When I have time I can try and find you evidence supporting my claim but I’m not making this up out of the blue and I’m not alone in remembering this frustrating trend. If it makes you feel better I can just say, fine you’re right, the press coverage was equal and fair throughout the process but, again, my intent is not to win some internet points in favor of Sanders to the detriment of Clinton.
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that the establishment and the party had their minds made up in favor of Clinton before the primaries even began. This was the conventional wisdom. And I think it’s a perfectly legitimate position to say that you agree with that judgement on the part of the establishment and party. I don’t agree with that assessment but it’s not an insane assessment to make and there are arguments in favor of either position.
Ok, I overstated the case. There was not a Bernie-embargo. Thanks for correcting me. He wasn’t covered as much as I would have liked or as positively as I would have liked by the NYT, but they did mention him. The most relevant articles I could find about the topic were:
I definitely think the establishment and party leaders thought Clinton would be the nominee, and I’m sure that had an effect on what they said and did. On the other hand, that’s not a conspiracy, and I’m not sure it is even unfair, and I don’t know what anyone can do to prevent that from happening every time. There’s almost always a front runner or presumptive favorite.
I’m more on the “she would have made an fine President” than “excellent” but yes, this. Nobody who wasn’t massively deluded about American politics voted for Stein or wrote in Bernie or whatever.
I love to tweak me some noses, no doubt, and I have serious issues about the corporatist/status-quo part of the the Democratic party and platform, but I still vote for the reality-based option and suggest everyone do likewise.
Thanks for linking, that was good. It boggles my mind how anyone could think that the more progressive incoming congress members wouldn’t be anything but good for the party as a whole and individual policies specifically. Even if you are more moderate or centrist, people like AOC give you “cover” and allow you to re-calibrate the middle ground - instead of playing tug of war already yanked to the Republican side, the extra pulling from the left increases your ability to get the flag where you want it.
I spent my formative years watching Democrats wilt in response to Reagan. They’ve never recovered really:
Why aren’t they offering clear, bold, long-term, super-jumbo policy solutions that people can remember instead of triangulating everything the Republicans suggest?
Because you might be labelled as a far leftist :shudder:
And heads up Joe Manchin!
Right, and that gets back to the trauma, right? The Democratic Party doesn’t even know how to take yes for an answer. They can’t even accept the idea that they are a majority party.
Take Tlaib using a swear word. Truman got in trouble for saying “If you vote for Nixon, you ought to go to hell.” And that was a brassy sort of rhetoric people had come to expect from Democrats. Not this pearl-clutching response that, every time someone uses strong language, they have to apologize for it.
Perlstein’s comments resonate with me profoundly. That’s what I’m getting at when I’m tweaking noses about the DLC, Clintons, and the Vichy Left. I very much think that future generations will look at Clinton’s Presidency as a catastrophic failure, a ceding of norms to Gingrich’s ilk that poisoned American politics for decades by empowering the nascent fascists and culture warriors that ultimately got Trump elected.
Fuck the lunatics running the GOP. They get nothing. Don’t trade “wall” funding for DACA relief, tax reform, or anything else. Tell them to take their xenophobic, immoral nonsense and shove it. Let them own shutting down the government in an act of indefensible hostage-taking even more brazen than the borrowing limit absurdities under Obama.
I know there’s a shitload of real human pain that goes along with the federal government going unfunded, but apparently that’s what the electorate needs to understand and internalize that government is not intrinsically evil, that taxes aren’t theft, and that this entire dead branch of political philosophy has brought the greatest Republic the world has ever seen to the brink of disaster even while it still enjoys all the benefits of nearly unchallenged economic and military hegemony on a global scale.
The ideological gulf between a democratic socialist and a progressive democrat is larger than the gulf between a progressive democrat and a moderate Republican (and yes, I know those are now extinct).
Whether the people who describe themselves as “democratic socialists” actually believe in that ideology as described by the DemSoc website is a different question, but it’s legitimate for members of the democratic party to think democratic socialism gaining influence is a bad thing.
Clinton was a moderate who was persuaded of the case to deficit reduction for the first 2 years. Almost certainly a mistake. However Clinton’s relationship with Gingrich was extremely antagonistic. Indeed 6 years of divided government produced a budget surplus neither side wanted, as Clinton was unable to raise spending while Gingrich was unable to cut taxes on the rich. Clinton compromised with Gingrich on occasion because it was the only way to pass the spending he wanted.
Right now I’m hoping we get IOU’s instead of furloughs when we run out of money (by my estimate should be March-April). I’ve got enough saved up that I can wait on my pay , I don’t want to not work, I want to work as many days as I can now because 1 day of this job = 3 days I don’t have to work in retail when my job ends at some point in the future.
I hope this is resolved before it impacts you, and I hope if not you get the IOUs rather than being furloughed. This is a shitty way to run a government.
If you actually read the article, the “party’s effort to undermine Sanders” discussed there consisted of politicians employed by a political party chatting about politics in private e-mails, and not bothering to conceal that they had favorites.
There was a narrative spun by the Sanders people that the DNC is supposed to be staffed by dispassionate Vulcans who have have had their political glands surgically removed and taken a blood out to never discuss candidates in anything other than completely neutral tones, even in private.
This narrative was and is bullshit: the internal workings of the Democratic Party have always been intensely political - imagine that! - since the party was founded. There’s no requirement that the staffers not have favorites. Indeed it’s expected that the staffers will be rabidly pro-incumbent when, say, a Dem President is up for re-election. (Note that in politics “having favorites” is not a synonym for “rigging elections.”)
An unasked question was, “Was Sanders treated better or worse by the DNC than challenger candidates in other years?” That’s because asking that question didn’t serve the interests of the Sanders people, the right-wing or Russians trolls who were using Sanders to damage Clinton, or the news media who wanted a horse race. It distracted from their central narrative: where’s there’s smoke there’s fire, where there’s a light haze there must smoke, and all this clearly proves Hillary Clinton was the most corrupt politician ever to walk the earth.
(My take is that both Clinton and the DNC treated Bernie unusually well, because they wanted to avoid the perception of a coronation - and also wanted a bit of a horse race to keep press coverage up.)
Is there a 2020 presidential election thread yet? Didn’t see one. Anyway, saw Kamala Harris on Morning Joe and although I thought I would like her I found her fairly uninspiring and conventional. She’s off this dude’s list!
A better unasked question would be: “Was Sanders treated better or worse by the DNC than a challenger who was not part of the Democratic party in other years?”
This is an important part of the question. The DNC is not required to treat everyone equally. What if Rick Santorum decided to run for the Democratic nomination? Would negative internal emails suggesting they figure out a way to prevent that be a problem for the DNC?
It’s a dumb slippery slope question, but there ya go.
Besides, many of the complaints by the Sanders camp weren’t that they were being treated worse, but that the DNC was not making special rules for someone who hadn’t been a member of the party before. There were lots of stories of Sanders delegates showing up at events not knowing the rules and demanding concessions. It was a shit show.
Yes, poor Clinton. It’s not like he explicitly moved himself and therefore the party massively to the right, on purpose, to little gain and much awful lasting effect.
In Dick Morris’ words, triangulation meant “the president needed to take a position that not only blended the best of each party’s views but also transcended them to constitute a third force in the debate.”[1] In news articles and books, it is sometimes referred to as “Clintonian triangulation”.[2][3][4] Morris advocated a set of policies that were different from the traditional policies of the Democratic Party. These policies included deregulation and balanced budgets. One of the most widely cited capstones of Clinton’s triangulation strategy was when, in his 1996 State of the Union Address, Clinton declared that the “era of big government is over.”[5]