This morning the NY Times is full of reminiscent news of Eastern and Western fronts, final days, and sprawling desperation:
Senator Ted Cruz and Gov. John R. Kasich of Ohio have agreed to coordinate in future primary contests in a last-ditch effort to deny Donald J. Trump the Republican presidential nomination…. [The Cruz campaign will] "focus its time and resources in Indiana and in turn clear the path for Governor Kasich to compete in Oregon and New Mexico"…. [The Kasich campaign will] shift its resources to states in the West and "give the Cruz campaign a clear path in Indiana."
Mr. Trump’s landslide victory in New York last week and an expected win Tuesday in a handful of Eastern states has demoralized those Republicans hoping to halt his candidacy. They fear that if he wins Indiana after his run of recent success, the appetite and financing to block him in the remaining states will dissipate…. At this late stage, it is unclear how effective the effort might be at swaying voters, especially if the campaigns do not give more explicit instructions.
In reading this dispatch I was reminded of Ian Kershaw's The End: The Defiance and Destruction of Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945. On the penultimate page of the book's concluding chapter, "Anatomy of Self-Destruction," the historian splendidly refers to "The great funeral pyre of the Third Reich." One may substitute the "Republican establishment" (which, shockingly, now includes the vociferously anti-establishment Ted Cruz), as the object of the prepositional phrase.
Leading up to Kershaw's conclusion is probably the grimmest history I have ever read. Hitler's "establishment" forces were dazed, exhausted, easily outnumbered and most assuredly doomed by encroaching forces from both East and West. And yet they struggled on. Kershaw's thematic question throughout: Why?
Why their hopeless defensive maneuvers and pathetic counteroffensives in the most barbaric bloodshed since the Thirty Years War? Why all the pillaging, rape, wanton civilian murder and heretic-housecleaning atop what was so clearly their own funeral pyre?
Kershaw's answer, hideously abbreviated: Why not?
They had fought so confidently and for so long, fighting was pretty much all they had left. Those who sat highest atop the hierarchical funeral pyre knew they were doomed. But, except for a few of them handing out business cards on the QT to the encroaching forces ("Call me"), a kind of zombielike perfunctoriness took over. Germany's "establishment" was doing what it was doing because that was all it could do; plus, of course, no establishmentarians wished to be marked and hanged by piano wire as a traitor to the old cause.
They would play things out to The End.
***
I should note that I too believed — and not that long ago — that the establishment's forces could successfully pull off an eleventh-hour counteroffensive. But Trump's forces, which seem to be everywhere, have been magnificently relentless in bullying and overwhelming the enemy — many among whom are now openly conceding defeat. And defeatism is contagious.
Chait's allegation that Sanders's primary tribulations are "making him a little crazy" never mentions the eerie similarity to Trump, I suppose because it's all too obvious:
Sanders’s denunciations of the primary system as rigged have merged with his descriptions of the economy and the political system as rigged. In combination with his attacks on Clinton for succoring Wall Street — which are exaggerated but not entirely imagined — Sanders has conjoined Clinton and the Democratic Party apparatus to the shadow nexus of villains that he and his revolution are pledged to overthrow. Jeff Stein (of Vox.com) traveled to Ithaca, an outpost of Sanders enthusiasm, and found the place almost uniform in its conviction that Democratic voters actually had preferred their man, only to be thwarted by some ill-defined combination of fraud or corporate/media chicanery.
I've noticed the latter's outpouring mostly on my Facebook page. The most heatedly committed among the Bernie crowd seem to prefer the haunting of social media over visiting blogs — excepting those that are safely pre-approved. By extrapolation, I assume they avoid straight reporting altogether, for fear of accidentally reading an "objective" item that fails to square with their political assessments. Such items, removed from the field of mere opinion, are especially painful to the ideologically marinated.
At any rate, over the last few months I have discovered, in assorted Facebook comments, that I am part of the "Hillary propaganda machine," a participant in the anti-Bernie "corporate conspiracy," a rabid defender of the dark "status quo" — all of which carry either the direct accusation or at least the heavy implication that I'm being paid to diss the insurgent, since no virtuous political observer could possibly stand in opposition to the political virtue that is Bernie Sanders.
Such accusations or implications are, of course, trickle-down paranoia. With evangelical fervor, Sen. Sanders has divided our political system into one of absolute virtue vs. absolute evil; and, given the religious intensity of his offering, his truest disciples have come to believe that one not only does not but indeed cannot compromise on The Word. Thus is even mildly unfavorable analysis of Bernie-ism deemed Hillary propaganda or corporate doggerel or, at best, a monstrous indifference to the wicked status quo. Those who differ with Bernie on matters of policy or political pragmatism are, as his campaign manager suggested of late, in the Devil's hip pocket.
Are the evangelically paranoid to be blamed for their condition? One could argue no; theirs is but a Greenspanian irrational exuberance born of a hard-wired human tendency to believe in simplistic, Manichean divisions. But if no blame is to be laid on Bernie-ism's truest believers, then one cannot blame the Trumpeteers for their condition. For The Donald is evangelizing much the same: Whatever fails to promote Trumpism is an unpardonable sign from below.
Would the Bernie Bros agree? Are the Trumpeteers blameless? Do they not genuinely see a righteous radiance in Trump that the rest of us foolishly, blindly dismiss? Should we not then forgive the Trumpeteers their cloistered exuberance? I doubt any such agreement.
Thus do I distrust passion — especially that of the plethoric sort — in politics. It is more uncompromisingly religious than political.
Meanwhile, I've yet to receive a dime from Hillary, her corporate bosses, or the masters of the status quo's universe. Please remit, asap.
The Associated Press reports that new hires and polished consultants enlightened GOP leaders yesterday about their gravy train of a boss, Donald Trump. They — namely, party-insider Paul Manafort — informed the apoplectically bewildered establishmentarians that The Donald has hitherto been "playing" a part, which is "evolving"; worry not, for Trump has merely been "projecting an image."
To which I can only say, Boy has he ever been successful.
The image that Trump has unforgettably projected is that of a scatterbrained, sleep-deprived, serially grotesque,, megalomaniacal bigot who rarely completes a thought — and those he has completed have irreversibly doomed him in any general election pursuit of the vast American middle.
His negatives are nothing short of astronomical; he has, within the brief span of 10 months, managed to rack up an unfavorable rating that actually outdistances Hillary's, which she ploddingly acquired through a quarter-century of unremitting right-wing pounding. Trump has, that is, "evolved" into an even bigger ogre in about 1/25th of the time.
Just think of what he can accomplish in the pioneering field of unprecedented voter alienation, given another six months.
Likewise I'll give his new hires and polished consultants credit: They're going to earn every slick dollar they're paid in their Sisyphean attempts to sell an absolute electoral catastrophe as potential presidential material.