Democrats need to choose a real candidate not a symbolic one

Paul Starr: “The support for Sanders has already sent a message. Now the primary voters have to choose a president.”

What message is that, exactly? That’s not a rhetorical question. It would appear that the message is that nothing can be done about any important problem other than go with the flow. Is there any position of actual power to influence events or policies that supporters of Sanders have gained or would gain as a tradeoff for supporting Clinton?

As an anarchist, I advise people to not uphold this rotten and corrupt political system. Paul Starr writes that I would ” [have] to be worried about making it more powerful”, but I don’t think that even if Sanders did manage to get single payer health care that this would make the state significantly more powerful than it already is, or that any conceivable alternative President wouldn’t do worse in some way. Clinton, for instance, seems set to ratify even further the escalated warmaking and spying inaugurated by Bush and supported by Obama.

The truth is, of course, that in terms of expanded state power Sanders is the lesser evil. Democratic Party supporters of the lesser evil strangely enough fall silent whenever the lesser evil turns out to be further to the left than they like.

I’ve read Paul Starr’s piece. He makes some points worth considering. The least convincing part of Starr’s article, imo, is this:

The other decisive problem for many voters would be that Sanders is not credible as commander-in-chief. When foreign policy issues have come up in the debates, he seems out of his depth.

Based on the parts of the debates I’ve seen, I don’t think Sanders seems all that “out of his depth” on foreign policy. And in any event, I wouldn’t esp. trust Starr’s judgment on that. Starr is a well-known sociologist who knows a lot about health care policy, among other things, but I’m not aware that he has any special knowledge of foreign policy or defense policy or int’l politics more generally.

Clinton was sec of state, so it stands to reason she is well-prepared to answer foreign policy questions (whether one likes her answers is a separate question). But on particular issues, such as Syria, Sanders has given quite concrete answers about his perspective and what his approach would be, and you can look them up in the debate transcripts. If Clinton had been highly detailed and Sanders by contrast vague on foreign policy, that would support Starr’s perception, but I don’t think the debate transcripts will show that.

If I were a voting US citizen I’d very very tempted to go Sanders anyway, despite the arguments of age, etc. I don’t think his low foreign policy experience is an argument, any good president assembles a good team. Who knows, Clinton could end back on the plane to Israel.

Would Sanders be a gift to the Republicans and the ‘script write itself’? If Trump gets the Rep nomination, there is no script.

The description ‘the system is rotten and corrupt’ I don’t think refers to the internals of gov departments as such, it’s the electoral system and the modern Republican rejection of democracy that’s the problem (the industrial military complex, DoD procurement etc is probably a special case). I remain persuaded by Mike Lofgren’s analysis in ‘The Party’s Over – How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted’ as a picture of the dire mess US politics is in. It seems the current polling for Trump and Sanders would indicate a few others do as well.

On why Sanders can’t revolutionise US healthcare… well…. The system is horribly inefficient, and sucks 18% of GDP. The best providers are full-service non-profits like Kaiser. With a strategy that created more Kaiser-like (relatively) efficient organisations (same number of patients as Sweden), why can’t it be done? Right wingers yell ‘communism’ at Obamacare or the NHS, but noone says that about Kaiser or Mayo or other such places, but they’re actually socialist concepts. See Clayton Christensen on that one.

On the other hand going with Clinton is going with someone who believes she has a right to be there and is embedded in the establishment. Nothing much will change.

If Trump is being taken seriously as a president, and it seems he is, why not Sanders?

” Quite honestly, there is a better chance of her being in federal prison next year than in the White House.”

Hillary doesn’t have an ethics problem. She definitely won’t be going to jail.

Hillary drives the right wing insane. Remember the Vince Foster thing:

http://beforeitsnews.com/obama-birthplace-controversy/2015/04/hillary-clinton-vince-foster-murdersuicide-coverup-the-strange-death-of-vincent-foster-christopher-ruddy-investigation-newsmax-articles-resurrected-by-citizen-wells-scathing-foster-investigation-2488700.html

She would be an OK president. Sanders would be better.

Single payer cannot be achieved by ordinary political bargaining in the US. The modest “public option” was bargained away for Joe Lieberman’s vote. In Remedy and Reaction, Starr says that single payer was last on the table was during Nixon’s second administration before Nixon’s and Wilbur Mills’s respective falls from power, and Ted Kennedy told the UAW leadership that it was lost in 1978.

So one has to imagine a crisis in which the current awkward inequitable and inefficient set of institutions for healthcare finance and provision collapse. I can well imagine such scenarios. Is this something to hope for or to fear? This is Corey Robin’s Hobbes vs. Marx question again from his Chronicle piece, but differently posed.

It is true, agreeing in spirit with Corey, that grassroots movements are necessary for progressive change. Partly it’s about new recruits to the political process, but there’s nothing particularly progressive about that. But in part, it is how groups of ordinary people recognize themselves by setting and winning their own demands (a bit of Hegelian Marxism there).

But a campaign for political office, where the goal is to win a narrowly defined contest, is at best an awkward vehicle for the self-definition of groups of ordinary working people. When it’s won or lost, it’s over, at least that’s how it usually works.

So maybe the goal or process at work in the Sanders campaign is to transform the Democratic Party into a party for working people in order to deal with the coming crisis. If this is happening then I will have to be part of it. But one wonders.

Tell me what I’m wrong, Sanders supporters. Quote Marx or Douglass to me. Demand that I choose sides in the coming fight. I’m genuinely receptive to anything like that.

=Obama; thanks useless Apple autocorrect.

If I had a wave-a-magic-wand wish list for governance it would certainly look more like the Sanders agenda than the Clinton agenda. That said, I am leaning (strongly) toward Clinton, and here is why:

1) The difference between the Clinton agenda and the Sanders agenda seems to reflect more than anything else a difference in the candidates’ pragmatic judgment about what is possible and what is attractive to voters: Sanders is far more aspirational and Clinton far more pragmatic.

2) Any Democrat elected President is likely to face a Republican Congress or at best a divided Congress — for reasons in part having to do with our odd constitutional structure and the present geography of American ideology, and in part for reasons having to do with Republican gerrymanders and voter ID laws and the rest. That hypothetical Democratic president will therefore have difficulty even maintaining the considerable albeit limited achievements of the Obama years. That favors pragmatism.

3) A contrary view might be that a more aspirational agenda will lead to more attractive compromises in the near term and better policy results in the long term. One would like to think that is so, but the Republican party as presently constituted is highly ideological and demonstrably very good at rejecting compromise.

4) On a popular vote basis, Sanders may well be as electable as Clinton. On an electoral college basis, which is what ultimately matters, Sanders is not as electable as Clinton and in fact will serve as a drag on the rest of the ticket. In particular Sanders’ self-identification as a socialist will cause many Democratic candidates in purple areas of the country to disavow him, because this country simply does not have a strong democratic socialist tradition (regardless of how you might personally feel about that).

5) A contrary view might be that a Sanders candidacy would bring out a previously silent majority of non-voters. Respectfully, this appears to be classic wishful thinking: Obama, a more charismatic candidate, was able to flip the Congress Democratic for just two years following a calamitous domestic and foreign policy meltdown by the prior Republican administration. The Sanders rallies are admirable but they are not portents of imminent revolution.

6) On the basis of the foregoing, I conclude that Clinton is somewhat more likely to be elected, and that if elected she would have something closer to parity in Congress.

7) Having a Republican president would be very bad for lots of reasons, including (i) rollback of lots of important legislation and (ii) establishment of a Republican Supreme Court for at least a generation. (In particular, the contention that there would be no significant difference between a Clinton administration and — for example — a Cruz administration is not at all sensible.)

8) There is an argument for supporting Sanders on the ground that some people who would vote for Sanders would not vote for Clinton on various grounds (e.g., “I could never vote for someone who gave George W. Bush authority to go into Iraq.”). I don’t think those are unreasonable grounds not to vote for Clinton, but I disagree with them basically for the reasons expressed above.

“I don’t believe that Sanders is electable in the general election”

Doesn’t that depend on who the other candidate is?

Francis @ 3

This is all that really needs to be said about this post.

@14 alkali

Maybe Sanders is very likely to lose if he’s the nominee. But I think it’s helpful to engage Sanders supporters without making predictions and without claiming some policies are impossible.

The question is also what makes sense to hope for.

I am deeply puzzled. All of the polls I’ve seen so far suggest that Bernie does better against the likely Republican winners than Hillary by a substantial margin, not worse, as you suggest. The problem with Bernie isn’t that he isn’t electable by the American people. It’s that he may not be electable by the Democratic party.

Do you have different data? Have I been misled?

The article you reference seems to be working from the notion that it goes against common sense that someone like Bernie could function as president. In other words, there’s no real argument here. We are just meant to understand that Hillary, being an insider, can be president, and Bernie, if through some fluke he were elected, could not, as an outsider, govern. That Bernie is not serious, and Hillary is.

To be entirely honest, I find the idea of a man or a woman as old as Hillary in the high-pressure context of the White House pretty worrisome, but those are our alternatives. The Republicans who are running all appear to be dangerous idiots of one form or another. So given that we are stuck with Hillary or Bernie, why is Bernie worse than Hillary as an elected President?

Is it because he wouldn’t go to war? He’s said he would, and as far as I understand it doesn’t have any ideological problem with going to war if it’s necessary, but he is against going to war as a primary solution, and based on recent history, he is clearly right. The wars we’ve gotten embroiled in have had no benefit in terms of national security or world peace: just the opposite. We could stand to have a president who won’t be bullied by the hawks in his cabinet into an unnecessary and ill-advised war.

As for the argument that he believes “government” is corrupt, it’s not clear that he does. What he seems to believe is that our political system is corrupt. I’m not the first person to mention this, but let me go down that path a little farther. We have a problem that there is so much noise in the public discourse that it’s actually quite difficult to find grounds for serious discussion. This Politico article is an example of that sort of thing. The base assumptions in the article are grounded in commonly-accepted garbage, which is commonly accepted because the public discourse is largely controlled by money, not by reasoned debate.

This is the problem Bernie proposes to address. It’s a really hard problem. It may indeed be impossible to fix it. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizen’s United was based on a very real problem: the news media at present is mostly speaking for the owners of the news media, who are ideologues, not pragmatists. So the traditional “free press” to which the First Amendment refers can’t be systematically distinguished from other corporate speech. And the first amendment, because it protects the press, cannot simply regulate corporate speech.

This problem was implicit at the framing of the Constitution, but we managed to paper over it for a very long time before Citizen’s United. I don’t have any clue how to put the genie back in the bottle. If you think that Bernie’s determination to try is quixotic, I can’t argue the point. But we have no choice but to seek out a way forward. Bernie is trying to do that. In my mind, that makes him the only serious candidate for President in the current election.

Thank you! The prospect of a Bernie candidacy throwing this election to the Republicans scares the living daylights out of me.

@Chris #16

From where I sit, Trump beats Sanders like a bass drum.

@ Ted Lemon

I ignored the parts of Starr’s piece that dealt with predictions. Starr’s more important point is whether Sanders’s policies make sense, from his perspective as a historian of the US healthcare system (and voter).

The hypothetical matchup polls are too remote. Also as far as I’m concerned, it’s not primarily about what Bernie Sanders as an individual believes, although that’s relevant. Sanders might just be a figurehead for a social movement, and that might be a good thing. It’s hard to say.

The question for me is whether this movement is really going “forward,” as you put it. It seems to me that Sanders’s campaign is more about trying to refight lost battles about healthcare and finance. That might be possible in a future crisis. But is that the goal?

The Sanders movement, my friends tell me, is registering new voters and bringing young leftists into the political process. That’s very, very good. But not the same as winning the election.

Aaron @ 10: “The modest “public option” was bargained away for Joe Lieberman’s vote.”
No. The public option went away because Obama didn’t want it. Joe Lieberman’s vote could have easily been bought for his committee positions, given that he supported the candidate from the opposite party. Obama had tremendous leverage over him and failed to exercise it.

Paul Starr’s piece makes some good points, but doesn’t capitalize on the essential one: The Democratic debates have convincingly demonstrated that Sanders will not be able to withstand the GOP/Fox media machine. Hillary can. I’d rather have the president I can get rather than the one I’d wish for.

correction:
“I think it’s all going to be…”

Francis Spufford @3
Is it ordinary in the United States to take ‘the political system’ and ‘government’ as synonyms, so that if you feel that campaign finance is corrupted, you cannot possibly believe that anything in the public sector could be competently administered? Or is this a piece of conscious bait-and-switch?

You’ve pointed out some slippage/slipperiness/whatever in Starr’s language here, but if you read his article you’ll see he’s not as stupid or as consciously bait-and-switchy as might be supposed on the basis of those sentences. Actually, an editor probably shd have taken out those sentences b.c the piece’s main arguments don’t really depend on them. Starr’s main pt (or one of them) on health care, istm, is that the current system is the product of a long complex history in which private insurers have played a major role and have built up considerable political power and it would be one thing if this were 1932 or 1948 and one were writing on a comparatively blank slate, but it isn’t. I’m sure there are some counterarguments but that’s what I take him, at least partly, to be saying.

Aaron Lercher:
I try to avoid arguments against Sanders based on political predictions or possibilities, because these might either seem arbitrary or selective. Or it’s me trying to be a pundit. Instead I’m asking what one may hope for.

How is “asking what one may hope for” different from asking what it is reasonable to suppose might happen, i.e., making a prediction of sorts? I don’t understand the distinction you’re drawing here.

@ R Puchalsky
The “message” is presumably that Sanders’ emphasis on economic inequality and related issues resonates w a lot of voters, and therefore candidates, and HRC in particular, have to pay more attention to it. Whether he has in fact pulled her to the left I suppose is debatable, and I’m sure you wd answer ‘no’. But that’s presumably what Starr is talking about.

(Also see my reply @34 to F. Spufford)

@Aaron Lercher
So in looking again at your comment @28, your case vs. Sanders is that he’s aiming to ‘refight lost battles’ instead of ‘looking forward’ [e.g. in the spirit of Kant’s “what may I hope for”? — I’m not esp. up on Kant [paging js., please] but I seem to recall he says that somewhere, though I largely forget the context]. Am I understanding you correctly?

Oops, three turned into seven. Outlines will do that to you.

And while I was writing this, Eric posted on HRC’s latest “let’s shoot ourselves in the foot” moment. “Reconstruction was too hard on the treasonous slavers. Lincoln would have been nicer to them if only that carpet-bagging JW Booth hadn’t shot him in the head.” Holy JC on a motorcycle, way to alienate your base there, Hilary, and to be stupid while doing it.

If you want to make the case that voting for Clinton is the more sensible course of action, make that case. There’s a case to be made there (not one that I entirely buy, but certainly a plausible case can be made). But calling Sanders a “symbolic” candidate is just fucking idiotic. He is in every plausible sense a real candidate running a real campaign, and if you want to convince his supporters to vote for Clinton instead, maybe don’t start by condescending to them in the very first sentence. Just, you know, as a matter of rhetorical strategy.

In case this needs to be made clear, this is targeted against Start, but EH.

It’s amazing to me how many people’s arguments against Sanders boil down to “Okay, you’ve had your fun, you don’t ACTUALLY want this guy to be President do you?”

Well yeah, Sanders supporters do want him to be President. It’s absolutely not about sending a message of any kind, it’s about electing someone we think would be a better leader. I can’t imagine any Sanders supporters saying “Oh, I guess I was just making a symbolic protest vote for a fake candidate, whoops!”

Last sentence in #45: “Start” should be “Starr”, obviously.

It’s always been interesting to me that working American intellectuals are so far removed from the realities of American life and so fearful of political populism…maybe it’s Richard Hofstadter’s fault. But from here in the heartland of democracy and the anus of progress, Bernie is not only electable but, unless they shoot ‘im , maybe we’ll see an end to our 116 year old civil war.

@46 – the left had a potential plausible candidate named Elizabeth Warren. She chose not to run. It’s a sign of the depressingly shallow Democratic bench that the only significant challenger to HRC is a 74 year old who’s never won an election as a Democrat in his life.

@Placeholder (52):“Any Democrat elected President is likely to face a Republican Congress or at best a divided Congress”

Actually, 2016 will be the best year for Democrats in Congress for a long time. Turnout will be higher in a Presidential year and currently, Republicans have 14 more seats up for election in the Senate than Democrats and Republicans only actually need to lose 4 seats.

I agree that 2016 will be the best year for Democrats in Congress for a long time. I nevertheless think Democrats can at best hope to take the Senate back.

I was about to note that of the 14 Republican seats, Rand Paul’s seat in Kentucky is uncontested, but having checked it just now — My Guarantee Of Quality To You!(TM) — I see that Lexington mayor Jim Gray announced for the Democratic side today, so go team.

I read post after post here of people saying they don’t think Sanders can win and therefore support Clinton. But since many/most polls have Sanders beating The Republican candidate (ie Trump) by wider margins than Clinton.

So in essence, your “gut hit” is widely off mark of the only real measure we have, polls. And that is a huge reason why I support Sanders, I think he has much greater change of winning than Clinton, whom I think is not an effective campaigner.

Also, @41: my jaw dropped when you called Sanders “uncharismatic and irritable”. Here again the polls tell us he is the most well-liked candidate in the race (and I even think the article linked above states this, though it might be something else I read today). In my mind it is the combative, contemptuous Clinton who is “uncharismatic and irritable”. If first-time voters are asking her why she doesn’t appeal to their generation (as one did at a recent town hall) she has serious likability problems.

For those who believe that Sanders is less electable than Clinton, that is, that Sanders is less likely to beat Trump/Cruz*: what were your opinions on Obama vs Clinton, in 2008? Do you believe Sanders is less electable than Obama was? Also, did you predict Obama’s landslide victory?

For anyone, regardless of where you are on Sanders/Clinton: do you think the Republican party is in worse or better shape, electorally speaking, than they were in 2008?

My take is: this election will be a landslide for the Democrats.** Because of this, I think the Democrats should nominate the left-most candidate willing to run. If there is a time to be less risk averse (and, on pain of ignoring the efficacy of hope in history, mustn’t there be such times?), this is one of those times. 2016 is close to 2008: the Democratic candidate will clean house, regardless of who that candidate is.

Of course, I mean a 2008-style landslide. There will be no more “Reagan in 1980” landslides ever again. 2008 was a solid Democratic victory: if you didn’t feel secure and assured of Democratic victory in 2008—or, if you did, but that feeling still wasn’t enough to move you from the risk-averse “Clinton is more electable” position—then, as I see it, you will never feel secure. This would be a chance to discover the insight (assuming you hadn’t in the past seven years) that your feelings with respect to security, risk, etc are very poor guides to real-world security. Again, 2008 is what a slam dunk looks like.

*And that this difference is significant, electorally speaking. For example, I’m not querying anyone who thinks Clinton has a 95% chance of winning while Bernie only has a 90% of winning. I’m only interested in those who think Clinton beats Trump/Cruz, and Bernie loses to Trump/Cruz. Also irrelevant, then, would be anyone who thinks Trump/Cruz would beat both Clinton and Sanders.

**Assuming no new global financial crisis. But with another gfc, I think even Clinton is not a sure thing.

protoplasm
Do you believe Sanders is less electable than Obama was?

Yes. That doesn’t mean Sanders will lose to, say, a Trump, but Sanders I think is less electable than Obama. Obama was relatively young, he was charismatic, he could mobilize minority, esp. black, voters; Sanders’ electoral career has been based in a small, largely rural, politically atypical state. Instinct says yes, Obama was more electable.

Dennis Redfield@43: The whole “opening bid” logic seems like magical thinking. Although certainly politicians are shaped by context and framing to a point, ultimately I think it’s a fairly accurate model to just say that either a legislator will vote for a bill or they won’t, and the legislative process is about discovering what sort of bill will get a sufficient number of legislators to support it. Or to phrase it in a way which acknowledges the messier side of it more, if you don’t have the leverage to actually threaten your opening bid to happen, it’s just a meaningless gesture. If you’re buying a car, an opening bid of a dollar accomplishes nothing.

There is an extremely strongly entrenched default for Congress to do nothing. Right now Congress is extremely deadlocked, but even in relatively productive congresses, there’s plenty of policy issues which get left untouched for decades because nobody wants to deal with it. And, generally speaking, conservatives prefer no legislation to progressive legislation. You can’t get past that with negotiation skills.

…and yet, I think Bernie Sanders could be a reasonable politician on that basis. For all his futile talk about political revolutions, he is quite experienced at the slow boring of hard boards. His tenure in Congress has not been based on unrealistic grandstanding, but incrementally pushing for progress where he can.

Hard to avoid Starr’s own hand-waving, but here’s a try:

“the proposals he has made for free college tuition and free, single-payer health care suggest what might be done if the United States underwent radical change.” —- Yes, and note that Sanders is explicitly calling for a “political revolution”, meaning for other people who believe the same things to stand and run for Senate and House, to get these things done.

“age is a legitimate issue, and if he were the Democratic nominee, even many people sympathetic to his views would have reservations about putting him in office.” —- I doubt this. More people are living older and healthier. Pick a good running mate, and problem solved.

“self-identification as a “socialist” is all that many voters would need to know to reject him.” —- Sanders is giving his own definition of “socialism” and not running away from it: It means things like Social Security, the New Deal. Let’s see how Sanders’ polls go. He is picking up recognition as we write. He is doing well with working people, or those who would like a job.

” ‘Socialism’ is the label Republicans have been trying to pin on Democrats” —- And they tried to pin it on FDR for 4 freaking elections.

“…not credible as commander-in-chief.” —- This is Starr’s judgement, also not credible.

“When foreign policy issues have come up in the debates, he seems out of his depth.” —- Sanders can probably correct for this easily.

“tax implications of Sanders’ proposals provide a particularly rich target.” —- Again, another thing that Sanders has begun to explicitly address.

“likely effect of switching to single payer under Sanders’ plan would be to destabilize the health-care industry.” —- Needs clarification. Does this mean, “send the health insurers to find another line of work”?

“But anyone who believes that government is rotten and corrupt has to be worried about making it more powerful” —- Other commenters here have noted how this is nonsense, and I agree. Just let me point out that “electing yet another trimmer” will NOT strike most people as the solution. (Definition of trimmer is, “a person who adapts their views to the prevailing political trends for personal advancement”.) Sanders is the only candidate who has given exactly the same message for his entire life, and he is clearly coming across as the only candidate whom you can precisely believe.

“The support for Sanders has already sent a message.” —- Umm okay, and that message is, “We want change, so think of us once in a while, won’t you?” or is it Hillary saying, “I intend to enact everything that Bernie Sanders says”? I’m a little confused about the “message” Starr has heard.

Thus is Starr refuted.

Hillary Clinton would make a fine President. That is not the issue.

LFC — @59 seems a little harsh. A large part of Beutler’s point is that the anti-Sanders camp has yet to make a persuasive case. So a large part of his argument is negative, and that argument seems to me successful (though it’s something I already thought, so I’m maybe not the best judge). But given that there are lots of very definite pronouncements coming from one side at least (symbolic candidacy! whatever that means), BB’s piece seems like a useful corrective.

I think Starr makes a reasonable point. It’s not clear how Sanders’ tax on, say, speculation would pay for all that he wants–free college tuition, for example. How would speculation be defined? How much would the tax bring in? Starr also raises question about Sanders’ health care strategy. At this point he does not seem to have developed a plan with all the necessary contingencies for the radical reform he is proposing.
That said, Sanders could save us a lot of trouble by using regulation to prevent Wall Street from blowing up the economy again. I would have to think Sanders is more likely to regulate wisely here than Clinton.

Aren’t the primaries supposed to answer the question of electibility? If Clinton can’t win the Democratic primaries, I would think that counts heavily against her winning the election. Starr seems to reverse the usual scientific equation of having a theory and testing it. His amounts to having a theory and thus not needing to test it.

If Sanders appeals to enough Democratic voters now, and he wins the primary races, I would say he is electable. We’ve seen certain Democratic candidates from the main stream who were elevated but seemed to me totally unelectable: Mondale, Dukakis, Kerry. Yet I remember no mainstream Dem pundit writing about how Kerry, for instance, was unelectable, although the obvious negatives (for instance, that his claim to fame, which was that he led an anti-war movement, was totally hidden by his campaign people and himself) were pretty out there to see.

After I wrote in 74 that Kerry was obviously unelectable, I went back to my blog to see if I was just retrovising my real opinion. Sure enough, though, in October, 2003, that is just what I wrote.
Really, that was a key election. And it was screwed up because mainstream Dems were scared about having a candidate that would robustly confront Bush on foreign policy. So they mealymouthed it and we got Kerry and the loss. I’m not sure I trust the Starrs or the Krugmans to tell us who is and who is not electable.

Can I note for a second that Bernie Sanders polls much better than Hilary Clinton in match-ups with the republican opposition?

Dem v Repub polls mean very little in the primary season. Michael Dukakis had good polls until he was felled by Bush I’s attack ads.

Good to see Very Serious People telling people how to vote “like adults”.

I don’t buy that HRC losing the primary implies she’d be worse in the general. It would honestly not shock me if there were a whole bunch of relatively well-off suburban Democrats who would rather see a fascist win than a social democrat. Capital is king, and if you go for the king, you best not miss.

OTOH, if *I* of all people am the marginal vote HRC needs to win Pennsylvania and the ’16 primary, then she’s even worse at campaigning than I thought and I’d have to vote for Sanders anyway. I’m planning to cast a symbolic Sanders vote. If it turned out that my vote is actually gonna matter, HRC would be doomed by that point anyway.

We have no evidence on who would be more likely to beat a Trump or Cruz in a general election, either way. The instincts we proclaim are as useless since they rely on experiences in a system where a Trump our a Cuz could never even get nominated and would lose to anyone at all in a general election. That’s why I conclude that pieces like Starr’s aren’t analysis; they are blackmail. Thru are in fact a coded threat by the neo-liberal establishment that they would rather see Trump win than Sanders.

We do however have evidence on what Clinton promises of incremental progressive reform are worth. Namely, nothing. We know based on experience that a president Clinton would likely not even try to implement any of the incrementally progressive agenda items of her campaign. This seems rather important to me.

Pundits never have to live with their opinions. This time last time it was that America wasn’t ready for a black president, so we just had to go with Clinton because it would risk throwing things to the Republicans if Obama were nominated. How many of you thought that?

@76 – Kerry was perfectly electable. He could have won if he’d run as himself. Instead he ran as a war hero. And even though he genuinely was a war hero, the effort to obliterate his more important role as a vet against the war was devastating to him. Although his account of his experiences was true, his overall presentation of himself with respect to the war was false, and that gave the Swift Boat accusations traction. This is what happens when you listen to the too-clever-by-half consultants, which is something that HRC does as a matter of course.

So let’s talk VP candidates. Let me guess. Trump will choose Pete King while Ted Cruz will ask Representative Todd Akin. I actually think the Democrats could run Bob Avakian and Cornel West and possibly win.

If he somehow gets the nomination in spite of their machinery, then something will happen to him or his campaign. He will be removed.

OK, I’ll bite. What do you think will happen? What is one possible mechanism whereby he’ll be “removed”?

On what basis is Clinton so powerfully electable anyway? In the only strongly contested election she has ever been in she lost despite having enormous institutional advantages. Her only wins were by leveraging the post presidency Clinton machine into chasing out all the other Democratic contenders in a sure thing Democratic state because she wasn’t a sure thing in her more contested home state. In fact it could be argued that her only proven strong suit politically is in controlling the Democratic money machine. (Which by the way isn’t nothing, but it isn’t the same thing as having a proven record of winning in national office in non-sure-thing elections). She is a meh speaker. She has bland charisma at best. She seems the perfect example of over-focus grouped–and that flaw alone has caused all sorts of missteps on gay rights and poverty over her career. If we were talking about Sanders v. Obama, the electability question would make sense. Obama is a great speaker, charismatic, proven in tough electoral races, inspiring, etc. But Clinton? Really? Quite seriously, what exactly is it about her that makes her such a prime candidate? It looks to me like ALL of the presidential primary candidates reveal how crappy things are in US politics at the moment–the best of the bunch are Sanders and Clinton. That isn’t actually a good sign for America.

Thank you for this. Here’s what I learned from reading the original piece:

Bernie Sanders revolution para 4
not credible para 5
not the proposals of a candidate who is serious para 5
his age is legitimate issue para 6
socialist socialist para 7
socialist para 8
Socialism para 9 (did I mention Socialism?)
‘not credible’ ‘out of his depth’ para 10
74 year Socialist para 11

The right wing is absolutely going to attack Sanders on the points listed in this hit piece. And yes, it is a hit piece. Despite the fact that Sanders has made a career out of sticking to his principles, Starr manages to collapse a lifetime of commitment into a cardboard dartboard. All that’s missing is Jon Favreau goosing this cartoon Bernie beer in hand. HRC, on the other hand, spent most of her life as the ultimate political insider. Maybe Starr is ok supporting a candidate who is going to be asked, and asked, and asked, and asked why she and her husband accept millions of dollars from foreign donors, why she takes $200 k to talk to a bank, not once, but as a regular part of her week.

Trump’s fantastical proposals to build a wall, make America great, and the rest of the hype are treated as starting positions in negotiations. He’s made that clear. We had to listen to years of ‘if you like your doctor, you can keep your doctor’ and ‘everybody’s premiums will go down’ from the likes of Harold Pollack, I might add. So, forgive me if I don’t hyper-ventilate about Bernie’s ‘unrealistic’ plans, or start holding him to a standard entirely different from President ‘Red-line’ ‘I never said that’ and his feckless water-carrier- ‘I did nothing wrong.’

Bernie has his faults, but the figure Starr describes is denied credibility as a candidate and as a man simply, it seems, because so many find Sanders so appealing.

You’ll need to do better.

The article does raise interesting points. Perhaps the most worrisome part:

“Sanders tells us that the political system is rotten and corrupt. But anyone who believes that government is rotten and corrupt has to be worried about making it more powerful, especially in a way that has such personal effects as health care does. This is the contradiction at the root of Sanders’ rhetoric.”

I get the apprehension, especially when coupled with the fact that he’s an avowed democratic socialist and the fact that the right is seizing upon such fears. I think Mr. Starr is afraid to fight for change in the same way young people are — it’s too much of a risk to nominate Bernie, given the opposition (Trump/Cruz). It will likely increase voter turn out for the republican base.

But, with a candidate young liberal people can fully support, democratic turn out might be high as well. I remember all the hand-wringing taking place when President Obama’s message first started to resonate with young people as well.

I also recall the various negative advertisements that were directed at him once he became the nominee. If young liberals (i.e. people from my cohort) could turn out to support Mr. Obama (twice, the second time when he was considered a socialist by the right), why not Mr. Sanders? This is something Mr. Starr’s article never considers.

As far as I can tell, the only candidate young liberals seem to fully support or remain excited about is either Elizabeth Warren or Bernie. I think that will remain unchanged despite what all the older democrats have to say. We all recognize he isn’t perfect, but no single candidate is. Re old age: John McCain was a serious contender for president. That said, I suspect that support for Bernie will grow.

Bloix 01.27.16 at 2:21 am @ 91 —
Heavens what a strong reaction! There must be something to what I wrote, then. The truth is, I have mystical, indeed, superstitious ideas about voting. Voting does not alter the outcome of a large election, but it does alter the voter. (Vote is cognate with devote and comes from a Latin word meaning ‘to vow’.) Be careful what you attach yourself to, then. There may be something to be said for clean skirts, after all.

“Obviously, the word “socialist” brings baggage”

On the other hand capitalism, as it is practiced these days, doesn’t have a lot to recommend it to the average voter. After hearing that government support invites moral hazard, once some bankers busted out AIG, there old government was to pay them out at 100 cents on the dollar. Also look the other way on forged foreclosure filings.

People, and thus voters, are angry that the rules that can cripple them don’t apply to people with far more resources. It is an untenable situation and this election will reflect it.

To his credit, Sanders is not saying that people should vote for him because there is no important difference between Clinton and Trump or Cruz. But Nader bamboozled Floridians with such false claims about the equivalence of Gore and Bush.

js @81

A few things.

1) Consumatopia did suggest that an editor should have axed those lines. Then, later on, w/o crediting consumpatopia’s earlier comment (my bad), I made roughly the same point @34:
“an editor probably shd have taken out those sentences b.c the piece’s main arguments don’t really depend on them.”

2) “send a message”: R Puchalsky also didn’t like this, though perhaps on somewhat different grounds than you. I think it’s not as absurd as you suggest. I’m glad Sanders is running in part because I think he will have the effect of pushing HRC at least slightly to the left on some issues — whether that has happened or not, or will happen, is a matter that people who have followed the campaign more closely than I have can determine. But the point is that one can vote for Sanders in a primary for various reasons, and “send a message” may be one of them. Prob most people who vote for him want him to be president, but that’s not the only reason to vote for someone under any circumstances. Electoral politics is not entirely separate from “smoke signals.”

3) Putting Starr’s piece to one side, I do think there is a respectable argument to be made that (a) the stakes are very high this year; even if one doesn’t see them in apocalyptic (capital A) terms, they are v. high, and (b) the electability question is not trivial. In a way I wish Sanders had been running in a different year and context, but he isn’t. It would have made some dilemmas less sharp.

4) And lastly — this just occurred to me — if Sanders is nominated and then loses to the Republican nominee, it may well cause the sort of internal bloodbath in the Dem party that will make what happened after McGovern’s loss in ’72 look like a genteel cocktail party. It could set back the position of the party’s left for a long time, ruling out the prospect of a left candidacy at a later, perhaps better time. (Yes, I expect this last pt to draw a lot of brickbats. So be it.)

@R. Gathman
The primaries are an *imperfect* test of electability b.c the primary electorate is quite different from the electorate in the general.

LFC — I agree with a lot of that, but… Taking your points in order:

1. Yes, I might have conflated both of your comments. In any case, noted.

2. I agree that people might vote for Sanders in the primary for all sorts of reasons, including “sending a message” (cf. Consumatopia @82 in this very thread). I still think that the Starr piece is unnecessarily to condescending to potential Sanders voters, and that its framing, at the very least, is rhetorically unhelpful.

3. I agree re the stakes. But I should say that I generally find electability arguments to be pretty bogus. They’re a proper subset of the kind of impossibility arguments Holbo was making fun of recently, and for good reason. McCain was pretty electable until the day Lehman collapsed; the day after that, not so much. In general, I’m disinclined to believe that received wisdom is at all a good guide on these matters.

I’m probably in the minority here, but I’d rather see arguments for why Clinton might make a better president, rather than candidate in the general—a case that I think could be made. (The only place Starr touches on this is with the “commander-in-chief” bit, which is totally dumb: the president is supposed to the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and I frankly don’t give a fuck how credible Sanders seems in that role—well, the less the better, I suppose.)

4. Well, yes. But the same could happen if Clinton won the nomination (esp. after an ugly fight) and lost the general. I take it this is part of Cranky Observer’s point @11, and I think it’s not uncompelling.

———

The vote that counted was that of a Republican by the name of Scalia.

This has pretty much been my argument for ages, but I’ve always gone with O’Connor because her vote seemed the more obviously cynical (as in, she’s the one you’d really have expected better of). Why Scalia?

Why Scalia?

Because he is the easiest to dislike.

Well Benghazi and the emails are not what Sanders has in mind when he touts his judgment as better; those are the “scandals” the Republican used to get a lot of Americans to think of Clinton unfavorably. And should Sanders win the primary, this sort of onslaught is what he’ll have to face. Clinton is right that she has already been through it.

Clinton is right that she has already been through it.

The Republicans will attack any Democratic candidate or office-holder. The Clintons are singularly bad at fighting back. We might consider that.

110 -no doubt, which is why one of the winners of the primaries from one of the parties will lose. However, i thinkit is a better indicator than the election waged in paul starr’s head – or mine, for that matter.
Out of curiosity – if clinton is the candidate and loses to the gop, do you think the establishment will say, we shoulda moved left? Or does recrimination only move usto the right – as well as victory? In which case the left has nothing tolose w sanders. Might as well be damned for winning the dem nomination as not.

#120 – in the run-up to the 1992 election here I remember telling some people that if Kinnock lost, the Labour Party would probably blame the Left move to the Right. They all looked at me as if I was a crazy person, and on reflection I agreed with them – move to the Right? Kinnock’s entire project had been to move to the Right! if he failed it would be obvious that the party needed to move Left! But I was right the first time.

#113 – those HuffPo ratings make interesting reading. Apparently there are only two names on their list with a net positive score (Favourable>Unfavourable); the higher net score of the two, and the highest Favourable score overall, is held by the current front-runner in the Democratic contest. Sanders is on +10, Clinton’s on -10. No Republican has a net positive score; Cruz comes closest with -3. The GOP field splits into those with a single-figure negative score (Carson, Cruz, Rubio, Kasich) and those with even lower scores than Hillary – Fiorina, Huckabee, Jeb Bush & that other guy.

On those figures, if the Republicans really are going to go for Trump the election is winnable for Clinton, though it’ll be hellaciously dirty and probably largely policy-free. But if the Republicans dodge the bullet and choose someone with an ounce of credibility to non-Republicans – possibly by drafting Paul Ryan, I don’t know – the same “vote for me because, come on, look at the other guy” strategy could come unstuck for Clinton – and I’m not sure she’s capable of running a campaign on principle & policy.

Also, look at the Don’t Knows. Trump’s rating is 40/55/5 DK; the number of people who don’t know what they think about Clinton is even smaller (43/53/4). Either one would have to be gambling on differential turnout; they can be fairly sure, even now, that they aren’t going to win much positive adhesion from the >50% of people who actually dislike them. On the Republican side, all the main candidates apart from Trump and Jeb Bush have enough DKs to offset their negative ratings (Jeb has 14% DKs and an approval rating of -20). Sanders’ scores are 47/37/14: barely enough DKs to offset his positive score, but enough to take him over the 50% mark.

Polling says: Sanders has made a damn good start. You’d think people would be pleased.

Both Sanders and Clinton will likely win the election if they are nominated, and both are vastly preferable to any GOP candidate. The only thing Dems should be worried about, in my view, is that the Democratic Party, on all levels, needs to fight against the GOP, rather than candidates fighting each other. The Rep candidates are doing a great job dismantling each other and their party. The Dems must not do the same. A good test for the suitability of a candidate is: does the candidate value the fortune of the party higher than his or her own political fortune?

It astonishes me how much even progressives are fixated on the presidential election. Democrats need to win on all levels, and their top candidates need to serve that purpose, not burn up their energy in the intra party competition.

How Hillary and Bernie might use the stuff I just wrote:

Hillary ought to completely internalize Sanders’ argument. She must explain exactly how she will take certain steps to stop the crooks, even though she is shoulder-to-shoulder with Wall Street, and explain how and why Obama failed to do this. She doesn’t need to name names, but she must stop sounding like she’s still playing footsie with these crooks. Right now, all of her assurances sound like rhetorical throwaways.

HIllary must explain how Obamacare sets up a path to single-payer.

(Obamacare allows this, you know: Colorado is about to vote on it. Are single-payer advocates rushing in, to help with this campaign? Or are they claiming boredom or impotence, unless it’s national?)

Bernie must explain to the audience exactly how he will avoid the evils of big government explained in section [1]. He keeps jumping over this. Simply prescribing a “revolution”, doesn’t cut it.

Maybe produce a list of House candidates in each district who are on his side? It’s daring, but it could start the sea-change.

And he can explain why single-payer is NOT “big government”. For example, yes it collects and disburses money, just like Social Security and Medicare, but there is very little bureaucracy, it’s not the Pentagon.

We can design single-payer to be totally transparent, like Social Security. The money comes in, the money goes out, no big bureaucracy. Note that its critics don’t attack it for being crooked, or as being unwieldly; they are trying to claim that it’s broke! Really there is more than enough money.

Single-payer will restrict healthcare? Nonsense: make a list of coverage, & vote on it.

Bernie thinks he is saying these things, but he is not; it isn’t coming through. What is wrong here? Answer: Bernie has Insider’s Disease.

Indeed both Bernie and Hillary suffer from Insider’s Disease. A damaging rhetorical affliction. Two different symptoms.

The first infirmity of Insider’s Disease is that they speak to the audience as if it should be enough for the audience to hear, as if the audience already knows as much as the officeholders in the House and Senate. The audience does not.

Bernie in particular keeps jumping over questions about Big Government by immediately responding, “Look, you need healthcare, without being ripped off by the insurers.” It sounds like Bernie hasn’t thought about Big Gov’t! This just came up in the Iowa townhall! Thus, skeptics feel that Bernie is incompetent, he doesn’t fully understand sections [1] and [2] above. Insider’s Disease makes you take too much for granted, makes you speak as if the audience knows the system in the way that you do.

The second infirmity of Insider’s Disease is a reluctance to rip the House and Senate open, for all to see. This combines the mistake just noted, that the audience already knows what you do, with a reluctance to cross personal loyalties that have been formed in shaky secret agreements.

But surely, you don’t have to go full-on, like nutty Trump or hateful Cruz, to get anti-establishment street cred.

Just start explaining WHY thing have failed, not in regards to how representatives voted on the floor, but in regards to the institutional mechanics that they were taking advantage of, to thwart the people’s business. Then, voting for a full new slate of candidates becomes a little easier to see. Even if it is too much insider baseball, we will like you more, for demonstrating your understanding of our concern.

“if Sanders is nominated and then loses to the Republican nominee, it may well cause the sort of internal bloodbath in the Dem party that will make what happened after McGovern’s loss in ’72 look like a genteel cocktail party. It could set back the position of the party’s left for a long time, ruling out the prospect of a left candidacy at a later, perhaps better time.”

But the democrats haven’t had a truly left candidate since McGovern. That IS the setback of McCovern and we’re still stuck there.

To nominate Sanders would be the first small step toward recovering from that setback. And to lose would, in the long run, just put us condemn us to what the Hillary crowd are already telling us out of pragmatism to accept: another 50 years of moderate right democratic candidates.

127: It doesn’t matter that they are truisms.

Though I don’t think you mean “truisms”, I think you mean “hypocrisies.”

But even hypocrisies aren’t penalized by most voters, if the system is more-or-less working. Hypocrisies only become important in crises. Or if the politician is caught with is hands in the cookie jar.

Anon #130: “Hillary is very electable and Sanders is unelectable. 2. Reply: but the only data we have, the primaries and polls, says the opposite”

The data doesn’t say the opposite. Hillary has kept at least a 15 point lead over Sanders since late September. Hillary still looks very electable.

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/us/2016_democratic_presidential_nomination-3824.html

Truism is indeed the wrong word. What I mean is more along the line “something that pundits and VSPs think is self-evident but that is actually false”. Is there a term for that?

“is there a general crisis?”

It is very unclear what constitutes a “general crisis”, and even people who agree that there is such a crisis will likely disagree on what the crisis actually constitutes.

One of the things to remember in this discussion is past failures. What the article proposes is “steady as she goes.” According to the author, the Democratic party’s strategy of tacking right has been effective, and will continue to be effective, and really is the only credible option.

The problem with this is that it leaves voters with no choice: you have a right-wing Democrat, with all the problems that come with that, or a right-wing Republican, with all the problems that come with that. There’s no meaningful differentiation: we just have to hold our nose and pick the one we dislike the least. The big differentiators for Clinton are things like abortion, which is a really absurdly pathetic issue to stake the presidency on. Sure, it’s important, but is that really the issue that should be deciding national elections?

Back to the history lesson, look at the Martha Coakley Senate election against Scott Brown in Massachusetts in 2010. She was running for the recently-vacated senate seat of Ted Kennedy, a dyed-in-the-wool liberal. Everybody thought it was a shoe-in, because no Democrat would vote against her. She was defeated fairly soundly. Why? Because she isn’t a liberal. She’s not a bad person, and perhaps by modern standards she seems liberal compared to Scott Brown, but there was no differentiation. As a candidate, independent of the implications for the balance of power in the Senate, there was simply no good reason to choose her over Scott Brown, and so the Massachusetts “conservatives” carried the day, because the “liberals” didn’t care enough.

But that was just bad luck, right? Coakley was running in the general election because she was the best the party had to offer, right? Wrong. There was a progressive candidate in the primary, who took 28% of the vote in the primary. But the Democrats wanted Coakley, because she was more “electable.” So they really put their thumbs down hard on the scale, backing Coakley to the hilt. That’s precisely how it was perceived in Massachusetts, and that’s why Coakley got a plurality but not a majority: not enough Democrats bought the party line.

There was genuine enthusiasm for Mike Capuano, a dedicated progressive who had a strong progressive voting record in Congress. If the Democratic party had taken a gamble on him, he almost certainly would have won the primary–he was gaining on Coakley in the polls every week up to the election despite the Democratic party’s heavy thumb on the scale. I think it’s very unlikely Scott Brown could have beaten him in the general election. But we never got to find out, because the Democratic leadership wasn’t willing to risk it.

So when I read articles like the one we’re discussing, that election failure stands out pretty starkly in my memory. I can’t even describe it as a failure of courage on the part of the Democratic party leadership, because the Democratic party leadership is actively anti-progressive. So it’s no surprise to me that they are against Bernie, and have done everything they can to weaken his election chances, just like they did with Mike Capuano.

But it’s definitely not “sending a message” when we support him in his attempt to win the primary. It’s that we don’t want Hillary, and we do want Bernie. The condescension that we see in this discussion is really unfortunate. While it’s true that the rank and file voters aren’t able to be as informed about the election as we’d like to be, and therefore may miss out on some nuances, it is not the case that the electorate as a whole can be assumed to be ignorant and stupid. The wisdom of the crowds isn’t dependable, because propagandists try to hard to sway it, but there comes a tipping point where no amount of propaganda is enough to get the crowd to do what you want, and it will be interesting to see if we have reached that tipping point in this election. We certainly did in the most recent contested Democratic primary.

Tm 135 — They are not false. The people who preach them are hypocrites. — This is a theory of how voters must be thinking, in order to try to explain the way they respond.

The same with your admonition about “what constitutes a general crisis”. It hardly matters what you or I think. Voters are responding to both Sanders and Trump on this issue — in both parties, in a profound way. Does that have meaning for predicting this election? Will this emotion subside, or not?

@137

It’s more complicated than that.

Capuano was well known near Boston and was supported by the traditional Democratic machine. He was totally unknown just 20 or so miles outside the capital. Coakley was well known farther from the city because she’d served there for years and had just run a statewide campaign (and won). If Kennedy had been alive, he probably would have endorsed one or the other and the election would have been over. Obviously, since the election was for his seat, he wasn’t and couldn’t.

What this says to me is that what’s obvious to “progressives” might only be obvious to people those progressives personally know.

@141

I think you just confirmed what I said: if the Democratic machine had gotten behind Capuano, he could have won the primary and then taken the general, but because they didn’t, he lost the primary and Coakley lost the general.

FWIW, I live in Vermont, and I was very aware of what was going on in the primary, and was so disappointed with the Democratic party leadership that I unsubscribed from all their mailing lists–I just didn’t see the point anymore.

If this makes me sound like an ideologue, I think that’s the wrong message to take. For the past few election cycles, candidates have gone well outside of their states seeking support, and that’s in fact why I was aware of Mike Capuano–I was asked to contribute to his campaign, and I did.

I’m not precisely a progressive myself, although I certainly have progressive tendencies in many areas, but he seemed like a more viable candidate than Coakley to me at the time, and the election was really important. The fact that the Democrats managed to lose it was really a testament to their disconnect with reality. I’m more than a little concerned that they’re going to do the same thing with this presidential election, and we’re going to wind up with President Trump.

TM 01.27.16 at 11:50 am @ 125 —
I would not make that assumption if the Republican candidate is Mr. Trump. According to ‘Man, The Unpolitical Animal’ and common observation, people do not vote rationally or ideologically; they vote for perceived immediate self-interest, image, tradition, and in many case ‘for no accountable reason’ (such as their feelings about the weather or the fate of their favorite baseball team). Mr. Trump seems to know about this, and he seems to know how to use it to defeat traditional politicians. Mrs. Clinton is such a politician: her present enterprise is based on name recognition, connections, the support of plutocrats, alleged though seldom demonstrated competence, and conservatism. All of these can be turned into deficits by Mr. Trump. Mr. Sanders, on the other hand, is a kind of curve ball. For instance, he calls himself a ‘socialist’. For generations, the Right has been calling mild Welfarists ‘socialists’ and they have defended themselves against the ‘charge’, but here comes someone who says, ‘Yeah, I’m a socialist, and here’s my plan.’ His plan turns out to be the New Deal, but instead of a old New Deal that must be wearily, grudgingly, ineffectively defended, as by the Democratic Party elite, Sanders presents it as some kind of revolutionary advance. This is a very tricky play: if the attackers insist he’s a socialist, they emphasize the supposed novelty and vigor of his ideas, which yet turn out to be vaguely and comfortingly familiar; if they insist he’s not a socialist, they contradict their own argument. You can see that traditional flacks like Paul Starr still don’t get it, and I’d bet that Mrs. Clinton doesn’t get it, either. Hence, I think Mrs. Clinton, cautious and conservative, can probably be defeated by Mr. Trump, but that Mr. Sanders — a man weird enough to be from Vermont and profess socialism — has some chance.

The result of Donald Trump debating Hillary Clinton will be very strong confirmation of Melvin Konner’s last book.

@146 Given that Coakley also lost in the 2014 gubernatorial race, maybe she just wasn’t that good of a candidate.

I’m not familiar with the dynamics of that race, but here in Maryland we also had O’Malley’s Lt. Governor (Brown) run a terrible campaign and lose to a nobody republican. Brown also was the establishment choice over a potentially better Dem candidate (Mizeur — who I voted for in the primary) and lost the general due to low Dem turnout.

The problem with electability arguments such as Starr’s and Krugman’s is that the argument as an observation is entangled with the argument as campaign propaganda. If it were true, as an observation, then there would be no great urgency to make it. Starr and Krugman weren’t writing these kinds of articles in June of last year because they believed the CW that Clinton was unbeatable. They make it now because, paradoxically,they do think she is beatable. As an observation, I think what we are seeing is not that Sanders is a symbolic candidate, but that Clinton is beatable. It is funny (ha ha funny, I mean) that these electability arguments are pulled out and urged only when one’s candidate is in trouble, i.e. seems to be losing an election.
Actually, if we grant the CW, then Sanders beating Clinton would seem to mean more about her electability than his. Is Clinton another Kerry?
I actually don’t think so, though. The demographics on this election strongly favor the dems. The GOP idea is that somehow, they can get more white conservatives out to the polls. I think that idea is pretty bogus. If the GOP gets the same percentage of the white vote as Romney, which was very good, there would have to be a significant collapse in the black and hispanic vote for the GOP to make it. Or a swing to the GOP, which is being rendered, every day that the campaign goes on, more and more unlikely.

152 There is no evidence that Humphrey or Muskie would have won against Nixon. Humphrey,in 1968, was a vice president and was supported by the entirety of the Democratic establishment. He lost to Nixon in 1968. A loss is a loss. McGovern’s loss, it must be said, really didn’t hurt the Dems downticket. The Dems took two more states in the Senate, in fact.
So yeah, somebody has to lose, but I don’t see McGovern as an especially egregious case that the CW candidate is the best.

Given that McGovern’s reasons for failure include:
+ Choosing as his running mate a man with a history of mental illness.
+  AFL-CIO opposition/support of Nixon
+ The Opposition of the Democrat party elite.

Given that McGovern largely ran on an anti-war campaign, the parallels don’t seem particularly strong.

But yes, if the Democrat elite decided to try and destroy Sanders chances that could definitely hamper his electability. Does anyone think this is likely? And if so, what does it say about the ‘anyone but a Republican’ strategy?

No one old enough to remember the actual George McGovern would call him an exciting grassroots candidate. He lost to Muskie in New Hampshire, lost to Humphrey in Ohio, lost to George Wallace in Florida. But, he got some crucial help from Nixon’s dirty tricks operatives and his candidacy benefitted from the breakup of the New Deal coalition and the damage that did to the Party. George McGovern was a divisive figure, not thru any particular personal fault, but just by virtue of the role he was cast into, in the political realignment taking place. I would not say McGovern wanted the role, but he was instrumental in breaking up the New Deal coalition, driving the working class out of the Party.

Personally, he came across to many people as indecisive and equivocating, an impression that was reinforced by his squeaky speaking voice and illustrated by the disastrous choosing and unchoosing of Eagleton as V-P. He was a remarkably ineffective spokesman against the war in Vietnam, and the economy was in a runaway boom so his electoral chances would have been slim, even without the demolition work his candidacy did on the Party.

Like Paul Starr in the OP, or Paul Krugman, the critics of Bernie Sanders’ candidacy insist that they agree with Sanders on issues, but . . . Is Bernie Sanders’ commitment to single-payer going to drive out of the Party overpaid white liberals, who consistently say they want single-payer? Are the people, who have argued that the most important thing is solid support for the Lesser Evil against the Greater Evil (Republicans) going to sit out the election if the Democrats fail to nominate the sufficiently corrupt and evil Hillary?

If Democrats do not go thru with the planned coronation, is that going to be some tragedy for the Party?

The Republicans have a full bench of epically repulsive candidates. Even if Trump self-destructs before the Convention, they’ve got worse.

Just to make sure, I looked it up. According to the Gallup poll, in May, 1972, Humphrey was even more behind Nixon than McGovern, 11 percent as opposed to 8 percent. Moreover, Wallace voters, asked their second preference, were more for McGovern than for Humphrey.
The argument that Humphrey or Muskie was more electable than McGovern seems very very poor to me. It doesn’t even try to make a case, given the data we have.

@157: the critics of Bernie Sanders’ candidacy insist that they agree with Sanders on issues, but . . . Is Bernie Sanders’ commitment to single-payer going to drive out of the Party overpaid white liberals, who consistently say they want single-payer? Are the people, who have argued that the most important thing is solid support for the Lesser Evil against the Greater Evil (Republicans) going to sit out the election if the Democrats fail to nominate the sufficiently corrupt and evil Hillary?

Speaking as an overpaid white liberal who agrees with Sanders on a lot of the issues, of course I’d vote for him, and I’m sure he’d take my state. No one is claiming that the key to electability for a Democrat is buttoning down the support of New England/New York/California liberals.

B Wilder @157
[McGovern] was a remarkably ineffective spokesman against the war in Vietnam

I remember the McGovern campaign very well. It was the first campaign in which I volunteered extensively (though not old enough to vote, I was old enough to do most of the grunt work that volunteers do). The claim that McGovern was “a remarkably ineffective spokesman against the the war in Vietnam” is, in my view, completely wrong. He was a very effective spokesman, partly because his style and background — a Midwestern directness (he was from South Dakota, as you may recall), bomber pilot in WW2, historian, legislator — was v. well suited to the role. He wasn’t the greatest orator who’s ever run for the presidency, to be sure, but he was a very effective anti-war spokesman. His loss was caused by a range of things, some within his control and many not, but let’s give credit where it’s due, and here it is due.

Actually, I suppose the only way one could prove, or make it more likely, that a candidate defeated in the primaries could have won the general election is to see whether that has ever happened. Is there a case that x candidate, who lost in the primaries in an election year, then ran successfully in the next election cycle both in the primaries and against the candidate who had won the presidential in the last cycle? I can’t think of a single instance.

@167: Actually, I suppose the only way one could prove, or make it more likely, that a candidate defeated in the primaries could have won the general election is to see whether that has ever happened. Is there a case that x candidate, who lost in the primaries in an election year, then ran successfully in the next election cycle both in the primaries and against the candidate who had won the presidential in the last cycle? I can’t think of a single instance.

If I have the criteria correctly in mind — Reagan: in 1976, lost nomination fight; in 1980, won successfully in the primaries and against incumbent.

ps I wonder if anybody in 1976 was arguing that Ronald Reagan was the more electable candidate? By anybody, I mean the VSP.

That should be, “But voters will tax themselves for important things that voters feel government should do.”

“But I am not convinced that HRC can win. Her history shows her to be a god-awful candidate – she makes unforced errors and her instincts are terrible – she fights dirty in the stupidest, most self-destructive ways. How can you be sure she will be the better candidate when any day she could blow herself up?”

@ 41: Clinton has been making the case for herself and defending the record of the current Administration and her old boss very effectively, particularly in the context of the debates. (The Donald may be able to run roughshod over his fellow Republicans in a debate but Hillary will eat him for breakfast. I wouldn’t count on Sanders to do that.)

She also sat for hours before the Benghazi committee and wiped the floor with her would-be inquisitors.

HRC will never work a rope line the way her husband can, she’ll never be a cool dude, and she’ll probably always be a little uptight in the public eye. But she has some formidable and impressive qualities as a candidate.

“Actually, I suppose the only way one could prove, or make it more likely, that a candidate defeated in the primaries could have won the general election is to see whether that has ever happened. Is there a case that x candidate, who lost in the primaries in an election year, then ran successfully in the next election cycle both in the primaries and against the candidate who had won the presidential in the last cycle? I can’t think of a single instance.”

I’ve noticed alot of variation in the amount knowledge of commentators here about politics, but this is a weird question. Its awkwardly phrased, so I may be misunderstanding it.

As someone else noted, an obvious example is Reagan losing in the primaries in 1976, and getting elected President in 1980.

Candidates losing a nomination contest and at least getting nominated later are not that uncommon. Dewey was not nominated in 1940 but was in 1944 and 1948, you also have the examples of Humphrey 1960/ 68, Dole 1980/88/96, Gore 1988/2000, McCain 2000/08, and Romney 2008/12.

Now of these half a dozen examples, none became President, but then you have Reagan, and at least Humprey and Gore came close. Gore won the popular vote, which is normally all that is required. The point is that parties nominating people who have already run national campaigns is pretty common, and not necessarily a losing strategy for the general election either. Nixon lost a general election, though it was very close and he may have had a popular vote plurality, but came back and won twice later.

I agree with Suzanne. I think Clinton’s (purported) weaknesses as a candidate are being a tad overplayed in this thread.

@ 168 This sounds about right.

@ 175 She’s a lawyer, a political insider skilled at raising millions, a political wife, and an accomplished liar in her own right. Iraq, Libya, Syria are each testament to her willingness to sell out national security and humanity for short-term selfish gain, again, again, again, and again no matter what the cost.

The best she represents is a highly suspect version of more of the same. She’s not Bernie, she’s not Trump and that alone is not sufficient to make her the nominee. Her speeches are bundles of platitudes that in many cases stand in stark contrast to her own behavior and her own positions.

Hillary is not Trump and that’s not enough, and may not be enough to beat Trump.

Obama, no fool when it comes to winning elections, noted that the American electorate will move towards the candidate of hope. Bernie and Trump have hope locked up. Bernie stands for idealism, hard work, and principle as the way forward. Trump is for American exceptionalism, patriotism, and guile. Both are clearly protectionist.

HRC and the Dem elite has sold out to Wall Street, Big Phama, Big Insurance, and Dem unions. HAMP went to special interests, banks got bailed, HRC and her ilk got paid and got rich, and the poor got health insurance and no jobs.

180- Johnson I think we can exclude. Being made president because of an assassination can be excluded from the set. Besides, again, the experiment has to put the losing candidate in the previous cycle up against the same candidate who won in the last cycle. That is the test of electability. Gore of course does not count at all. He didn’t run and win against George H Bush in 1992. Or rather, he ran as VP. And in 2000, he ran against George W. Only Reagan qualifies. And here I think we have something curious. If Reagan had run in 1976, I dont – for gut reasons, because of Watergate, etc – think he would have won against Carter. Which might have disqualified him among GOP voters in 1980.

Re: down ticket fall out. Starr is right, but he’s got the wrong candidate. Bernie reminds us that Establishment dems at the state and local level have been hammered because of the lack of inspiration that are the result of Dem national failures. Bernie: ‘don’t complain unless you are ready to stand up and fight back.’

Good stuff!

These arguments by a very narrow parallel construction do not seem very enlightening to me.

It seems to me that, deservedly or not, Hillary Clinton has become the candidate of continuing the status quo, and Sanders has become the candidate of structural reform, the kind that changes the fundamental structure of power.

It is fascinating to me that this chasm has opened up, and that people like Paul Starr or Paul Krugman would take the positions they do, and do so in support of Hillary Clinton. (I do not think they do Hillary any favors associating her with preserving the status quo.) What I mean is that Sanders is talking about structural reform of health care and the financial sector. Single-payer and Glass-Steagall are structural reforms that would take out major elements of corporate money and predation in the political economy and funding for corrupt and reactionary policy. Their argument seems to be, these kinds of structural reform would be desirable in an “ideal” world, but the attempt to introduce them in our world will result in a destabilization of our comfortable dystopia.

This is what Starr says, “High-costs have been built into the health-care system; they can’t be taken out overnight. . . . Switching to single-payer—“Medicare for all”—implies withdrawing an enormous amount of the revenue that hospitals and other institutions are counting on (for example, to meet bond payments). The likely effect of switching to single payer under Sanders’ plan would be to destabilize the health-care industry.”

The arguments about financial reform offered of late by Krugman are similar: you cannot change anything, because it will destabilize the system.

Coming from people who built reputations as critics of the unfortunate developments that led to our dystopia, this defense of preserving the dystopia is startling, as is the attack on fundamental reform for being fundamental.

Vote for Hillary, she will extend and pretend (also bomb). It does not seem very persuasive on its face to me.

@kidneystones
If the primary in my state were held now or in next week or two, I’d vote for Sanders. Not sure what I will do when it actually occurs, b/c it depends partly on developments betw. now and then. It all may be a moot point by then; it may not. Etc.

It’s interesting that when someone reads your comments and responds, you reply w/ e.g. charges of “cowardice and lack of conviction.” It wd be interesting to see yr response to people who — unlike myself — are supporters of HRC. Such exchanges, perhaps mercifully, don’t occur.

I will leave w your parting remark “She’s done nothing but tend to her family’s political fortunes and help start most of America’s recent wars.” Perhaps Sanders shd make this his line of criticism from now on.

I’ve spent too much time on this thread. Not planning to comment further.

Someone else mentioned Robert Reich commentary on Bernie v Hillary as well as the Trump phenomenon. He’s been remarkably clear. Yves Smith quoted him today in her attack on Krugman’s new role as spokesman for the Vichy Left.

The column quoted was quite good, I thought:
http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/robert-reich-why-2016-election-political-volcano-full-eruption
He sounds some of the same themes as kidneystones, though he’s less vituperative.

I’ve known Hillary Clinton since she was 19 years old, and have nothing but respect for her. In my view, she’s the most qualified candidate for president of the political system we now have.

But Bernie Sanders is the most qualified candidate to create the political system we should have, because he’s leading a political movement for change.

The upcoming election isn’t about detailed policy proposals. It’s about power – whether those who have it will keep it, or whether average Americans will get some as well.

. . . on book tour in the nation’s heartland: I kept bumping into people who told me they were trying to make up their minds in the upcoming election between Sanders and Trump.

At first I was dumbfounded. The two are at opposite ends of the political divide.

But as I talked with these people, I kept hearing the same refrains. They wanted to end “crony capitalism.” They detested “corporate welfare,” such as the Wall Street bailout. They wanted to prevent the big banks from extorting us ever again. Close tax loopholes for hedge-fund partners. Stop the drug companies and health insurers from ripping off American consumers. End trade treaties that sell out American workers. Get big money out of politics.

Somewhere in all this I came to see the volcanic core of what’s fueling this election.

If you’re one of the tens of millions of Americans who are working harder than ever but getting nowhere, and who understand that the political-economic system is rigged against you and in favor of the rich and powerful, what are you going to do?

Either you’re going to be attracted to an authoritarian son-of-a-bitch who promises to make America great again by keeping out people different from you and creating “great” jobs in America, who sounds like he won’t let anything or anybody stand in his way, and who’s so rich he can’t be bought off.

Or you’ll go for a political activist who tells it like it is, who has lived by his convictions for fifty years, who won’t take a dime of money from big corporations or Wall Street or the very rich, and who is leading a grass-roots “political revolution” to regain control over our democracy and economy.

In other words, either a dictator who promises to bring power back to the people, or a movement leader who asks us to join together to bring power back to the people.

You don’t care about the details of proposed policies and programs.

You just want a system that works for you.

I understand that many people, though concerned in principle, are comfortable and even complacent and don’t want to risk having the sky fall or the noise of a truly confrontational politics, where the crookedness is exposed. I am probably a bit that way myself, if I tell the truth. I just do not think I should be.

@192, see @150

#133 – Hillary has kept at least a 15 point lead over Sanders since late September.

And the link shows precisely that – from the start of December, Clinton 48-58, currently 52ish; Sanders 30-40, currently 38ish. Huh. The shape of the trend is similar, but the figures are nothing like HuffPo’s ‘favourable’ ratings* – which put both candidates in the 40-47 range since the beginnning of December, with Sanders currently on 47 and Clinton on 43. Why are they so different?

*”Currently tracking 82 polls from 16 pollsters”

Phil: “Why are they so different? What’s up with that?”

Go read the different pollers’ actual questions!

“Favorability” polls don’t ask the same questions as “whom do you plan to vote for?” polls. Favorability can sometimes be a harbinger, however.

For more homework, go and study the methodology links at 538 (Nate Silver) and Princeton Election Consortium (Sam Wang), and Google “opinion poll methodology and problems”.

Nate & Sam are scientists, HuffPost & RealClear are not.

HuffPost & RealClear are making poller aggregations, and the pollers themselves have different adherence to accuracy (to say the least). I like RealClear because the whole site panders to the rightwing, and so I take it as the easy-to-check, worst-case scenario for the forces of sanity.

That said, HuffPost’s Dem primary poll aggregate looks just like RealClear, only smoother:
http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/2016-national-democratic-primary.

The overall trend is probably the most accurate thing you can take from these. It’s early in the season. The 9-point minimum spread showing at Jan 12-16 may be significant, or not. Time will tell.

“Nate & Sam are scientists, HuffPost & RealClear are not.”

A bachelor’s degree in economics and a career in baseball forecasting does not a scientist make.

But whatever modest scientific credibility he once had for his methods is pretty much gone now that he’s using political endorsements as part of his statistical calculus. That’s beyond pseudo-science. That’s comedy.

This piece in Vox today, on Sanders’s long-term electoral strategy, is absolutely critical to this discussion:

“Indeed, though critics like Slate’s Jamelle Bouie have criticized Sanders’s theory as blind to the realities of partisan polarization in Washington, Sanders argued to me that that polarization is what makes his moonshot plan to change politics so necessary. ‘The Republican Party right now in Washington is highly disciplined, very, very well-funded, and adheres to more or less the Koch brother position,’ he said. ‘You’re not gonna change them in Washington. The only way that they are changed is by educating, organizing, and what I call a political revolution.'”

http://www.vox.com/2016/1/28/10853502/bernie-sanders-political-revolution

I’d read that piece along with this excellent piece by Matt Karp, which shows that where Obama and other Democratic Party challengers in the past depended for their support on wealthy liberals, Sanders is the first primary challenger in a very long term to draw his support from low-income voters in Iowa and New Hampshire.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/bernie-sanders-democratic-president-primary-new-hampshire-iowa-caucus/

‘You’re not gonna change them in Washington. The only way that they are changed is by educating, organizing, and what I call a political revolution.’

Which is great, but the midterm electoral behavior of Democrats illustrates that running for President isn’t actually the best way one accomplishes it. It’s hard for a presidential campaign to avoid becoming preoccupied with … the presidential campaign. And winning the presidency unavoidably diminishes the urgency created by “The first step in real change is electing me president.” So if this is the answer to the barrier of partisan gridlock, Sanders has it the wrong way round. Republican reactionaries didn’t get Goldwater elected president, then take over the party from the bottom up.

Here is the list of Senate votes on which Sanders and Clinton differed http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/28/upshot/the-senate-votes-that-divided-hillary-clinton-and-bernie-sanders.html?_r=0

93% of the time they voted the same way. Clinton voted for the bailouts and Sanders did not. Clinton seemed to be in favor of the immigration compromise while Sanders seems to have opposed it. Clinton voted for action against Iran twice–the development of a missile system and action against Iran in Iraq. Sanders opposed the civilian nuclear deal with India, Clinton did not.

The best argument for not going into Iraq in 2003 is Article 6 of the Charter of the International Military Tribunal (Nuremberg war crimes trials).

@ 208 Your clever enough to read, so please do not put words in my mouth. “… Bush did his best to start an all-out nuclear arms race in Asia… ” Your entire comment has precisely zero connection to anything I wrote. I could spell this out for you point by point, but your ham fisted ploy is so transparently dishonest to merit nothing but surprise and contempt.

The US-India nuclear deal is/was a big deal for the billions of us who live in Asia and for the rest of the world because the deal, as Bush would have it, effectively allowed India greatly expand its own nuclear weapons program. The degree to which this has actually taken place is not the only issue. What the deal in Bush form did was shift the debate on nuclear arms production in all the nuclear-capable nations in Asia – North Korea, China, Pakistan, Russia, Iran, and Japan. Some may believe that more nuclear weapons in Asia, including Japan, would be a good thing. That is/was certainly the Bush position. Abe certainly would like to see Japan ready to ‘do its share’ militarily on the world stage.

I’m opposed to such a development on every level. But that’s me. Your comment betrays a facile and flip contempt for the threat posed by a nuclear arms race in Asia to us all and frankly beggars belief.

Considering the Republican candidates, im rather very optimistic Sanders will win if he gets the nomination.

Besides the ‘Vichy Left’ never having been particularly leftish, it is probably incorrect to use the term ‘Vichy’, in that those who adhered to the Vichy government were mostly people who believed with reason that France had been conclusively defeated and abandoned, and that they had better make the best of things. They were probably aware of what had been done in Poland. By contrast, many on the American pseudo-Left have taken the lead in projects of war, imperialism, plutocracy, surveillance, the Drug War/prison industry, police militarization, and other similar enterprises. I am sure I don’t need to name names. They do not have the excuse of having been defeated; they have been on the winning team from the beginning. Very serious people, indeed.

I’m frankly astonished only one commenter thus far has mentioned this piece comes from Politico. OF COURSE a bastion of conventional Beltway thought is going to think Bernie Sanders is naturally unelectable, compared to Hillary Clinton.

The polling data doesn’t agree, but the Beltway doesn’t trust or else doesn’t understand polling data. Remember how mad Nate Silver made all those pundits last time?

Sanders wants higher taxes on the rich to pay for, among other things, more and better health coverage. The Beltway knows that it’s impossible to raise taxes, which would come as a surprise to those presidents who have done it in just my lifetime: Reagan, GHW Bush, Clinton, and Obama. Nevertheless! it’s impossible this time.

Sanders is a socialist (I would call him social d, myself, but whatever), and socialist = evil because Ronald Reagan said so. But voters my cohort have a higher appraisal of socialism than of capitalism (am I seriously the only one who remembers this?). The Beltway doesn’t understand it, either.

Jay Rosen called this sort of clap-trap the “cult of savviness,” the idea that strikes dimwitted journalists the world over that they understand what is possible, what the consequences simply have to be, of this political event or that one. And the fact that they’ve been wrong nearly every single time doesn’t seem to shake their faith in that belief.