Category: Elections

Here is how the “Hillary is a Republican” game is played and why it so absurd. (h/t Nick Alpers whose post got me started and from which I borrowed much of Step One.) Step one: Ignore all the ways that Hillary Clinton breaks with proposals that almost all Republicans support but that are anathema to Democrats: repealing Dodd-Frank; repealing the ACA; block granting Medicaid; turning Medicare into a voucher program; cutting food stamps by 60% and instituting a work requirement to get them; overturning Roe, banning abortion and opposing women’s rights across the board; destroying unions and all workers’ rights; freezing or even eliminating the federal minimum wage; privatizing social security; denying the reality of global warming and opposing cap and trade, a carbon tax, and President Obama’s clean energy plan, instituting Voter ID; reversing pretty much all civil rights legislation; overturning Obergefell and eliminating all protection for the the… Continue reading

It’s Over With Hillary’s victories in at least four and most likely five of the primaries today, she has effectively won the Democratic nomination for president. Barring a collapse of unprecedented proportions, which could only come about because of some major unexpected event, her pledged delegate lead of 300 is insurmountable. Like Clinton did eight years ago, Sanders will win some caucuses and primaries between now and Pennsylvania. But he’s totally unlikely to win by large enough majorities to overcome or even get that close to Clinton’s pledged delegate lead. And if he can’t do that, he won’t convince many super-delegates to switch to him. It’s over. Sander’s Impact on Our Politics Sanders’s campaign has had a major impact on this race and will have a major impact on the Democratic Party in the future. He’s brought the issue of inequality to the fore in a way that is now… Continue reading

The big loser is Nate Silver (and other pollsters). Silver is they guy who kept saying that Trump would collapse and gave Hillary a 99% chance of winning Michigan. That he is the big loser means that Sanders win is Michigan becomes far more important. Sanders supporters have been claiming, wrongly, that the mainstream media is biased against him. It isn’t. But the media has long believed, on the basis of the initial contests and polls, that Sanders had no chance of winning the nomination and assumed, not unreasonably, that he is too far to the left to do so. And Sanders reinforced that notion by calling for a political revolution. If you say you can only win with a political revolution, you better start showing people that you can make one. Losing the base of the Democratic Party, Blacks, by huge margins while failing to cut far into the… Continue reading

The Republican establishment is still so upper-class WASP. They’ve been happy to run on racism and sexism and militarism for years. But they insisted on being polite about it, using the appropriate code words and deniable symbols like Willie Horton. Their problem with Trump is not his racism and sexism and militarism. It’s his vulgarity and bad manners. He doesn’t know which fork and knife to use when he’s skewering Black people to secure the votes of white working people for the corporate elite. Continue reading

Mitchell Swan just proposed an interesting idea–perhaps the relatively low Democratic turnout has arisen because the differences between Clinton and Sanders are actually not that great, especially compared to the differences between both Democrats and the Republicans. Now, I know that the Bernie and Hillary partisans don’t think the premise is true You see huge differences between Hillary and Bernie. But maybe your vehemence–and your efforts to focus increasingly on relatively trivial matters that are of no interest to the vast majority of voters–is a product of that lack of broad difference. It’s a combination of the imperatives of competition and what Freud called the “narcissism of small differences.” Continue reading

Trump has given self-promotion a bad name. But can I just point out that a few weeks before the reigning genius of political prognostication, Nate Silver, wrote a long post about why the Trump campaign would soon collapse, I wrote a long post explaining why Trump had a really good chance to win. My argument was not only about the appeal of Trump to the white working class base / old middle class of the Republican Party, which I’ve argued is motivated far more by race, anti-feminism, and fear of foreign enemies than economic conservatism. I also pointed to Trump’s media skills and ability to finance. My argument also rested on there being no dominant candidate in moderately conservative (which for Republicans means not totally loony) lane and that Rubio / Bush / Kasich / Walker would divide up that tendency. I think this is as important as Trump’s ability… Continue reading

Here in a nutshell is why Scalia’s originalist theory of constitutional interpretation doesn’t make sense and can’t be consistently followed by him or anyone else. Scalia says we should be guided by the “meaning of the words” of the Constitution not by the intent of the Framers in achieving certain goals in using those words (which is why he was disdainful of Courts examining legislative history.) 1. But the most important word such as “freedom of speech” and “due process of law” are abstract concepts only given meaning within a large theoretical understanding of politics, our rights, etc. 2. There has never been any time in our history in which there was only one political theory that everyone accepted. As a result, the meaning of these abstract words have always been contested. 3. The Framers were well aware of this. It they wanted to avoid, rather than encourage, Courts to… Continue reading

Given that we are in relentless pursuit of every mistaken political position and illegitimate friendship Clinton and Sanders have taken and made in their lives, I decided to put all my Facebook friends under the same scrutiny. I made a list of the 100 most important issues of my lifetime, starting with the Cuban Missile crisis. And I made a list of the most odious people in national, state, and local politics. I was going to ask all of you to indicate your position on those issues AT THE TIME (anyone can be right after the fact). And I was going to require that you all indicate if you ever had a conversation with the odious people in which you didn’t tell them how horrible they were. My plan was to de-friend anyone who did not score at least a 95%. Because, if you were wrong about the 1994 crime… Continue reading

Here’s why I’m not stressing about the Democratic nomination. To win the nomination, Sanders has to do what he needs to do to win the general election: expand the electorate, turn out young people, convince the base of the party, Blacks, to support him, and win over white working class Democrats who sometimes vote Republican while not scaring off moderate Democrats with his tax and spending ideas. And he needs a volunteer base twice the size of Obama’a. If he does all that, he’ll be the next President. If not, Clinton will be the nominee and Sanders will enthusiastically support her and encourage his volunteers to work for her. Most of the people Sanders has energized will do so, if only because of the Republican nominee. And she will be elected president. I don’t see a bad ending here unless the Clinton and Sanders supporters adopt the tactics of Republicans… Continue reading