Something important happened in Virginia this week: Governor Terry McAuliffe restored voting rights to Virginia felons who have served their time and completed the subsequent probations. In the age of mass incarceration, that’s a lot of people: more than 200,000 in Virginia alone. Nationally, an estimated 5.85 million people have lost their voting rights because of felony convictions. That’s bigger than the winning margin in every recent presidential election other than 2008.
But the question that probably leaps to mind is: Why would changing that be a good thing? The class of felons includes a lot of bad people, so why do we want more bad people picking our leaders? But felon voting rights are important for both micro and macro reasons.
The individual ex-con. The micro-level reason is that we want an ex-con to have a path back into normal life. (John Oliver did a great segment on this a few months ago. The ex-con’s difficulty re-entering society also made it into pop culture through the recent hit movie Ant-Man.) The old-fashioned notion was that by the time a prisoner got released, he had “paid his debt to society” and everything was square now. But in reality, many ex-cons can only hope for a second-class citizenship, which permanent disenfranchisement symbolizes. And if you can never hope for a normal life, returning to crime becomes more tempting.
Decades ago, you might start over by taking the Jean Valjean approach: Move far away and keep quiet about your criminal history. But in this era of universal databases, the relentless Inspector Javert has been automated: Your past is bound to catch up with you.
Large-scale voter suppression. The macro-level reason is that our criminal justice system is biased, so disenfranchising felons is a way to diminish the voting power of blacks, the poor, and other over-policed segments of society.
The racial difference might be defended if it were solely the result of blacks committing more crimes than whites, but that’s far from the whole story. An ACLU report says:
[R]acial disparities result from disparate treatment of Blacks at every stage of the criminal justice system, including stops and searches, arrests, prosecutions and plea negotiations, trials, and sentencing. Race matters at all phases and aspects of the criminal process, including the quality of representation, the charging phase, and the availability of plea agreements, each of which impact whether juvenile and adult defendants face a potential [life without parole] sentence. In addition, racial disparities in sentencing can result from theoretically “race neutral” sentencing policies that have significant disparate racial effects, particularly in the cases of habitual offender laws and many drug policies, including mandatory minimums, school zone drug enhancements, and federal policies adopted by Congress in 1986 and 1996 that at the time established a 100-to-one sentencing disparity between crack and powder cocaine offenses.
Racial disparities in sentencing also result in part from prosecutors’ decisions at the initial charging stage, suggesting that racial bias affects the exercise of prosecutorial discretion with respect to certain crimes. One study found that Black defendants face significantly more severe charges than whites, even after controlling for characteristics of the offense, criminal history, defense counsel type, age and education of the offender, and crime rates and economic characteristics of the jurisdiction.
Governor McAuliffe invoked the racial issue by comparing felon disenfranchisement to the poll tax, but I think a better comparison is to another Jim Crow relic: literacy tests. The literacy test had a similarly virtuous rationale: Do you want illiterate people picking our leaders? But it was applied in biased ways, and combined with other systemic discrimination (i.e., separate-and-unequal school systems) to keep blacks from voting.
Partisan politics. As so often happens these days, what ought to be a simple good-government argument has gotten swamped by partisan power politics. Blacks overwhelmingly vote Democratic, so Republicans are against anything that enfranchises more of them. (This has the cycle-completing effect of motivating more blacks to vote Democratic.) And so, Kentucky’s Democratic Governor Steven Beshear issued a similar order as he was leaving office, but the incoming Republican Governor Matt Bevin rescinded it before it could take effect. Felon disenfranchisement effects about 1 in 19 Kentuckians, but 1 in 6 blacks.
As Mike Dukakis learned when he became the Willie Horton candidate in 1988, felons (especially black ones) make for bad political optics. And that puts governors on the horns of a dilemma: Like Gov. Besmear, they can wait until they’re leaving office to restore voting rights, when critics can claim that they didn’t dare do it until they were slinking out the door. Or, like Gov. McAuliffe, they can restore rights earlier in their terms, and face the criticism that they are trying to remake their own electorate.
Optics or partisanship aside, though, it’s the right thing to do. We’ll have a hard time tackling the racial biases in our justice system as long as they continue to give one side an advantage on election day.
If Bernie Sanders isn’t going to be president, what happens to the movement that coalesced behind him?
A week ago, on the eve of the New York primary, there was still a plausible scenario in which Bernie Sanders would be inaugurated as president next January: New York had elected Hillary Clinton to the Senate twice, so an upset win there — or maybe even just a photo finish that would keep her from declaring victory until Wednesday morning — would the change the narrative of the campaign in a way that could set Bernie on the road to the White House.
Until that moment, the recent string of Sanders victories could still be written off as the calendar’s fortuitous grouping of several Bernie-friendly contests. But if he won New York, no one could deny that the campaign had seen a real momentum shift. Clinton’s big margins in delegate-rich early states like Texas, Florida, and Ohio might start to seem like old news. The combination of a New York upset, Clinton’s shrinking margin over Sanders in national polls, and Sanders’ advantage in head-to-head match-ups with Republicans might be enough to turn around the polls that showed him trailing in the next round of states (Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island, and Delaware, which vote tomorrow), shrink Clinton’s pledged-delegate lead to insignificance by the end of the primaries in June, and convince superdelegates that he was the candidate the party needed to unite behind at the Democratic Convention in July.
But that didn’t happen.
Instead, Clinton had a crushing 16-point win in New York and extended her pledged-delegate lead by an estimated 31. Polls show Clinton continuing to hold big leads in Pennsylvania and Maryland, with a smaller lead in Connecticut (and little polling in Rhode Island and Delaware). Even if he could squeak out wins those states, it wouldn’t be enough at this point. To catch up, he needs landslides — a long string of them — and there’s no indication that they’re coming.
Hillary is now virtually certain to go the convention with a sizeable lead in pledged delegates and primary votes. Back when Sanders supporters hoped to win in the primaries and were worried about superdelegates overruling the will of the people, big Bernie-supporting organizations like Democracy for America and Move On committed themselves to the position that the pledged-delegate winner should be the nominee. They would have a hard time walking that back now. And besides, superdelegates (who are precisely the kind of party establishment figures Clinton appeals to) rushing to Sanders has always been hard to picture.
In short, Hillary Clinton is going to be nominated.
What Bernie accomplished. None of that should diminish the impressiveness of what the Sanders campaign has done. A year ago, it might have seemed like a moral victory if Sanders had put up some token resistance in Iowa and New Hampshire — 25% or 30%, maybe — before fading out of the picture altogether. Instead, Bernie has won states in every region but the South, and created moments of real panic inside the Clinton campaign. Rather than a Clinton coronation, the outcome has ended up hanging on a single factor: Sanders’ inability to break through with non-white voters. (The margins Clinton achieved in New York — 75%-25% among blacks and 64%-36% among Latinos — are fairly typical. Sanders and Clinton split New York’s white vote 50-50.)
In the national conversation, progressive ideas have moved closer to the mainstream. Several of Occupy Wall Street’s points have stopped sounding fringy and are well on their way to becoming common sense:
The top 1% have captured too much of our nation’s wealth
Their institutional power gives their viewpoint too much influence in the media.
Our virtually unregulated campaign finance system makes it too hard for politicians to stand up to them.
As a result, their combination of market power and political power rigs the American economy in their favor.
Looking to 2020 or beyond, candidates will have to seriously consider funding their campaigns out of small donations, knowing that they’ll face criticism if they go the Super PAC route instead.
Those are significant accomplishments. So while it’s natural for Sanders supporters to be disappointed in how things are turning out, the campaign has not been a failure.
But where should it go from here?
Scorched Earth? One possibility is that Bernie could go down swinging: Keep hammering at Clinton’s trustworthiness and Wall Street ties; promote a persecution narrative that the process is rigged against him; make the convention as contentious as possible; and either encourage his supporters to vote for a third-party candidate like the Greens’ Jill Stein, or even run himself as an independent.
I think Bernie would probably encourage people to [support Hillary if he loses] because he doesn’t have any ego in this thing. But I think a lot of people are, ‘sorry, I just can’t bring myself to’.
The threat that their unwillingness to unite behind Hillary might hand the White House to Donald Trump does not move them: On this episode of The Young Turks, Cenk Uygar argues that Trump is a fascist, so “we can’t roll the dice” on a Trump presidency. But Jimmy Dore pushes back:
Think how strong the left would be. Think how strong — and also, we’d have all the independents and we would pick off Republicans. … I think it would put liberalism over the top. You know how we always say that Americans are liberal but they just don’t know it? I think they would know it.
Getting in line? A second possibility is to do what Hillary Clinton herself did eight years ago: After pushing all the way to the end of the primaries and coming up short, she endorsed Barack Obama in early June. It was not a half-hearted, check-the-box effort: She and Bill worked hard for Obama, in spite of die-hard supporters who tried to organize against him. Bill’s speech was one of the highlights of the 2008 convention.
If Sanders did something similar, if he didn’t just say “Yeah, I guess she’s better than Trump” but toured the country campaigning for the Democratic ticket, that could go a long way to unify the party for the fall.
But Clinton would have to tango as well. If after the convention she acts like Sanders has socialist cooties, or that appearing on a stage with him would threaten her image with moderate swing voters, Bernie could hardly be blamed if he spent the fall doing something else, either campaigning for progressive candidates lower on the ticket or just resting up in Vermont.
Planting seeds? An in-between possibility was outlined by Michael Lerner of Tikkun: Bernie could try to organize his supporters and contributors into a “Tea Party of the left”. (Lerner suggests the name “Love and Justice Party”).
Like the Tea Party, this wouldn’t be an attempt to break the two-party system, but would be an organized faction inside the Democratic Party. Just as Tea Partiers were adamant in voting against Obama in 2012 and understood that Mitt Romney was their only viable option, there would be no doubt that the Love and Justice Party supported Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump. But it would be forming and supporting its own identity rather than merging seamlessly into the Clinton campaign.
At the convention, Sanders delegates could push for changes in the process that would make the Democratic Party more democratic (and presumably more open to a progressive takeover) in future cycles: no superdelegates, no closed primaries, and — even though Bernie did well in them — no caucuses.
For the fall campaign, I picture a message that is honest and authentic: Hillary isn’t everything we want, and we will be watching her like hawks once she takes office. But if you want more people to have access to health care rather than less, if you want to continue talking to Iran rather than bombing it, if you want to expand women’s rights and voting rights and minority rights rather than shrinking them, if you want a higher minimum wage, affordable college, and a job-creating infrastructure program, then Hillary Clinton is the clear choice in this November’s election.
[You can argue that the Greens or an independent Sanders candidacy would represent those positions better, but I think that misses the central point of democracy: It’s not about finding a candidate who agrees with you 100%. If it were, then we should all cast write-in votes for ourselves. Rather than self-expression, democracy is about building favorable governing coalitions.
In a parliamentary system, a vote for Stein would basically be giving her your proxy to negotiate a progressive place in a center-left coalition after the election. But in the American system, voting for Stein means opting out of any possible governing coalition.]
For lower offices, L&J would like some Democrats better than others. Just as Mike Lee and Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio entered office identified as Tea Party Republicans, 2017 could see a class of L&J Democrats come to Washington. Going forward, Democrats who were less progressive than their districts might begin to fear primaries, just as insufficiently conservative Republicans do.
Of course, a Love and Justice Party would lack what the Tea Party has always had bushels of: billionaire cash, the kind of seed money that can go looking for a candidate rather than the other way around. Sanders has proved that millions of liberals will give at least a little money to a campaign that excites them. But can that be turned into a lasting political identity?
Forming a party-within-the-party would test whether Bernie’s network of small donors really can assemble into a billionaire-sized megazord. Would they be willing to go on contributing to build a movement, even in years when there is no election, and when the L&J candidates for the next election haven’t emerged yet?
That’s what the Koch Brothers and their friends do for the Tea Party. Can millions of small donors balance them, year in and year out?
The lesson for 2020. As I said earlier, what Clinton’s victory over Sanders has hinged on is the support she has gotten from blacks and Hispanics. Many Sanders supporters have been frustrated by that, because Sanders’ positions on the issues ought to appeal to non-whites, who are even more likely than whites to be on the wrong side of the rigged economy. At times, that frustration has devolved into condescension: What’s wrong with those people? Why aren’t they smart enough to realize which side their bread is buttered on?
But the problem isn’t with them, it’s with us: Many progressives, Bernie included, have a 2-dimensional view of politics. Everything is about ideology and grand proposals like single-payer healthcare. But the Clintons understand that politics is also about relationships and identities. Hillary is winning this race because, long before the official campaign started, she developed relationships in black and Hispanic communities nationwide. Non-whites felt like they knew her and understood exactly how far they could or could not count on her.
Early in the campaign there was an apparently tangential argument about whether Bernie had been involved in the civil rights movement, which his campaign answered by digging up stories of his work as a student activist at University of Chicago in the 1960s. But like so many of the arguments that make up a campaign, the significance of that one was under the surface. The real question in the minds of black voters, particularly in the South, was: “Why am I only hearing about this guy now that he wants my vote?”
You can argue that the people who asked that question were just ignorant, that Bernie had been on their side for a long time and if they didn’t know about him it was their own fault. But that kind of answer doesn’t win anybody’s support.
The next Bernie. If the next progressive candidate, the one who inherits Bernie’s mantle in 2020 or 2024, is going to win among non-whites, he or she has to start building those relationships now. Over the next eight years, a 2024 wannabe needs to invest significant time and effort in working with blacks and Latinos and Asians on the local issues they care about: pushing their legislative proposals, bringing national publicity to their marches and demonstrations, fund-raising for non-white local candidates, and so on.
That runs counter to an image that Bernie has taken advantage of, one appeals to progressive whites: a man of no particular national ambition who suddenly feels the Hand of Fate upon him and realizes he has to take up leadership of the progressive cause. But a candidate who invokes that Cincinnatus image is just going to repeat Bernie’s failure: He or she is going to represent an ideology, and make proposals non-whites ought to like, but not have built the relationships necessary to win.
As much distaste as we might feel for ambitious office-seekers, and as appealing as a candidate untainted by presidential ambition might be, politics is a real profession that calls for real work and real skills. Building a multi-racial progressive coalition is a long-term political project; it needs real politicians who focus on the job for years at a time, not someone who feels the Hand of Fate the year before the election.
Hillary Clinton’s big victory in New York on Tuesday didn’t just stop Bernie Sanders’ momentum, it closed off the last plausible scenario for his nomination — the one where a big finish to the primary campaign diminished Clinton’s pledged-delegate lead to such insignificance that it motivated super delegates to jump on the Bernie bandwagon.
But the Sanders campaign has always been about more than just personal ambition: It started at a time when his nomination seemed hopeless, and his supporters seem to be in no mood to go home just because it seems hopeless again. So what’s the next step? What continuing goal makes this more than just a campaign that came up short, like Martin O’Malley’s or Marco Rubio’s?
So: Bernie or bust? Jill Stein? Leading his followers back to Hillary for a stop-Trump campaign in the fall? Setting up the progressive movement to take over the Democratic Party in some future election cycle? Or something else? I’ll discuss the possibilities in “Beyond Bernie 2016”, which should post sometime between 9 and 10 EDT.
The other big thing that happened this week was that Gov. McAuliffe restored voting rights to Virginia’s 200,000 ex-cons. Giving convicted felons more political power may sound iffy on the surface, but in an era of mass incarceration and a racially biased judicial system, a lifetime ban on felon voting rights is actually a major factor in voter suppression, which I’ll review in a second featured post “Why You Should Care About Felon Voting Rights”. It should appear in the 10-11 range.
The weekly summary will discuss Trump’s attempt to pivot towards the general election, a call to end the blasphemy of Saturday Night Live (with links to said blasphemy, of course), Prince, and a few other topics, before closing with a massive flow chart guiding you through NPR’s list of the 100 top fantasy and science fiction novels (in case you were running out of things to read).
Or at least worrying about them. Today is the deadline for filing 2015’s federal income tax forms. If you’re missing it, don’t kick yourself, just get it done. You might have to pay a penalty, but you won’t go to jail.
Every year, Tax Day sets everyone wondering if there isn’t some better way to do this. It’s not just the money that gets siphoned off into the tax-prep industry, it’s all the time and stress that goes into the process. Sales tax just happens without you needing to fret about it. Property tax is a bill you pay — costly, maybe, but pretty straightforward. Income tax is an ordeal.
For Republicans like Steve Forbes, the resentment Tax Day raises is a chance to push a flat tax, which would be a gold mine for very rich people like Steve Forbes, but wouldn’t make taxes simpler for ordinary folks. (Flattening the tax just changes the numbers in the tax table. Every change that actually would simplify your taxes could be done without flattening the tax rates.)
On Wednesday, she introduced a bill that would let people with simple taxes file for free without filling out a return — essentially, the IRS would do people’s taxes for them. Bernie Sanders is a co-sponsor; his rival for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, said she supports the bill, too.
For a very large number of people, the 1040 just collects a lot of information the IRS already knows: It gets the same 1099 and W-2 reports that you do, and you told them last year how many dependents you have. It could run all that through its computers and send you a return. You could OK it and be done, or, if you wanted to take advantage of some deduction they don’t know about, you could submit an amendment.
Why isn’t this a no-brainer for Congress? Three reasons:
If you really want the pro-plutocracy flat tax, you want to hold genuine tax simplification hostage. Make people believe that a flat tax is the only answer to their pain.
The people who would benefit most from Warren’s plan are ordinary Americans who have no lobbyists.
The tax-planning and accounting industries are solidly against this kind of reform, and they do have lobbyists.
Tax Day is also a good time to review how money flows through the federal government. One factor that significantly dumbs down political discourse in the United States is that so few people have a clear idea how the government raises money or what it spends money on. (It’s amazing how many people think we could slash government spending by cutting foreign aid and defunding the National Endowment for the Arts.)
Individual income is the tax you’re paying now. Payroll taxes are mainly Social Security and Medicare taxes.
And here’s where it went:
The difference between the two — around $450 billion, or 12% of total spending — was the deficit. Healthcare, Social Security, Defense, and interest on the national debt are pretty obvious, and among them account for 71% of spending. Other Mandatory is stuff like Food Stamps and unemployment compensation.
Non-Defense Discretionary is everything people ordinarily think about when they talk about cutting government spending. It’s only 16%, and includes everything from keeping the National Parks open to NASA to disaster relief.
but I was thinking about a bookstore in Asheville
An op-ed in Thursday’s NYT reminded me what a blunt instrument a boycott is. The owner of Malaprop’s Bookstore asked: “Why Should My Store Be Boycotted Over a Law That I Despise?” Malaprop’s has had to cancel author events, and out-of-state customers have been avoiding Asheville while North Carolina’s new anti-LGBT law HB 2 remains in effect.
This made me stop and think, because Asheville is a place I like to visit. I have a red coffee mug with the Malaprop’s logo on one side and “Eat. Sleep. Read.” on the other. Last December, a chunk of “Small-Government Freedom vs. Big-Government Rights” was written while sitting in Malaprop’s cafe section, drinking a Fire Distinguisher (a chili, cayenne, and cinnamon mocha), and using their wifi. (Yeah, I was in the South when I wrote that.)
So yes, it’s a shame Asheville is catching flak for the bigots’ law. And yet … that’s kind of the point. Would the Asheville City Council have taken such a strong position on HB 2 without a boycott?
A law like HB 2 passes because a lot of the people who ought to know better believe that it isn’t really their problem. The boycott is the rest of us saying, “No, it is your problem.” I hope that all over the state, Carolinians who otherwise don’t prioritize LGBT rights, and who shrug and say “What can you do?” whenever the Christian Taliban pushes something through their legislature, are now saying: “This is why we can’t have nice things.”
I’m sorry the boycott is hurting such a cute and pleasant independent bookstore, but HB 2 is hurting a lot of innocent people. And while North Carolina figures out how to fix this, I’ll be looking forward to the next time I can sit in Malaprop’s with a stack of new books on the table, drink some ridiculous coffee concoction, and write a blog post. But don’t look for me there anytime soon.
The most amusing part of the boycott happened last Monday when the porn site xHamster announced it was blocking access to computers with North Carolina IP addresses. This could be more effective than you might think. Studies suggest that Bible Belt states consume more online porn than more liberal, less religious states. It’s that whole repression/rebellion cycle.
and the intersection of religion, law, and absurdity
is not a ‘religion’ within the meaning of the relevant federal statutes and constitutional jurisprudence. It is, rather, a parody, intended to advance an argument about science, the evolution of life, and the place of religion in public education.
I more or less agree in this particular case, in which a prisoner is asking the prison administration to make allowances for his Pastafarian practices. But if I were a judge, I wouldn’t have much confidence that I could in general draw a line that neatly separated “real” religions from ridiculous systems that people are just having fun with. Imagine, say, a group teaching that people require an absurd deity to properly respond to the absurdity of the human condition. The practitioners themselves might not be able to draw a line between the serious and unserious parts of their faith.
Wednesday David Corn recalled the time in 2007 when Ted Cruz, then state solicitor general, defended a Texas law banning the sale of dildos and vibrators. His office submitted a brief to a federal court claiming that Texas had a legitimate interest in discouraging “autonomous sex” and denying any
substantive-due-process right to stimulate one’s genitals for non-medical purposes unrelated to procreation or outside of an interpersonal relationship.
Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might.
And if your hand needs to amplify its might with battery-powered tools, that doesn’t seem like much of a stretch.
John Kasich is supposed to be the nice, considerate Republican candidate. But in this video, shot in a Jewish bookstore, we see him “goysplaining” various pieces of the Old Testament to Talmud students, who politely refrain from telling him what a jerk he’s being when he asks them if they know about Joseph and Joshua. I was reminded of the time Rand Paul thought he could teach Howard University students about black history.
If we believe the Bible is the inspired word of God, then we shouldn’t be recognizing it only as a book of historical and economic significance. If we are recognizing the Bible as a sacred text, then we are violating the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of Tennessee by designating it as the official state book.
That seems simple enough, but supporters of the bill are going to try to override the veto. To me, the vetoed bill is an example of dominance politics, a phrase I picked up from Josh Marshall, who uses it a little differently. This bill isn’t about solving any substantive problem of the citizens of Tennessee. It’s about one group of citizens proving to the others that they are on top and can grind everybody else’s noses in the dirt.
Mississippi now allows firearms in churches. Gov. Bryant signed the “Church Protection Act” Friday. Psalm 46 says, “God is our refuge and strength.” But just in case that isn’t enough, you might want to pack heat.
However, if you have a favorite gun, I’d recommend leave it at home, because the Psalm continues: “He breaketh the bow and cutteth the spear in sunder; He burneth the chariot in the fire.” I don’t know what He would do to a Glock, but I’m guessing it wouldn’t be pretty.
You would never know it from watching the news reports, but there’s been a protest going on all week in front of the Capitol. About 900 Democracy Spring protesters have been arrested, including Lawrence Lessig.
I love this video criticizing Senate Republicans for refusing to hold hearings on Merrick Garland’s nomination to the Supreme Court. “I only do my job when I feel like it. That’s why I stand with the Senate.”
Paul Ryan is having the same problems that undermined John Boehner’s speakership, and with the same people, the so-called Freedom Caucus. Friday, the House missed its deadline for passing a FY 2017 budget. Because of the deal Boehner passed on his way out the door, this failure doesn’t necessarily put us on track for an across-the-board government shutdown in October. But it bodes ill for the appropriations bills that the committees should start producing in May. If any of them don’t pass by October, the corresponding segments of the government will shut down.
Digby has a fantasy: Sarah Palin on TV at the Republican Convention. Maybe she’ll compare herself to Bill Nye again, or just go off on another incoherent ramble.
Speaking of Forrest, who in addition to being a war criminal was also the first Grand Wizard of the KKK, the effort to remove his bust from the Tennessee State Capitol has turned into a general law defining a memorial-removal process, which looks like it could tie the whole thing up for a long time. Meanwhile, the bust remains on display.
In the 1990s, Clintonism was all about avoiding the fate of McGovern, Mondale, and Dukakis. Two decades later, is that still an issue?
If you google “Sanders McGovern”, you’ll find a fairly large number of articles debating whether Bernie Sanders is or isn’t the second coming of George McGovern, the anti-establishment, left-leaning Democrat who suffered a historic landslide loss to Richard Nixon in 1972.
Reading those articles, I keep recalling a quote from the 19th-century mathematician Karl Friedrich Gauss: “I have had my solutions for a long time, but I do not yet know how I am to arrive at them.” In every case, it looks to me like the author started with a desired conclusion, then looked for ways to justify it.
I think the question deserves something better than that, so I’m going to do the exact opposite: I’m going to write down everything I know about this issue and leave you with a cliffhanger at the end. I’ve thought about this and done some research. In the end, though, I have hopes and I have fears, but certainty escapes me. I can’t promise you that a gamble on Bernie Sanders would win or lose in November. All I can do is draw a clearer picture of what we’d be betting on.
Where I start. I’m a somewhat left-leaning Democrat who also really wants to win in November. If I could snap my fingers and install single-payer health care or a carbon tax, I absolutely would. But I also think ObamaCare is a huge improvement on the health care system we had in 2009, I’m glad we’re finally starting to do something (though not nearly enough) about climate change, and I’m afraid of losing all that under President Trump or Cruz.
I went to one of the early Bernie rallies (in Portsmouth in May) and I definitely felt the Bern when he talked not just about health care and the environment, but also about tough regulations for Wall Street, creating jobs with a big push to rebuild our infrastructure, investing in college for our young people, and reducing the influence that big-money donors have on our political system. The growing inequality of wealth looks to me like a problem that isn’t going to fix itself, and will destroy the American way of life if it goes much further.
But I’m also not willing to sign up for a Charge of the Light Brigade. If asking for the moon means that the voters will give us nothing, and that instead the gradual progress we’ve made under President Obama will be undone, then count me out. If that’s the choice, then more gradual progress under another President Clinton sounds fine to me. On the other hand, if that’s not the choice, if we really could have the kind of revolutionary change Sanders calls for, then I don’t want to leave those possibilities on the table. So I voted for Bernie in the New Hampshire primary, but with similar uncertainty to what TPM’s John Judis is feeling as the Maryland primary approaches.
For me it’s a real question: Is another McGovern-type loss really something to worry about, or is it a Boogie Man we’ve been afraid of for far too long already?
Ultimately, we can’t be certain about the answers unless we run the experiment: nominate Bernie and see what happens. But it ought to at least be possible to sharpen our understanding of the questions, and to know what we’re counting on if we decide to take the chance.
What the McGovern Problem isn’t. Often the McGovern Problem gets stated too simplistically, which makes it easy to shoot down: Democrats can’t run a candidate who’s too liberal. It’s as if the White House were a roller coaster, with a sign outside saying: “You must be at least this conservative to enter.”
If that’s the problem, then liberals are right to refuse it any consideration, because otherwise we give the game away before it starts. Important issues like single-payer or a less belligerent foreign policy are off the table by definition; we’re not even allowed to make our case to the country.
Republicans didn’t accept that lesson from their Goldwater loss in 1964. They continued making their case, and by 1980 the Goldwater wing of the GOP was electing President Reagan.
History shows that American political sensibilities change. Ideas that are “too radical” in one era — even liberal ideas like Social Security or child labor laws or the 40-hour week — can become common sense in the next. Who’s to say that free college or converting the economy to sustainable energy won’t join that list?
Plus, if Democrats can’t talk about what we believe in, the public will quite correctly perceive that we’re hiding something, and even a centrist Democratic ticket will face a suspicious electorate: What aren’t they telling us? What secret socialist agenda are Democrats planning to spring on the country after Inauguration Day?
What the McGovern Problem is. The problem I have in mind is much more specific than just being “too liberal”: Republicans have a tried-and-true game plan for running against liberal Democrats. A bunch of negative stereotypes sit in the public mind waiting to be activated, and they seem to work really well to cut our candidates off at the knees.
So the problem isn’t just that McGovern lost and then Mondale lost and then Dukakis lost. It’s that they lost in almost exactly the same way. There’s a buzzsaw attack waiting in the fall campaign, one that our candidates don’t face in the primaries, because it doesn’t work on a purely Democratic electorate. But we know it’s coming.
The issue that confronts every potential Democratic nominee, the one that gets labeled electability, isn’t “Are you too liberal?” but “Are you marching straight into the buzzsaw?” When the predictable attack comes — the attack you haven’t had to deal with at all in the primaries — will your candidacy survive it?
But even as we consider this question, we need to remember that the Dukakis wipeout was 28 years ago. If you’re one of the young voters whose energy is fueling the Sanders campaign, there hasn’t been a real test of the McGovern Problem — or a Republican presidential landslide — in your lifetime. Maybe the old dragon has lost its teeth by now, and all those gray-haired Hillary voters are quivering in front of shadows on the wall.
How can we know if that’s the case? I think we need to tell the story from the beginning. Then we’ll be in a better position to judge whether it’s ancient history or history that’s about to repeat itself.
It starts with LBJ. If we’re going to decide how relevant McGovern is in 2016, we need to go back a little further, to the last big push for progressive change in America: Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society.
When LBJ assumed the presidency late in 1963, he was riding a wave of national grief over President Kennedy’s assassination. The Democrats already controlled Congress, and then in 1964 the Republicans played into Johnson’s hands by nominating their most polarizing candidate, Barry Goldwater. After a huge landslide with long coattails, LBJ began 1965 with a national mandate and 2-1 majorities in both houses.
He got a lot done. The accomplishments of 1964-1966 make a stunning list, especially from the gridlocked perspective of 2016. The Social Security Act of 1965 created both Medicare and Medicaid in one fell swoop. By itself that was a bigger change than anything that has happened under Obama, but Congress just passed it and moved on. The bill got bipartisan support, wasn’t filibustered, and Johnson didn’t have to spend the rest of his term fighting back attempts to repeal it or block it in the courts.
Jim Crow finally ended: Congress passed the 24th Amendment (that banned poll taxes), the Civil Rights Act, and the Voting Rights Act. Johnson began affirmative action for government jobs by executive order.
He declared War on Poverty: In addition to Medicaid, Johnson created food stamps, and funded urban renewal programs to clean out the slums. When Bill Clinton “ended welfare as we know it” in the 1990s, what we knew was LBJ’s version of welfare.
The backlash. The Vietnam War is usually remembered as Johnson’s undoing, but the backlash against the Great Society would have been a thing regardless. The race riots of the 1960s led to a narrative that blacks were “ungrateful” for Johnson’s anti-poverty programs and the advances in civil rights. The riots combined with rising crime and the Supreme Court’s focus on the rights of defendants to create the impression that criminals were being coddled and government lacked the will to defend public order. The phrase bleeding heart liberal referred to someone who had less sympathy for you than for the ghetto-raised black teen-ager who was mugging you.
School desegregation was finally hitting the North in a big way, leading professional-class whites to flee to the suburbs, and leaving the white working class behind to deal with urban racial conflict. Affirmative action led to the claim that restless blacks were being bought off by giving away the opportunities of working-class whites. (After all, a black kid who got into Harvard through affirmative action wasn’t acing out some legacy admission like a Kennedy.) The phrase limousine liberal referred to well-to-do Democrats who could afford to be idealistic about race and poverty, because they were insulated from the social impact of their programs.
Tax-and-spend liberal didn’t catch on until the Reagan years, but that stereotype also comes from the Great Society backlash: If there was a problem, LBJ was likely to throw money at it. The logic — that we were a rich country with way too many poor people, so we could fix things by moving money around — may seem a little simplistic now, given the complex social dynamics of poverty. (In hindsight, urban renewal looks especially naive. Its high-rise housing projects quickly became worse than the slums they replaced.) But that’s the kind of thing you can’t know until you’ve tried it.
By 1968, the Democratic Party was badly divided. The only possible unifying figure, Bobby Kennedy, was assassinated. The Chicago convention turned violent. A third-party run by George Wallace split off what in FDR’s day had been “the solid South”. Even in the North, Wallace appealed to the kind of working-class whites who also had once been reliable Democrats (the kind who support Trump now). LBJ’s VP, Hubert Humphrey, split the rest of the vote almost down the middle with Richard Nixon, but Nixon got a slight plurality and an electoral college win.
McGovern/Nixon. George McGovern came to national attention at the 1968 convention as the leader of Bobby Kennedy’s orphaned delegates. By 1972, he was the first candidate to understand the new rules that made the primaries decisive. (Humphrey had gotten the 1968 nomination without ever entering the primaries. 1968 was the last hurrah of the smoke-filled-room era, when party leadership could do pretty much whatever it wanted.) He ran an insurgent campaign that portrayed the existing Democratic establishment as corrupt. That culminated at the 1972 convention, when the McGovern delegates disqualified Mayor Daley’s Illinois delegation in favor of a rebel slate led by Jesse Jackson. (Without the backing of the Daley machine, McGovern managed only 41% of the vote in Illinois in the fall. He won only Massachusetts and the District of Columbia.)
In terms of policy, McGovern wanted to push the Great Society social programs further, while rejecting the militaristic Kennedy/Johnson foreign policy that had led to Vietnam. With Wallace out of the picture (after being wounded in an assassination attempt), Nixon knew that a two-party race depended on capturing the Democrats who had defected to Wallace in 1968. So the key arguments in the campaign came from an organization called Democrats for Nixon.
DfN attacked McGovern on two fronts. First, his defense plan would leave the country dangerously weak.
And second, his social programs would tax working people (pictured as a white male construction worker) and give money to undeserving people (who aren’t pictured, but are easily imagined to be blacks or young white hippies).
Less explicitly, Nixon’s campaign associated McGovern with the counterculture: people who took drugs and despised soldiers and got involved in violent protests. Nixon himself claimed support from the “great silent majority“, people who did their jobs and raised their kids and lived by the old-fashioned American values that the counterculture rejected. The flag and patriotism belonged to conservatives; they were weapons to wield against liberals (literally, in this Pulitzer-winning photo), who should “love it or leave it“.
The anti-liberal formula. By 1976, the Republican Party had been stained by Watergate, and Jimmy Carter, a born-again Navy veteran from Georgia, won by projecting an image very different from McGovern. But Reagan unseated Carter in 1980, and in 1984, Walter Mondale challenged him. Mondale was the candidate of the Democratic establishment, which by this point was the Great Society playing defense. Reagan successfully attacked him as a liberal, and in 1988 Reagan’s VP, George H. W. Bush, ran a similar — and similarly successful — campaign against Mike Dukakis.
By now the anti-liberal attack was a formula based on a few well-defined stereotypes:
Liberals won’t protect us from foreign enemies. This is usually phrased in terms of naivety: Liberals want to cut defense spending and avoid military intervention because they foolishly trust treaties and organizations like the UN. They believe our enemies are like us and want to come to mutually beneficial agreements. They don’t understand that our enemies are truly evil and can only be controlled through strength.
For example, Reagan ran this commercial against Mondale. It starts “There’s a bear in the woods. For some people, the bear is easy to see. Others don’t see it at all. Some people say the bear is tame.”
Liberals won’t protect us from criminals at home. Again, they are naive about evil. They believe crime is a social problem they can solve with more welfare spending, rather than a moral problem that requires police and jails.
Liberals don’t believe in America. They’re not patriotic, and they want to retell American history to make us the bad guys. They have no faith in the economic individualism that made this country rich, and keep telling us we should be more like France or Sweden.
Liberals want to weaken moral values. The exact content of this attack varies from era to era, depending on what the moral problem of the day is. Abortion is a constant, but there’s also pornography, video games, rock music, drugs, homosexuality, promiscuity, and transgenderism. Usually, this is related somehow to religion, with the implication that whatever religion a liberal claims to practice is actually just a smoke screen that hides an underlying atheism, relativism, nihilism, or hedonism.
Liberals think they’re smarter than you are and want to make your decisions for you. Liberals are book-smart but don’t have common sense. They want to tell you who you can hire, which customers you have to serve, what you can drive, what you can eat or drink, how to discipline your children, what words you are allowed to say, and so on. Rhetoric about “the liberal elite” or “political correctness” invokes this stereotype.
Liberals want to raise taxes on working people to buy votes from lazy people. Nixon’s construction-worker ad became a paradigm. Mitt Romney’s “47%” hurt him only because it was too explicit. We still hear about “free stuff“, “dependence on government“, and “makers and takers“.
Bill Clinton and the New Democrats. If you didn’t live through it, it’s hard to communicate just how depressing the Dukakis debacle was. Entering the fall campaign, Democrats hadn’t thought of Dukakis as a McGovern-style left-winger. (Jesse Jackson had been the candidate of the party’s left wing, and Dukakis had resisted pressure to pick him as VP.) On the national scene, Dukakis was a fresh face who should have been able to slough off past stereotypes. He didn’t have a big spending program, wasn’t pushing a tax increase, and his Greek-immigrant-pride thing should have shielded him from the patriotism issue. One post-convention poll had Dukakis ahead of Bush 55%-38%.
But when the Republicans unleashed the formulaic anti-liberal attack, Dukakis proved just as vulnerable as McGovern and Mondale. His poll numbers quickly collapsed, and Bush (who had never seemed like a particularly strong candidate) didn’t just win, he romped his way to 426 electoral votes.
After 1988, Democrats had a sense of “What do we have to do?” The answer came from Bill Clinton. You can’t understand Clintonism without grasping that post-Dukakis despair.
Clinton recognized that the problem was as much image as substance: It wasn’t liberalism itself, it was getting tagged with the liberal stereotypes. You had to compromise somewhat, but you could still have broadly progressive values. You couldn’t stop Republicans from throwing the McGovern/Mondale/Dukakis attacks at you, but (like Jimmy Carter in 1976) you could still win if you maintained an image that the stereotypes wouldn’t stick to. Far-right conservatives might still believe them, but the swing voters wouldn’t.
Clinton wasn’t a “Massachusetts liberal” like Dukakis: He was a Southern Baptist with a drawl who easily projected a good-old-boy sensibility. He declared himself to be “a new kind of Democrat”, and he shifted Democratic rhetoric across the board. He “felt our pain”, but always justified his programs as fairness rather than appealing to compassion, and he rooted his case in respect for traditional American values like hard work.
We’ll think of the faith of our parents that was instilled in us here in America, the idea that if you work hard and play by the rules, you’ll be rewarded with a good life for yourself and a better chance for your children. Filled with that faith, generations of Americans have worked long hours on their jobs and passed along powerful dreams to their sons and daughters. Many of us can remember our own parents working long hours on their jobs and then coming home and helping us with our homework. The American dream has always been a better life for people who are willing to work for it.
He also regularly did something infuriating if you found yourself on the wrong end of it. Like the kid who escapes bullying by finding the mob some weaker kid to bully, Clinton escaped the liberal stereotype by projecting it onto other people. A Sister Souljah moment(also sometimes known as hippie punching) is when a center-left politician repudiates someone further to the left as a way of establishing his non-scariness. (The phrase comes from Clinton’s denunciation of a black hip-hop artist.)
Clinton made a career out of stealing Republican issues and putting his own spin on them: Balance the budget? Reform welfare? He’d do it, and if Republicans wanted to oppose him they’d have to move even further to the right. In retrospect, some of Clinton’s “accomplishments” — Don’t Ask Don’t Tell, the Defense of Marriage Act, and his crime bill — can only be defended by observing that something even worse probably would have happened if he hadn’t gotten out in front of a popular movement that was gaining momentum.
He compromised, but he won, and it mattered that he won. That’s why Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer are on the Supreme Court rather than two more Clarence Thomases. While Clinton sometimes rattled his saber and kept defense spending relatively high, America managed to go eight years without launching a major ground war. He left office with low unemployment, low inflation, a budget surplus — and a 66% approval rating.
Every Democratic presidential nominee since has in one way or another learned from Clinton’s example, and has maneuvered to project a centrist image. (I believe that’s why Obama drops his g’s.) In that time, the Democratic candidate has lost the popular vote only in 2004, and even that election was close.
One measure of the success of the Clinton strategy is that each recent Democratic nominee has been attacked in some way that was uniquely personal, rather than just being fed to the generic liberal-killing buzzsaw. Bill Clinton was “Slick Willy”, Al Gore was so wooden you wouldn’t want to have a beer with him, John Kerry didn’t deserve his medals, and Barack Obama was a shallow celebrity who palled around with terrorists. The too-liberal case was still there, but it didn’t stick for a majority of voters, so Republicans had to try other attacks.
The downside of Clintonism. As George Lakoff and others have often pointed out, there is no centrist worldview. So while stealing Republican issues and hippie-punching figures to your left may put you in a position to rein in something really bad — to turn, say, a constitutional amendment defining marriage into DOMA, which the Supreme Court (with Breyer and Ginsburg in the majority) could later find unconstitutional — along the way you reinforce the overall conservative frame, and marginalize anyone who promotes a liberal frame. That may win elections in the short term, but makes it hard to build a movement.
For example, Obama’s attempt in 2011 to strike a “grand bargain” with John Boehner to cut the long-term deficit was a Clintonian move that backfired: Not only did the bargain not happen, but treating the manufactured 2011 budget crisis as a negotiating opportunity set up the much scarier 2013 game of chicken over the debt ceiling. Obama’s grand-bargain offer legitimized the deficit as a more important concern than creating jobs, as well as the idea that long-term cuts in Social Security and Medicare might be the solution.
Even if you take a Clintonesque incremental view of change, the Democratic Party needs its idealists to produce the long-term vision that gives the party substance. Maybe we will only make progress in small steps, but somebody still needs to provide a clear vision of where we’re trying to go.
So what about Bernie? Remember: whether or not Sanders “is McGovern” isn’t about whether he can be tied to a label like liberal or even socialist. Of course he can. Everybody knows he’s challenging Clinton from the left and has called himself a socialist; that’s baked into his public image already. It hasn’t hurt him yet in those national polls that show him beating Trump and Cruz by margins far larger than Hillary’s. (One recent poll has Sanders beating Trump by 20%.)
The more important questions are first, when Republicans begin attacking him with the tried-and-true formula, will the anti-liberal stereotypes stick? And second, does that still matter the way it did in 1972, 1984, or 1988?
I think several of the stereotypes could stick to Bernie, sometimes fairly and sometimes unfairly.
Foreign enemies. So far, Sanders’ entire defense-and-foreign-policy focus has been on what he hasn’t done, wouldn’t do or wouldn’t have done: He wouldn’t have invaded Iraq. He wouldn’t give the NSA such a free hand to gather intelligence on Americans. He wouldn’t torture. He wouldn’t keep Guantanamo open. He doesn’t support defense spending at the current levels, and opposes certain specific weapons systems.
And none of that by itself is a problem. (In fact, I agree with him, and Hillary agrees with a lot of it.) But the majority of Americans are not ready to stop being a superpower. So in a general-election campaign, Sanders will at some point have to pivot back to what he would do: What level of defense spending does he support? What weapons does that buy? What Sanders Doctrine describes the situations where is he willing to use those weapons to defend our country, our allies, or our interests? (Example: Putin decides to conquer the rest of Ukraine. What do you do?)
When he does have to state a positive position on defense, is he then open to a Nixonian attack where a hand sweeps forces off the table? Is he convincing as a possible Commander in Chief, or does he look like Mike Dukakis in a tank?
Crime. The problem is similar: So far we’ve heard about the things Sanders wants to undo: He wants to put fewer people in jail. He wants to stop police brutality. And that’s all good: We went overboard both on the War on Drugs and on the scary-black-people image. We’ve been way too eager to interpret dark skin as a predictor of criminality, and to see prison as the solution to our fears, especially the irrational ones.
But crime is also real and has real victims. Americans want to hear that their president is serious about protecting them. Can Bernie provide that assurance? There are two Willie-Hortonish avenues of attack here: violence connected (at least in the public mind) with Black Lives Matter, like the Baltimore riots; and crimes committed by undocumented immigrants (which do exist, even though in general the undocumented are not a big crime risk).
Again, there are answers to such attacks, but (as the Reagan-era adage has it) “If you’re explaining you’re losing.” When somebody shows you a real woman who has been raped by an immigrant, quoting the statistics on immigrant crime is not a compelling response.
Tax and spend. Sanders admits that his Medicare-for-all plan would raise middle-class taxes. To be fair, middle-class families would still benefit from his plan, because their healthcare costs should go down by more than their taxes go up. But voters are quicker to believe in taxes than in the benefits they fund. (That’s why ObamaCare was so vulnerable in the 2010 midterm elections.) Plus, not even Sanders’ supporters are comfortable with their taxes going up. And again, if you’re explaining, you’re losing. Look for an ad in which layabouts of various races endorse Bernie and look forward to the benefits they expect from him, while somebody else works thanklessly to clean up after them.
Moral values. The problem here is religion. Sanders admits that he is “not particularly religious” and, though a Jew by ethnicity and culture, does not belong to any congregation or synagogue and does not regularly attend services of any type.
That doesn’t kill you in a Democratic primary, and at various times Bernie has spoken about his beliefs in a heartfelt way that works fairly well for a liberal audience: “I think everyone believes in God in their own ways. To me, it means that all of us are connected, all of life is connected, and that we are all tied together.” But to a lot of the country, that Spinoza-like position is just a fancy kind of atheism, and polls consistently show that atheism (moreso than even Islam) is a deal-breaker for many voters.
I picture one of those man-in-the-street interview ads, where somebody says, “He claims to be Jewish, but he sounds like an atheist to me.” That’s a two-fer: Not only does it use the A-word, but it dog-whistles to anti-Semites by reminding them that at best Sanders is a Jew.
Thinks he’s smarter than you. Smart is good, if you handle it right. Bill Clinton is a Rhodes scholar. Barack Obama was president of the law review at Harvard. But both of them know how to use their considerable personal charm so as not to seem too smart or too stuck-up about it. Both have that good-teacher ability to answer a question confidently without making the questioner feel stupid.
I don’t see that in Bernie. When challenged, he has a tendency to raise his voice and wag his finger. If I were debating Sanders, I’d be trying to bring out the side of his personality that talked down to Vermont voters in this Q&A event. (“Have you heard of ISIS?” he demands.)
Smarter-than-you is a quality that unlocks other parts of the liberal stereotype. The root Republican message is that they want you to be free to make your own choices in the marketplace, while Democrats want government to choose for you. (Unfortunately, the unregulated marketplace Republicans champion often leaves you with no good choices. What good is a menu of dozens of healthcare plans, if none of the ones you can afford will keep you from going bankrupt if you get sick?) Democrats need to communicate that they appreciate the awesome presumption that regulation involves, and that they will use that power with humility. But when Bernie Sanders thinks he knows the right answer, humility seems far from his mind.
Believing in America. A big piece of the Clinton/New Democrat thing was being able to invoke patriotism without sounding fake or hokey. Can Sanders do that? Bernie often compares the U.S. unfavorably to more socialistic European countries like Denmark or France, and if you dip into the archives, he’s also said good things about Cuba and Nicaragua (when the Sandinistas were in power and the U.S. was funding the opposition). Again, a man-in-the-street ad could be effective: “I wonder why he doesn’t run for president of France?”
Does it still matter? The most convincing point in the Sanders-is-not-McGovern articles is that times have changed. Thom Hartman writes:
Comparing Sanders to McGovern assumes that the country is in a similar state now as it was 44 years ago, and that’s just not true. … [In 1972] the middle class was much larger, and it was doing much better than it is today. And so the older generation voted for Nixon, they voted to keep things on track, because they simply didn’t feel as screwed over as we did in the younger generation.
And Dave Johnson says that the old manipulative tricks won’t work in the Twitter era:
Sanders’ mass appeal, big crowds and enthusiasm in spite of a virtual media blackout shows that America has grown up a lot since 1972. Thanks to the Internet, we are able to communicate past media manipulation and organize. Many people are now well aware of how Republicans use racial and other divisions to misdirect and manipulate people from seeing what is being done to us.
There’s also a demographic argument: The electorate that responded to George Bush’s racist dog whistles in 1988 was much whiter than America is in 2016. When Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority was organizing against Mondale in 1984, the percentage of Christians was far higher and “Nones” far lower than it is today.
So their argument boils down to this: In a less white, more secular America, where the sufferings of the middle class and the planet are far more apparent, and citizens have better ways to figure out who to vote for than watching 30-second TV ads, the progressive message is more compelling than the old liberal stereotypes. Healthcare as a right, free college, the threat of global warming, and the rest of the Sanders message will overpower the false image of wimpy, naive, America-hating, too-smart-for-their-own-good liberals.
And here, I think we reach the point where the evidence in inconclusive: America is different now, but is it different enough? Quantitative questions — questions that center on “how much” rather than yes or no — are hard to answer without running the experiment. There’s a risk and there’s a reward. How to weigh them against each other is something we all have to decide for ourselves.
George McGovern is one of the ghosts haunting the 2016 campaign. To some Democrats, his 1972 wipeout loss means that we should never again nominate somebody who is “too liberal”, like, say, Bernie Sanders. To others, that was the wrong lesson to learn from McGovern, and besides, 1972 was so long ago that it might as well have been a different planet.
All the articles I’ve seen on this question seem partisan to me. If the author is against Bernie, the McGovern parallel is so strong we shouldn’t even be talking about Sanders. Conversely, if the author is for Bernie, there is nothing to be learned here: 1972 was destined to be a bad year for Democrats anyway, and McGovern had bad luck and ran a bad campaign. End of story. The landslide losses of Mondale in 1984 and Dukakis in 1988 similarly have nothing to tell us.
But (being just old enough to have clear memories of politics in 1972) the question has been bugging me personally. So I decided to look at it and see where it goes. I started without a conclusion in mind and went off on one of my long historic expeditions, back to the Great Society and then forward to the present. And having done the research, I still can’t tell you for certain what will happen if we nominate Bernie. But I’ve narrowed down my uncertainty considerably: I have a much clearer idea what exactly we’d be betting on.
The chronicle of that expedition is this week’s featured post, “Do We Still Have to Worry About the McGovern Problem?” It’s written already, but it’s long and still needs some editing, so I’m just guessing when it will post: maybe around 9 EDT.
The weekly summary will celebrate — or at least mark — Tax Day. I’ll reflect on how the North Carolina boycott affects one of my favorite bookstores. Some vaguely religious news stories give me several opportunities to quote Scripture mischievously. Confederate Heritage Month continues on the Orcinus blog. And I just discovered Princess Rap Battles. Let’s say that appears around 11.
One of this week’s featured posts is another installment in what I’m coming to think of as my countdown-to-Augustus series “The Broken Senate is Breaking the Courts“. The other is my assessment of the Democrats’ chances of taking control of the Senate (and how you can help) in “What Can You Do about the Senate?“
The sincerely held religious beliefs or moral convictions protected by this act are the belief or conviction that:
(a) Marriage is or should be recognized as the union of one man and one woman;
(b) Sexual relations are properly reserved to such a marriage; and
(c) Male (man) or female (woman) refer to an individual’s immutable biological sex as objectively determined by anatomy and genetics at time of birth.
In other words, HB1523 gives people special rights if their opinion falls on one side of a controversial issue, but not the other. (And why aren’t more people paying attention to (2b)? If you are a cohabitating heterosexual couple, somebody who sincerely believes you are “living in sin” can discriminate against you.) I can’t imagine that this will pass constitutional muster. If the government can’t legally penalize you for the content of your religious beliefs, then it can’t reward you for them either.
That specificity is necessary, though, in order to avoid the other horn of the legalized-discrimination dilemma: A general law protecting people whose religious beliefs justify discrimination would also protect racists. Plenty of religions have at one time or another taught that God created the races and intended them to remain separate. (I researched this last year in “You Don’t Have to Hate Anybody to Be a Bigot“.) So if your religious beliefs entitle you to discriminate against gays, why not against blacks?
If you’re confused by the law’s name, “government discrimination” refers to government enforcing non-discrimination; it’s a little Orwellian that way. In other words, if your religious beliefs make you want to refuse service to lesbians, and the government says you can’t do that, then the government is discriminating against you.
You know the drill: War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Yada, yada, yada.
If you’d rather just make fun of Mississippi’s effort to one-up North Carolina in the most-bigoted-state competition, Funny or Die has that covered.
and presidential politics
For the Democrats, same story as the last few weeks: Yes, Bernie is gaining ground on Hillary. No, he isn’t gaining nearly fast enough to get nominated.
I’m resisting writing about the details of the various disputes between the campaigns, because I doubt I’m getting a balanced view of them. My FaceBook feed and email lists all lean to the left, so I’m exposed to a lot more Bernie stuff than Hillary stuff. These last few weeks the conversation in general has gotten increasingly partisan and irrational, with unfair and downright petty charges going both ways. But because of where I sit, I hear a lot more Bernie irrationality than Hillary irrationality. (I’d give examples, but that just starts me down the rabbit hole.) If I start trying to correct it all, this is going to start sounding like a Hillary blog, which is not my intention.
In general, I’ve been defending Hillary against what I see as basically Republican attacks, like my occasional comments on the email pseudo-scandal. So far, Republicans haven’t been saying much about Bernie, so a comparable defense hasn’t been necessary.
On the Republican side, things are really starting to get interesting, in the horror-movie sense of interesting.
For a long time, pundits had been speculating that Donald Trump’s support had a ceiling, and that when the race came down to two or three candidates, he’d be in trouble. Well, that ceiling turned out to be considerably higher than most of us thought, but he finally seems to be bumping against it.
Nate Silver does what he does best: defines a stat that captures a vague notion we’ve all had. (This is where you see Nate’s background as a baseball stats guy. Baseball is full of vague notions — like clutch hitting, the value of a slick-fielding shortstop, or what it takes to get into the Hall of Fame — that you can’t talk about intelligently until you define some new stats.) The stat is Minimum Winning Vote Share: If all the other candidates got the exact number of votes they actually got, what percentage of the vote would your candidate have needed in order to win by one vote?
MWVS trends inexorably upward as the number of candidates shrinks. Trump’s MWVS in New Hampshire was only 19.5%. (His actual vote share was 35.2%, so he crushed the opposition.) But in 4 of the last 5 contests his MWVS has been over 40%. Trump’s 35.1% of the vote in Wisconsin is almost identical to his percentage in New Hampshire, but it earned him a decisive loss rather than a landslide win, because his MWVS had increased.
Nate then produces two charts: The increase in Trump’s MWVS as the primaries go on, and the increase in his vote percentage. Both trend upward, but MWVS is increasing much faster and looks like it has finally caught up.
In addition to having a ceiling somewhere south of 50% of Republicans, Trump’s nomination is also being called into doubt by how the inner workings of the Republican process are playing out. Getting from polls and primary votes to convention delegates turns out to be a much darker art than most of us realized, and Ted Cruz seems to be a lot better at it.
Trump has already started saying “The system is rigged.” And his supporters already feel cheated by government, by immigrants, by big business, by liberals, and so on. If Trump’s campaign ends up looking (to them) like a microcosm of the whole rigged country, the Republican Convention in Cleveland should be the most interesting convention since the Democrats were in Chicago in 1968. Again, that’s in the horror-movie sense of interesting.
The Republican presidential candidate’s campaign said in a memo that if elected in November, Trump would use a U.S. anti-terrorism law to cut off [remittances from immigrants] unless Mexico made a one-time payment of $5 billion to $10 billion for the wall.
receives approximately $24 billion a year in remittances from Mexican nationals working in the United States. The majority of that amount comes from illegal aliens.
Threatening to shut that off, Trump thinks, will bring Mexico to its knees. Voxtakes a more nuanced look at the topic.
A few points: First, people should be very wary of the government finding creative uses for anti-terrorism powers. These laws were meant to keep international banks from laundering money for Al Qaeda. Using them to keep Jesus the Janitor from sending $20 a week to his grandma goes way beyond Congress’ intent.
Second, it demonstrates a pattern of thought that I’ve pointed out before: when you imagine taking decisive action against somebody and then ignore whatever they might do in response. That thinking often leads to conflicts where your opponent’s responses are actually much cheaper and simpler than yours, and so you will lose even if you are stronger and richer.
Trump’s whole wall is that way. A 30-foot wall can be defeated by a 31-foot ladder and a rope. Making the wall a foot higher is very expensive. Making a longer ladder and rope, not so much.
Similarly, maybe you can prevent Jesus from making a wire transfer or using some other 21st-century process. But are you going to open every Mexico-bound letter to find all the cash or debit cards? What about friendly American citizens who will carry unsuspicious quantities of cash across the border for Jesus?
That leads to the security downside of lumping Jesus’ grandma in with Al Qaeda: Ordinary Americans might cooperate with a money-smuggling network if they thought they were benefitting Mexican grandmas. And once that network is up, maybe Al Qaeda will use it.
I believe that mainstream media contains very little conscious propaganda. Reporters at CNN or the NYT aren’t thinking “I want (or don’t want) Bernie Sanders to win, so I’m going to say this.” Instead, reporters (both individually and as a group) develop an unstated — and to a certain extent even unconscious — model of who these candidates are and what the larger narrative of the campaign is. That model influences which events get classified as news and how that news gets presented.
If you want to get technical, it’s not about bias so much as prejudice. Reporters aren’t pushing for or against a certain candidate, but they have made prior judgments that may cut either way, depending on the circumstances.
The judgment they’ve made about Sanders is that he’s authentic, but he’s a big-picture guy who doesn’t sweat the details. Clinton they see as calculating and occasionally slippery. That level of generalization doesn’t appear explicitly in news stories, but it influences coverage: If Hillary says something different from one day to the next, it gets covered as a tactical maneuver. If Bernie does the same thing, it’s because he hasn’t thought things through that well. Either candidate might regard that coverage as negative bias.
Rosen sees this as an inherent problem in the journalistic ideal of objectivity. By pretending to speak with an idealized objectivity that is more or less impossible for humans to achieve, subjective judgments are driven underground, where they arguably do more damage and are harder to correct. Klein puts it this way:
the model is, for the most part, hidden, and the accumulated inputs to the model are hard to explain or may not have been things an individual journalist was allowed to report on. The result is that coverage can feel confusing and biased, because the real rationale for the decisions being made about what to cover and how to cover it is obscured from the audience.
Klein’s article is unusual because of how introspective he is about his prior judgments on the candidates. So it is less “objective” than most campaign coverage, but probably communicates more insight.
In a nerdy but interesting 538 article, Ben Casselman explains how quadratic voting might improve the five-choice (strongly approve to strongly disapprove) polling scale.
WonkBlog’s Emily Badger points out how easy it is to come up with some “solution” for poor people’s problems that covertly assumes they have the same resources the rest of us take for granted. The example is simple: reusable cloth diapers. Yes, they can be cheaper than disposables, if you have the upfront money to buy them and a washing machine.
and let’s close with a gadget
It’s like the kids who grew up watching Transformers are old enough now to design real things.
Currently Republicans have a 54-46 Senate majority (as long as independents Angus King of Maine and Bernie Sanders of Vermont continue caucusing with the Democrats). That what gives them the power to monkey-wrench the Obama administration and the country as a whole.
Fortunately for the Democrats, though, this fall all the Republican senators from the Tea Party wave election of 2010 are up for re-election, including some who won in reliably blue states (like Illinois’ Mark Kirk). Conversely, the Democratic incumbents are the ones who were strong enough to win when the wave was crashing against them.
So Republicans have to defend 24 seats and the Democrats only 10. That improves Democrats’ prospects of gaining the five seats (or four plus the presidential election, since the vice president breaks ties) necessary to gain control.
Predictions. My usual prediction guru is Nate Silver, but other than a couple of articles about specific races his 538 blog hasn’t weighed in yet on the Senate. Three other election-predicting web sites (Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball, Cook’s Political Report, and Predictwise) tell similar stories: Democrats are likely to gain Republican seats in Illinois and Wisconsin, and they have an even shot to flip four others: Ohio, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, and Florida. The only Democratic seat that looks iffy is the one Harry Reid is retiring from in Nevada.
Sabato thinks three other Republican seats — Arizona, Missouri, and North Carolina — could flip if a serious Democratic wave develops. Cook and Predictwise are pessimistic about Arizona and Missouri, but agree on North Carolina. Predictwise sees possible trouble for Republicans in Indiana and Louisiana, but Cook and Sabato disagree.
The three have a minor disagreement about how secure Democratic Senator Michael Bennett is in Colorado (partly because there’s a chaotic Republican primary still to come), but nobody rates that race as a toss-up.
In the PredictIt prediction market, a share that will pay $1 if the Democrats control the Senate is going for 64 cents, compared to 36 cents for Republican control.
This far out, I don’t think anybody’s predictions are all that reliable, but they do give you a sense of where the battle lines are. If the Democrats are going to gain four seats, they need to win in Wisconsin and Illinois, and then take three of the five toss-up states: Nevada, Florida, New Hampshire, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. (That turns a 1-6 disadvantage into a 5-2 advantage, gaining four.) If a Democrat doesn’t win the presidency, Democrats need to take four of the five toss-ups.
The seven key races. In Wisconsin, former Senator Russ Feingold is trying to get his old seat back from the guy who beat him in 2010, Ron Johnson.
In Illinois, two-term Congresswoman Tammy Duckworth is trying to unseat Mark Kirk.
In New Hampshire, Governor Maggie Hassan is running against Senator Kelly Ayotte. New Hampshire Republicans always try to project the Warren Rudman image of an independent-minded person with broadly conservative values, but when push comes to shove, Ayotte does what the Mitch McConnell tells her. So while she’s agreed to meet with Garland for appearance’s sake, she’s holding firmly to the party line of refusing hearings and or a vote.
In Ohio, ex-Governor Ted Strickland faces Senator Rob Portman, who suddenly discovered that same-sex couples deserve a shot at marriage after his son came out of the closet. You can give him credit for having the courage to say so, or you can see it as one more example of a Republican whose compassion ends at the boundaries of his own family.
In Pennsylvania, Senator Pat Toomey is defending his seat against an undetermined Democrat. Joe Sestak, who lost to Toomey by only two percentage points in 2010, is fighting a primary battle with Katie McGinty, the governor’s former chief of staff, who is less well known, but is backed by most of the party establishment.
In Nevada, former state attorney general Catherine Cortez Masto is expected to be the Democratic candidate. In recent polls, she’s been running slightly behind Republican Joe Heck and significantly ahead of 2010 Senate candidate Sharron Angle, famous for her call for “Second Amendment remedies” if Democrats couldn’t be stopped at the ballot box.
The unexpected toss-up is Florida. This is Marco Rubio’s seat, which he decided not to defend to emphasize how committed he was to his presidential campaign. Neither party has picked a candidate yet; the primary is August 30. Polling on both sides has Undecided far ahead of any candidate.
What you can do. Citizens influence elections in three ways: by voting (if there’s a race in your state), giving money (if you have it), and working. Working for a candidate is a lot easier if you live nearby, but in this era of inexpensive long-distance calls, just about anybody can phone-bank for a candidate, and you can always write letters to newspapers in a candidate’s state. If nothing else, you can go to a candidate’s web site, click whatever link asks you to volunteer, and see what they say.
Who to support. The voting part is a no-brainer: If there’s an election in your state, you should vote. Unless you’re rich, though, you’re not going to give significant amounts of money to more than one or two candidates, and even one candidate can absorb all the volunteer time you have. So once you get past voting, you need to be selective: Which candidates deserve your support most?
Well, that depends on what you want.
If you’re sick of watching your candidates lose and you just want to win one you can feel good about, both Feingold or Duckworth are favored, and either can give you a sense of vicarious pride. In 2001, in the mad panic that followed the 9-11 attacks, the Senate voted 98-1 for the Patriot Act. Feingold was the 1. Duckworth flew helicopters in Iraq, where she lost both her legs in a rocket attack. Now she says, “When my colleagues start beating the drums of war, I want to remind them what the true costs of war are.” She also would increase the woeful number of women in the Senate (currently 20 out of 100).
If you want to make the biggest difference, the most toss-uppy toss-up is either New Hampshire, where PredictIt is giving 53-47 odds in favor of Hassan, or Pennsylvania, where Predictwise makes the (still unchosen) Democratic candidate a 48-52 underdog. (The polls in Pennsylvania are dismal for the Democrats, but that’s not unusual when an incumbent is matched against someone who hasn’t nailed down the nomination yet.) I’d pick Hassan here, because all Senate seats have the same power, while New Hampshire is a small state. So one contribution or one campaign worker is likely to have a bigger impact in New Hampshire than in Pennsylvania.
If you want to dream the big dream, I’d try to unseat John McCain in Arizona. It’s remotely possible, and it would make an enormous splash.
If you want to send a message, the senator most responsible for stalling the Garland nomination (other than maybe McConnell, who isn’t up for election this year) is Iowa’s Chuck Grassley, the chair of the Judiciary Committee. Grassley was once thought to be untouchable, and still is seen as a likely winner, but the Garland issue is making him vulnerable. As a result, some high-profile Democrats have been drawn into the race who might otherwise have decided it’s a waste of effort, like former Lieutenant Governor Patty Judge.
Or just roll some dice and pick a race. Whatever you decide to do, you’ll feel better about it than if you do nothing.
Merrick Garland is just the tip of a dangerous iceberg.
There have been a few cracks, but Mitch McConnell’s blockade of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination is holding. The quick threat of a primary against Kansas Senator Jerry Moran (when it looked like he might break ranks) not only got him back in line, but served as a warning to any other Republican who might consider taking the Senate’s constitutional duties seriously.
Ironically, the court blockade is one of the indirect effects of the Supreme Court’s dismantling of campaign finance laws, and shows the advantage that development gives extremists in the Republican Party. A few cycles ago, the threat of whipping up a statewide primary challenge from scratch against an otherwise popular incumbent in just a few months (the Kansas Senate primary is in early August) would have been laughable. And it still would be laughable if the far Left made a similar threat against a Democratic senator over some progressive issue. But everything changes when a handful of deep-pocketed donors can call up a potential challenger and say: “We’ve got the money, are you ready to go?”
For some broader perspective, consider that Republicans have only confirmed 16 judicial nominees since becoming the Senate majority in January 2015. At this same point in President George W. Bush’s eighth year, when Democrats controlled the Senate, 40 judicial nominees had been confirmed.
… The last time the Senate confirmed a judge was in mid-February, and that was only because McConnell postponed a package of judicial nominees from 2015 into the new year. There are 15 judicial nominees ready for a confirmation vote right now, but only one of those votes has been scheduled. Another 32 are waiting on the Judiciary Committee, which hasn’t held a hearing for a nominee since January. Federal courts, meanwhile, are at 79 vacancies and climbing.
That kind of behavior almost forces the Democrats to respond in kind if the political situation reverses. To do anything else — to let the Senate resume its constitutional duties as soon as a Republican enters the White House — would mean conceding that only Republican presidents are empowered to appoint judges. Such acquiescence would guarantee a conservative judiciary for the foreseeable future.
That exemplifies why it’s nearly impossible to be the Good Government Party once the other side decides to be the Bad Government Party. And so the deterioration I’ve been tracking in my Countdown to Augustus posts goes on.
Last fall, Bendery explored the effects of a broken judicial-appointment system: overloaded judges who burn out and cases that drag on forever. Courts prioritize criminal cases for good reason: A long delay risks either leaving a predator on the streets or wrecking an innocent defendant’s life by letting him rot in jail. But something has to give, as Chief Judge Morris England of the U.S. District Court for California’s Eastern District explains:
What happens is you have to keep pushing civil cases further out. They’ve already been waiting sometimes three to four years. I get concerned when cases are so old. Memories are fading; people are no longer around. It’s not serving anyone trying to get justice.
Take that a step further: As the federal court system continues to deteriorate, any right those courts enforce deteriorates as well. Little by little, we wind up living in a country where “Yeah it’s illegal, but what are you going to do about it?” is a viable strategy.
That, in turn, creates a temptation to flip the situation around: to get even with your own illegal act, and let the other side beg for justice from the broken courts. And so the back-and-forth of political hardball begets a similar back-and-forth of hardball in everyday life.
This week I mostly look away from the presidential race and turn to the Senate and the courts. The huge Republican Senate class of 2010 is up for re-election, so there are lots of opportunities for Democrats to flip the four (if they keep the White House) or five (if they don’t) seats they need to gain control.
For me personally, the one to focus on is obvious, since my local race in New Hampshire is considered a toss-up, the Democratic candidate (Maggie Hassan) has been a good governor, and the Republican incumbent (Kelly Ayotte) is supporting Mitch McConnell’s refusal to grant Supreme Court nominee Merrick Garland the fair hearing every other nominee has gotten.
But what if you’re not in one of the five toss-up states where Senate control is likely to be decided? Or you are, but your local candidate doesn’t give you the kind of feeling you want from a politician that you go all-out for?
Well, the Koch brothers aren’t sitting out the Senate races just because their guy in Kansas looks safe, and you shouldn’t either. You may not have millions to sprinkle all over the country, but your money travels as well as theirs does, and in this era of cheap long-distance, you can phone bank for anybody.
One of this week’s featured articles “What Can You Do About the Senate?” takes you through the races that will decide whether Mitch McConnell keeps his veto power over the next Supreme Court justice, and makes suggestions for who you might help, depending on what you want to accomplish.
That link between the legislative and judicial branches is the theme of this week’s other featured post, “The Broken Senate is Breaking the Courts”. Merrick Garland is not a unique example. The Republican Senate is refusing to process the Democratic president’s nominees at all judicial levels, creating a long-term threat to the rule of law. That problem sounds abstract, but it could easily show up in your life.
The broken Senate article is pretty much done and should be out momentarily. The what-to-do article still needs some work, so let’s picture it coming out around 10 EDT. The weekly summary — where I will end up saying a few things about the presidential race, as well as Mississippi’s new entry in the very competitive most-bigoted-state contest — should follow by noon.
What the McGovern Problem isn’t. Often the McGovern Problem gets stated too simplistically, which makes it easy to shoot down: Democrats can’t run a candidate who’s too liberal. It’s as if the White House were a roller coaster, with a sign outside saying: “You must be at least this conservative to enter.”
Bush painted Dukakis as 
Liberals want to raise taxes on working people to buy votes from lazy people. Nixon’s construction-worker ad became a paradigm. Mitt Romney’s “47%” hurt him only because it was too explicit. We still hear about “
There have been a few cracks, but Mitch McConnell’s blockade of Merrick Garland’s Supreme Court nomination 
The Weekly Sift 