He pokes his teeth out and sort of seems to retract his neck into his chest like a frightened turtle. His head bounces a little, almost imperceptibly, and then he puts the teeth away.
So he's Bert the Turtle, of Duck and Cover fame? Though not nearly as cute...
The only point at which I can relate to Cruz has to do with country of birth. And I can just barely relate to Calgary, I guess.
As you know, I grew up in a border town, one of thirty or so non-Mexican-American kids at my high school. Most of my friends were very, very poor by American standards. People were very family and community-oriented. Sexually, the community was quite conservative by American standards.
So college was a real culture shock. Suddenly I was surrounded by upper-middle class white kids from suburbs like the one Ted Cruz grew up in. I remember hearing somewhere that Ted Cruz started going by Ted instead of Rafael after he got sick of being made fun of at his Houston-area private school for his non-WASPy first name. Now, I know a number of people from that area. It's viciously conservative and, to this day, deeply racist -- but the kids are spoiled little children of privilege and largely behave in ways that utterly betray the community's professed values. (The most vocally Christian of them seemed to suffer fro kleptomania and would frequently shoplift or steal liquor from parties. He had actually been caught multiple times in high school but nothing had come of it. It occurred to me upon hearing that that consequences were simply different for rich white kids than they were for my brown-skinned friends back home.) For various reasons, I got drawn into this social circle early on in college. I found myself desperately wanting to be liked and accepted by these people. But at the same time, I was utterly repulsed by their racism (Mexicans were a favored target), their moral hypocrisy, and their downright nastiness. But I tried very, very hard to fit in for a while. I guess I just didn't know what else to do. It didn't work, and I think people just found me more obnoxious for it.
So I can't imagine what poor Ted must have been put through in his teens. His very socially conservative Cuban family anxious to give their son an American life, themselves probably as desperate to be accepted by the neighbors as he was by his peers. His entitled, shitty white friends, those probable date rapists that nonetheless saw fit to disparage homosexuals for their sins. Those awful shits that made fun of him for his Spanish name.
I think one of the things that stands out to me after watching an unhealthy amount of Ted Cruz footage is that the guy is trying way too hard to be something he's not. Even in that video of him in high school where he makes that "ass-pirations" joke and says he wants to be in a "teen tit film", it comes off as just totally forced. Those movies probably offend his conservative sensibilities. He might even feel a little bit guilty about the ass joke. He'd probably have been ashamed if his father saw the tape. He was just doing his best to play the part of the entitled white kid so that he would get invited out somewhere instead of sitting in his room reading books all the time.
Marco Rubio has a lot of support among the more conservative people I know from the valley, but Ted Cruz has none, and it's not hard for me to see why. That fucker broke. He gave in. He changed his name to Ted. He became an arch-Republican. He took a hard line on immigration. And now he's the kind of guy that insinuates to a room full of white country club Republicans that Marco Rubio can't be trusted because he spoke Spanish on Univision. He allowed himself to be ashamed of where he came from. Many of the people I know from back home don't see Cruz as any better than Donald Trump.
Edit/copy-paste error: First sentence should start with "as some of you may know..."
Ted Cruz is basically the same age as me. I'm pretty sure he legitimately wanted to be in a teen tit film. It was a bigger deal back then what with no internet.
Are the Houston circles described in 2 the same whose not-so-subtle racism led Columba Bush to demand of Jeb that they move to Florida? Or comparable?
Probably. They are not very subtle when only other white people are around though.
Is there a conservative for whom I could say, "That's how I could have turned out, had some major crossroads broke differently"? I'm not sure. There must be.)
Mishima. Just a few minor details, a couple of different choices...
Or maybe Franco.
Girolamo Savonarola.
François Leclerc du Tremblay, cause eminence grise is a great name for a rock band
I mean Cmon who doesn't dream of this
Their servility was exceeded only by his indifference to it.
Conservative I would have liked to have been: Cardinal de Retz.
His memoirs are completely wonderful: if Harry Flashman had been forced into the church by his father, that is the book he would have written.
Francois Mitterand admired de Retz enormously and regularly quoted a remark of his to the effect that when you resolve an ambiguity, you deny yourself something.
Churchill, obviously. Not least because he said "When I was a conservative, I said a lot of very stupid things. And I became a liberal so that I would not have to go on saying very stupid things."
And after he re-ratted and became a Conservative again, he said a lot more stupid things, such as "I know! Let's go back onto the gold standard at pre-war parity, and then we can have lots of lovely deflation!"
8. I don't dream of it. Can you imagine how fucking cold it was? I find it hard to feel much affinity for conservatives. If you dedicate your life to standing athwart history, shouting "Stop!", you're either ineffectual or a vandal. Clio writes you off as a fool. I suppose I could empathise with Robert Peel, but he was a reformer who accidentally wound up in the Conservative Party.
9. I shall read de Retz asap.
It's pretty egotistical to think that thousands of years of history have led to the precisely optimal point at which its time to say stop, and it just happens to be within your lifetime.
I'd pick Charles II, for mistress-related reasons.
9 is the highest praise I have ever read for a book.
Trivers, I think stories like these make a fundamental error: feeling like an outsider as a child and never quite fitting in with the clique you want to be part of might explain why Cruz is the way he is, but there are lots and lots of other weird kids who grow up to be perfectly nice adults. They either find a way to smooth their jagged edges and fit in, or they find their clique of weird smart kids. I think it's fairly east to sympathize with what must have been a rough child- and young adulthood, but now, he's wealthy and powerful and using that wealth and power to immiserate rather than help. My sympathy evaporates.
If you dedicate your life to standing athwart history, shouting "Stop!", you're either ineffectual or a vandal
Yes. I've never understood the veneration for Buckley's remark - who imagines history will listen, let alone stop just because some guy with a blog is yelling?
I think he had a magazine before it was a blog.
Comment 2 is great. I completely agree that the thing that's stands out about Cruz is how painfully forced all of his mannerisms seem to be. It's like watching a guy who's a bad actor but who seems like he would never, ever, even to himself, admit he acting.
17: I don't see why one can't be both sympathetic about whatever he's been through personally and also diametrically opposed to everything he currently stands for.
I've never understood the veneration for Buckley.
I'm sure growing up in the same house with his bugfuck insane father was an unpleasant and scarring experience that contributed mightily to making Ted Cruz the repulsive figure that he plainly is. Yet still: absolutely nothing remotely likable about him. Distilled asshole.
20: Sympathetic as in, "Yeah, maybe I could have gone that way under the same circumstances," or "This is an understandable response that could be expected of anyone," not really. That's more what I meant. I can imagine so many responses to that kind of childhood that are sympathetic, and this isn't one of them.
25: Nancy Reagan said you could get a disease that way, but she's dead now so go ahead.
27: I thought the "just say no" thing was just about drugs. She was too much of a lady to discuss sex.
The OP and 2 are high-quality.
I suppose for me the sympathy I might be able to muster for Ted Cruz would have to do with trying to imagine how awkward I would be if I was trying to play the politician. But it was a lot easier for me to feel that way about Jeb Bush, because he hardly had a choice.
But if I start thinking about the causes they have devoted their lives to fighting for....well, 23 sums it up.
If you dedicate your life to standing athwart history, shouting "Stop!", you're either ineffectual or a vandal. Clio writes you off as a fool
Whig theory become ubiquitous? What are you talking about? "arc of history is long and bends toward justice"
Bends toward decadence, death and dust.
Vandals were history. Hitler was History. Trump or Cruz could be history. Species extinction due to AGW won't be history, cause won't be anyone to record it.
"Whig history is a form of liberalism, putting its faith in the power of human reason to reshape society for the better, regardless of past history and tradition. It proposes the inevitable progress of mankind."
Not really Marxism, which knows a) we can always go full madness, b) the final transition where the proles are reduced to less than subsistence will be unspeakable, c) odds of a soft landing are slim.
Willing to fight, die and kill for revolution now isn't based on some kind of optimism or inevitabilism. It's about panic.
I don't know. I think most of you are attributing far too much actual malice to Cruz. Most people here know that as an early adult I swung from very hard religious right to centrist to fairly-left liberal, and I'd like to flatter myself and think there was something inevitable about that swing, whether because I'm intellectually curious, fundamentally honest, open to new evidence, or whatever. (And of course a significant number of people undergo a similar swing between the ages of 18-25, through higher education or otherwise.) But it's not really that hard for me to imagine an alternate universe in which I settled in with different peer groups during those years, and had all those prior beliefs cemented and reinforced instead of challenged and ultimately disregarded. And then I might literally be Ted Cruz today.
In the long run, she said, a continuation of capitalism would lead to the literal collapse of civilized society and the coming of a new Dark Age, similar to Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire: "The collapse of all civilization as in ancient Rome, depopulation, desolation, degeneration -- a great cemetery." (The Junius Pamphlet) [2]
By saying this, Rosa Luxemburg was reminding the revolutionary left that socialism is not inevitable, that if the socialist movement failed, capitalism might destroy modern civilization, leaving behind a much poorer and much harsher world. That wasn't a new concept - it has been part of Marxist thought from its very beginning. In 1848, in The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels wrote:
"The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles. ... that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes."
In Luxemburg's words: "Humanity is facing the alternative: Dissolution and downfall in capitalist anarchy, or regeneration through the social revolution."
Conservatism makes some kind of moral sense.
Whiggish liberalism is pure utopian madness.
And then I might literally be Ted Cruz today.
And then who would he be?
You know, given all the history of Germany and the German left in particular, I feel absolutely no regret at saying, "Why the fuck should I care?" to Mark and Luxemburg."
33 Posting comments on an eclectic web magazine and coming up with completely novel sex acts of course *shudder*. Strong evidence that Leibniz was right and we really do love in the best of all possible worlds.
33 Posting comments on an eclectic web magazine and coming up with completely novel sex acts of course *shudder*. Strong evidence that Leibniz was right and we really do love in the best of all possible worlds.
Love and live. Stupid fat fingers.
Why not look to Ebert who actually accomplished things like running Germany (briefly) and reviewing movies.
36,37,38: I like "love" better. Hippie flower-child Leibniz.
41 Monads are definitely the kind of theory a hippie on way too much LSD would come up with. Dont know about the calculus though.
... feeling like an outsider as a child and never quite fitting in with the clique you want to be part of might explain why Cruz is the way he is, but there are lots and lots of other weird kids who grow up to be perfectly nice adults. They either find a way to smooth their jagged edges and fit in, or they find their clique of weird smart kids.
Or even, to be honest, they do none of those things but are still generally nice adults because below those awkward bits they're just generally nice people. I mean, the problem with Cruz isn't that he's awkward, or anxious on some fundamental level*, or kind of weird or off putting in some way (he's all of those things). It's that he's a malicious little shit of a man, and that the other stuff just amplifies or makes it harder to disguise that fact. What probably was a really hard childhood, and the effects that clearly do linger in him, doesn't necessarily even explain any more than the reason that his innate creepiness is more easy to see (maybe), like the number of people out there trying to defend themselves when people point out that they're being nasty assholes by saying that they're on the autism spectrum and that people have to excuse them for it as a result. Are they? Maybe! Does that make people into nasty assholes? Not remotely!
*Rubio is even worse here, I think. At least Cruz knows to put some kind of thick latex mask over his fear. One of the things this election is confirming for me is my suspicion that a lot of Republicans are just fundamentally cowardly people who are convinced that freaking out in terror is a kind of bold toughness, because it's what they're doing constantly and admitting otherwise would be realizing something uncomfortable about themselves. This clip where a conservative commentator tells the host that Obama is insulting them because he's talking about people being scared when people aren't scared they're really, really angry in the most terrified tone of voice imaginable is my go-to example, because it's so surreal.
The New York Times is feelin' that the Bern is an effective legislator.
I'm inclined to deny that I could ever be Cruz-like, but surely that would be like saying: "If I were a big landowner in the antebellum South, I would have freed my slaves." It's hard to empathize with evil people, but it's a cinch that I have more in common with my evil fellow humans than I'd care to contemplate.
In my actual life, I could imagine having gone Catholic-bad. As a kid, I was pondering being a priest, even.
31 to 43. Put another way, if we posit that Cruz must be a malicious asshole, then I really don't have any way to resolve the question of whether (a) I veered away from conservatism because I'm fundamentally not a malicious asshole, and so that ideological change would have occurred pretty much regardless of my specific life circumstances from 18-25, or (b) I'm fundamentally deep down a malicious asshole (or at least a latent asshole or something) that has only ceased to manifest (in this particular way) by virtue of some contingent life circumstances (a fortunate set of experiences, etc.).
My point in 31 was that (a) would be flattering but feels wrong. So, we're left with (b), which is very possible!, or with questioning the premise that Cruz himself is a malicious asshole. Or at least, questioning whether he's a malicious asshole in a way that's really any different from how most people can be malicious assholes. I'd bet he thinks he's trying very hard to do the right thing.
If we posit that Cruz must be a malicious asshole, then I think we have to be Calvinists.
Or if we contend that Cruz could have been eaten by a tiger, then we Hobbesians.
48: "then we are Hobbesians". peep, if you're going to make the mistake of reading your comments, maybe you should do it before you hit "post".
Nothing comes between me and my Calvins.
The OP and 2 are interesting.
For myself, I don't see an alternate history in which I'd be politically conservative, but I am aware that I'm quite conservative personally -- in the sense that I have a fairly strong feeling of CHANGEBAD, and that I am not the person who can envision or attempt major changes of the status quo. I am very good, however, at trying to figure out small ways to make the status quo work, and to improve it.
I'm aware that this means that what I end up working on is going to be heavily influenced by the context of my life -- I just hope that the choices I've made mean that the things I'm doing are positive rather than propping up something that doesn't deserve my support.
I don't mean to present myself as completely passive but it's true that the things I put the most energy into aren't things that I've chosen as causes they're things that come out of the choices I've made for work or friends.
The New York Times is feelin' that the Bern is an effective legislator.
He has often been an effective, albeit modest, legislator. . . . In the Senate, he secured money for dairy farmers and community health centers, blocked banks from hiring foreign workers and reined in the Federal Reserve, all through measures attached to larger bills.
That doesn't sound like a recipe for leading a political revolution.
And the opening anecdote
As Democrats cobbled together a sweeping overhaul of the nation's immigration law three years ago, Senator Chuck Schumer of New York was clear about one thing: His party could not suffer a single defection.
But one naysayer remained -- Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who had opposed a similar effort in 2007 and once again did not like provisions in the new bill that he thought would displace American workers. And he had a price, a $1.5 billion youth jobs program.
makes it sound like part of why he offers so many amendments is because he's happy to wait until a bill is almost negotiated and then say, "here's my price to sign onto that." Which is a completely fair tactic, and makes use of the power he has as an independent Senator, but is very different that what he would be able to do as president.
For me personally Cruz feels like a robot assembled from different parts of separate things that I hate to form the ultimate hate Voltron (the only thing I can think of that's missing is some kind of hacker techno-ideology). Plus people I'm friends with, including Republicans, knew him personally and hate him. But with all that said Trivers is absolutely right and it's important that we have people saying this kind of stuff even about someone like Cruz. I don't want to drop my internet persona completely and I'm certainly more a perpetrator than a victim but Jesus Christ (literally) do we ever need less, not more, rants and hating and extremism and internet political bubble freak outs these days. That Cruz probably wouldn't extend the same charity to Trivers makes it more, not less, important to give charity back to Cruz and even his supporters. That's not either fun or funny but it's reality.
That doesn't sound like a recipe for leading a political revolution.
Yep. It is a historical fact that Bernie did not lead a political revolution in Congress.
Which is a completely fair tactic, and makes use of the power he has as an independent Senator, but is very different that what he would be able to do as president.
Right. Certainly a lot of people think that being an effective Senator isn't adequate preparation for being President.
I tend not to be forgiving at all of youthful conservatism (or worse libertarianism) but the truth is that my affiliations are as tribal as anyone else and I grew up in a very liberal tribe. So the truth is that I'm the asshole. And lord knows that there are plenty of people with great, left wing politics who are malicious assholes.
I was thinking that it's that charity that makes Trivers a liberal, and Cruz not. The difference between the two is one can say "There but for the grace of God.." and one can't.
52 is very nicely said.
Yep. It is a historical fact that Bernie did not lead a political revolution in Congress.
Heh, touche.
That Cruz probably wouldn't extend the same charity to Trivers makes it more, not less, important to give charity back to Cruz and even his supporters.
So you're one of those cheek-turning Christians. President Trump is looking forward to the opportunity to smack you people around.
57: And they are looking forward to the challenge of forgiving him.
51
Forgive me if I'm missing something, but the last minute "but here's my price to sign that" would seem to me to be amplified into "don't even think about sending a bill to my desk until it has all these things I want".
59 - I don't want to get into this but the issue is the controversy level of the ask. It's a perfectly fine strategy to ask to amend a bill to put in $20 million for a pet project, and the President can do that to (indeed that's classic legislative horse-trading; one thing Bernie effectively figured out was that even though you couldn't "earmark" things for your constituents like in the olden days if your proposals were more obviously idealistic you could use old school methods to get things into a bill. That's a good strategy, but it's not particularly indicative of ability to get things done where the ask is really significant and not in the horse-trading range. But maybe it's indicative of an overall willingness to engage in pretty good strategies, which, maybe so.
Anyhow, the main knock on Bernie as a Senator is screwing up his major assigned responsibility, which was oversight of the VA. I've done a fair amount if reading up on that in anticipation of comments here, and it seems like a scrupulously fair assessment is that he was asleep at the switch on basic oversight of the agency but did a decent to good job of getting bipartisan funding through once the scandal broke.
I'm not going to read the New Republic article yet, but that title, "Beyond Good and Evil"? You know, when someone is Good, there's no need to go beyond that. Everyone settles on "good" and calls it a day. It is only when someone is Evil that we have to talk about 'beyond' and maybe 'around' or 'behind'.
Isn't it established by now that the VA scandal wasn't?
I think the idea is that you need to get beyond looking at things on a unidimensional good to evil axis.
59 - I don't want to get into this but the issue is the controversy level of the ask. It's a perfectly fine strategy to ask to amend a bill to put in $20 million for a pet project, and the President can do that to (indeed that's classic legislative horse-trading . . .
Tigre is correct, and I'd add that part of what I'm thinking is that there's a difference between what you can ask for if you're getting involved at the beginning of a process or at the end. If you get involved early you can (hopefully) be involved in decisions about the basic architecture of a plan -- what mechanisms it will use, what will the approximate size and funding be, what trade-offs does it make. But if you get involved early you are implicitly committing to support a bill with that architecture even if there are elements that you don't like.
Getting involved at the end of the process you won't be able to get people to change those major structural decisions, but you can ask for a pay-off; adding on funding for some related project, and that's what Sanders was doing in that story.
63: You should tell the VA that. They still seem worked up about it.
...even though you couldn't "earmark" things for your constituents like in the olden days if your proposals were more obviously idealistic you could use old school methods to get things into a bill.
That Nebraskans should have to pay as much for something as everybody else is kind of an ideal.
This report suggests that the scandal was an intentionally misleading attack, albeit abetted by some record-gaming on the part of some facilities.
63: I'm pretty sure there was problems there, and that they definitely had to be addressed. There was a separate Koch brothers thing trying to privatize the whole system (obviously) that was muddying the waters a lot at the time (mostly by "we need to solve this by eliminating social security!" sorts of stuff). But the scandal was real. The Tigre argument is basically that Sanders should have known before it showed up that it was there and solved it before it happened rather than responding to it afterwards.
Also the "Beyond Good and Evil" thing is a reference to Nietzsche, and his (semi-mythic at best) story about ressentiment, and how things that seem like weaknesses or bad things ended up shifting into (Christian) moral virtues. (So "Good and Bad" -> "Good and Evil".) I'm guessing it's the ressentiment part of Trump's appeal that's being talked about there.
From the WaMo report:
"In only twenty-eight out of the more than 3,000 patient cases examined by the inspector general was there any evidence of patient care being adversely affected by wait times. During the worst of the "crisis," fully 89 percent of patients received appointments within thirty days of their preferred date."
"In short, there was no fundamental problem at the VA with wait times, in Phoenix or anywhere else."
To be sure, this confirms my biases, so grains of salt and all, but it's also the most comprehensive, detailed report I've read.
I'm concerned that 68 and 70 were by distinct authors.
I didn't read the article linked in the OP, but I did look at the pictures. They were very evocative.
71: The fn contract does guarantee uniqueness
I am beyond swamped with work, but two quick primary-related comments.
1) there's been lots of wondering about why millennials, and young millennials in particular, are ridiculously for Bernie. One theory I haven't seen, but seems way more plausible than 90s Right wing talking points transmitted through the womb, is that their first political experience of Hillary was the 08 election, as children or young teens. Hillary ran a very off-putting campaign full of racist dogwhistles, so if that's your first experience of her, it would be easy to dislike her. That is, the absolute suckitude of her 08 campaign is still haunting her among people who don't know her as anything else. Older millennials like me remember the 90s and have some sympathy for all the sexist crap she had to deal with.
2) With Cruz, I remember reading something a long time ago on Sadie Do yle's blog (which I in general had a lot of issues with, but this was good) about Betty Draper, and noting that we like to think of victims as good guys, but often people who are victims (of abuse, bullying, etc.), are prickly assholes, and negative experiences don't always cause people to change for the better.
As an aside, are we allowed to move on to a new primary thread when we haven't filled the last one up all the way? We still need 200 comments over there before Heebie will be satisfied.
I think 500 comments is a rough upper limit, not floor.
I've started to worry that I'm in a novel and the last sentence of the novel is "I love Donald Trump".
1) there's been lots of wondering about why millennials, and young millennials in particular, are ridiculously for Bernie.
I continue to think that social media has to play a role in just how lopsided the numbers are -- that it takes an advantage and makes it more decisive.
I don't have any good explanation for how to measure that process, but I was interested to read Timothy Lee thinking about that. It doesn't have any definitive answers, but there are some interesting observations and questions (apologies if I'm excerpting too much, but there are three things that I think are worth pulling out)
The internet's disruption of the political establishment explains how outsider candidates -- Bernie Sanders on the left, Ted Cruz and Donald Trump on the right -- have made such huge gains despite the overwhelming opposition of insiders in their respective parties. And it suggests that their rise isn't a fluke. In future elections, insurgent campaigns are only going to become more common, while political insiders will struggle to retain the influence they used to wield.
...
Thinking back to the race for the Republican nomination in 2000 illustrates how dramatically the political landscape has changed. George W. Bush leveraged his father's connections and his relatively successful tenure as governor of Texas to lock up endorsements from a large number of conservative elites.
Bush's leading challenger, John McCain, was charismatic, had a compelling message, and generated excitement among voters who saw him speak, allowing him to prevail in New Hampshire. But he simply wasn't able to overcome the financial and organizational advantages conferred on Bush by his supporters in the Republican establishment and the conservative donor class.
McCain was arguably the first presidential candidate to have his campaign catch fire on the internet. In the wake of his upset victory in New Hampshire, McCain raised $810,000 from donors on the internet. At the time, that was considered a shockingly large sum to raise online, but it wasn't nearly enough to allow McCain to build a national campaign that seriously threatened Bush.
But online fundraising has gotten steadily more important for insurgent presidential candidates. In 2004, internet darling Howard Dean shocked the political establishment by raising $5 million a month in the final six months of 2003, much of it online. In December 2007, Ron Paul supporters organized an online "money bomb" that raised $6 million in a single day -- without the campaign having to lift a finger. . . . [Sanders] was able to leverage his online support to raise $73 million from 2.5 million donors in 2015 -- most of whom gave small amounts. He raised another $20 million in January and $40 million in February, with an average contribution size of $27.
...
In late 2014, just as politicians were starting to lay the groundwork for their presidential campaigns, we at Vox started to notice that articles about Bernie Sanders attracted a lot of traffic. And it wasn't hard to figure out why: Bernie Sanders fans love reading articles about their favorite candidate and sharing them with their friends.
...
About a year ago, news sites learned that pro-Bernie content generated a lot of traffic, and many started producing more of it. That, in turn, spread the word about the Sanders candidacy, attracting new supporters and further expanding demand for pro-Bernie content.
Sanders was able to broaden his appeal among liberals despite the fact that many prominent liberal pundits -- including Paul Krugman, Jonathan Chait, Kevin Drum, and Jamelle Bouie were attacking Sanders for having half-baked policy proposals and an unrealistic political strategy. One big reason these attacks failed is that a lot of Sanders fans never saw them.
People on /r/politics aren't just reading more articles about Sanders, they're also overwhelmingly getting articles that are pro-Sanders. Articles that criticize Sanders or make the case for Hillary Clinton (or, for that matter, any of the Republican candidates) are much less likely to reach the front page.
before Heebie will be satisfied
Don't be fooled. The woman is insatiable.
Well-sated women rarely make history.
So which do you think is more important to HRC, earning millions and millions of dollars, or being President? If she had to chose one or the other which would it be?
So which do you think is more important to HRC, earning millions and millions of dollars, or being President?
That answer might change over time and, of course, there's also going to be a "bird in the hand" factor to the decision.
That she agreed to be Secretary of State after she lost in 2008 would suggest that she valued government service highly. After 2012, she was happy to go take the money (and, personally, I believe that she was legitimately unsure of whether she wanted to run in 2016 at that point. It might have been obvious to everyone that it was likely that she would, but I don't think it was certain).
* and it was clearly a huge commitment. As Jon Favreau said, "She was by far the most prepared, impressive person at every Cabinet meeting. She worked harder and logged more miles than anyone in the administration, including the president."
Those are different things?
Actually I'd say it's very much the latter rather than the former. The problem for Clinton is that she's been living very comfortably inside a wealthy DC-Serious-Person-Consensus bubble for a really, really long time and really doesn't have any real sense of what's outside of it, in the same way that the "Wait, there are people opposed to the Iraq war? Well, surely not more than one or two loonies, right?" people were. And within that bubble there's nothing strange or weird about this kind of general patronage/fake jobs money. You know, everyone does it. What are you freaked out about?*
I suspect it's the same reason we saw her casually mentioning how tight she was with Kissinger - within that group he's a great elder statesman and the idea that people might get worked up about the whole "millions of deaths for no obvious benefit" thing is ridiculous. And it's the same reason she passed on that nice fact about Nancy Reagan - after all, people knew that she'd done that sort of quietly probably and the Reagans were good folks anyway so why not mention it?** And it's the same reason she didn't know to stay the hell away from anything that could result in a photo like this, because hey even if you disagreed with him he's part of a pretty exclusive club just like her and they know him personally so why not?
*Like with the Volkswagen and banking scandal things: people just assume it as part of the structure of how things work and they'll admit that it's probably not really strictly upstanding stuff but whatever it's normal and nothing to get worked up about. And then it becomes public and everyone else, who wasn't in that bubble, freaks out and they don't know how to deal with it or why it's happening.
**One of the things I can help but notice about these groups is the extent to which they're living in a mostly consequence free zone. They might care, massively, about how policies and court decisions will affect people, but it's still mostly an intellectual kind of caring. They're not threatened, and neither are the people they know. So there's nothing personal about it all. (This is the best guess I've got for how, e.g., Ginsburg and Scalia could have been friends.)
79 is interesting and seems right. It's not just the spreading of information it's the kind of information people receive. Also the very quick and easy degeneration of internet space into us/them heated conflict seems relevant -- much better to just pick a side you're roughly comfortable with and only sign on to get information from activists you like.
Roberto, I think you're offering a standard "Internet bubble" critique, but I think Lee (and maybe Nick) are saying something different.
Remember that Lee is trying to explain how people are won over -- how people's opinions can be changed. He's not talking about how people's biases are confirmed.
At the risk of being a naive Internet triumphalist, I'm going to offer a more positive spin.
Even now, a key critique of Sanders is his non-viability as a national candidate. The existence of the Internet allowed people to find out something different: The US has many of the forms and practices of a functioning democracy, and people can actually mobilize and decide to buck the Establishment.
Trump/Sanders comparisons are, as a rule, odious, but I think something similar is happening among the Republicans. Delusional as Trump voters are on so many topics, they are primarily responding to a thing that is actually happening in the real world. There really are elites within their own party that don't much give a fuck about their views and interests, and who have been taking advantage of them. Again: The elites turn out to be vulnerable to actual democracy.
Seriously, my SIL is freaking the fuck out about Bernie because she's a huge Hillary supporter and posts articles from mainstream to fringey about how horrible Bernie is, so I skip over them thinking I don't need that shit.
Something related that confuses me is Krugman, also pro-Hillary, is seeing things that I'm not seeing with Bernie becoming Trump-like in attacking Hillary. He thinks this is self-evident and as proof links to their respective twitter feeds.
What do I see on Bernie's, last two days: policy, retweet several endorsements, attacking things about current system (unions, PTSD, child poverty, capital punishment, teacher wages). The only indirect thing I can see about Hillary is when he says "We need a president who will stand up to XXX industry" and one direct thing about how we should defeat TPP when Hillary says we should modify it. That's some weak sauce for what Krugman calls "bitter personal attacks on anyone who questions the campaign's premises, an increasing amount of demagogy from the campaign itself." I mean, maybe he's picking up mentions of Bernie instead of the official campaign feed? But I can't believe he'd make the mistake of confusing the two.
Hillary spends much more time in the last day going after Trump directly, attacking/mocking Republicans, also her share of endorsements, policy/things we should improve. There is one "Scoreboard!" showing how she's ahead even more in delegates after Michigan. Honestly probably more negative than Bernie's overall but directed at Republicans, not at him.
Half of my Twitter feed is one person boosting Trump. It's getting to be a bit much. Maybe I should unfollow that guy and follow Sanders.
87: People just go crazy in primary season.
He thinks this is self-evident and as proof links to their respective twitter feeds.
I saw that too... and also went looking for whatever the alleged odious Tweets were on Bernie's page. Didn't find much.
87: Krugman is weirdly blind here. An independent economist puts out an implausibly rosy view of Sanders' economic policies and Sanders' campaign people refer people to it. Krugman finds this to be the Crime of the Century.
Hillary talks about how Nancy Reagan was in the forefront of AIDS activism and what is Krugman's reaction? Crickets chirping.
Krugman is usually very good at looking for, and responding to, the best arguments from the opposition. For whatever reason, he seems unable to do that with Sanders.
87: one of my former anarchist friends just posted a video from *Citizens United* about the eeevil seekrit history of Hillary, Whitewater, cattle futures and Vince Foster. And he says he's also pissed off about Chappaquiddick.
91: OK, but come on: for all he talks politics, he's an economist. If Bernie retweets Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse as his vision for a better America, I'm going to freak out in a way that I don't over pretty much anything else he says.
And, not to relitigate the analysis, it was about as realistic as one of those "One Weird Trick" diets; I harshly judge anyone who speaks favorably of those, too. It really is a marker of lack of discernment.
95- Well, sure, but because of the mortal sin Bernie has committed against the sacred profession of economics, Krugman has now gone PUMA-like against him, making easily refuted arguments in a manner totally unlike his usual tone.
To the OP, I haven't known quite what to say, because I was, in fact, a conservative Catholic in my early college years, so it seems incredibly self-serving to say I could never have been Cruz (or Rubio or Santorum). But I was always more empathetic than those assholes, and I was largely taking my cues from my mom, who was the sort of person to be politically harsh even while being incredibly warm and nonjudgmental to my sister's fucked up friends.
But then I just remembered the time when some slick Young Republican asshole tried to recruit me. I think he was, honest to God, involved in Opus Dei, and he knew I was involved in Catholic activities, so he approached me to try to get me to go to whatever his deal was, and I was completely repulsed. Point being, that guy yearned to be Cruz or Santorum or whoever, and I instinctively rejected him before I had even the faintest inkling of leaving the Church or conservatism in general.
Huh. I just realized that I voted D* in '92, which was almost certainly before I had my political awakening. Now I'm confused, although I know that environmentalism was definitely the first issue that pushed me away from Republicans. But anyway, the incident I mention above was freshmen year, so no doubts about my politics then.
*well, I wrote in Paul Tsongas' name
97: I'm not sure the timing there is right*, but I agree that his anti-Bernie animus seems disproportionate.
*I'm pretty sure that, before that analysis ever came out, PK had said mildly anti-Sanders/pro-Clinton things and had Bernie people jump all over him, so he was already inclined to be pissed at Sanders supporters. The bogus analysis just locked everything into place: Krugman saw it as betraying fundamental incompetence**, and also saw that voicing such was going to result in a bunch of people deciding that he was now basically a tool of The Man.
**and remember, he really was Cassandra on GWB, and it was precisely because he paid serious attention to the economic BS being spouted on the campaign trail. This isn't out of character in terms of his MO on judging candidates: do the numbers add up? No? Then something stinks.
OK, but come on: for all he talks politics, he's an economist.
I get that. But Krugman was talking about politics, and he was elucidating a general principle.
He wasn't saying: Here is a bad economic analysis. If that was all he said, I'd have no room to object. He was saying that this is the type of analysis that separates Sanders from Clinton, who not only wouldn't produce bad analysis, but wouldn't point to a reputable outsider's analysis as being acceptable if it were clearly wrong.
and it was clearly a huge commitment. As Jon Favreau said, "She was by far the most prepared, impressive person at every Cabinet meeting. She worked harder and logged more miles than anyone in the administration, including the president."
I just now learn that that "Jon Favreau" guy who people are always retweeting about politics is not the movie director. I wonder how many of the retweeters know that.
The last time I checked the eventual conclusion of the whole thing after the Krugman/whoever savaging, the Galbraith/etc. response, and the resulting back and forth was something along the lines of "Ok a really big effect yes but that's still pretty optimistic and it'll probably not be as impressive as that." That's pretty damn far from "One Weird Trick" diets though (which was largely the original accusation).
From what I can remember the eventual back and forth revolved around how much the economic growth that resulted from the initial boost would taper off after a year or two, and the study was probably assuming it wouldn't taper off as much as it probably would. The fact that Krugman freaked out about that, and did it before anyone had run the actual numbers is a pretty good indicator that something is going on with him that isn't just professional distaste for nonsense.
There really are elites within their own party that don't much give a fuck about their views and interests, and who have been taking advantage of them.
I can't resist. Sorry for the length, but this is gorgeous.
Kevin Williamson at NRO (paywall) via djw at LGM
If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy -- which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog -- you will come to an awful realization. It wasn't Beijing. It wasn't even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn't immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn't any of that.Nothing happened to them. There wasn't some awful disaster. There wasn't a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence -- and the incomprehensible malice -- of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain't what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump's speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.
Uhh, "gorgeous" because revelatory.
And I grew up, not above, but maybe escaped? from that world, and still feel one step in it, tilting, falling.
Many many of Trump's voters live in trailers.
102: My impression is that nobody changed their minds.
The analysis is along the lines of, "The food stinks and the portions are too small." Bernie's plan is being overhyped and will never do what it says, oh and it will never pass anyway.
Roberto, I think you're offering a standard "Internet bubble" critique, but I think Lee (and maybe Nick) are saying something different.
I think of the excerpt I posted as having three parts. The first is an observation that the theory that "the parties decide" is taking a beating this year. The second two look at what might cause that.
He then notes that that online fundraising has only recently grown to the point that it can match or exceed traditional fundraising.
Finally he notes that, for people, consuming political news via social media (or a socially-curated site like Reddit) there is (a) a bandwagon/snowball effect as a candidate attracts followers and (b) that's powerful enough to overcome disinterest or dismissiveness from the mainstream media.
The final point has elements of the "Internet Bubble" phenomenon, and I do think that's part of what's going on. What I don't know, and what the Tim Lee article doesn't say, is how important the "Internet Bubble" effect is.
87: People just go crazy in primary season.
Very true. Was this always the case, or has this gotten worse as we spend more time on social media?
"People just go crazy in primary season."
"Very true. Was this always the case"
Way back in 1968 1924 it took 2 weeks and 103 ballots to nominate a Democratic candidate, that political giant John W Davis.
102: Kevin Drum walked back his initial "what fucking morons!" post a few days later.
And when Romer (the only one of the four whose area it really was) actually did the analysis the debate suddenly turned into a debate about how economic stimuli really work, deep down and how far we are from where we could be right now. (Friedman was assuming you could see long term growth from a shorter term stimulus, and Romer was saying you definitely could not. Also I think a lot of it seemed to depend on how much slack there is in the economy right now: most of Friedman's 'crazy' predictions just amounted to "it would put us back on the track we were on before the great recession", how much of the rate of people in the economy who aren't working could be working, and so on.*)
I don't remember Krugman walking anything back, but by that point he was full on screaming-anti-Sanders on any number of non-economic things too so I wouldn't have expected it.
*Can't say anything about the reliability there, but it looks exactly like a lot of the stuff we saw after Krugman/Romer/etc.'s initial smear job.
107 - My take is that a "quickly snowballing bubble" is about the right concept even if it's a terrible metaphor. People live in and don't want to move outside their political bubble. But if that bubble gets momentum and spreads to other people's social media quickly (and it can do so) it can very quickly envelop them too. So you can have movements that are big, that persuade the not already-convinced and yet still are extremely bubble-like.
Say you start off with 5-6 friends who are activists and are supporting Sanders (or Clinton), and nobody else cares too much. Without thinking about it your feed quickly reaches a critical mass where the only news stories you're seeing are the ones attacking Clinton (or Sanders) just because that's what you're seeing. Like a few of those and then you see more stories. Decide you like what your friends are doing yourself and you've become committed. Now you have your own strong priors. Moving out of the bubble means you not only have to renounce your priors, but either ignore or be annoyed at your social media "friends." And as thing intensify, the urge to divide social media political bubbles into strong and contentious us/them factions gets ever more powerful. Now, you're mostly seeing one side of a story, and not only do most of your friends seem committed to that story, creating an ever-intensifying feedback loop. Bu beyond that you're seeing intensely contentious lambasting of people who are on the other side. This dynamic actively favors taking ever more extreme positions on social media. Once its in play, if you make a move towards the mushy middle you're betraying your friends and immediately go into the out group. And not committing at all can also put you into the out group.
Some of these dynamics are inherent to politics and nothing new. But it's more bubble-y and moves much faster these days. I do think there's a real pressure towards the extremes that comes from that.
I thought there were some good posts about the forecast stuff here.
Is Sanders really that unusual? Primary candidates can't totally satisfy everyone in the party, front-runner assembles preferred majority coalition, those who are ok with but not exceptionally keen on front runner generate an alternative candidate who links up with those parts of the campaign machine that aren't employed by front-runner, pushes their issues but never really looks like winning. That's not a totally unusual process and it's not one that seems to be the same as the Trump process - in particular, Sanders never looked like he could ever win, but Trump probably will.
109: I don't see anybody other than Drum (the non-economist) changing his mind. The debate breaks down on entirely predictable lines -- the mainstream economists (Romer, Krugman) on one side, and the heterodox economists (Galbraith, Mason) on the other. Mainstream economists don't think that the government can raise the long-term growth rate of the US economy, and heterodox economists think it can. Every economist's conclusions followed from this, and none of them learned anything.
Ya know, the press was totally happy to use Friedman's analysis when it told them that Bernie's plans would cost $18 trillion, and Krugman and those henchfolk sure as shit didn't quabble with them when they used that fat number, free of context, without mentioning that the same analysis projected $23 trillion in additional revenue.
110.1: I suspect you are seriously overestimating the insularity and underestimating the overlap of discourse streams. And how long and persistent a particular topic leads.
I presume that many of the same people subscribe to #BLM, #protest, and something like #ChicagoSanders, and taking a full Sanders storm onto BLM would be unacceptable. Multiply by x number of follows
What was somewhat interesting in the articles about the Chicago-Trump protest was how many of the 1500? did not know each other. IOW, kinda immediately emergent.
Yes it happens faster, and maybe more intense for a period, but mostly it is just hard to categorize and objectify, let alone control
I do think there's a real pressure towards the extremes that comes from that.
Pressure toward extremes is the wrong way to think about this. What's actually happening is the citizens of a democracy are able to think and act outside of the limits set by the elite.
The gatekeepers define the center, so anything outside their prescribed limits is going to be viewed as "extreme." Barack Obama was a big surprise to the elites, and it's hard to imagine his rise without the democratization brought by the Internet, but he has never been an extremist.
Bernie Sanders is no extremist either - at least if you compare his views to those of the actual American people, rather than the views of the center-defining elite.
112 -- being a strong contender to be a party's candidate while being so far outside of that party is pretty new. I can't think of another example easily, though the primary system itself is also really new. But putting that aside I mostly think there's something real and new about how social media pushes politics to extremes and favors outsiders. Even candidacies that are less unusual are now talked about differently.
God dammit 114 was me. Stupid autocorrect.
113: Walt has it right, but it remains interesting what that meta-story tells us about Romer and Krugman. More than just that they are HRC shills, much more.
The Krugman panic over a slightly unreality-based economic analysis might be a little projection. And honest to God, there is always an element in economics of "This only works if people believe it."
Krugman is doing himself at least temporary damage this season, but like many technocratic moderates, he is very scared of the center losing control, especially to Repubs. So many are disappointed.
Or something, I confess I don't have the sociology of mainstream economics quite down yet.
113: The change I was talking about though was mostly that it started out with accusations of fairy-tale partisan Paul Ryan style horseshit from Romer/Krugman/etc., and was reported straightforwardly as if it was that for the most part. And then there was a hard pushback from people like Galbraith and some of the commentators like Drum backed off a bit (others just kept at it). And Romer(mainly) and the rest backed off of the open smearing and went back to their more normal (already existing) disagreement about modeling and whether the government can affect the growth rate of the economy (in long term structural ways rather than short term stimulus ways).
103: not bad, but if I were Williamson's editor I'd make the following amend.
It wasn't even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn't immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn't any of that. It was me. Me, and everyone I agreed with and promoted throughout my career. And if you're reading NRO, quite possibly you.
There's been a bit of this tebbly concerned stuff from people who were personally responsible for the problem lately. David "Axis of Evil" Frum is a frequent perpetrator. So is Charles Murray. In the UK, we had Thatcher policy adviser Ferdinand Mount with a whole fucking book on inequality. His entire career was devoted to creating more of it!
And now, the bastard is all *concerned*!
116 is pretty much my opinion too. Yeah you do see bubbles forming, but the only real difference is that you see ones that aren't structurally controlled by various powerful interests. And that's why sudden out-of-nowhere phenomena like Sanders' candidacy or like Trump really freak them out. (Trump freaks them out for other reasons too like, well, what he's doing and saying.)
Sanders isn't obviously different in political views from FDR, or from any number of center-left parties in the developed world. He's extreme with regards to the bubble in the US that the internet is smashing up. But that's just a feature of the general media picture of the US, which had the bad luck to have their ability to degraded by the internet at basically the exact same time that they failed massively in a totally undeniable way. (If we hadn't had the Bush administration but just a boring neoliberal Gore administration without anything as dramatic happening I'm guessing the political parts of the internet really might look entirely different/be way less substantial.)
Pressure toward extremes is the wrong way to think about this. What's actually happening is the citizens of a democracy are able to think and act outside of the limits set by the elite.
I can think of two related theories of how social media does create a pressure towards extremes*.
First is that there's a ratchet effect in terms of what it means to be "authentically" a progressive. Once somebody says, "Hillary Clinton praised Nancy Reagan for having engaged in AIDS advocacy. Fuck her." There's a natural pressure for everyone to agree that the Reagans' attitude towards AIDS was disgraceful and that anybody who understands the issue knows that, and how could Clinton have possible gotten confused about that. There's a pressure to be on the right side of the issue. Multiple that by 30 issues and you end up with . . . well you end up with something that looks like a party platform which takes a position on a bunch of issues even though not every politician agrees with all of the planks.
Secondly, I do think there's a tendency towards, "you like Clinton because she'd do [X]? Well Sanders would do that and more. Don't you want more?" I say that just because I've seen it happen on unfogged threads. That's only possible if everyone assumes that one candidate is more left than the other (if you had two candidates in which one was more left in certain areas and the other more left on other issues, that wouldn't happen), and it creates a rhetorical advantage for the more extreme candidate.
But I'm just speculating. As I've said, my main venue for talking about the primaries this year is Unfogged, and I doubt that it's representative of much.
* have the sense that there's research showing that a group of people who agree will often converge on an opinion which is more extreme than any of the people hold individually. I haven't looked at that recently, so I don't remember what the mechanism is. I'm just speculating.
124 last is well established for juries, which suggests that how you structure your deliberation really does matter.
I'm talking through a fever with three children who don't want to sleep yet even though they'll be awful in the morning like they were this morning, but I also came from a religious-conservative background and I'd have a hard time saying I moved away from that because of anything special about me, certainly not empathy. I've become less judgmental and more empathetic over time for reasons totally unrelated to religion or atheism, just about wanting to be better and more human. But I think most of the very conservative people I know see themselves as deeply empathetic and just think because of that they know better what others need. (I am not saying I don't do the same; of course I'd be glad to be philosopher-king and set the world up the way I want it to run!) Some of the most selfish people I know don't see that selfishness at all or else see it as a moral good. They'd certainly identify as empathetic. Okay, I'm rambling now. This just strikes me as weird and maybe not the whole story.
Two additional notes on 124.
First, part of why I'm being so cautious is that I don't want to say that Sander's support depends on pressure towards the extremes. I think it's totally reasonable for people to support Sanders. I also think, however, that his campaign benefits from (or "taps into" or "reveals" if you prefer) dynamics which do encourage a more ideological candidate.
I think it's interesting to speculate about what those dynamics are.
Also, I realized that the first theory could be more simply stated like this: if you have a group of people who self identify as, for example, liberal, there's going to be an asymmetry in the way that the group consensus shifts. If you start with some position X and there are a few arguments that X is too liberal in some aspects and a few arguments that X is too conservative, the group is going to be more open to the arguments that come from a liberal perspective. Because it fits the self-identification as liberal. So that means it's more likely for the consensus to shift leftwards and, as it does, it strengthens the self-identification of the group as being liberal.
117 - Goldwater, McGovern, maybe Jerry Brown? I'm not saying Sanders isn't partly influenced by the internet, just that there's a presentist tendency to overrate how unusual slightly kooky failed presidential primary campaigns are - after all, we forget them because they lose.
My feeling is that Trump is the oddity, and he's an oddity primarily driven by the fucked-upness of the Republican Party cable news, conservative talk radio, and network television -- not the internet, I don't think.
I have been reading this whole thread trying to come up with a rational analysis for my reaction to Ted Cruz and I just don't have one. Plain and simple, he terrifies me. I see his face and something pre-verbal in me says THREAT THREAT THREAT GET AWAY NOW.
I am not exaggerating when I say that he triggers in me the same response I've had in a handful of situations when I was not at all sure things weren't about to go very sideways and end up with gunfire. I'm remembering an incident on the subway when I was about 22 or 23. Heading into a tough neighborhood in North Phila, white guy in camouflage comes through the car doors, walking end to end in a way that it's straightforward to do on a railway train but very rarely done on a subway. He's adjusting something at his waistband and I'm sitting there wondering if I should just start running. I have rarely felt such as sense of imminent menace in my life.
That's what Ted Cruz triggers in me. It's the red-alert that say LEAVE NOW because this person cannot be trusted, not even the tiniest bit.
117.1 -- McGovern feels like the closest of those, but he ran and won on a for-real intra-party split on the war in Vietnam which was completely visible since 1968. Goldwater had substantial backing from party members, especially in the West. Jerry Brown, sort of amazingly, was the establishment "stop Carter" candidate in 1976. I dunno, though, I don't really disagree with you. I'm mostly interested in what is different about this time, which does seem to be social media-y and have a particular dynamic that does push people to more extreme positions than they might hold otherwise. 127 makes a lot of sense to me in all details.
129: That's weird because his face doesn't strike me as a threat but as a target. I want to throw bits of paper at the back of him head to see if I could make him call for the teacher. And I really didn't do that even when it was more age appropriate.
Unless it's not weird for reasons as laid out in the OP and #2.
130 - I was thinking of Jerry Brown in '92!
I'm not arguing Sanders isn't unusual, but I think that Trump is a phenomenon all of his own and it's better to analyse him on his own.
If you didn't start with social media, would that be where you ended up with Trump? I dunno! I think Trump is actually quite "old media" - he's a reality TV star, he's very good on radio, on television. He uses twitter as a way to put out statements, but suppose twitter didn't exist - he'd just send out faxes...
Maybe the electorate is warped by social media - but it seems to me that things like racism, economic stagnation, the fact that the Republican Party is deeply self-destructive at a federal level all play into Trump more.
I'm not sure - maybe I just have an irrational dislike of "social media" as an explanatory tool.
Thinking further: It's a sense of personal threat. And on some level it feels very gendered, although I imagine Cruz encountering any of my non-WM friends and I have the same surge of fear/revulsion on their behalf.
I'm not arguing Sanders isn't unusual, but I think that Trump is a phenomenon all of his own and it's better to analyse him on his own.
I'd agree with that. If Sanders is unusual for his ability to attract attention and to raise money without the backing of major establishment figures, neither of those things are what is surprising about Trump.
I'm not sure - maybe I just have an irrational dislike of "social media" as an explanatory tool.
I think that's a good rule of thumb. As I've said before, the one thing that makes me think that "social media" is part of the dynamic is seeing young people split 80-20. If they were splitting 68-30, I wouldn't think anything usual was going one. But the 80-20 split makes it seem like they are behaving as a more unified bloc that I would expect.
Thinking further: It's a sense of personal threat. And on some level it feels very gendered . . .
I realize I've watched very little video of Cruz. Do you have that reaction to stills, or does it mostly come through in video?
136: I'm not sure how many photos I had seen of him before the first debate, so I'm not sure. I mean, at this point I definitely have it to still pictures, but that could be because of repeated exposure to video via the debates.
136: NickS is clearly designing a sinister, Ballardian psych experiment with video clips of Cruz and panels of the deprived.
I couldn't disagree more with MHPH's characterization of how that mess went down. My read of Romer was that the analysis was exactly as stupid and nonstandard as all of the Very Serious Economists said: it said that each year of ongoing stimulus creates additional growth, and then that growth doesn't stop when the stimulus ends. That is completely not how fucking stimulus works, and it's not some fine technical debate. This isn't some new position, either: this was discussed ad infinitum in 2009 and thereafter, that ending stimulus will hurt economic growth, and so you'd better hope that the economy is chugging along well enough that you can take the hit.
Oh yeah, and Friedman's response to Romer was, "Well, maybe I don't agree with that," which is basically, "I don't agree that atmospheric CO2 matters." He had zero modeling to back that up, and nobody in the field agrees with him that stimulus works that way (and AFAICT, he never said it before).
"Slack in the economy" was always obviously bullshit, because his projection was that we would surpass pre-2009 trend by 15%. That's just Looney Tunes numbers, and it was never credible, and it was embarrassing that JKG boosted it, because, even if it's possible to recover lost growth that way (and most evidence is that it isn't--that pre-2009 growth trend was based on people who got degrees in 2010 getting good jobs, creating economic value, and growing their own personal abilities for every year between 2010 and 2017; nothing Bernie could do in 2017 could recover that), there's still no way to get above long term trend without inflation or some exogenous force.
Drum walked his comments back after Galbraith and before Romer; citing his walkback is meaningless, because it wasn't based on full knowledge, it was based on "Hey, one guy I roughly trust said it's possible, so maybe it's not insane BS."
OTOH, I think NickS is making all sorts of sense. He doesn't quite say this, but I think his points are heading towards this: it's not "extremism" that social media pushes towards, it's purity/rigidity*. Think about the countless internet blowups before the primaries, how someone would get swarmed for saying something out of line: for the most part, nobody was being pushed to an extreme position, it was just that no one was allowed to be in a gray area between totally correct and obviously incorrect. That is, if you were an MRA, then whatever, you're an asshole, but if you're just some dude who writes something saying that women should be careful not to get drunk at frat parties, 200 people show up to tell him he's slutshaming and that the way to stop rape is for men to stop raping. None of which is extreme or incorrect; it's that the gray area is no longer tenable.
Meanwhile, the right achieved that sort of purity pre-social media thanks to talk radio, mostly. It ended up extreme, but I'm not sure that's exactly it. Most of the current, extreme GOP positions have been present for a long time; what's changed is the uniformity and, yes, rigidity of them. Go back to the pre-Gingrich, '93 GOP House caucus, and I'd bet you'd find 90% of them agreeing with big chunks of the current Republican platform. The change is that nowadays you'd be hard pressed to find anyone who disagrees with any of it. Over there the money is pushing in roughly the same direction as the ideological warriors, so the effect is much stronger, but I don't think the dynamic is completely different.
*I don't mean those to have a negative connotation
nobody in the field agrees with him that stimulus works that way (and AFAICT, he never said it before).
The point of debate wasn't that a stimulus would necessarily have those long term effects, though. It's that it could depending on the type of stimulus it was: for example, if it was a stimulus that made substantial structural changes to the way the economy was working (which is what Romer denies could happen). If you just send everyone cash, or temporarily cut taxes that's one kind of stimulus; if you set up the WPA that's a very different kind of stimulus (for example you get roads out of it and rail lines and so on). (And in 2009 we were dealing mostly with the first kind.)
According to Romer the claim is that those two things would have the same basic impact, so that once the WPA is abandoned then things to back to working the way they did before (and you've just kind of shortened the painful bit.) According to Friedman (style-economics) that kind of investment makes a big deal and can change the productivity/employment possibilities for the economy (and of course there are people who agree with him on that - come on here - and it's not just a view that was invented by him last month). And as far as the fifteen percent figure that would actually have been what put us back on the track we were before so the numbers aren't directly insane (as Galbraith put it: big things have big effects).
Or, I guess the simple version is, Romer claims that the New Deal didn't really affect the economy outside of speeding up the recovery that would have happened anyway. (And come on - I actually did link to people saying this: you can't just go with what Romer/Krugman claimed after the fact without reading the other side of it.)
Jerry Brown's father was a governor too!
If you just look at the unemployment chart from the 30s, it looks like the New Deal was a relatively shitty stimulus compared to World War II. Maybe Trump is right that we need another Hitler?
And as far as the fifteen percent figure that would actually have been what put us back on the track we were before so the numbers aren't directly insane (as Galbraith put it: big things have big effects).
This isn't what Friedman's numbers said. Pre-2009, the forecast was (say) 2% growth/year indefinitely. That would mean, in 2026, 34% cumulative growth*. Then the Great Recession happened, and now it's 2016 and the economy is exactly where it was in 2008. Friedman says that Bernie Magick will create 5% growth every year for 10 years, so that in 2026 we'll be at 150% of 2008 instead of 134%. So no, that has nothing to do with picking up slack. Slack in the economy means that we can get back to baseline (134% in 2026) without inflationary effects.
As for your last para, standard economics absolutely does acknowledge that productive stimulus has net effects beyond the direct effects; that's what multipliers are all about. Friedman's claim is that there's no diminishing returns, and that the economy can never overheat
*compounding effects don't matter for this description; it doesn't change my point
141 is pretty much evidence for what JRoth's saying. It's too extreme to say nobody would agree with Friedman, but it really is a fringe position. It's economics -- as John Emerson (PBUH) used to complain, there's always a paper out there that supports every position. I assume it's the position of the author, who is maximally kind to heterodox economists, but everything is consistent with what JRoth is saying.
Speaking of stimulus, has Sanders released a revised health care plan that has the math work plausibly for prescription drug spending?
I'd be interested if anyone has some evidence regarding 124.last, or Roberto's addendum in 125 that juries tend to converge on an opinion that is "more extreme" than that held by individuals. It seems counter-intuitive. (Juries, of course, are being asked to reach a binary decision that won't, pretty much by definition, reflect the richness of viewpoints of individuals and will necessarily be more "extreme.")
At the risk of reiterating my own 116, I'm going to take issue with 140. I think the Internet and the multiplicity of media* even pre-Internet tend to undermine the "both sides do it" narrative and allow people to resist the pressure for centrism and conformity. Once you alleviate that pressure - once you start providing more freedom - it's axiomatic that people's views will necessarily migrate to places where they previously weren't - that is, to places that differ with the prior orthodoxy and that are therefore more "extreme."
I mean, sure, the Information Bubble is a real thing - but it has always been a real thing. Our multiplying media change the characteristics of that bubble.
*You can now get your late-night social commentary from any number of white males.
146: Have a look at Kocherlakota's post here: https://sites.google.com/site/kocherlakota009/home/policy/thoughts-on-policy/2-21-16
As for your last para, standard economics absolutely does acknowledge that productive stimulus has net effects beyond the direct effects; that's what multipliers are all about.
Long term effects is what I said. Multipliers are different and, per Romer, only happen during the actual stimulus spending (because that's the only bit that affects the economy). The question isn't whether there are multipliers, it's whether the way the stimulus works can have long term effects on the economy. Romer says that stimulus has positive effects on the economy and when that spending tapers back off the positive effects taper back off along with it, because it's just the stimulus working in reverse. Friedman disagrees (in the sense that he thinks that economic stimulus can have long term effects, not that it must).
149: I don't think that's helping. Using 1933 to 1937 as an example of rapid GNP growth is looking a growth that still is very much below the pre-Depression trend and just gets thing back to 1929. The most convincing thing in that whole link is: "Some might use graphs on post-World War II data on real GDP growth to dismiss this claim as outside the realm of what is plausible."
149: That's a much smaller, more plausible amount. 4-5% over 4 years is catch-up growth, while 5.3% over 10 years would mean the economy would grow faster even after it returned to full capacity.
Krugman is clearly right on the economic merits of Friedman's argument. I was taking issue with his comparison of Sanders to the Republicans, and his contrast of Sanders with Clinton in their use of third-party information.
My only point was the one that JRoth agrees with in 99:
I agree that his anti-Bernie animus seems disproportionate.
149: That's 40% of Friedman's claim. And he readily acknowledges that there's little support in theory, and only mixed in empirical (note how he dismisses the empirical example of postwar growth).
If Friedman's claims had been Kocherlakota's, I'm not sure it would have raised any sort of stink. Some doubts, maybe, but not accusations of unseriousness. Kocherlakota acknowledges that he's pushing for something outside the mainstream. Friedman's analysis was 2.5X farther outside. Krugman, who has spent the past 8 years pointing out that mainstream analysis has gotten more or less every aspect of the Great Recession right, doesn't think that Democratic leaders should be pointing to far-outside-the-mainstream analyses as legit projections. There's really no mystery, no conspiracy, no shillery here. The desperate need of Bernie supporters to see it is really unseemly.
I'm having trouble following this, mostly because I always get Friedman and Krugman confused.
i haven't read all these links, but when I was reading more about this a few weeks ago, it seemed like the factor that was missing from the analyses of Bernie-defenders is wages/fed reactions. You can't even hope to achieve growth like that without general wage inflation, which from the fed's point of view is the worst possible form of inflation. (This sounds like a left-wing conspiracy theory when started that baldly, but it's orthodox macroeconomics.) The fed would react very aggressively to increase interest rates and create a strong counterweight against what they would view as overheated growth/rising wages. I'm very sympathetic to the TFP arguments and similar theories that imply that macroeconomic growth could be juiced significantly in the abstract, but in the real world I don't think there's any chance that growth could persist in the face of aggressive federal reserve action pushing in the opposite direction (and I think the fed would push as hard as necessary in order to minimize wage inflation... Which again without wage inflation those growth levels are absolute fantasy.)
Wage inflation is pretty much the whole reason I want growth.
What do I get out of more productivity without higher wages?
I guess I'd take more leisure, if that's an option.
159: a rising 401(k) balance.
(It's actually fine from the fed's perspective for wages to rise, just not too fast.)
153: From the point of view of the mainstream, the Friedman projections use the same magic assumptions that the Republicans do. "My preferred policies magically permanently raise TFP" is Republican's preferred loophole for why their policies will do anything other redistribute wealth upwards, and has been since Reagan. If you are inclined to be unsympathetic to Sanders, the comparison will seem natural.
My own view of Sanders' plan is that there's no downside. If Friedman is right, then free ponies for everyone. If Friedman is wrong, then inflation has been too low for ten years anyway, so if we had ten years of 4% inflation instead, that would also be beneficial.
And extra inflation reduces people's debt loads, which given Piketty I now wonder why we haven't been talking about as a deliberate jubilee-lite policy. Though maybe more student and home loans, I'm not sure if credit card rates peg.
I should refinance into a fixed rate loan, I guess. I meant to do that but I kept putting it off because of the odds I'd have to move.
163: My guess (I mean, aside from "the economists who currently have literally everyone's ear think that inflation is the devil's work and must be avoided at all costs) is that as a policy it would be really easy to sabotage. For all that they like to talk about free markets and capitalism it seems to me that the business-owning class in America is pretty much the only group of people who really, instinctively understand the idea of solidarity. And it wouldn't be hard for them to simultaneously (1) raise prices with inflation (because they have to!) and (2) leave wages exactly where they are. They couldn't manage it in the long run, but I'm guessing it would only take a few years of that before the pitchforks came out and I doubt that the mob would be chasing down them down, as opposed to someone who wasn't actually responsible for it. (See also: "No, we had to change your plan to something weird because Obamacare says that [thing it doesn't say, or requirement that actually won't take effect for five years or something]! If you don't like it go to him about it not me!")
People now have enough money to afford soup to eat while on a conference call, but not enough money to have a headset with a mute button for the microphone. Thanks, Obama.
165: Krugman's policy prescription for Japan in the 90s and the US in the Great Recession was to deliberately cause inflation. Anti-inflation hysteria has a iron grip over the Fed, though.
It does seem like the only form of class consciousness is at the top, but I think it's too hard to coordinate at that level. The rich can corrupt politics because it's cheap for them to do so. For example, Rick Santorum introduced a bill to ban the US weather service from making its weather forecasts public after Accuweather gave him a donation of $25,000. If they raised prices like that, they would seriously cut into their own profits to the tune of billions. It would be too tempting to cheat.
I think it's too hard to coordinate at that level
Mostly because at least nominally it's illegal.
An economist won wrote a famous book on that.
Also the Fed closely tracks signs of increasing union activity to help them decide if it's time to clamp down, right?
I don't think it would need to be coordinated or anything, though. They'd all be doing what was in their short term interest anyway, and even if they didn't labor isn't a responsive enough market that they'd take a really bad hit before the next electoral cycle brought in hundreds of legislators promising to do whatever it took to kill this runaway inflation. I mean, deliberately colluding silicon valley style would be one thing, yeah, but "with inflation the way it is I'm sorry but the company just can't afford to give anyway a raise right now" would need about as much collusion from CEOs or business owners as the insurance industry needed to start screwing people over and blaming the ACA. (At best it would amount to "Hey, Johnson over there at OtherCorp is right!")
If there's no wage growth, how would there even be inflation? They'd send more money to Saudi Arabia for oil out of the goodness of their hearts? If raising prices were in their interest, they'd do it now.
That's basically the 70s, except OPEC was the heart.
I hope at least they liked the Rockford Files.
They hated everything -- long hair on men, shag carpets, the Rockford Files. Eveything except cocaine.
It does seem like the only form of class consciousness is at the top, but I think it's too hard to coordinate at that level.
Are you kidding? Davos was just a few weeks ago.
Ski vacations they can coordinate.
173: Raising them along with inflation? You see that all the time. (And in some cases you don't see wages rising along with them, or at the same rate.)
The point though is that they'd have a very good short term excuse for it - "Hey don't look at me this thing I hate and am hoping goes away is forcing me to screw you over, there's nothing I can do". And once the inflation dropped down the price rise would fade away and maybe wages would go up a little but maybe not. But either way the inflationary policies would die off quickly enough that you'd need a way of doing it that wouldn't take more than a year or two to have the effect that you wanted.
To have inflation, the price of something has to go up. If it's not wages, then what prices are going up? What mechanism is making them go up?
Scarcity and/or an increase of the money supply.
Or kittens. Just to fuck with us.
For example, Rick Santorum introduced a bill to ban the US weather service from making its weather forecasts public after Accuweather gave him a donation of $25,000.
Accuweather is (was?) a Pennsylvania company. He probably was doing whatever they wanted already. I'm sure they would have to pay a lot more for a senator from some other state.
185: We should apply for a grant to run an experiment where we try to buy in-state and out-of-state senators, to see if that holds empirically.
Now I don't feel bad for not reviewing the free app they have that I use every day.
On Cruz: this is really just plain cruel, and makes me feel sorry for him.
187:
Given your snark it's probably better for them that you don't review it.
188:
That Onion piece is low.
186 is a great idea, and would be perfect for a political science study, or perhaps an awfully well funded piece of investigative journalism. I wonder how much different factors influence politicians - does it matter which party they're in, whether or not it benefits a business in their state or a neighboring one, how much the level of government they're at matters, what they're net worth is, etc.
It would have to be at least a reasonably toxic or at least dumb bit of legislation, though. And there's the obvious ethical problem with running the risk of buying off enough politicians to have it end up passed.
The National Review has doubled down on its utter contempt for poor white people:
190.2 suggests a lack of familiarity with the amount of grant funding available in the social sciences.
148: Juries, of course, are being asked to reach a binary decision that won't, pretty much by definition, reflect the richness of viewpoints of individuals and will necessarily be more "extreme."
Juries in civil cases are asked to reach a non-binary decision when they determine damages. You could easily have a case where the pre-deliberation opinions of the jurors ranged from say $500K-$2M as the appropriate ballpark damage award, but post-deliberation they award $10M, for example. Of course, the hard part is figuring how much of this is jurors egging each other on to higher amounts, and how much is just working through the individual decisions that lead up to the final conclusion in a structured way.
I'm with Walt here. As we've just proven, the Fed can increase the money supply, and the gov't can (modestly) borrow-and-spend, and it won't change the inflation rate one bit unless wages rise. Inflation isn't some abstract thing that's separate from what's happening in the economy. If wages increase faster than productivity*, you get (accelerating) inflation; if they don't, then things proceed normally.
Probably worth saying it explicitly: inflation is not exactly the same as scarcity. Rents in SF and masterpieces aren't inflating, they're just rising in price. If everyone got $100k in Bernie Bucks tomorrow, prices would rise in response, and you'd have inflation**. Under inflation, everything goes up in price, uniformly; under scarcity, specific items go up without secular effects (indeed, ordinary consumption items aren't much more in SF than they are anywhere else, even as housing is 4X as much).
If the economy as a whole is near capacity, then increasing the monetary supply can, maybe, increase inflation, but so far it's been pushing on a string; it may be that the economy actually needs to be already at capacity, and generating "natural" inflation, for the monetary channel to mean much.
*given years of declining share of productivity gains going to labor, I'd assume that there's a ton of wage slack, but at some point inflation would come into play
**theory says that, if it's a one-time deal, then inflation is, at most, temporary, but roll with it.
Well, it would have to be a private grant* so you'd be begging for it from some random wealthy person rather than going through normal channels right?
Also it's sad to admit it but that Cruz ad really might work. Just a silent display of anyone's face looking at the camera would be creepy as anything, but Cruz has a real talent for being creepy. I wonder if a totally silent video clip would work even better though. If you found the right one it totally might.
*"Dear Government. We would like to find out how corrupt you are. Please give us money to do that."
*"Dear Government. We would like to find out how corrupt you are. Please give us money to do that."
Is the idea that there are no meaningful divisions in what the myriad of different governmental agencies might be interested in funding?
Didn't Congress just cut-off any NSF funding for political science anyway?
148 -- I'll give some links when I can, but look up "group polarization" and "juries" and you'll get most of it. It's really pretty interesting. The studies are done in the case of damages. After a trial, where you have a jury that has decided in favor of liability, jury deliberation systematically increases the likelihood that the damages number will be much higher than the mean or median number that the jurors came in with -- often more than the initial number anyone came in with. Somehow, the group setting and discussion systematically pushes people further than they'd otherwise be willing to go. The same effect can work in the other direction -- a jury generally inclined initially to a low number will go lower in deliberations. It's one of a number of similar examples of "group polarization." There are multiple known settings where group dynamics push people to more extreme views than they, collectively, started with. When you start of with like preferences (in those settings) moderation drops out and people move to the limits of the group's belief.
Now, obviously, all deliberation doesn't work like that. And whether this has anything to do with social media or Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump is pure speculation by me. But it sure feels (to me) like it does. And, also, JRoth is right above. It's not necessarily "extremism" if you imagine a linear left/right spectrum that people are moving on. It's, when the dynamic exits, more movement of a group to the least compromising position of a group's member. That's not necessarily a push to the "left" or "right" but it's a real phenomenon that might matter for this conversation.
And since I just got to a real computer, here's a quick link. Note that this is by noted moderate third-way squish Cass Sunstein, so if you're inclined to discount it for that reason alone, go ahead. But I think the phenomena is well established for juries, at least enough for us to think about it and use it professionally in the real world.
199: Interesting! Anecdatally, I was on a jury where we pretty clearly awarded more money than we had originally contemplated.
Anyhow, here's a definitely-beyond-fair-use excerpt from the Sunstein thing, suggesting some mechanisms for group polarization. He's focusing on criminal juries here but the basic points are there. It feels to me like all three explanations are relevant in the social media context. I especially like the idea that people really do consume the information and opinions they get from others, but that this can lead a group with a relatively small amount of initial consensus to get more "extreme" in a particular direction over time.
Why does group polarization occur? There are several explanations (see Brown 1985).The first and most important involves the exchange of information. Fortunately, most people do listen to the arguments made by other people. In any group whose members have a definite initial inclination, the views of most people in the group will (by definition) be skewed in the direction of that inclination. Suppose that the majority position within a group is that a defendant should be convicted, that global warming is a serious problem, or that the incumbent president is doing a terrific job. As a statistical matter, the arguments favoring that initial position will be more numerous than the arguments pointing in the other direction. Individuals will have heard of some, but not all, of the arguments that emerge from group deliberation. As a result of hearing the various arguments, deliberation will lead people toward a more extreme point in line with what group members initially believed. Through this process,many minds can polarize,and in exactly the same direction.
The second explanation involves social comparison. People usually want to be perceived favorably by other group members,even on a jury. Sometimes people's publicly stated views are,to a greater or lesser extent, a function of how they want to present themselves and to be perceived. Once they hear what others believe, some will adjust their positions at least slightly in the direction of the dominant position. In a left-wing group, for example, those who lean to the left will be more acceptable,and for this reason they might well end up leaning somewhat more to the left. So too on a jury:most people do not want to be perceived as silly or stupid,so if eleven people are inclined to convict a defendant, the twelfth will usually go along.
The third explanation of group polarization stresses the close links among confidence, extremism, and corroboration by others (Baron et al. 1996). As people gain confidence, they usually become more extreme in their beliefs. Agreement from others tends to increase confidence, and for this reason like-minded people, having deliberated with one another, become more extreme as they become less tentative. In many contexts, people's opinions become more extreme simply because their views have been corroborated,and because they become more confident after learning that others share their views (Baron et al. 1996). So, too, on a criminal jury: if ten people want to convict a defendant, and two others are unsure, their proconviction inclinations will be strengthened after corrobation. If the two others are Juror 8 [i.e., in 12 Angry Men], they must have a lot of confidence to resist the impact of the other jurors' views.
Since this is technically the primary thread, what are people thinking about what's going to happen this evening when the returns come in?
My guess on the Democratic front is that the breathless "will Sanders repeat Michigan in a huge exciting upset!?" talk isn't worth much and we'll see results way more like the polling we have now. So FL will be a blowout for Clinton, and NC won't be as big of a blowout (because of the northern parts of it) but still a strong win for her. Illinois and Ohio will be up in the air between the two - Sanders might win both, or only one, or neither of them, but the difference between those three results is almost entirely down to bragging rights because they're all basically proportional and the chances of a win big enough to make a difference in delegates is effectively zero. He's got a plausible chance at a bigger win in Missouri though. At the end of the evening we're likely to see either "And the race is back to where it was" or "SANDERS WINS BIG IN UPSET IS HE GOING TO WIN THE NOMINATION!!?? oh and in other smaller news Clinton is now further ahead in delegates than she was yesterday".
On the Republican front there could be more interesting things happening. I'm not at all convinced Trump will win Ohio, but I do think he'll win Florida and North Carolina. Kasich will take Ohio by a relatively small margin, which will make no difference, and with Rubio losing Florida he'll probably get a huge blast of press as a result. I have no idea about Illinois but I'm guessing Cruz and Trump carve it up between them. The delegates are by district though so it could be a blowout for either one, or an even split. Missouri is probably similar there. My guess overall is that because of how the wins are split between different candidates unless Cruz's turnout machine does especially good work Trump is likely to come out with a slightly increased lead over everyone else but not enough to change the dynamic of the race overall.
On the one hand Romney campaigned with Kasich, but on the other hand, Cruz won the all-important Yglesias endorsement.
Its not over till its over: http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/mar/12/inside-bernie-sanders-campaign-do-or-die
Pollster Nate Silver gave Hillary a greater than 99% chance of winning. In the final 48 hours, Bernie and his multitude of supporters achieved the impossible: they closed a 21-point gap in the polls.
I'd love it if this were true, and if Sanders really was hitting a huge boost in momentum and was going to start smashing its way through the states. But to be honest the author is kind of ignoring the other, more likely interpretation of Michigan which is "But the people running the polls had made a mistake and he actually had way more support there."
Talk of Republicans going third-party in November to keep out Trump. Great if it happens, though I say they're still too timid to pull it off.
205: The author identifies himself as a "social engineer." We'll see how effective he is when the results come in tonight.
"Social entrepreneur." Which is somehow worse.
209: Wow. Apparently my mind couldn't come to grips with that professional description.
My big question for tonight is: Is there any scenario where Rubio stays in the race? I can't see one.
If he wins Florida and Ohio, he stays.
You have my word as a sociable data analyst.
Just winning Florida would probably be enough to keep his hopes up, and probably enough for some of his backers to toss him a few scraps in the hopes of keeping the vote divided enough to block Trump or Cruz from an outright win. It's hard to say though. He hasn't looked well recently, and I'm guessing he's probably had enough humiliation at this point.
I think he's staying in the race to put off having to make a decision on who to endorse.
Rubio has been very good at control expectations going into today's contests.
I stole that from the internet but I can't remember where.
Except they probably used the gerund properly.
207:
I think if Hillary gets the DNOM they'll run a third party and effectively throw the race to Clinton -- the devil they know -- in the name of keeping turnout high and keeping as much control of the Senate as possible. If it's Bernie v. Trump, then we're headed into truly uncharted waters.
214: I meant to say "remotely plausible scenario."
A Hillary presidency combined with a very powerful Republican legislature feels like one of the worst possible outcomes of the race. A narrow win by Cruz/Trump (which is what we'd likely see if one of them won*) might not move the Senate to the Democrats but there's a strong decent it would, especially since those two are repellant enough that they could drive turnout up in the places where there are vulnerable senate seats. And then we'd get four years of Republican insanity set right against an unpopular Democrat with a history of compromising away (at best) the things that a huge part of the democratic base want or care about, and a press corp delighted for the opportunity to play "both sides..." and "well every serious person agrees that..." on almost every issue.
*I mean, if we got 60+ Republicans in the Senate and control of the House and Ted Cruz as president that would be worse, but it would at least make clear which party was the one responsible for all the disastrous stuff that happened so if the country survived that without a total meltdown we'd probably get a significant chance of undoing a lot of that stuff and wouldn't end up with complete chaos like we would if it was the Democrat signing off on half those things. At least if you can say "Those are the bad guys." it reduces the number of people thinking "Fuck all this burn shit down".
it would at least make clear which party was the one responsible for all the disastrous stuff that happened so if the country survived that without a total meltdown we'd probably get a significant chance of undoing a lot of that stuff and wouldn't end up with complete chaos like we would if it was the Democrat signing off on half those things.
Um.
223: Think of everything the Democrats could get done in 2020 and 2021, before the country forgets again and turns Congress back over to the Republicans.
Basically yeah to 224: we had a pretty ok sort-of-the-middle-of-2009, as far as actually doing some things, even if the people on the Democratic party side hadn't really come to terms with how literally the Republicans meant their crazy obstructionist stuff. And, well, that's about all we had too, because we didn't have 60 votes in the senate before Franken was sworn in and we didn't have them after Kennedy died. So basically that was the window for things to happen.
If the Republicans got full control of the government, they'd probably fail to prevent a horrible terrorist attack, ineptly invade some foreign country on a false pretext, stand by while a major city is wrecked by a natural disaster, use federal prosecutors to pursue political vendettas, institutionalize torture, wreck the economy, etc., etc.
After four years of that kind of government, there's no way the president could be re-elected, and Congress would turn Democratic for a generation.
Well, to be fair even if he could have run Bush wouldn't have stood a chance in 2008. (Like half those things happened in his second term.)
But yeah the Democrats wouldn't get more than a short window to do something, unless they managed to do something really big that was hard to demagogue (unlike the ACA).
And even then, only as far left as the 60th vote.
Interesting - an editor at the NYT seems to have decided an article as originally published did not come off as sufficiently derisive of Sanders, and tweaked the spin.
Well now I want Sanders to win just grind the NYT's nose in it.
228: And, of course, it would only really matter in the states that weren't smoking radioactive ruins.
229, 230: See, when you spread that kind of information, you turn people like MHPH into extremists.
It took four minutes for CNN to call Florida.
Nothing earthshaking so far. Trump winning except in Ohio, Clinton winning everywhere but especially in Florida.
I assume it's too early to say anything about Ohio. Currently Clinton is up there by as much as she is in Florida. That can't be right. Or it can't be right unless Sanders is just gone.
The ONLY thing I'm interested in discussing is how Trump won the CNMI vote. Who are the angry white Republican men of Saipan?
People in Ohio can't count for shit apparently. How can they be so far behind Florida in getting the totals?
239: "White" is socially constructed.
Ohio needs Common Core math. But CNN is calling it for Kasich with only 20% of precincts reporting.
Who are the angry white Republican men of Saipan?
Huh. Wikipedia says:
"The Republican Party in the Northern Mariana Islands is much stronger than the Democratic Party, but the Conservative Covenant Party, which only exists in the Northern Mariana Islands, has become the main competitor for the Republican Party on the islands and defeated the Republican Party in the last elections by taking the governorship. However, in 2013, the governor, Eloy S. Inos, switched party affiliation from the Covenant Party to the Republican Party, thus making the governorship controlled by the Republican Party."
Who knew?
Didn't the Republicans take over there with the whole Ralph Reed corruption thing?
Who are the angry white Republican men of Saipan?
The sweatshop owners, presumably.
Ohio called for Clinton; others aren't looking great
Sanders really needed these wins to get the nomination, but he should stay in all the way to the end. I got a twitch today that he would drop after tonight.
1) Like Rubio, this really isn't entirely about the candidates, but about the party, in this case the little people who have been working for months in California.
Their effort should be respected. And of course loser's delegates could still have influence at the convention. Money will matter of course.
2) It might be good for Clinton to have the humiliation of losing the West Coast, a whole string of states. But she won't care.
3) Besides health and justice, Clinton looks to have the potential to commit a clear career-killing "gaffe"
Although if the Bush hug didn't do it...
Wiki says that the sweatshops all closed down in 2009. Apparently they used to run their own immigration system and opted for slave labor, which is how the sweatshops got started, and then the federal government shut that down and the sweatshops moved on. So maybe it's "build a wall around the island to keep the workers in"?
The same Wiki thing says that 60% of the population are "contract laborers" (i.e. slaves). So the remaining 40% T are a minority ruling class dependent on exploiting the slaves, so I guess it makes sense that they're into the Republicans.
I guess all the Bernie supporters are too depressed to post and Tigre doesn't know who to yell at now.
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Sodjya hear they're rebooting Xena to make it more lesbionic? I guess nobody cares about frightening the horses anymore.
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Two stats that struck me from the fivethirtyeight coverage. First, this is just depressing.
Sixty-two percent of Ohio's electorate was 45 and older.
Perhaps that's totally normal. I don't know what I would expect for turnout in a primary election, but that is striking, in terms of what it means that old people vote much more consistently.
Second, this is interesting, given that we were talking about McGovern earlier in the thread.
So far, Trump has won 37.1 percent of the votes throughout Republican primaries and caucuses. That percentage is up tonight after Trump had strong results in Florida and other states. And it will could climb further in subsequent states, especially with only three candidates remaining in the race. But the percentage is still on the low end by the standards of previous nominees. Since primaries became widespread in 1972, only George McGovern won his party's nomination with a smaller share of the vote -- just 25.3 percent, with McGovern winning by taking advantage of delegate rules that he had helped to write.
He's leading in Missouri, but I think when it's all counted it'll be a very slight Clinton win. One hope she's learned something after Michigan. Or maybe Trump is just sucking up all the oxygen this last week or so.
If Rubio had dropped out last week, would Cruz have won NC?
Missouri is remarkably close on both sides.
Trump won every county in Florida except Miami-Dade. That's one hell of a dominating performance.
NYT headline: "Kasich Captures Ohio, Keeping Hopes Alive." Hopes for a contested convention, I guess they mean.
It looks like Clinton eked out a "win" in Missouri. And Trump held on there.
I thought Missouri was ridiculously close until I saw the Republican numbers. The joke about it is that which Democrat 'won' there was effectively meaningless: it's proportional so a difference of two tenths of a percent either way is meaningless.
Trump won Missouri by .1%. And winning gets you an additional 12 delegates. That's a hell of a .1%.
Interesting tidbit from Dave Wasserman re: Trump in Illinois. He found several instances where trump delgates with "foreign-looking" names ran enough behind the other Trump delegates that they got beaten. For instance (look for Nabi Fakrodden in 5th over 10% below other two Trumpies and below two Kasich delgates.).
Proportional by statewide vote or proportional by congressional district makes a difference, no?
The Conservative Covenant Party? At least make some token effort not to sound evil, for example by not naming yourself after the religious fanatic villains in one of the most successful games of all time.
The government of Saipan appears to be fantastically corrupt and largely dependent on different ties to US business and Republicans. My guess is that the rise if the Covenant party was about different ways of allocating slush funds.
Listening to the radio last night Trump went way way out of his way to thank various Saipan politicians by name. Like he spent a bunch of time on Saipan politicos. I got the sense that these were people he'd personally known and had cut or was cutting deals with.
We used to have cock jokes, but now we just have Saipanese politics.
From Cruz's "victory" speech:
The mainstream media, the network suits who makes the decisions, want Donald Trump as the nominee. That's why they've given him hundreds of millions in free advertising -- because they are partisan Democrats ready for Hillary. And they know that Donald may be the one person on the face of the Earth that Hillary Clinton can beat in the general election.
...
Two debates ago, Donald Trump promised all of us that he would compromise with Harry Reid on replacing Justice Scalia to the United States Supreme Court. Our rights hang in the balance -- and let me be very clear to the people of America, I will not compromise away your religious liberty.
...
Two debates ago, Donald Trump promised as president to be neutral between Israel the Palestinians. Let me be clear: as president I will not be neutral. I will stand unapologetically with the nation of Israel. Anyone who cannot tell the difference between our friends and our enemies, who cannot tell the difference between Israel and Islam terrorists -- that raises questions about their fitness and judgment to be commander in chief. Donald Trump says he will keep in place this Iranian nuclear deal and try to renegotiate it. I will rip to shreds this Iranian nuclear deal on the very first day in office.
Sure, I understand why people think that Trump is a special and unique danger. But Cruz makes a strong case that we should be grateful if Trump becomes the Republican nominee.
Oh, I hadn't realized that Clinton swept; last I checked, Sanders was up in IL and MO, and I figured he'd take at least one.
538 published an interesting analysis yesterday, using outcomes by congressional district to get a better picture of how Sanders would do in each state going forward. Using that analysis retroactively, it got MI more or less correct (and fit most of the states pretty well). Projecting forward, it predicts a series of Bernie wins starting next Tuesday: other than Arizona, he has at least 61% odds in every race until NY on April 19. A lot of those are small states--ID, UT, HI, AK--but that's a long run of wins. It might have meant something if he's pulled off an upset last night, but as it is, he's terribly far behind in delegates (as NPR noted this morning, HRC now has a bigger delegate lead than BHO ever achieved) and last night's results pretty definitively set the narrative.
Hey, this is funny: according to this analysis, Sanders is 90% likely to winNorth Dakota, but only 34% likely to win South Dakota. I knew they weren't identical, but that's quite a split. By actual percentage, they're projecting him winning 63% of ND votes and 45% in SD.
Two debates ago, Donald Trump promised as president to be neutral between Israel the Palestinians. Let me be clear: as president I will not be neutral.
....I will openly work toward a restoration of the Ottoman Empire because of my love of nations sharing names with household goods (Hello, China and, if they are willing to change the spelling, Greece) and a general feeling of not wanting to fuck with the whole thing any more.
267: Maybe oil workers with weaker ties to the area are going for non-establishment candidates?
Impressive: incumbent prosecutors in both Chicago and Cleveland have been ousted based on their non-charging of police in the cases of Laquan Macdonald and Tamir Rice respectively.
269. If you're permitting spelling changes, you have to ask where does Cruz stand on eating Chilli?
269. If you're permitting spelling changes, you have to ask where does Cruz stand on eating Chilli?
Not sure why that happened, only posted once.
That's more of a food than a household good.
267 -- I believe some extremely large percentage of South Dakota Democrats are Native American. Though I'd also guess that the 538 numbers assume that the NA vote breaks heavily for Clinton because it is a "minority" vote. Which may or may not be true (I have no idea how that vote breaks down) but is probably a lazy assumption and I could certainly see a world in which that vote breaks heavily for Sanders.
That was my first thought but when I looked it up, the difference didn't seem as big as I thought they would be. South Dakota is 8.8% Native American and North Dakota 5.4%
Nebraska, which is I think the reference standard most everybody uses for demographic issues, is only 1%.
OT: Somebody is going to prison for the fappening.
So, it really does look like a very good month for Sanders coming up.
Which is true, and sucks, because my main desired result for the primary is to have people on the internet shut up. And "WE WON ALASKA!!!" vs "NO ONE LIVES IN ALASKA" is exactly the kind of thing that will keep Facebook's moron patrol rolling for at least one or two more months.
Sorry, that should be "WE WON ALASKA AND WHAT ABOUT THOSE SPEECHES TO GOLDMAN SACHS" vs "NO ONE LIVES IN ALASKA AND YOU HATE WOMEN."
I think Sanders has a better shot in some upcoming states than he did last night, but the method article linked in 266 seems a bit weak. It predicted a 42% probability of a Sanders win in Ohio and Clinton won by like 15% or so.
Anyway, I have 54 minutes where I can assume I'm going to be nominated for the Supreme Court.
It's an honor just to have been not specifically ruled out of contention.
I oppose the nominee on the grounds of his having an odd name. Sounds too waspy.
He has a very good head of hair for a 60-something man. I'm sure he'll be fine.
It'll be interesting to see how turn-out plays out in the late states if the Dem race is still going.
My state senate district has a primary this year (our incumbent is termed out). In redistricting, we picked up a bigger portion of the CSKT Nation -- which is half the district, by population -- and the primary is between two lawyers: (a) Native woman who lives on the CSKT and has served a number of terms (up to 2009), but was recently rejected for a judgeship for submitting someone else's work as a writing sample and (b) white guy who lives in town and spent whole career with big environmental organizations, including working on wolf restoration.
Winner will face the (white) farmer who's currently the House member for the CSKT half of the senate district, and it's a very competitive district.
We have an open state Senate race, and I'm going to see them debate tonight. Both are pedigreed left-liberals, formerly Assembly, and I can't find anything big to distinguish them on. They both voted for the various Chamber of Commerce-designatsd "job-killing" bills given the opportunity, both indeed sponsored at least one. Maybe something will come up tonight.
Garland: another for the Jewish/Catholic wall. Where are the Protestant fathers??
Protestants are all ruled out by abortion/cultural issues: if you're culturally Protestant you're either obviously completely secular or quite religious -- there aren't any vaguely religious Protestants left. Quite religious Protestants are divided into hardcore hippies and hardcore evangelicals. None of those three categories are confirmable in the current climate: for religiousish but plausibly not insane (in the eyes of both sides of the spectrum), it's Catholics, Jews, or I guess Hindus.
Of course there are vaguely religious Protestants left, LB, put down your drug of choice.
Alcohol, if 294.last is open to anybody.
There are, but anyone seriously religious is going to call them atheists.
Yeah, huh? There are tons of religious Protestants. Furthermore, 60% of this country is "personally spiritual but not uncomfortably group religious" which is definitely not atheist.
Maybe they're personally spiritual but not willing to join a specific denomination or take the LSAT?
What I can't understand is why the punditry can't understand what Cruz is going to do about Trump. There are basically two options:
(1) participate in stealing the nomination from Trump, and very likely lose to Clinton, ending his presidential political career; or
(2) come in a solid second, watch Trump lose, and (a) being the presumptive frontrunner for 2020 and unofficial leader of the opposition; (b) leading the total obstruction of everything; (c) leading the recapture of the Senate in 2018; and (d) riding a wave into the White House with as much of a mandate as is possible in 21st century politics.
Why on earth would Cruz choose 1 over 2? The good of the party? Do these people know anything about Cruz at all?
A complete moderate who is 63 YEARS OLD?! What the fucking hell, Obama.
300: That choice is "None more Obama".
Well, it's not like he's going to be confirmed.
I really hope this is one of those "Not even this guy!?" nominations, and that he's proposing it in the hopes of keeping "Republicans are insane about this!" in the news for as long as possible.
But I'm also not remotely convinced that he doesn't mean it. And I don't know what the benefits of prompting another "look at how unreasonable they are" round of press coverage (like with the government shutdown) when they're all out there voting for Trump.
Is the idea that since the nominee isn't going to be confirmed, you put up somebody who looks very confirmable to make not even holding hearings look worse. Because if nobody is getting in anyway, what I mainly want is something good to attack Toomey about.
He's a great candidate for embarrassing blue state Republican senators. Which, in context, is worth a whole lot.
299: I really hope there's a third option which is like (2) but doesn't involve the Republicans' recapturing the Senate or Cruz's being elected President.
Seems like a great pick, under the circumstances. It wouldn't be a disaster if he were confirmed, and if he's not going to be confirmed, a totally non-scary white guy who a bunch of Republicans have once voted to confirm sure does put a point on the presidential race.
I'm assuming 293 is a joke.
Can't blue state Republican senators easily just say: "I thought he should have had a fair hearing and an up or down vote in congress, but congressional leadership decided otherwise. I disagreed with that decision, but it wasn't my decision." That seems like a simple message that might even be actually true and could easily also help them boost their image as independent from and more reasonable than the Republican Party as a whole.
"has tutored elementary school children in reading and math for almost 20 years" - yeah, this is all about screwing with any remaining sane Republicans.
I actually like the Monty Hall aspect of the game Obama is playing with the Republican senators with this nomination. "You can approve this moderate (but far to the left of Scalia) nominee now, or you can wait until after the election and approve Clinton's more liberal choice, or you can gamble on what's behind door #3--Trump's potential nominee--which is either a new car or a goat. And by the way, if you choose not to approve the moderate nominee now, you increase the chances of having to live with Clinton's more liberal nominee later."
I mean, a lot of republican senators have basically been saying that since before the nominee was even announced, so I don't know why they can't just continue with that message. And it seems like a message that would be convincing enough to most voters.
It simplifies matters, though, that anyone Trump might appoint would be maximally terrible. It's not either a new car or a goat behind the door, it's a whole herd of goats crammed up against the door waiting to burst out.
It wouldn't be a disaster if he were confirmed
No more than any lost opportunity can be said to be a disaster, no. But it would be a pretty significant lost opportunity. A 45 year old moderate wouldn't be a disaster. A 63 year old bona fide liberal wouldn't be a disaster. But a 63 year old moderate?
314: First guy nominated is going to get rejected no matter what. Having planted their flag on that hill, they can't back down when the first shot is fired.
It simplifies matters, though, that anyone Trump might appoint would be maximally terrible.
Maximally terrible from whose perspective? After all, one man's new car is another man's goat. From the perspective of conservatives, there is a fair chance that a Trump nominee would be preferable than either Garland or Clinton's nominee to be named later.
309: Toomey, at least, already came out against any new nominee.
More to the point, though, I'm pretty sure every GOP Senator already said they will not vote to approve any Obama nominee. With that as an underlying, bright line position, some weasely statement about being in favor of hearings doesn't cut much ice. These guys are already vulnerable, and so the optics matter way more than some nuanced position that is ostensibly preferable to the optics.
317: they already said they wouldn't vote for the nominee? If that's true, I'd missed that. It seems like a stupid thing to say.
Yes. They all signed some document saying they refused to do anything.
Mitch McConnell is in the tv blaming Joe Biden and being unconvincing.
I shorthanded the Protestant thing -- the word I left out was "churchgoing". Being a non-churchgoing Protestant, whatever you say about your spirituality, is going to be a serious negative to the part of the country that's hostile to secular people. If you're a churchgoing Protestant, though, your particular church is very likely to be a strongly political affiliation that will piss off half the country: either social-justice hippie or hard-right evangelical.
Catholics can be churchgoing without it appearing to determine their politics conclusively, and have more room to not go to to church consistently and still look religiously affiliated; sort of the same with Jews, although the feel is different in detail.
Most have said they wouldn't even meet with an Obama nominee, let alone hold hearings or have a vote.
Being a non-churchgoing Protestant, whatever you say about your spirituality, is going to be a serious negative to the part of the country that's hostile to secular people. If you're a churchgoing Protestant, though, your particular church is very likely to be a strongly political affiliation that will piss off half the country: either social-justice hippie or hard-right evangelical.
I think both of these sentences are seriously off-base.
Can't blue state Republican senators easily just say: "I thought he should have had a fair hearing and an up or down vote in congress, but congressional leadership decided otherwise. I disagreed with that decision, but it wasn't my decision."
The problem with that position is that most Trump/Cruz Republicans feel betrayed by congressional leadership. It's not a good year to run with a message of "I wanted to act independently, but in the end I fell in line with the Washington establishment."
Pauline Kael Manhattan-splaining religious attitudes.
323: Does it still seem off base when you're thinking with the abortion issue foregrounded? Non-churchgoing Protestants can do fine in electoral politics, as long as they nod to religion somehow, but for the SC, I think abortion really brings the issue forward.
Or maybe I'm wrong, but I don't have a better explanation for where the Protestants on the Court have gone.
either social-justice hippie or hard-right evangelical.
This is very wrong. There is a big middle ground in all of the mainline Protestant denominations.
Most people aren't paying that much attention to SC nominees, period, and nominees aren't really put forward with the general population in mind. At best, they're put forward with the Washington Plato's Cave version of Real Americans, and then the debate takes place on the cardboard cut-out level.
Pauline Kael Manhattan-splaining religious attitudes.
I really think an extra hyphen between Man and hattan would have clinched the delivery of this joke.
It was already over-determinedly bad.
I'll stormsplain you whether it's bad or not.
This Times piece has Garland to the left of Kagan and Breyer.
329: Man-hattansplaining is correct. Only one hyphen.
"Washington Plato's Cave version of Real Americans" is a great phrase.
It should have been "Washington-Plato's Cave version of Real Americans".
I think you mean "Plato's Washington Cave version..."
Now look who's platosplaining.
Aw damn, the family all got home.
341: This joke was so bad the preposition went on strike.
Why would we want to subtract Plato from Washington? This isn't how I learned to do subtraction in school.
344: Because it's time to get down to hard tacks.
- there aren't any vaguely religious Protestants left
What?? We have at least one whole denomination, maybe 4-5. Andwe still operate some fancy elementary and high schools EVEN IN NEW YORK.
You're in the denomination with the snake-handling?
"But I'm also not remotely convinced that he doesn't mean it. And I don't know what the benefits of prompting another "look at how unreasonable they are" round of press coverage (like with the government shutdown) when they're all out there voting for Trump."
the shutdown make house GOP favorability drop. so this sets up for the scenario where trump is nominated, is polling 15 points behind clinton, and republican congresspeople are out there saying "trump may be crazy, but we aren't. elect us to keep hilary in check". This reminds everyone that GOP congress=obstruction/disagreement, and that they are just as crazy as trump.
(I mean, look at Garland's expression...)
I like Garland a lot but he's too old (he's no more a moderate than anyone on the Court now, and there are almost no true "liberals" in the old fashioned judicial sense anywhere in the federal courts these days). But his age might not matter that much b/c if Hillary gets elected she'll have multiple nominations, not just one, and if she doesn't get elected he won't get confirmed anyway. Unless he does, which would be fine, because he's a really excellent judge.
I like Garland a lot but he's too old
63 is not that old - as a white man in the US he's got another 21 years life expectancy on average, and you can add a bit on to that given his high SES.
I just realized that I have passed one of those depressing life milestones: Too old to be a really good nominee for the Supreme Court.
351: You tell 'em ajay! I still have some good potential-nominee years ahead of me!
I really think an extra hyphen between Man and hattan would have clinched the delivery of this joke.
Whereas I think that using an en dash rather than a hyphen would have improved it enormously.
and there are almost no true "liberals" in the old fashioned judicial sense anywhere in the federal courts these days
And the reason for that circumstance is that Democrats keep nominating centrist moderates. Why??
351 -- yeah but you can add a lot to your legacy by getting an additional 10-20 years from a justice. Clarence Thomas was Bush I, a long time ago, but in 2036 he's still going to be sitting on the RoboCourt in TrumpMerica.
346: I'm calling you a hippie, hippie. I mean, this is a very, very loose usage (to the point of being simply wrong) of the word 'hippie', but the kinds of public positions espoused by the Episcopalian church in the US are pretty out there on the social-justice-warrior side of the spectrum. Which is wonderful, and I'm all for it, but being a seriously churchgoing Episcopalian is a pretty strong predictor of being generally politically leftwing enough (on poverty issues more than anything else, but also everything else) that I think it'd be a political negative for an SC nominee.
I like Garland a lot but he's too old
His age may be a reason why he agreed to be a political football with a minimal chance of actually being confirmed. A younger judge might give this opportunity a pass, betting on a chance of being nominated later when the confirmation chances are better. Whereas he probably knows that this is an opportunity that will not likely knock on his door again.
I don't want a new Xena reboot if Lucy Lawless and Renee O'Connor aren't the stars.
358: The Republicans are placing cowardly obstructions in the road to a Supreme Court nomination. You can't do better than a Garland when you have to deal with a yellow-bricked road.
Excellent chance that Obama's preferences march with Garland's, regardless of his tactics in nominating.
That was some real bullshit-sentiment in his statement this morning about Garland following the rules as a prosecutor "because Merrick would take no chances that someone who murdered innocent Americans might go free on a technicality."
His age may be a reason why he agreed to be a political football with a minimal chance of actually being confirmed.
This reminds me slightly of Peter Gurney's anecdote about doing EOD during the IRA campaigns in the 1970s: he got a letter from a group of old-age pensioners who said that they reckoned too many young EOD officers were getting killed, and they would be happy to take a short EOD course and step in for them, on the grounds that they'd already had long and happy lives and were therefore fairly expendable. (A similar story came out after Fukushima IIRC).
Wasn't the Fukushima thing even a little more rational -- that the plausible health effects would be expected to hit decades out, at which point someone who was old enough at the time of exposure would be expected to be dead of something else already. So not even willing to assume additional risk because they've already had a full life, but in some sense not actually assuming any real additional risk.
The Japanese get old, but not in a way we can understand.
It reminds me of Al Franken's idea to replace the current set of astronauts with the elderly so that we wouldn't have to spent so much on safety.
365: NASA reports the International Space Station's turn signal has been blinking for the past eight months.
So what's up with the rules committee which will convene at some point to determine the Rules for the Republican convention?
As I understand it, current convention rules hold that a prospective nominee must have won at least 8 states in order to be eligible for the nomination (this was put in place in 2012 in order to block Ron Paul). A rules change would be necessary in order to make Kasich -- or possibly Cruz, for that matter -- or anyone else the nominee, in the absence of 8 states in either of their cases.
What I haven't glommed on to quite yet is the makeup of this rules committee.
Since it's a function of the GOP convention itself, I assume it's run by Reince Priebus.
That reminds me: when Charlie Pierce refers to Priebus as "Obvious anagram Reince Priebus", what does he have in mind? Pruriences be?
"Rice Rube Penis." It's a Scooby Doo thing.
I come up with the spoonerism Prince Rebus, but it doesn't quite work as an anagram.
Colbert did a bit on this a few years back, in the form of "You can't spell Reince Priebus without [something that was usually just a near-anagram, I think]."
The best one, the only one I remember, was "Pubic Re-rinse."
If you use his actual first name (Reinhold), the field broadens significantly. Horrid Penis Lube, I Rub Her Old Penis, etc.
I'll go with Pubic Re-rinse.
So you guys have no idea about the convention rules committee, or what? Sigh.
I am just torn between feeling really bad for the Republican party at this point, and being downright alarmed that they've fucked themselves up so badly.
There are bright spots for them: the NPR Marketplace thing -- with Kai Ryssdal or however you spell his name -- now sports a sponsorship by Koch Industries. "We are Koch."
380: I feel neither sorry nor alarmed because fuck those guys. I hope their convention ends in bloodshed. They have earned it.
381: Is that what the rest of the world will be saying about the U.S. soon?
I'm with Apo all the way on this one. I'm relishing watching them eat their own carcass.
381: Trump is openly talking about riots if he's denied the nomination.
The downright alarmed part I could see, but "feeling really bad for the Republican Party at this point" was a joke, right?
Look around at just some of the other sheer lunacy their party perpetrates when it's not trying to shut government down, redistribute wealth upward, and prevent the president of the United States (who, the last time we looked, has the constitutional right and mandate) from filling a vacancy on the Supreme Court.
The Republicans in southern California just got a 7-6 majority on the region's air quality board and have set out to reverse all of its safeguards, "reaffirming new smog rules backed by oil refineries and other major polluters," according to the Los Angeles Times.
Mary Lou Bruner, a Republican crank in Texas who claimed that a young Barack Obama had worked as a black male prostitute, is on track to become a key vote on the state's board of education, the group that, as Matt Levin at the Houston Chronicle writes, is, "already drawing intense criticism for textbooks that, among other issues, downplayed slavery and racial segregation."
I didn't know either of those things. They do alarm me.
Sweet Apo, I get it. But fuckin' A. Unless we stop the shit at a local level, far beyond the FUBAR that's happening for Republicans at the national level, well, we still have a problem on our hands.
Did any of the CA or TX members of the commentariat know about the things quoted just up there?
386: I feel bad for them because apparently they were too stupid to realize what they were creating. They seem to continue to be too stupid to realize it, actually.
387: I actually chided heebie about the TX thing on this eclectic webzine.
388: Who is this "they" you are referring to? People like William Kristol?
I feel bad for them because apparently they were too stupid to realize what they were creating.
Too Dumb To Fail interview (not as amusing as the title would suggest, but interesting to hear a conservative's POV on the whole situation).
As more and more ugly shit about Trump comes to light, I'm slowly coming around to the possibility that a Trump nomination may really mean Clinton wins all 50 states in November. Or something close enough to that result.
388: In the words of Deep Throat: "The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand."
381, 383: Yes. Fuck 'em.
Honestly, some people have no follow-through.
Did any of the CA or TX members of the commentariat know about the things quoted just up there?
Yes.
who claimed that a young Barack Obama had worked as a black male prostitute
I'm assuming this means Texas Republicans are fine with male prostitutes that are white.
I do wonder what the maximum Dem pickup could be in November. I know the standard models say that, even if Dems win every House race called "competitive"*, it's still not enough, but this is one heckuva unorthodox situation. Clinton has been doing well with Hispanics in general, and obviously they should be motivated to turn out.
I guess it will be a real test of the "gerrymandering doesn't matter" thesis. Can Dems win the House popular vote by 10 points and still not gain the Speaker's gavel?
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that a filibuster-proof Senate is simply impossible. But a boy can dream.
*or maybe one category over from there)
I think the Republican move, if they decide they're more concerned about the legislature than the Presidency, is to run a bland but acceptable person as a third party (Mitt Romney maybe), effectively tossing the Presidency, but making sure that Trump supporters and bland guy supporters alike show up to vote straight Republican tickets.
Except that if Mitt is the third party guy, pulling the straight ticket lever votes for Trump.
Oops, meant Trump/Romney + straight Republican ticket for the rest of the ballot.
For anyone who is interested in going down the conservative media rabbit hole, today, The American Conservative is discussing the issue of to what extent it is appropriate to blame the problems of poor whites (and the poor more generally) on their own shortcomings. As is usual when the National Review and the American Conservative get into it on any issue, the American Conservative discusses the issue with much more subtlety, genuine compassion, and depth of understanding:
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/of-pigpens-and-paradise/
In PA, there's a single button that gets you a straight ticket at one go. Not being able to use that will hurt them at least a little bit.
Pennamites: Is there any benefit to voting for Fetterman in the senate primary as a protest vote? Figure it'd send a signal about concern for our poorer communities, although of course in the general I'm more concerned that Toomey goes.
538's delegate target tracker suggests the California Democratic primary in June might push Clinton over the 50% line (excluding superdelegates).
I would be so excited to vote in a primary that wasn't completely settled.
Also, 395 was me.
402: Articles like that are like watching a guy discussing a famine, and steadfastly refusing to mention that eating food might be a solution. Having ruled himself out from discussing any kind of practical remedy for the situation, how can he not wind up at "repent!"
394: well, Jesse seems to like him
404: He's gotten talk in national media as part of Bernie's "revolution", so the more votes he gets, the more that narrative/idea gets advanced.
OTOH, Sestak is a legit liberal who's outside the establishment and is unquestionably electable (he did much better against Toomey than Onorato did against Corbett, and would undoubtedly have won in more or less any year other than 2010).
Why would Trump supporters want to vote for a bunch of party apparatchiks who are trying to sabotage their candidate? They already feel betrayed by GOP élites.
409: Good point, I've barely thought about Sestak. I did like him last time around. If he's seen as on the liberal wing of the party, that could lead to a left-winger vote split and giving McGinty--who I know little about beyond that she seems pre-anointed--the nom. Hrm. Will ponder it more.
"Trying to shit in the urinal" is certainly a good metaphor for some policy debate or another. I didn't read past that because clearly I got the best part.
How has Fetterman actually done since winning office? My impression of him about 5 years ago was that he seemed like primarily a publicity hound. The plans were for things like turning vacant lots into vegetable gardens, turning empty factories into art spaces and performance venues, things that are nice but superfluous and very easy to do given massive depopulation.
I always get off the 61B at Murray, so I don't know.
413: I don't think I've seen anything really investigative, but here are a couple things I know:
Some of the development has actually happened and been beneficial. No way to assess from the outside, but I think his presence has advanced those things.
Turns out Mayor is relatively weak under Braddock's form of gov't, so a lot of the actual governance happens at Council, which has at times clashed with him. I don't know the current status of that, but it does mean that it's a relatively figurehead position, so his publicity houndery isn't a problem on that front.
I don't know how to make that shrugs emoticon, but that's what goes here.
367 -- That isn't what the rule says, and can't be what it means, since it applies to VP nominations as well, and none of them have won any states at all. What the rule says and means is that 8 states have to sign off, at the convention, on a nomination. Condi Rice doesn't have to win 8 primaries. She just has to have party regulars talk 8 delegations with a majority not committed to support her nomination.
Lots of journalists are getting this wrong because it's more fun to do so.
The Bernie machine (by which I mean supporters -- not the campaign officially) is getting really loud and angry, which I understand and am even maybe kind of happy with, but by god the time to do this was in November when there was still time to get some early victories and really turn this into a race, not in March when Bernie's down by a large margin and needs to pull off a miracle to win. Now people are getting angrier and even more anti-Clinton with even less time to kiss and make up before the general and stop whatever abomination the Republicans barf up.
I wanted (and still want) Bernie to beat Hillary, too, but tarring Hillary in March with many of the same attacks that Trump is (unfortunately justifiably -- which is one reason I've always thought Bernie was a better candidate than is generally acknowledged) going to keep using is just recklessly bad strategy.
The Bernie machine (by which I mean supporters -- not the campaign officially) is getting really loud and angry
That is both annoying and completely predictable.
I'm glad that I haven't gone looking for that (and I suppose I'm glad you didn't provide any links, though part of me is curious) but I honestly doubt that it will have much lasting impact -- because the same thing happened in 2004 with the PUMA Hillary supporters. I suspect (hope) that it's healthy to vent and that there will be plenty of time to kiss and make up before the general election.
And you know, I could understand it if it were Hillary running against Romney, McCain (sans Palin), even Marco Rubio, or Kasich. But she's going to be running against someone who is openly inciting people to racial violence. I know that argument after argument has been made that on policy, Trump isn't as bad as the rest. But the incitement to violence and the complete refusal to apologize crossed a line that I think is completely different than anything that anyone else has done. Given the choice between herrenvolk fascism and oligarchy, we're all insane not to show up to vote for oligarchy and work to improve things from there.[1]
I predict things are only going to get uglier. It's only a matter of time before someone gets killed at one of these rallies. Worse, I'm not sure it's going to affect the outcomes at the polls one bit now that we've all got our own echo chambers to rationalize every single bit of evil that our tribal in-groups are guilty of.
[1] I'm not actually so cynical to believe that a vote for Clinton is a vote for oligarchy; but even taking the least charitable lefty view possible towards Clinton it's a no-brainer to show up and vote for her against Trump.
Obviously I don't have a Vulcan mind-meld with Sanders, but I've always thought he started as a protest candidate who was trying to push the party (which in the context of him starting his campaign meant "Hillary") to the left, but didn't have any idea he might in a zillion years actually win. So, now it looks like maybe he coulda mighta won if maybe whatever. I'm sure it's a shock to him and his advisors, but it's too late and maybe always was. The fix was in. Interrupting a coronation is harder than interrupting a wedding ("... forever after hold your peace").
I think he's made it pretty clear that he has always been in it to win, even if he did think it was a long-shot.
If Bernie was a protest candidate, the Dems really got caught flat-footed. No one wanted to really seriously challenge Hillary for the sake of keeping the Old Turks happy, I'm sure, and the result was that they gave waaaay more airtime to a guy with a (totally legitimate) axe to grind that happened to be the same axe that a huge percentage of the party had been wanting to grind for decades. The result is that Clinton is still going to win but she's going to come out rather more bruised than they had hoped. In hindsight if they wanted a Clinton candidacy they really should have urged a few other people to "seriously" run and maybe should have even let Larry Lessig up on the stage to keep airtime away from the old democratic socialist from Vermont.
If there had been a Lessig boom on social media I seriously would have gone full on mass murderer. Would either have ended up on a remote island with no internet or in prison.
I think that it would have been good for this country -- probably better than if Bernie got elected -- if Larry Lessig had won the nomination. I simply can't believe that a guy as well-educated and as full of integrity as Lessig wouldn't have made the Presidency work in one way or another.
In the end, I think that this election cycle has shown that he really was right that money and entrenched interests in politics needed to be taken care of before anything else could get done sensibly. I'll admit I wasn't a fan of the idea of him becoming President just to get campaign finance reform passed and then stepping down, but once he committed to serving the full term I became pretty committed. Actually even gave $300 to his campaign and circulated petitions to get him onstage at the debate. It's a shame things didn't pan out. People didn't really see it -- not that they had the chance -- but he was like Bernie, only with a lot the essentials of a great candidate that Bernie lacks. Many people can't take Bernie seriously because of his demeanor -- Larry didn't have that problem. But like, Bernie, he would have been more electable in the general because of the fact that voters would have known that he wasn't beholden to anybody except them. Probably would have gotten a lot of support from the tech community, too, so it's not like there would have been no major players in his corner whatsoever.
Oh my God why did I even respond. I don't want to end up in prison. Larry Lessig is a gigantic fraud and an asshole and probably the last guy you want to see as President, except for maybe -- MAYBE -- Cruz or Trump. He's probably more of an egomaniac than Trump and only marginally smarter. Just trust me on this.
Sanders initially running as a protest candidate seems reasonable to me: there was an open coronation of a right wing democrat going on with everyone certain she would win, and there was a pushback against it from the left (Draft Warren!) which made clear there was at least some clout to be wielded there for the progressives. It's the perfect time for someone whose ambitions were policy focused and who wasn't too reliant on party patronage to try to shove the party around a bit in favor of his preferred policies, especially if he's sitting close to the end of his political career anyway. (I kind of suspect Webb/Chafee might have been thinking the same kind of thing but on the other side of Clinton.)
I don't think he realized exactly how much protest was waiting out there, because I'm not convinced anyone did. I have trouble believing that if Warren/other-progressive-darling/whatever had any idea that there was that much just sitting around out there waiting to be picked up by Sanders they still would have stood back and let Clinton stroll through the earlier stages. And since it became clear that he has real power he's been doing his best to use it as hard as he can to push things in the direction he wants because that's what you do when you want something and you have power.
I don't know about the danger to Clinton. I think the comparison between them is hurting her right now, but that's not because of the criticisms - it's hard to imagine a gentler way Sanders could be pointing out the serious differences between the two of them. What's worrying is that she still doesn't seem like she knows how to respond to them, which is going to be a big problem when the right starts going after her with those same things. What she needs to do is to find a way to answer those criticisms and reassure the Sanders voters, and when she does that it'll defuse a lot of their clout for the general. What's scary is that she doesn't seem to know how to do that right now. It makes me wonder if her plan wasn't really to jump significantly to the right after the nomination, which would soften a lot of those attacks only now she's trapped and can't figure out a backup response.
424
I was hoping for a somewhat lengthier response, but you packed enough anger into those two lines that I consider my troll duties for the week complete.
Really glad I didn't have to try to pull that off in person because I don't think I could have made it through any of those sentences with a straight face.
Bernie is to Warren as McCarthy was to RFK? (Or does that violate the analogy ban?)
It makes me wonder if her plan wasn't really to jump significantly to the right after the nomination
There is no question her plan was to jump significantly to the right before the nomination. She would not be saying any of the things she's saying about a lot of issues that have been forced on her by Sanders' insurgency. She knows that for some reason half the country has long been convinced that she's some sort of secret socialist superliberal, and she planned to start as early as possible assuring them that she is really a reasonable moderate conservative democrat--contrasting herself to the extreme right wing Republican candidates.
Sanders totally wrecked this plan, and good for him.
No kidding - as unappealing as I find her right now as a candidate (a lot) if she was cheerfully cruising to the nomination three or four notches to the right of where she is now I would be feeling ill.
I wonder if she'll manage to adjust to it in time for the general though: Sanders is very good evidence that the general picture she has of the electorate is ...inaccurate.* But I'm worried that that hasn't sunk in in any serious way for her (because, well, she's not someone with a history of learning a lot from mistakes or adjusting quickly to different circumstances).
*Clinton: Hey - don't worry everyone! I'm a Democrat sure but that doesn't make me a socialist liberal or anything ha ha ha!
Old Man Yells at Cloud: I'M A GODDAMN SOCIALIST LET'S BREAK STUFF AND CHANGE EVERYTHING!!
..
Voters: Hmm... Tell us more about these changing and breaking things policies..
In hindsight if they wanted a Clinton candidacy they really should have urged a few other people to "seriously" run and maybe should have even let Larry Lessig up on the stage to keep airtime away from the old democratic socialist from Vermont.
Carchetti, and the space telescope guy who is actually a Republican, and I think there was another guy, weren't serious enough for you?
I wonder if she'll manage to adjust to it in time for the general though: Sanders is very good evidence that the general picture she has of the electorate is ...inaccurate.*
Everything is good evidence of that! Ted Cruz has made more sensitive and socially conscious comments about the battle between angry young people and Trump's goon squad than she has. Even though Ted is running directly against Trump and she is running directly against the leader of the Trump protesters/Bernie-Jugend movement, that does not make sense.
Holy shit was that troll well played. I mean not against a very difficult player, i.e., me, but the eau de sincere was impressive.
Is this this first Trump ad aimed directly at Clinton? Or have I missed previous ones?
Watching that ad makes me realize how very much I'm not looking forward to this election season.
I didn't actually know we disliked Larry Lessig. I don't know much about him, but he's certainly said some sensible things. Does anyone have a link to a short summary of what's wrong with him? (Short but longer than 424.)
I was wondering the same thing after Tigre said that, so I googled "Larry Lessig fraud" and found this:
This is classic Lessig: co-opting a seemingly populist cause like copyright reform, while faithfully carrying forward a corporate agenda. In this case the MacGuffin is campaign finance reform but to my eye the real plot line involves a clever new way for Silicon Valley to influence (or threaten) our elected representatives with BIG money. Just look at the list of donors especially the big donors. It's a who's who of Silicon Valley and anti-copyright ideologues. No surprise the serial innovator of artist rip-offs, Sean Parker (Napster, Facebook, Spotify), tops the list at $500,000! But something else becomes readily apparent when you dig down deeper into the midsize donors: there sure are a hell of a lot of Google employees who've donated to this PAC. So many that one shouldn't be faulted for questioning whether this was coordinated. I've helpfully compiled all the donors listed on the FEC documents into a single Excel file that you can search and sort on 22 fields. Don't believe me? Dig in and draw your own conclusions.
This state senate Dem debate is nice to watch, but damn are we in a liberal bubble.
One of the two career politicians running has signed on to free tuition.
The last time I tried to discuss politics on Facebook I found myself trying to convince a 24 year old Bernie supporter that term limits for elected officials are stupid and there's a reason the Koch brothers want them. I typed out "You don't know what the fuck you're talking about" and then thought better of it, deleted it, and took my dog for a walk instead.
435: It's the first one I've seen, but I don't have any more idea if there have been others.
God only know how Clinton's going to respond to that kind of thing. The entire ad is designed to undercut "Trump is a dangerous clown/Clinton is at least a stable serious politician" story that everyone has been assuming will lead to a massive Clinton victory. Making Clinton look silly in ads probably isn't even that hard, really, and responding to it without sinking to his level (and failing at it) is something the Republicans haven't really figured out how to do yet.
Looks unlikely to change anyone's mind, so I don't see why she should respond at all.
Heck, even the gadfly heiress candidate wouldn't be horrible.
"We" don't dislike Lessig, Tigre does for the obvious reasons.
I thought this was a decent approach for anti-Trump ad. The execution should be sharper, but it's still pretty good -- in that it might actually shift people's opinions.
Why, enough of those ads and he'll barely get any self identified feminist voters!
(Some of those are genuinely bad, but a lot of them are exactly the kind of nasty boys-will-be-boys stuff that all kinds of conservatives go for, and really easy for women inclined in his direction to laugh off. Maybe as a base motivating play for the Democrats it could have an effect, but I'm surprised Romney and Jeb! thought that would do anything to him. Maybe if it was shortened down to some of the most garish/awful ones it could work. )
Every candidate thinks they can win, even if they also know they can't. And you have to.
Sanders was probably the ideal candidate for Clinton to run against in the primary. He doesn't care about Clinton personally so he has no interest in the scandals that could actually hurt Hillary in the general, and he makes the Democrats look principled and not-total-dicks. He pushes a hard left line and Clinton gets to look moderate. He's an old white guy who makes Clinton look comparatively young and highlights the fact she'd be the first female president. Beating him doesn't run the risk of alienating any big demographics. He's going to stay in for a long time, so he keeps Clinton in the news, but there's no real risk he'll win, so Clinton can stay positive and start pivoting to anti-Trump messaging now. And Hillary gets to field-test her campaign (especially the turnout aspect) under moderate but not severe stress.
Basically, if I was Clinton and I had to design a candidate to run against, an idealistic old white guy who had no real hope of winning would have been basically my ideal.
I agree with 446; the biggest danger is people associated with her campaign forgetting to be positive.
Speaking of positive, we went to this -- http://missoulanews.bigskypress.com/GreenRoom/archives/2016/03/16/jeff-bridges-brings-a-bit-of-the-dude-to-the-wilma-and-montanas-campaign-season -- last night. Folks, if this show comes to your town, drop what you're doing and go.
I also agree with 446. I think this has been a really good and productive primary season on the Dem side, despite the inevitable people being jerks on the internet.
Don;t be so hard on yourself, teo.
I'm also happy that at this point there doesn't seem to be any reason for me to caucus on the 26th. Even my FB friend who is very involved in the Young Dems and is helping organize it was posting recently about how much the process sucks and how they should change it for next time.
369: I don't know about an anagram, but the joke I remember is that if you disemvowel his name, you're left with "RNC PR BS".
415: CopyShrug.com
439: You should have. Well, not in those exact terms, probably, but it's worth explaining why term limits are a foolish idea, why encouraging and providing politicians with incentives to approach civil service as a career is worthwhile (against the alternative of the corporate revolving door), etc. Being against term limits is political woo that is unfortunately attractive to the pissed-off and newly politically engaged, like supporting third parties in an American-style electoral system. There should be a FAQ somewhere with rote answers for that species of nonsense.
Also agree with 446. Aside from inciting violence, it's hard to picture a better primary season. Maybe if Cruz were destroying the republicans.
Cruz is destroying the Republicans. He's just doing it in a more subtle way than Trump is so it gets overlooked.
Maybe he's perfecting the Republicans.
437
The link seems a bit thin on actual evil things Lessig's PAC has done. The website sucks, and there are undisclosed small donors? Yeah, that makes him the new Karl Rove, all right.
443
"We" don't dislike Lessig, Tigre does for the obvious reasons.
Because he's an IP lawyer (that's right, isn't it?) and Lessig is for copyright reform?
446: Beating him doesn't run the risk of alienating any big demographics.
I'm not sure she's done it yet, but there's absolutely a possibility of alienating pretty big demographics with Sanders, if only because they're the ones (lower income; young) that tend to face obstacles to voting and so turn out in lower numbers if nothing is pushing them. I think Clinton absolutely thought she could mostly run without doing anything to appeal to the openly progressive demographic, because the whole '90s Clinton strategy was something like "Hey, where are you going to go anyway?" What's threw her off was the realization of just how far to the left the under-30 demographic was was painfully counterproductive (especially when it was clear that women under 30 weren't voting differently than men under 30). Her dropping favorability numbers are something worrying, and I suspect that a large part of that is the result of that reaction.
Here's a YouTube video for how to pronounce schadenfreude. Just in case you find yourself wanting to talk about Republican politics in the coming months.
The tag at the end seems to mispronounce "pronunciation".
Pronunciation is what professional town criers engage in.
Sean Parker, at least, is indeed doing a good deed by bankrolling marijuana legalization in CA. (I'm sure he envisions a corporatized structure, but I don't know that he means to benefit personally, and under his steering pretty good language has emerged.)
It's legal to solicit super PAC and PAC donations from employees provided the solicitation meets certain criteria. Lots of companies do it for their own PACs.
The whole Lessig campaign was a silly waste, but if there was Google employee coordination for donations it was probably legal.
I thought we didn't like Lessig, at least in the context of politics, because his campaign was a complete goddamn farce. Elect me president on this one issue and I'll pass a bill over Congressional opposition using my magical "mandate" and "resolve", then I'll resign! If he ever thought that was an actual thing that would happen he's an idiot. And then after receiving criticism for that he said oh yeah, maybe I'll come up with some positions on other policies too and govern based on those even though I've already given away the game that I don't give a shit about that other stuff..
419 has an interesting statement:
Given the choice between herrenvolk fascism and oligarchy, we're all insane not to show up to vote for oligarchy and work to improve things from there.
In context, Trivers is talking about Hillary vs. Trump, but as a principle, it strikes me as being more applicable to the Republican primary - and I'm not sure the conclusion in that context is correct.
I mean, oligarchy is a pretty big, intractable problem in the USA. I am tempted to suppose, at least in the long run, the US can make progress against fascists in a way that has heretofore been impossible against oligarchs.
So in the context of the Republican Party, I'm pretty much rooting for Trump. I think he's a problem that America-at-large knows how to solve, in a way that Romney or Rubio are not.
This machine kills oligarchs.
The thing about Lessig is that basically everything is like that presidential campaign. If you actually care about copyright reform (which I do! But this also holds if your poisitions are different than mine) Lessig is your worst enemy because his stupidity and egomania have helped fuck up that prospect for decades. Same with campaign finance. He's a classic personally egomaniacal professor type and shouldn't be allowed anywhere near policy by an electric fence. Also on economics to the extent he has views he's a libertarian. Hillary Clinton is like 8 orders of magnitude to his left. Also he's interpersonally a shithead
Thanks, politicalfootball. That's useful for me.
How could Clinton possibly be to his left? I mean, I don't know his position on most issues, but on the issues he's spoken about most prominently, he's pretty far left.
Thank you, 452.2.
464 is correct. And 423 was very impressive.
469: If he's even a little libertarian on economic issues, he's to the right of Joe Fucking Lieberman.
467, 423. I basically like Lessig's policy suggestions. He's right that campaign finance is a structural problem that blocks fixing many other problems. The campaign may have been pointless wrt him personally, but the narrower aim (identifying friendly legislators and getting legislation to fix the problem at least proposed and possibly passed) seemed sensible to me. I gave to the campaign also.
Regarding copyright-- given that Disney's lawyers wrote the Sono Bono copyright act of 1998, are you completely sure that a wannabe reformer whose policies you can't be bothered to describe because his manners are more interesting, are you completely sure that the reformer rather than entrenched interests are the problem there?
I was thinking about the primaries this morning, and had two ideas. First, I was thinking about Kevin Drum's post about Hillary Clinton's "honesty problem."
The other quotes are similar. It doesn't even matter if they're the truth. They don't sound like the truth. People my age might forgive Hillary a bit of this lawyerlyness because we remember the '90s and understand the damage that even a slightly misplaced word can cause. But millennials don't. They just see another tired establishment pol who never gives a straight answer about anything.
Life isn't fair. Politics isn't fair. I think Hillary Clinton is careful, a little bit paranoid, and, ironically, congenitally honest on policy issues. She just can't bring herself to give simple-minded answers when she knows perfectly well the truth is more complicated. But especially this year, when her competition is a guy like Bernie Sanders, this just makes her look evasive and insincere.
Previously I said that I thought this missed the point, in term of identifying what it was that made people distrust Hillary. But this morning, I thought that it does identify something important, and that is part of what it is about Hillary that makes her less of a natural politician and a less effective campaigner than many people -- when Hillary hedges a statement it's immediately obvious that she's hedging something. She doesn't have the ability, that some politicians do, to make a statement on a controversial topic which sounds acceptable to everybody. She always sounds like she's weighing too sides and avoiding committing to either of them.
That said, I was also thinking that this sort of statement from MHPH is the kind of thing that drives me crazy about the primaries (emphasis mine).
I'm not sure she's done it yet, but there's absolutely a possibility of alienating pretty big demographics with Sanders, if only because they're the ones (lower income; young) that tend to face obstacles to voting and so turn out in lower numbers if nothing is pushing them. I think Clinton absolutely thought she could mostly run without doing anything to appeal to the openly progressive demographic
I believe this stems from a basically true premise -- that Clinton as president is likely to disappoint progressives, and turns it into something false. One of her first major speeches of the campaign, long before Bernie Sanders looked like a credible challenger, was about criminal justice reform, and she said all the right things and explicitly distanced herself from the 90s crime bill.
If you go back and read her speech kicking off the campaign she absolutely tries to appeal to progressives (quotes below).
This, I think, relates to the point that JRoth has made before, that it's irritating when people give Obama a pass for something, and then turn around and attack Clinton for it (and I'm not saying that MHPH is doing that). I say that because in 2008 Obama was the choice of the "openly progressive demographic." He wasn't perfect, but he was exciting, and there was a lot of support for him (and he was able to bring out people who wouldn't have otherwise voted). Then his first term was fairly disappointing. He supported a stimulus package and a health care reform bill which both conceded a great deal to his sense of what was politically possible, and he oversold them, to some extent, as major changes. But now, looking back at his entire presidency, there's much to like, and the things which were disappointments are still disappointing but, on balance, he looks like a good president.
Given that it seems like it should be possible to acknowledge that Hillary Clinton would probably disappoint, but that isn't the same thing as saying that she hasn't done anything to reach out to progressives.
Here are some quotes from the speech.
We're still working our way back from a crisis that happened because time-tested values were replaced by false promises.
Instead of an economy built by every American, for every American, we were told that if we let those at the top pay lower taxes and bend the rules, their success would trickle down to everyone else.
...
Just weeks ago, I met another person like that, a single mom juggling a job and classes at community college, while raising three kids.
She doesn't expect anything to come easy. But she did ask me: What more can be done so it isn't quite so hard for families like hers?
I want to be her champion and your champion.
If you'll give me the chance, I'll wage and win Four Fights for you.
The first is to make the economy work for everyday Americans, not just those at the top.
To make the middle class mean something again, with rising incomes and broader horizons. And to give the poor a chance to work their way into it.
The middle class needs more growth and more fairness. Growth and fairness go together. For lasting prosperity, you can't have one without the other.
Is this possible in today's world?
I believe it is or I wouldn't be standing here.
Do I think it will be easy? Of course not.
But, here's the good news: There are allies for change everywhere who know we can't stand by while inequality increases, wages stagnate, and the promise of America dims. We should welcome the support of all Americans who want to go forward together with us.
. . .
Follow-up: Just to be clear, I'm not saying that the quoted speech is specifically targeted at progressives, just that she is clearly signalling awareness of progressive concerns and the desire to address them.
Obama has been a good president only in a relative sense when comparable to possible alternatives. He does not even approximate the platonic ideal of a good president.
Harry Reid is calling on Republican leadership to refuse to support Trump:
http://www.vox.com/2016/3/17/11254638/harry-reid-donald-trump
This is going to get even more interesting.
I don't know that Lessig has had much impact on campaign finance. It's a boring issue where it's hard to get much notice, and I doubt Lessig has a single idea about it that people working on the issue hadn't already thought of*, aside from gimmicks that involved him personally.
I say this as someone who more or less agrees with his campaign finance goals and had never met him.
*To be fair, he may not be claiming his ideas are new. I just don't think he's pushing existing ideas further.
He does not even approximate the platonic ideal of a good president.
I think that's sort of inherent in the definition of "platonic ideal".
It's difficult for any news starting "Harry Reid calls on Republicans to... [anything]" to grab me.
It occurs to me, if any of Sean Parker's economic beliefs at all are reflected in the Adult Use of Marijuana Act, he can't be any kind of libertarian - that has small business and consumer protections out the wazoo.
475- I don't think that is actually knowable. I say that as someone who has always (since it was announced he would speak at the convention) said he was corrupt. We just can't be sure about the constraints he operates under. Who knows who has threatened him, and how credibly, if he moves an inch to the left.
I support Bernie but I always recognized he just might not be allowed.
My guess is that Reid is smart enough to know that doing that only puts the Republicans in an even worse place when it comes to Trump. If he does this publicly enough, and Democrats do it regularly enough, it keeps the "even Trump is too much for you, right?" stuff on the front page. If they refuse to disavow him in the face of people calling for them to do it then they really own him (which is bad), and if they do disavow him then they're putting themselves even more at odds with the base (RINOs!), which is also bad.
I say that because in 2008 Obama was the choice of the "openly progressive demographic."
There were a lot of people supporting him, but from what I can remember a big part of the progressive support from politics nerds (at least) had less to do with thinking he was Progressive Luke Skywalker and more to do with (1) he's not a f***ing Clinton; (2) he's not one of the Iraq war Democrats; and (3) locked into the Clinton/DLC network or surrounded by their operatives. The first Great Betrayal as far as I can recall was when he immediately surrounded himself with a lot of those people after winning the election (including Clinton herself, but also a lot of the other guys). That was seen as one of the major causes of the disappointing features of the ACA and the stimulus package too (as opposed to the important/good features of them - they're better than not by far).
Since then most of the things that he's gotten praise for have been things that were more closely linked to after he jettisoned a lot of those people, and especially the general no-fucks-given Obama of the last year or two. Just because he was the choice of the progressives, and Clinton had a lot more animosity pointed against her, doesn't mean anyone thought he was perfect or an impressively progressive figure. It's just that Clinton was (and is) significantly worse from a progressive angle.
Obama may well be the best president possible under current political conditions--I don't really question that. (I mean I do question it, but it's hard to disprove.) But that doesn't mean he's objectively "good".
I don't think that is actually knowable. I say that as someone who has always (since it was announced he would speak at the convention) said he was corrupt
Well, I knew he was corrupt from the moment he was born.
(I also remember clearly when the slam on the most progressive parts of the democratic base was* that they were purity ponies who only wanted unicorns and rainbows when they complained about Obama's policies or got mad about compromises that they weren't convinced were necessary ones. So it's hard to see a double standard there.)
*"was"
One of the weirder things about the 2008 primary is that Obama's policies (domestically) were slightly to the right of Hillary's, at least officially, yet Obama easily wrapped up the progressive vote. Mostly b/c people made a decision either that policy platforms didn't matter, or that the Iraq vote was a bigger deal. But officially at least Obama was the least "progressive" of the three main candidates, though all were mainstream liberal democrats. A lot of people noticed this at the time, but the idea that there was some kind of Obama betrayal was mostly based on people letting their imagination about him get way beyond anything he actually said or did.
That s/b officially least progressive on domestic policy. I can't actually remember any foreign policy differences in 2008, except Clinton trying to walk back her Iraq vote.
There were a lot of people supporting him, but from what I can remember a big part of the progressive support from politics nerds (at least) had less to do with thinking he was Progressive Luke Skywalker . . .
Right, that's why I said you don't fall into the category of praising Obama and slamming Clinton. Anybody who called Obama corrupt in 2008 and Clinton corrupt now is being consistent (and correct in meaningful ways), but they're also clearly outside of the political mainstream*.
I also recognize that, "time to get disappointed by somebody new (who also happens to be a familiar figure from the 90s)" isn't an inspiring slogan, and I understand why there aren't going to be a lot of people flocking to that banner. I just happen to think that's a more accurate description of Clinton, and of this race, than the people that argue that she's unusually corrupt or argue, as you did, that she wishes that she could ignore the progressive wing for the entire race, and is only forced to acknowledge them by the presence of Sanders.
* Which may good. The political mainstream is too narrow. But see Bruce Wilder commenting at CT about why he wouldn't vote for Clinton in the general and coming across as a "purity pony" (as you put it).
Yeah, there are clearly Bernie supporters whenever trusted Obama (or only trusted him briefly), but the idea that, what, 40% of Dem primary voters to date are people who consider Obama to be all of the awful things they say about HRC is ridiculous.
OK, that's not fair, because there's clearly a sliver of Bernie voters who would genuinely be happy to vote for her, but are happier to vote for a real lefty. But I think it's smaller than the number of people who are basically happy with Obama but consider Clinton to be... I don't even know. GHW Bush?
Don't you think that negative things about her being blown out of proportion right now explains many peoples image of her?
Anybody who called Obama corrupt in 2008 and Clinton corrupt now is being consistent (and correct in meaningful ways), but they're also clearly outside of the political mainstream*.
Hi
Although by election day my expectations for Obama had already been lowered, he still disappointed me. Worse than I could have believed.
Clinton is not capable of disappointing me. Chattel slavery and thermonuclear war are in the range of possibilities.
Being outside of the mainstream is closer to a complement than a criticism at this point. The mainstream is defined by people who exist to lie to you, and who get more obvious and blatant about it every day.
492: I kinda like Wilder, but am unsatisfied and understimulated by his style. Some kind of institutionalist, maybe a New Institutionalist, he writes in a kinda of vague generality that is not theoretical enough for me to make sense. Maybe Veblen, maybe Wolin, always talking about risk, insurance, the need for hierarchies. I need cites, a bibliography.
He is good at the popular sort of Internet argument that shows intelligence and verbal skills rather than erudition.
But he's ok. Shows up at Ian Welsh's blog.
494: To some extent, sure, but something like the bogus email thing shouldn't lead people to say stuff like 430 or "I think Clinton absolutely thought she could mostly run without doing anything to appeal to the openly progressive demographic", which, as NickS showed, is essentially untethered from the truth.
Worse than I could have believed.
bob knew that he would privatize social security, but even he couldn't imagine that Obama would actually give all the money in the Social Security Trust Fund to Goldman Sachs.
499: Not Obama's fault, he needed a figleaf of taxes on corporate jets, but the Republican House wouldn't give it to him.
But after giving health care to Wall Street, he was overambitious, and the Republican base had been alerted and mobilized by TARP whereas Democrats are still delusional.
Or at least most Democrats over 40.
Chattel slavery and thermonuclear war are in the range of possibilities.
Vote for indentured servitude and fission-only weapons!
I keep telling y'all, this is like watching a pickup game between James and Curry, and saying James looks old and a little slow and has lost a lateral step...that is what criticizing the likes of Cruz and Rubio is like. We do because we are terrified of the distance from the elites, bring them down to reassure ourselves. Tell you what, the next time you talk a 60 year old titan into giving you 5 million dollars for a ridiculous plan let me know.
These people are in the running for the most powerful difficult job in the history of the world, talking billionaires out of their money on a daily basis, getting umpteen millions to worship and sacrifice for them.
They are so out of our league it's ridiculous, trying to parse their speech and determine credibility or motives is like trying to play basketball with Lebron James.
Do not listen to a word they say. Ever. You are not capable, and it will only confuse you, as it is supposed to.
Also re:473 - I'm not sure what in that speech is supposed to count as 'reaching out to progressives' or running in a left wing way or something. Pretty much the entire thing is standard uplifting political rhetoric that could have come just as easily from Ted Cruz, because it's detail free but inspiring calls for support. There's nothing wrong with that - it's an announcement speech and that's exactly how they all sound . But to say she's appealing to progressives or positioning herself on the left doesn't seem obvious at all.
And for each of the quotes you listed that are actually progressive-seeming, even a little, there are bits of tax-relief-for-job-creators stuff like:
We will unleash a new generation of entrepreneurs and small business owners by providing tax relief, cutting red tape, and making it easier to get a small business loan.Or suspiciously Arne Duncan school-reform-y talk about how education is important and so we need to improve schools by finding the best teachers :
Our country won't be competitive or fair if we don't help more families give their kids the best possible start in life. So let's staff our primary and secondary schools with teachers who are second to none in the world, and receive the respect they deserve for sparking the love of learning in every child.Or the kind of everyone-comes-together stuff that Obama went in for pretty heavily and may have gotten stung by:
So I'm looking forward to a great debate among Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. I'm not running to be a President only for those Americans who already agree with me. I want to be a President for all Americans.
Is there anything you can really infer from that? Certainly nothing more than you could from the bits you quoted. But that's because it's a pretty generic Democratic party speech. I don't see how it amounts to reaching out to appeal to progressives or saying she's going to run on a strong progressive platform or anything: it's just as consistent with running in a way that completely ignores the stuff that Sanders is dragging her into.
Also "The politics of failure have failed. We need to make them work again!" is maybe the greatest summary of like half of all political speeches out there.
I'm not sure what in that speech is supposed to count as 'reaching out to progressives' or running in a left wing way or something. Pretty much the entire thing is standard uplifting political rhetoric that could have come just as easily from Ted Cruz, because it's detail free but inspiring calls for support.
Sure. FWIW, I'd cite the speech about criminal justice reform as a substantial appeal to the progressives and the campaign speech as a symbolic appeals (starting from the opening which invokes FDR and the UN, for example -- that isn't a policy position, but it's not the symbols that Cruz would use).
Also, to be slightly more pointed in my response. I said:
Just to be clear, I'm not saying that the quoted speech is specifically targeted at progressives, just that she is clearly signalling awareness of progressive concerns and the desire to address them.
To which you reply
But to say she's appealing to progressives or positioning herself on the left doesn't seem obvious at all.
But you then go on to describe the bit I quoted as
actually progressive-seeming
At that point, I feel like you could just agree with me, rather than presenting your position as disagreement. I'm not claiming that she was running as a progressive, I was just disputing your claim, "I think Clinton absolutely thought she could mostly run without doing anything to appeal to the openly progressive demographic"
The entire reason to put, "actually progressive-seeming" things in a speech is because you think that is a demographic that you need to appeal to.
Now, the point I'm making is fairly narrow, and perhaps you could accuse me of quibbling. But I'm quibbling for a reason because I don't object to you supporting Sanders, or finding Clinton unappealing. What I want to object to is what I'd call, "argument by innuendo" which is part of the primary season that I find tiring, and which I wanted to push back against.
"It's a progressive serving institution."
You know, instead of spending all this time arguing about dissident Republicans, maybe we could get the SAS to come in and clean house.
I think "seeming" is carrying more weight in my mind, there, though (and also probably "mostly"). I don't think she's saying anything particularly conservative with the small-business talk or whatever school reformers count as with the good teachers thing. And she's running for the Democratic party candidacy (even when it looked like she wasn't so much 'running' as 'walking'), so you're going to see basic democratic party stuff showing up. But I think it's clear that she wasn't really intending to run on the stuff that's now taking up a lot of her time either.
The speech you did link to makes me suspect her ideal campaign was built around more social-domestic policy stuff* with some gently phrased hawkery**, and a lot of 'I can work with conservatives and wealthy interests to get things done'. And she's definitely not running in a race that's as conducive to appealing to moderate democrats with some conservative democrat stuffed tossed in there. And there would be some progressive stuff in there too, but more 'entry on the issues page but not really mentioned otherwise' stuff.
*Not to say this is unimportant, but not "we need fundamental change to the structure of society" as much as "we need some moderate social programs and also to stop the Republicans from murdering us all."
**Which, I know, she mentions a lot less than the other stuff, but check out the actual speech she was referring to. I had completely forgotten what the actual thing was about.
The speech you did link to makes me suspect her ideal campaign was built around more social-domestic policy stuff* with some gently phrased hawkery**, and a lot of 'I can work with conservatives and wealthy interests to get things done'.
Part of why I looked up that speech was because I thought it is interesting to see how she would position herself in the absence of any specific opponents. We could speculate about who she expected or feared running against (Biden?), but that speech was clearly designed to be broad enough to cover a range of possibilities.
But, let me say, 509 is great. I think that if I've gotten you to read her speech (and then read the FDR speech that she quotes) and start thinking about the specific language she's using, I'm happy and am going to pat myself on the back and call that a win.
I say that because, a while ago there was a day when I was feeling cranky about the conversations on unfogged about the primaries and I found myself wondering, "is anybody actually going to change anybody else's mind, or is this all just posturing?" And I thought about how it is that conversations work to change people's opinions and there are two basic ways. First offering new things to consider -- new evidence, new arguments, or making the case that something familiar is more important that it might seem. Second, repeating familiar positions often enough that they become part of the background that everybody takes for granted as part of our collective sense of (approximately) "what do the people on unfogged think about [X]."
I like unfogged, and in cases where I think there is a general consensus about something that definitely affects my opinion of the topic.
So when I comment on the primaries I'm mostly doing so to either (a) answer a question, (b) make an argument or (c) state, "no I do not think that's a fair summary of the situation" to a statement that I think is clearly too broad. The last caries the potential for getting sucked into stupid arguments, but I still think it's worth doing from time to time. But I'd much rather be involved in a conversation about specifics.
So, for that reason, I appreciate 503 & 509, and am happy to have steered the argument in that direction.
I found myself wondering, "is anybody actually going to change anybody else's mind, or is this all just posturing?"
On that note, who's up for a reading group? It's been a while. I just got Micah White's The End of Protest, and I think it could have broad appeal here and make for interesting reading group discussions.
