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Friday, February 12, 2016
Post-New Hampshire
I didn't really want to let myself get sucked into another post-election
commentary like last week's
Post-Iowa, but
enough links have popped up to be worth a brief post.
On the Democratic side, it's worth noting that Bernie Sanders thus
far is running ahead of Barack Obama in 2008 against Hillary Clinton:
sure, Obama won Iowa handily where Sanders only tied, but Clinton beat
Obama soundly in New Hampshire, and this year lost that same state by
even more. Geography tilts Iowa toward Obama and New Hampshire toward
Sanders -- a little bad luck for Clinton there, but doesn't Clinton
also have the advantage of having done all this before? In both states
Sanders gained 20-30 points over the last six months. That's momentum.
Both states are atypical in various ways, and despite all the effort
candidates put into winning them, their idiosyncrasies make them poor
guides for subsequent primaries, where campaigning is necessarily less
personal. The main thing Iowa and New Hampshire seem to do is to winnow
down the field. The sixteen Republicans we started with are now down to
six: Trump, Kasich, Cruz, Bush, Rubio, and Carson. Not sure if Gilmore
still thinks he's running: he got 133 votes, or 0.052%, a figure that
trailed three no-longer-running candidates (Paul, Huckabee, Santorum)
but at least topped ex-candidates Pataki, Graham, and Jindal; see results
here; all 30 names listed were on the
Republican ballot, but the list doesn't break out the 1750 write-ins.)
Gilmore (and for that matter Santorum) were also beat by Andy Martin, who
Wikipedia describes as "an American perennial candidate who has
pursued numerous litigations" and "the primary source of false rumors
that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was secretly a Muslim
during the 2008 U.S. Presidential election." Just behind Gilmore (and
ahead of Pataki) was Richard Witz, a retired school custodian from
Spencer, Massachusetts. The low vote getters on the ballot were
Matt Drozd,
Robert L. Mann, and
Peter Messina, with five votes each (Messina is the only one of those
three with as much as a website).
Chris Christie (6th place, 7%) and Carly Fiorina (7th place, 4%) dropped
out after New Hampshire. With most of next month's primaries taking place
in the South, they didn't really have anything to look forward to. Further
down, Ben Carson (8th place, 2%) and Jim Gilmore (13th place, 0%) seem to
still be running (as opposed to "in the running").
[PS: On Friday, after I had written the above, Gilmore gave up the
ghost. NBC noted that the Republican field had narrowed to six, then gave
a rundown that only mentioned five of them. Ben Carson seems to be turning
into the invisible man.]
Here are some links to chew on:
Nate Silver: Republicans Need to Treat Donald Trump as the Front-Runner:
Looks for comparisons in past Iowa-New Hampshire results for patterns and
finds everything from Pat Buchanan to Mitt Romney (who in 2012 did 0.2
better in Iowa and 4.2 better in New Hampshire, but really pretty close,
at least without adjusting for the competitive fields). The sidebar also
(at the moment) shows Trump with a 55% chance of winning South Carolina
(which you may recall Romney lost to Newt Gingrich; he has Rubio at 22%
and Cruz at 15% but only in the fishy-sounding "polls plus" column).
Then Silver abandons the stats and starts dreaming:
If you could somehow combine Rubio's likability and appeal to conservatives,
Kasich's policy smarts and post-New Hampshire momentum, and Bush's war chest
and organization, you'd have a pretty good candidate on your hands. But
instead, these candidates are likely to spend the next several weeks
sniping at one another. The circular firing squad mentality was already
apparent in New Hampshire, where fewer advertising dollars were directed
against Trump despite his having led all but one poll of the state since
July.
By pegging Trump as the "front runner" Silver seems to be daring the
"Republican elites" to get their act together and settle on one anti-Trump
miracle and be done with it. Still, you have to wonder (as
Elias Isquith does), if, having downplayed Trump's changes, Silver
isn't just looking to salvage his reputation. What Silver's own data
shows is that Bush-Kasich-Rubio (maybe even Cruz) understand that only
by getting past each other does one have a chance of taking on Trump --
the problem is that none of them come close to Silver's dream criteria.
What I suspect will eventually happen is that those "elites" will in
the end reconcile themselves to Trump, because in the end Trump is no
threat to them. That's far more likely than the prospect of the Democratic
Party apparatchiki giving in to Sanders even if Sanders sweeps the primaries
as thoroughly. Part of this is, as David Frum put it, because the GOP
fears its base, whereas the Democrats loathe theirs. But mostly it's
because Trump is just another corrupt demagogic symptom of a system that
Sanders is promising to upend.
Paul Krugman: Hard Money Men: Ohio Governor John Kasich skipped Iowa
and ran pretty close to the perfect New Hampshire campaign -- lots of town
halls, one-on-ones, presenting a low-key personality with a command of
issues and his own temper -- and wound up getting 16% of the vote, pretty
unimpressive totals except that he topped Cruz, Bush, and Rubio for second
place. Tempting, given his competition, to argue that he's a sane oasis
in the Republican field, but Krugman isn't having any of it:
[N]ote that on economic policy -- which sort of matters -- Kasich is
terrible, arguably worse than the rest of the GOP field.
It's not just his balanced-budget fetishism, which would be disastrous
in an economic crisis. He's also a hard-money man.
Ted Cruz has gotten some scrutiny, although not enough, for his
goldbuggism. But Kasich, when asked why wages have stagnated, gave as
his number one reason "because the Federal Reserve kept interest rates
so low" -- because this diverted investment into stocks, or something.
No, it doesn't make any sense -- but it tells you that he is viscerally
opposed to monetary as well as fiscal stimulus in the face of high
unemployment.
So no, Kasich isn't sensible. He's just off the wall in ways that
differ in some ways from the GOP mainstream. If he'd been president
in 2009-10, we'd have had a full replay of the Great Depression.
For more on Kasich, see
Heather Digby Parton: John Kasich is a right-wing Trojan Horse.
On the other hand, Jon Huntsman received 17% of the vote in New
Hampshire in 2012 (3rd place behind Romney and Ron Paul) and was never
heard from again.
Emily Douglas: Last Night, Rachel Maddow Perfectly Captured What
Bernie's Win Means for the Left: Follow the link for that quote
(and some video). What I find more interesting is this later bit:
Think back to the 1992 conventions, when Pat Buchanan gave his infamous
culture-wars speech, announcing a "crusade," as Maddow put it, against
gay people, minorities and feminism and concluding that "There is a
religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is
a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be
as was the Cold War itself." In response to that declaration of war,
the Democratic Party didn't have much: "As a gay person watching that
in 1992, I didn't feel like Bill Clinton had my back. I didn't feel
like the Democratic Party had my back," she added. "He was talking
about agreeing with Ronald Reagan that government was the problem."
I saw a little bit of Maddow in the election coverage. She was
talking about how Trump is viewed, at least in Europe, as analogous
to the neo-fascist right-wing parties there. That's probably true,
but Americans have little experience with native-grown fascism, so
the same resonance isn't easily felt here. On the other hand, most
European countries experienced native fascist movements as well as
the fascist-driven World War -- so bad that surviving right-wing
parties can't help but be tarred by the experience. You find, for
instance, in France large numbers of people who will vote for
anyone against Le Pen. The closest analogue in the US was
when Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke ran for governor of
Louisiana. But aside the KKK, the US has never really had fascist
movements. In a sense, the hallmarks of fascism -- racism, rabid
xenophobia, militarism -- have become so mainstreamed here that
they don't get flagged as such.
Martin Longman: Why Sanders Is Still Behind the Eight Ball: Points
out that the way the Democratic Party selects "superdelegates" creates
a huge baked-in advantage for Clinton (currently 394-42). By comparison,
with the proportional split of delegates in New Hampshire, Sanders has
made a net gain of 13 delegates. At that rate, it's going to take a long
time and a lot of landslide victories for Sanders to catch up. Sure,
Clinton had a similar advantage in 2008, but not as extreme as this
year: Obama had a number of prominent Democratic supporters (Longman
emphasizes Tom Daschle). Still hard to say what happens if the primaries
go overwhelmingly for Sanders: those superdelegates may save Clinton,
but won't make her look like the people's pick.
Joel Beinin: More details about Bernie Sanders and Kibbutz Sha'ar
ha-'Amakim: In case you're curious. I've heard reports that
after New Hampshire Clinton was going to attack Sanders for being
anti-Israel. Good luck with that. Chances are that most supporters
of Sanders are already more disturbed by Israel's right-wing polity
(not to mention the alliance of Netanyahu with the Republicans)
than Sanders himself is -- so attacking him on that is more likely
to shift voters against Israel/Likud than it is to harm Sanders.
Michelle Alexander: Why Hillary Clinton Doesn't Deserve the Black Vote:
"From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted --
and Hillary Clinton supported -- decimated black America." Then, and these
are not unrelated, there's "the economy, stupid":
An oft-repeated myth about the Clinton administration is that although it
was overly tough on crime back in the 1990s, at least its policies were
good for the economy and for black unemployment rates. The truth is more
troubling. As unemployment rates sank to historically low levels for white
Americans in the 1990s, the jobless rate among black men in their 20s who
didn't have a college degree rose to its highest level ever. This increase
in joblessness was propelled by the skyrocketing incarceration rate.
[ . . . ]
Despite claims that radical changes in crime and welfare policy were
driven by a desire to end big government and save taxpayer dollars, the
reality is that the Clinton administration didn't reduce the amount of
money devoted to the management of the urban poor; it changed what the
funds would be used for. Billions of dollars were slashed from public-housing
and child-welfare budgets and transferred to the mass-incarceration machine.
By 1996, the penal budget was twice the amount that had been allocated to
food stamps. During Clinton's tenure, funding for public housing was slashed
by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent), while funding for corrections
was boosted by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), according to
sociologist Loïc Wacquant "effectively making the construction of prisons
the nation's main housing program for the urban poor."
Josiah Lee Auspitz: For GOP, It's 270 to Win, but Also 1237 to Lose:
Reviews the strange delegate allocation procedures the Republican Party
adopted to help ensure the dominance of conservatives by tipping the
scales toward smaller states in the west and south.
Eric Alterman: Why There Will Be No New New Deal: Draws on the
argument of Jefferson Cowie in a new book, The Great Exception:
The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics. Cowie seems
to believe that the New Deal was an unrepeatable exception because
it occurred at the one point in American history when the internal
divisions of America's working class -- race, ethnicity, religion --
were at low ebb (even so, he sees the exclusion of blacks from many
New Deal benefits as necessary for their passage -- for details see
Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White). Civil
rights for blacks and increased immigration only serve to undermine
the New Deal's unique focus on class and solidarity. Alterman also
cites Robin Archer's Why Is There No Labor Party in the United
States? and Robert J Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American
Growth to pile on inevitability. Yet he also notes:
Beginning midway through Jimmy Carter's presidency, with the New Deal
order wheezing on life support, Democrats tried to save themselves by
aping right-wing arguments about government being the problem, not the
solution, to the challenges that ordinary Americans faced. By tying
themselves to the mast of a corrupt campaign-finance system, they have
helped to make it so.
Uh, maybe it wasn't so inevitable. Maybe it had more to do with some
bad decisions certain politicians made because the Cold War had blinded
them to thinking of America in class terms? Someone like, oh, Bill
Clinton? Cowie points to the Great Depression and WWII as the key
events that forged the sense of unity and solidarity that made the
New Deal, and implies that they are irrepeatable. On the other hand,
it's not that we lack for depressions and wars -- just the critical
analysis to understand and overcome them.
Gar Alperovitz: Socialism in America Is Closer Than You Think:
Lest you think that socialism is un-American, Alperovitz has a number
of examples of things that already exist that go beyond Sanders' own
program. Not all are advertised as "socialism" -- a brand that hasn't
fared all that well, not that socialists don't have an honorable legacy,
often moving well ahead of more mainstream politicians.
Josh Marshall: A Clarifying Encounter: On Thursday's Democratic debate,
which Marshall thought was good for both but maybe a bit better for Clinton.
He complains, "and yet there's a vague hint of Rubio-ism in Sanders" -- an
objection to Sanders repeatedly hitting his campaign talking points. Having
heard them all many times I can't say that's something I especially enjoy,
but I suspect such repetition is needed to drive his points home -- and
they are points that encapsulate broad programs, unlike Rubio's whatever.
I caught about three minutes of the debate, which included Sanders citing
the 1954 coup against Mossadegh as a lesson in unintended consequences --
and he wasn't just name-dropping; he explained it very succinctly -- and
blasting Kissinger's guidance of American foreign policy, citing how the
Kissinger's expansion of the Vietnam War destabilized Cambodia and led to
three million deaths and how his opening to China has cost millions of
American jobs. That's all stuff I know like the back of my hand, but it's
also stuff you never hear politicians say. When Sanders promised he wouldn't
be seeking Kissinger's advice, Clinton asked he would listen to on foreign
policy, and Sanders ignored her. What should he say? The Democratic Party
mandarins, like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madelyn Albright, are every bit as
compromised as Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice: indeed, you can't be certified
as a "foreign policy expert" in Washington without having been systematically
deluded for decades. Maybe Marshall is right and Clinton is exceptionally
knowledgeable about wonky policy specifics. But Sanders knows his history,
and that's where lessons are to be learned -- not least the ones that have
blindsided Clinton time and again.
Ask a question, or send a comment.
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