Bernie wants to barbecue your dog

​​​​​A frightfully spot-on analogy, from Jonathan Chait:

"As a general rule, politicians for every position from dog catcher on up understand that advocating unpopular things makes winning elections harder. Not impossible, but harder. All things being equal, a candidate for dog catcher who promises to round up and cook stray pets at random has less chance of winning. Sanders can still overcome this and win, of course. One can even imagine circumstances — like a sudden, deep recession — in which he would  probably win. One could likewise imagine a town that elects the dog-barbecue candidate for dog catcher. All that said, the scale of the downside risk seems unnervingly high."

I have yet to grasp Sanders' followers' prodigious minimization of the "unnervingly high" risk of a Sanders nomination. Chait speculates that their casual dismissal of such is grounded in a "calculation [that] is perfectly rational. Even if Sanders is likely to lose, the small chance of success is worth the risk to a party they don’t care for to begin with."

That much — a disdain for the daftly named Democratic "establishment" — I do grasp. Yet why would a grievously anti-Trump crowd favor rolling three-spot dice against the odds of first rolling a seven? The downside risk seems more than just unnervingly high. It's disturbingly insane.

Let us recall the less than mass enthusiasm behind the multiple presidential candidacies of Eugene Debs — and his runs occurred when socialism was riding relatively high in the public's opinion because of the robber baron effect and J.P. Morgan et al.'s ravenous financial power. (Debs' highest electoral percentage was, however, merely 6 percent, in 1912). Or, against even the manifestly tricky Dick, ultraliberal George McGovern's candidacy garnered all of one state's (Massachusetts) Electoral votes, against Nixon's 520.

I have rightfully been charged with becoming hysterical over the looming electoral catastrophe that is Bernie Sanders. One of America's grandest historians, Arthur Schlesinger Jr., would perhaps have been disappointed in this historian's rather severe case of neurological frenzy. "Knowledge of the past," he wrote in his 1986 Cycles of American History, "should inoculate against hysteria."

In Schlesinger's era, though, the soon desperately wannabe dictator Donald Trump was merely grifting along as always and phoning laughably incognito self-promotions to the New York Post. Yet a caveat finished Schlesinger's observation: "but [knowledge of the past] should not instill complacency."

As a sage observer of the vital center's criticality in American politics and foreign policy, Schlesinger would have modified, I'm rather certain, his aphoristic warning against hysteric's onset. Mere non-complacency comes nowhere close to effectively battling the disastrous plague of 2020 Sandersism. Thoughtful male strategists such as Arthur would first unravel in a 21st-century version of women's 19th-century frenetic neurosis, and only afterward regain some semblance of oppositional equanimity. That, I am still seeking.

Regrettably, I doubt my hysteria will subside until the Democratic Party's dog-barbecuer has been either flattened by Mike's billions of bucks or humbled by Joe's incomparable political experience. Meanwhile, I have a sufficient store of morphine, Valium and mind-calming Mary Tyler Moore sitcoms to somewhat settle my nerves.  

Comments

[shsavage]

Bernie's path to the White House depends on his generating significantly higher turnout percentages among Millennials than have previously been recorded, either in past election cycles or the current primary/caucus season. And there's a clear downside beyond the Millennials non-participation. Bernie's rhetoric is just as likely to pull center-right non-voters out in horror.

There's an interesting analysis of non-voters by Yascha Mounk in The Atlantic this morning: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/02/truth-about-non-voters/607051/ -- My take on his piece is that a reasonable Bayesian prior estimation of the election outcome would start with the assumption that the non-voting population is distributed across the political spectrum in about the same way as the voting population (I imagine that's what Nate Silver is doing). So when Bernie talks about bringing out new voters, he has to hope that only a segment of non-voters turn out. But it's equally likely that his rhetoric will turn out right wing non-voters too.

All that having been said, I note that if you're a dog-barbecue aficionado running for dog catcher, you might stand a decent chance of success, if the election were being held in Korea. But this isn't Korea.

[Peter G]

I read your stuff and it causes the old memory banks to pop out strange things. This one made me think of a satirical piece by P.J. O'Rourke on the art and science of driving drunk. Mainly because of his first observation that the very best kind of car to drive drunk in is a rental car. And that right there describes Bernie and the Democratic Party.

[teabow]

re: joe's incomparable political experience

God, would he just show some of it!!!