Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie

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Democrats Will Learn All the Wrong Lessons From Brush With Bernie
Instead of a reality check for the party, it'll be smugness redoubled

By Matt Taibbi June 9, 2016


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Bernie Sanders at a campaign rally in Santa Monica, California, Tuesday. Marcus Yam/Getty

Years ago, over many beers in a D.C. bar, a congressional aide colorfully described the House of Representatives, where he worked.

It's "435 heads up 435 asses," he said.

I thought of that person yesterday, while reading the analyses of Hillary Clinton's victories Tuesday night. The arrival of the first female presidential nominee was undoubtedly a huge moment in American history and something even the supporters of Bernie Sanders should recognize as significant and to be celebrated. But the Washington media's assessment of how we got there was convoluted and self-deceiving.

This was no ordinary primary race, not a contest between warring factions within the party establishment, á la Obama-Clinton in '08 or even Gore-Bradley in '00. This was a barely quelled revolt that ought to have sent shock waves up and down the party, especially since the Vote of No Confidence overwhelmingly came from the next generation of voters. Yet editorialists mostly drew the opposite conclusion.

The classic example was James Hohmann's piece in the Washington Post, titled, "Primary wins show Hillary Clinton needs the left less than pro-Sanders liberals think."

Hohmann's thesis was that the "scope and scale" of Clinton's wins Tuesday night meant mainstream Democrats could now safely return to their traditional We won, screw you posture of "minor concessions" toward the "liberal base."

Hohmann focused on the fact that with Bernie out of the way, Hillary now had a path to victory that would involve focusing on Trump's negatives. Such a strategy won't require much if any acquiescence toward the huge masses of Democratic voters who just tried to derail her candidacy. And not only is the primary scare over, but Clinton and the centrist Democrats in general are in better shape than ever.

"Big picture," Hohmann wrote, "Clinton is running a much better and more organized campaign than she did in 2008."

Then there was Jonathan Capehart, also of the Post, whose "This is how Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are the same person" piece describes Sanders as a "stubborn outsider" who "shares the same DNA" as Donald Trump. Capeheart snootily seethes that both men will ultimately pay a karmic price for not knowing their places.

"In the battle of the outsider egos storming the political establishment, Trump succeeded where Sanders failed," he wrote. "But the chaos unleashed by Trump's victory could spell doom for the GOP all over the ballot in November. Pardon me while I dab that single tear trickling down my cheek."

If they had any brains, Beltway Dems and their clucky sycophants like Capeheart would not be celebrating this week. They ought to be horrified to their marrow that the all-powerful Democratic Party ended up having to dig in for a furious rally to stave off a quirky Vermont socialist almost completely lacking big-dollar donors or institutional support.

They should be freaked out, cowed and relieved, like the Golden State Warriors would be if they needed a big fourth quarter to pull out a win against Valdosta State.

But to read the papers in the last two days is to imagine that we didn't just spend a year witnessing the growth of a massive grassroots movement fueled by loathing of the party establishment, with some correspondingly severe numerical contractions in the turnout department (though she won, for instance, Clinton received 30 percent fewer votes in California this year versus 2008, and 13 percent fewer in New Jersey).

The twin insurgencies of Trump and Sanders this year were equally a blistering referendum on Beltway politics. But the major-party leaders and the media mouthpieces they hang out with can't see this, because of what that friend of mine talked about over a decade ago: Washington culture is too far up its own backside to see much of anything at all.

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Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid speaking with Bernie Sanders in D.C. this week. Alex Brandon/AP

In D.C., a kind of incestuous myopia very quickly becomes part of many political jobs. Congressional aides in particular work ridiculous hours for terrible pay and hang out almost exclusively with each other. About the only recreations they can afford are booze, shop-talk, and complaining about constituents, who in many offices are considered earth's lowest form of life, somewhere between lichens and nematodes.

It's somewhat understandable. In congressional offices in particular, people universally dread picking up the phone, because it's mostly only a certain kind of cable-addicted person with too much spare time who calls a politician's office.

"Have you ever called your congressman? No, because you have a job!" laughs Paul Thacker, a former Senate aide currently working on a book about life on the Hill. Thacker recounts tales of staffers rushing to turn on Fox News once the phones start ringing, because "the people" are usually only triggered to call Washington by some moronic TV news scare campaign.

In another case, Thacker remembers being in the office of the senator of a far-Northern state, watching an aide impatiently conduct half of a constituent phone call. "He was like, 'Uh huh, yes, I understand.' Then he'd pause and say, 'Yes, sir,' again. This went on for like five minutes," recounts Thacker.

Finally, the aide firmly hung up the phone, reared back and pointed accusingly at the receiver. "And you are from fukking Missouri!" he shouted. "Why are you calling me?"

These stories are funny, but they also point to a problem. Since The People is an annoying beast, young pols quickly learn to be focused entirely on each other and on their careers. They get turned on by the narrative of Beltway politics as a cool power game, and before long are way too often reaching for Game of Thrones metaphors to describe their jobs. Eventually, the only action that matters is inside the palace.

Voter concerns rapidly take a back seat to the daily grind of the job. The ideal piece of legislation in almost every case is a Frankensteinian policy concoction that allows the sponsoring pol to keep as many big-money donors in the fold as possible without offending actual human voters to the point of a ballot revolt.

This dynamic is rarely explained to the public, but voters on both sides of the aisle have lately begun guessing at the truth, and spent most of the last year letting the parties know it in the primaries. People are sick of being thought of as faraway annoyances who only get whatever policy scraps are left over after pols have finished servicing the donors they hang out with at Redskins games.

Democratic voters tried to express these frustrations through the Sanders campaign, but the party leaders have been and probably will continue to be too dense to listen. Instead, they'll convince themselves that, as Hohmann's Post article put it, Hillary's latest victories mean any "pressure" they might have felt to change has now been "ameliorated."

The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide.

This is especially the case now that the Republican Party has collapsed under the weight of its own nativist lunacy. It's exactly the moment when the Democrats should feel free to become a real party of ordinary working people.

But they won't do that, because they don't see what just happened this year as a message rising up from millions of voters.

Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings. Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn't an organic expression of mass disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders, who within the Beltway is viewed as an oddball amateur and radical who jumped the line.

Nobody saw his campaign as an honest effort to restore power to voters, because nobody in the capital even knows what that is. In the rules of palace intrigue, Sanders only made sense as a kind of self-centered huckster who made a failed play for power. And the narrative will be that with him out of the picture, the crisis is over. No person, no problem.

This inability to grasp that the problem is bigger than Bernie Sanders is a huge red flag. As Thacker puts it, the theme of this election year was widespread anger toward both parties, and both the Trump craziness and the near-miss with Sanders should have served as a warning. "The Democrats should be worried they're next," he says.

But they're not worried. Behind the palace walls, nobody ever is.

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/democrats-will-learn-all-the-wrong-lessons-from-brush-with-bernie-20160609#ixzz4BBv58se9
 

StatUS

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I just wonder how Clinton thinks she's going to get the Bernie supporters. Please don't say Warren because those Bernie voters already turned on her too.
What's been said on the net about Warren isn't indicative of the whole electorate. I'm betting Warren is still pretty popular with people. The issue with the Dem party is they think a single person will sway opinion.

Bernie's uprising isn't about him, the people were already there they just didn't have a voice. They were already upset that Obama turned their backs on them while the party turned into corporatist shills and let the GOP make them out like pussies. Bernie just happened to be there to fan the flames and to the surprise of many including me it was much greater than expected.

The DNC and apparently Hillary supporters themselves are just so wrapped up in identity politics right now that they're thinking it's #ImWithBern when it was always #He'sWithUs. When you've spent the last decade and some propping up your next leaders as pseudo-royality then it's no wonder they're completely blind to a movement based on the issues and not the person themselves.
 

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What's been said on the net about Warren isn't indicative of the whole electorate. I'm betting Warren is still pretty popular with people. The issue with the Dem party is they think a single person will sway opinion.

Bernie's uprising isn't about him, the people were already there they just didn't have a voice. They were already upset that Obama turned their backs on them while the party turned into corporatist shills and let the GOP make them out like pussies. Bernie just happened to be there to fan the flames and to the surprise of many including me it was much greater than expected.

The DNC and apparently Hillary supporters themselves are just so wrapped up in identity politics right now that they're thinking it's #ImWithBern when it was always #He'sWithUs. When you've spent the last decade and some propping up your next leaders as pseudo-royality then it's no wonder they're completely blind to a movement based on the issues and not the person themselves.
I know what they want they want a Progressive. It's not really about Bernie, but the people.
 

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Taibbi ignores demographics completely. It is not a surprise that Clinton hired most of Obama's campaign people to recreate the map that won him 2012. The idea that populism and standing behind unions is all it takes for Democrats to win every election in a landslide is popular among white liberals. They assume that if only Democrats make a play for white working class voters in addition to their minority support it would be too big of a coalition to overcome for the GOP. Almost 50 years of observable behavior by that class is not enough to dissuade them of that notion. Politicians go where the votes are and they know how the dynamics of appealing to one constituency affects the other. Most demographic models showed how Bernie was going to lose, his campaign noticed it late. The only lesson Democrats will draw from this is that they will double down on minorities plus females going forward. If Hispanic votes are in the same range as AA votes in November it will probably be their way forward. Hell even the GOP after 2012 realized this and hence their panicked reaction to the Curiel stuff among others.
 

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What's been said on the net about Warren isn't indicative of the whole electorate. I'm betting Warren is still pretty popular with people. The issue with the Dem party is they think a single person will sway opinion.

Bernie's uprising isn't about him, the people were already there they just didn't have a voice. They were already upset that Obama turned their backs on them while the party turned into corporatist shills and let the GOP make them out like pussies. Bernie just happened to be there to fan the flames and to the surprise of many including me it was much greater than expected.

The DNC and apparently Hillary supporters themselves are just so wrapped up in identity politics right now that they're thinking it's #ImWithBern when it was always #He'sWithUs. When you've spent the last decade and some propping up your next leaders as pseudo-royality then it's no wonder they're completely blind to a movement based on the issues and not the person themselves.

Yup.

Plus, how do you get people to vote every 2 years? Obama's Organizing For America and the DNC missed the mark in 2010 and 2014.

The Dems really can win elections in landslides if they just struck the populist message and ran with it on every level.

The party not having a spine has been a criticism of it for so long. Bernie and others are saying you can have a spine for standing up for the issues. Why let the right wing narratives control public policy? Why does it have to be cutting social programs and giving tax breaks all the time? Why does it have to be supply side economics? This country has so many resources and its people need to be invested in.
 

StatUS

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I know what they want they want a Progressive. It's not really about Bernie, but the people.
The issue right now is they're gonna try to paint Bernie's support as nothing by young white males, but it would be foolish to ignore his young minority support also. If they just assume "they'll grow out of it" then they risk actually losing to a grassroots candidate in the future when they could easily just put their prop guy up as a progressive candidate.

Yup.

Plus, how do you get people to vote every 2 years? Obama's Organizing For America and the DNC missed the mark in 2010 and 2014.

The Dems really can win elections in landslides if they just struck the populist message and ran with it on every level.

The party not having a spine has been a criticism of it for so long. Bernie and others are saying you can have a spine for standing up for the issues. Why let the right wing narratives control public policy? Why does it have to be cutting social programs and giving tax breaks all the time? Why does it have to be supply side economics? This country has so many resources and its people need to be invested in.
If they can't get the house back in a reasonable way most of their inroads in the executive branch means nothing. The appeal of being a workers party greatly outweighs pragmatism in state and local elections. They'll still lose on social issues in the south but if the economic message is strong enough it could move alot of seats. They don't need to turn into fukking hippies but they do need to shift to left more because they'll get beat every time on the right by the GOP.
 
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FAH1223

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Taibbi ignores demographics completely. It is not a surprise that Clinton hired most of Obama's campaign people to recreate the map that won him 2012. The idea that populism and standing behind unions is all it takes for Democrats to win every election in a landslide is popular among white liberals. They assume that if only Democrats make a play for white working class voters in addition to their minority support it would be too big of a coalition to overcome for the GOP. Almost 50 years of observable behavior by that class is not enough to dissuade them of that notion. Politicians go where the votes are and they know how the dynamics of appealing to one constituency affects the other. Most demographic models showed how Bernie was going to lose, his campaign noticed it late. The only lesson Democrats will draw from this is that they will double down on minorities plus females going forward. If Hispanic votes are in the same range as AA votes in November it will probably be their way forward. Hell even the GOP after 2012 realized this and hence their panicked reaction to the Curiel stuff among others.

The demographics shifts are true.

But lost on this is that voters under 45 across ethnic lines were voting overwhelmingly for Sanders. It's not just young white kids.

At the same time, the Democratic Party has ignored white working class people. And it's amazingly insane that the narrative has those people voting for supply side policies when it's against their own interests.

Sanders basically has provided more ammo that you can appeal to those voters easily because the majority of people in the country across party lines want to keep the New Deal programs in place, want to expand on them, want college affordable, etc, etc, etc.
 

SirReginald

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The issue right now is they're gonna try to paint Bernie's support as nothing by young white males, but it would be foolish to ignore his young minority support also. If they just assume "they'll grow out of it" then they risk actually losing to a grassroots candidate in the future when they could easily just put their prop guy up as a progressive candidate.


If they can't get the house back in a reasonable way most of their inroads in the executive branch means nothing. The appeal of being a workers party greatly outweighs pragmatism in state and local elections. They'll still lose on social issues in the south but if the economic message is strong enough it could move alot of seats. They don't need to turn into fukking hippies but they do need to shift to left more because they'll get beat every time on the right by the GOP.
Sanders does well with young Blacks though. So, that narrative that they would create would be false information. I hope most of these Bernie supporters either vote for Stein or Johnson. Hell, if they like Trump's message vote for him. I hate when people are scared into voting for a candidate. It makes no sense issues wise. Fear Mongering 101 :snoop:
 

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Then there was Jonathan Capehart, also of the Post, whose "This is how Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump are the same person" piece describes Sanders as a "stubborn outsider" who "shares the same DNA" as Donald Trump. Capeheart snootily seethes that both men will ultimately pay a karmic price for not knowing their places.

"In the battle of the outsider egos storming the political establishment, Trump succeeded where Sanders failed," he wrote. "But the chaos unleashed by Trump's victory could spell doom for the GOP all over the ballot in November. Pardon me while I dab that single tear trickling down my cheek."

Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/democrats-will-learn-all-the-wrong-lessons-from-brush-with-bernie-20160609#ixzz4BBv58se9

Truly clueless the lot of them
 
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