By Lambert Strether of Corrente.
Here is a third post debunking common talking points by Clinton loyalists and Democrat Establishment operatives. You might hear these myths on Twitter, or at the gym, or over coffee. For both talking points, I’ll give quotations that illustrate the myth, followed by rebuttals. (Three previous talking points are debunked here, and two more here.)
Talking Point: Democrats Are the Party of Smart People
Here’s an example of the talking point (although the headline confuses the left with Democrats, that’s what author means; the lead immediately shifts to talking about Democrats). Politics USA:
Evidence That The Left Is Smarter: Democrats Have Bigger Vocabularies, Better Grammar Than GOP
Here’s a quote from Congressman Andre Carson:
“Keith [Ellison] is a friend of mine. I’ve found him to be very thoughtful, very smart, a very hard worker. He’s proven himself as a leader of the progressive caucus. He has shown that he is connected to progressive values,” Carson said.
Here’s another example:
“Chuck is a very smart guy,” said Nomiki Konst, a Democratic strategist [see here], former Sanders surrogate, and host of “The Filter” on Sirus XM. “He has to be a senator. He has the responsibility in the Senate to make things work, and he knows probably half the Hillary supporters were much more progressive.”
I could go on and on and on and on and on and on. Thomas Frank, in Listen, Liberal, gives a final example (page 131):
Obama donor and hedge fund boss William Ackman told Reuters in July 2008: “My goal is to elect an incredibly smart and capable guy.”
(The possibility does exist that Ackman is confusing credentialism and academic polish with smarts, but that is a topic for another day.) Anybody who’s been on the Twitter knows that the second or even the first rhetorical move of a Democrat loyalist is to call their interlocutor, one way or another, stupid; it won’t even be a subtext. There are at least two reasons this talking point is false.
First, downballot Democrats have been in free-fall since 2008, and this did not stop in 2016. Philip Bump prepared the following chart:
The chart only goes to 2015; in 2016, the Democrats gained a minuscule 5 House seats, 2 Senate seats, 1 legislative chamber, and lost two governships. An optimist would call 2016 signs of a coming Democrat wave, a pessimist would call it a dead cat bounce, and a realist would look at the chart and call any gains a blip. And of course the Democrats lost the Presidency as well.
Second, Democrats schemed to get the 2016 opponent they wanted[1], and still lost. Salon:
The Clinton campaign and Democratic National Committee called for using far-right candidates “as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right.” Clinton’s camp insisted that Trump and other extremists should be “elevated” to “leaders of the pack” and media outlets should be told to “take them seriously.”
It continued, “Our hope is that the goal of a potential HRC campaign and the DNC would be one-in-the-same: to make whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the electorate.”
“In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more ‘Pied Piper’ candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party,” the Clinton campaign wrote.
As examples of these “pied piper” candidates, the memo named Donald Trump — as well as Sen. Ted Cruz and Ben Carson).
“We need to be elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the pack and tell the press to them seriously,” the Clinton campaign concluded.
And if there’s one lesson we can take away from the Podesta emails, it was Brooklyn’s ability to “tell the press” what to write; the great majority of mainstream publications functioned as an operational arm of the Clinton campaign (and in fact still do).
So, for this talking point to be true, we have to believe that being smart means that you cause your party to collapse. You also have to believe that being smart means controlling the party apparatus, dominating the press, having boatloads of money, getting to pick your opponent, and still losing. All after framing your opponent not merely as a danger to the Republic, but as a fascist. To rephrase Deirdre McCloskey: If you’re so smart, why aren’t you winning?
Talking Point: Republicans Stole Election 2016 from the Democrats
Here’s is an example of the talking point. From The Nation:
Trump undermined the basic tenets of democracy in ways unseen by any previous presidential nominee. He said he might refuse to accept the outcome of the election if things didn’t go his way; his supporters explicitly called for “racial profiling” at the polls; and his campaign openly boasted that “we have three major voter-suppression operations under way” to reduce turnout among African Americans, young women, and liberals.
If anyone was rigging the system, it was the Republicans—by making it harder to vote. Evidence of voter fraud never materialized in 2016—except for the case of a Trump supporter in Iowa who voted twice and was caught—but as we saw in states like Wisconsin and North Carolina, voter suppression was all too real.
The subtext here is that the Democrats are innocent victims of Republican perfidy (and yes, the Republicans have been perfidious). That said, there are two reasons this talking point is, if not false, only true when context is not taken into account.
First, Republicans did purge minorities from voter lists. [2] To begin, those of you who listen to podcosts should check out this excellent recent interview with Greg Palast on “This is Hell.”[3] This is the best explanation of “caging” and crossheck that I have encountered, and sadly better than the print versions. (Readers, please correct me!) Greg Palast:
What’s far more likely to undermine democracy in November is the culmination of a decade-long Republican effort to disenfranchise voters under the guise of battling voter fraud. The latest tool: Election officials in more than two dozen states have compiled lists of citizens whom they allege could be registered in more than one state – thus potentially able to cast multiple ballots – and eligible to be purged from the voter rolls.
The data is processed through a system called the Interstate Voter Registration Crosscheck Program, which is being promoted by a powerful Republican operative, and its lists of potential duplicate voters are kept confidential. But Rolling Stone obtained a portion of the list and the names of 1 million targeted voters. According to our analysis, the Crosscheck list disproportionately threatens solid Democratic constituencies: young, black, Hispanic and Asian-American voters – with some of the biggest possible purges underway in Ohio and North Carolina, two crucial swing states with tight Senate races.We had Mark Swedlund, a database expert whose clients include eBay and American Express, look at the data from Georgia and Virginia, and he was shocked by Crosscheck’s “childish methodology.” He added, “God forbid your name is Garcia, of which there are 858,000 in the U.S., and your first name is Joseph or Jose. You’re probably suspected of voting in 27 states.
Swedlund’s statistical analysis found that African-American, Latino and Asian names predominate, a simple result of the Crosscheck matching process, which spews out little more than a bunch of common names. No surprise: The U.S. Census data shows that minorities are overrepresented in 85 of 100 of the most common last names.
So, paraphrasing Palast’s podcast, Secretaries of State would send their voter data in to CrossCheck for cleaning. Crosscheck would flag duplicates using matching procedures guaranteed to take minority voters off the rolls, by (for example) saying that “Jose Garcia” in Michigan and “Jose Garcia” in Arizona were the same person, trying to vote in two states. Bad. Indeed, evil (although as Palast notes, the Koch brothers operatives who ran Crosscheck “didn’t care about the color of their skin; they cared about the color of their votes.” Systemic racism).
Second, Republicans could never have succeeded with their purge if Democrats had expanded the franchise.
Perfidious though CrossCheck is, it’s very similar to the “scrub list” that Jeb Bush “cleansed” the Florida voter rolls with when his brother ran for President in 2000. Greg Palast has a detailed description here, but this paragraph leaped out at me:
Smith added that the DBT computer program automatically transformed various forms of a single name. In one case, a voter named “Christine” was identified as a felon based on the conviction of a “Christopher” with the same last name. Smith says ChoicePoint would not respond to queries about its proprietary methods. Nor would the company provide additional verification data to back its fingering certain individuals in the registry purge. One supposed felon on the ChoicePoint list is a local judge.
Again, we have the same kind of “childish methodology” accidentally producing the same outcome: Voter rolls disproportionately purged of minorites, that benefit a sitting party. Bad, indeed evil.
But let me take a moment to break out my calculator: 2016 – 2000 = 16. That’s sixteen years that Republicans have been running the same kind of scam, and what have the Democrats done? Squat, absent some targeted election year registration drives after hitting up a squillionare who wants to do some virtue signalling.
Do you think that if Democrats were running a 24/7/365 voter registration operation that the Republicans would be in power to run the CrossCheck scam in the first place? Of course not. Voter ID? Bad! So suppose a million voters lose the franchise because of it. And suppose it costs $50 bucks a pop to get a voter their ID. Let me break out my calculator again: $50 million is a drop in the bucket compared to Clinton’s budget for red, white, and blue convention balloons. So why don’t the Democrats do it? Because they really don’t care about expanding the franchise, that’s why.
So, the talking point is true, looked at without context. Put into context, it’s the worst kind of falsehood. Crosscheck is a bad thing. But in my book it’s even worse to enable the perfidy of others, and then erase your own responsibility for it.
Conclusion
As you can see, I’m moved into more generic indictments of the Democrat debacle of 2016. I hope you’ve enjoyed the series (so far?), and if other people are coming up with similar lists, I’d very much appreciate it if you’d leave links to them in comments.
NOTES
[1] When John DiIulio became the first Senior Advisor to leave the Bush White House, he blasted the White House staff as “Mayberry Machiavellis.” Seems a propos, except that in this case Barney and Opie are from Brooklyn.
[2] Please, nothing about “fraction magic” in the comments. Thank you.
[3] Paraphrasing: Democrats steal primary elections, using retail methods. Republicans steal general elections, using wholesale methods.
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Wait a minute. This did not stop in 2016? Of course it did, at least in the House and the Senate. The Democrats didn’t gain much in the House or Senate, but they gained a little. “Free fall” means that they would have continued to lose more seats in those legislative bodies. As for state governorships, yes, the free fall is continuing.
Falling down a flight of stairs seems to be the better description. There are periodic breathers before the next fall.
You got any numbers to back that up?
From the article:
You can check other sites, too, such as RealClearPolics dot com.
Just keeping you honest
I dont recall I’ve ever read Vatch making an explicit claim wo being able to provide a legit link
Hmm. That’s a gain, huh? 5 House seats means nothing when the opposition still controls, because institutional control in the House is rather iron-bound. 2 Senate seats means little even when the Dems supposedly have institutional control, because even when they do have control, they apparently don’t. In this case, those two Senate pickups won’t amount to baby food.
On the larger questions, Democrats have not been able to advance a single important policy issue in years, and this year they lost the one power center they still nominally controlled: the White House. This they accomplished by repelling their own base in the election with a candidate so despised that they lost to a supposed fascist.
This is not the profile of a party on the rebound. I can see how Bob Shrum might call it that, and thus why the entire denuded Democrat establishment would do so. But I wouldn’t believe a word that came out of his mouth, nor theirs.
Depends on whether you consider the executive actions on clean power and holding all broker/dealers to a fiduciary standard while advising retirement accounts to be “important policy issue[s]”
That’s sort of like the powerful Hillary response to the Bank crooks “Cut it out.” Or Trump’s powerful control over his fan base using intimidation “Don’t do it”
Remember the vote on Trade Promotion Authority (fast track for the TPP, TTiP, etc.)? It passed the House by a narrow vote of 218-208. Even though the great majority of Republic representatives supported it, not all of them did, so they needed Democratic votes to pass it. There were 28 Democrats who voted for it, and they received a lot of criticism as a result. With 5 extra Democrats in the House, it will be a little harder to pass such legislation. When the Republicans don’t agree, they’ll need a larger number of Democrats to play the villain rotation game, and sometimes, they might not be able to find enough who are willing to play.
Despite all that, I agree that the gain of 5 is pretty small, and the Republicans will continue to be able to do mostly as they please.
As for the Senate, now that there will be a Republican President, along with a couple of extra Democratic Senators, perhaps the Democrats will grow some spines, and use the filibuster.
That assumes that the Democratic leadership (and the representatives they helped put in office) wanted Fast Track to fail. You have to remember all the rather obvious moves being made.to make sure it did pass by Nancy and Steny. I know it was the Senate, but my favorite story of the passage was Chuck Schumer helping rewrite the bill to secure Democratic votes in the Senate, but keeping up his front by voting NO.
I think that the Democratic leadership did want fast track to pass. But that doesn’t mean that it was easy for them to find trade traitors from the rank and file Democratic members of the House. I don’t believe that every Democratic Representative is willing to practice villain rotation. Furthermore, some of the ones who do participate in villain rotation probably have limits on how frequently they will do it.
A gain of 5 members is a gain of 5 members; it’s not a continuation of free falling losses. It’s a genuine victory in a minor skirmish, but the war is still being lost.
“If current trends continue…”
Hitting a branch on the way down doesn’t mean it’s not a “free fall.”
Actually, that’s wrong. An object in free fall is being acted on by gravity alone (we sometimes make an exception for air resistance). If the falling object collides with another object, that’s a significant additional force that conflicts with the freely falling state of the object. In the case of the Senate and the House, the fall didn’t just stop, it reversed, but only by a little bit.
Hillary Victory Fund.
I’m sure that helped down ticket candidates.
/sarc
In New Mexico dems regain the House and the Senate. Governorship is still in Republican hands but that said the reason why they’ve made gains is because in the greater majority of all the races in the state of New Mexico are being run uncontested. I will repeat that they are being run on contested mostly by democrats in which people don’t see any viable alternative because there is no viable alternative running. That said however that may change. They have awakened an opposition.
So, I don’t quite follow why Democrats don’t care about the franchise- and do you have any direct evidence of that? Might there also be other reasons (I have no idea what they could be) why the Democrats have not acted over the last 16 years in the face of voting irregularities?
I’ve been quite puzzled myself as to why the Democrats haven’t spoken up about Crosscheck and the like.
> do you have any direct evidence of that
Sixteen years of failure is enough direct evidence for me.
But, the question is, I think, why the Democrats don’t care that a million+ probable Democratic voters are being purged?
One gets the uneasy feeling that Clintonite Democrats actually would prefer lower working class voters not vote for them, so as not to be beholden to them, i.e., not have to represent them.
Here is another way in which the Democrats are stupid: for a quarter century or whatever Democratic ‘thought leaders’ have been assuring themselves that once they have finished tweaking this country’s demographics they will never lose any more elections.
Well wake up and start reaching out in a BIG way, Team D, ’cause on its own it ain’t —-in’ working.
But I think that IS the case. Allegedly Bill Clinton told Hillary to run on economic issues and to court working class voters, as he did successfully, and allegedly, she decided not to do that.
Not only did Hillary not attempt to campaign for working class votes, she actively sought out Elite Republican voters to cross over and vote for her. Her campaign cheered and crowed over every rightwing Elite Republican establishment figure & newspaper who endorsed her.
I felt like I was in bizarro world. Here’s Trump, the putative “Republican,” campaigning to the left of Clinton courting working class voters, while there’s Clinton, the alleged “Democrat,” being endorsed by Henry Kissinger and a boatload of the creme de la creme of Oligarchic Righwing elites and campaigning for the votes of rich Republicans.
WTF???
But when I pointed this out to my traditional “D” voter pals, they pretty much told me to STFU.
There is such a thing as cognitive dissonance, and voters from both sides if aisle engage in it in their own special ways.
It’s cute how Bill must have had his PR guy throw his wife under the bus here. Bill was ineffective on the campaign trail, insulting crucial members of the Democratic coalition — any version of it you wish to choose — including suffering workers. I think he did try a couple of Sister Souljah moments, insulting young people and people of color, I guess to throw white workers a tasty bias bone. But see, they weren’t hungry for that from a Democrat. They wanted material benefits, and Bill didn’t offer them that any more than his wife did. He praised the TPP somewhere in the midwest, IIRC.
So, no, everything wouldn’t have been fixed if “The Big Dog” was in charge. (God, how I hate that epithet.) I know the flaccid critiques of her campaign’s failure in the corporate press is heavily focused on the idea that if she had just showed up in these places she lost narrowly, she’d have flipped those states. But that presumes that people would have gone, and liked what they heard. She lost Ohio by A LOT, and she went there A LOT (for her, at least).
It’s the policy, stupid. (That is a sentence directed to everybody involved in promoting Clinton during the campaign and excusing her now.) She (a deeply tainted and distrusted figure) offered nothing but vaporware, on behalf of a party that was directly responsible for many people’s suffering. Turns out, that’s not very effective.
Lets not forget the McCarthyesque dogma being spewed from liberal Democrats, of all people, against a Right Wing, anti-free trade, pro-working class, big infrastructure Republican. A bizarro world indeed.
Much as I despise the IDPoli Democrat left and am relieved Clinton had her ass handed to her I’d wait a bit before declaring Trump an “anti-free trade, pro-working class, big infrastructure Republican”. That remains to be seen.
Choosing that Breitbart loon as his advisor…well, I’m gonna take my own advice and wait before bringing down the righteous boom of my judgement. I hope he at least works things out with Russia (and doesn’t start any wars elsewhere to make up for it) and stops arming and training the al-Qaeda linked Islamists destroying Syria.
He will be under immense pressure before January from the squawking on-the-way-out-door Dems and their necon DoS cronies and the establishment GOP and their neocon cronies to keep doing what the Bush and Obama administrations have been doing.
And lets remember that candidate Trump was not a particularly inspiring or nuanced dude and spouted some pretty vile stuff during his campaign. That doesn’t mean the free and independent (lol) media’s hysterically tarring every person who voted for him with racist and misogynist brush is accurate, but the man himself is a grade A asshole.
Don’t leave out the possibility that Democrats find voter suppression to be a useful tool in the toolkit to have from time to time. Without various forms of voter suppression, Clinton would have been in a tighter race against Sanders in the primaries.
I agree with you and JSM, and also think that election fraud is useful for Democrats and Republicans in state and local elections that control lots of money and power. Both parties want to exclude upstarts from their fiefdoms. Overarching all this is that both parties are beholden to oligarchs that don’t want real elections.
All right, I confess to being the dim bulb here, so please indulge me. Tell me if I’m getting this straight:
“Let’s rig elections in a manner which guarantees our opponents get more votes than us, giving them majorities in all political venues. Obviously, this brilliantly esoteric strategy has been a whiz-bang success: In eight years we’ve lost gobs of State Legislatures, hundreds of State legislators, numerous Governorships, Senators, and, Congressmen. It’s almost too good to be true!
So, was Hillary’s loss of the Presidency the Grand, Ultimate Democratic Victory?
@NYPaul – Yep, that’s about right.
Of course, there are other tactical failures on the part of the Dems and Lambert mentions some of them in the process of debunking the myths of the lost election.
It’s really a damn shame. The Democratic Party my parents supported did good things for equality, civil rights, fighting poverty, the labor movement, and other issues. It’s long gone and we have a duopoly of major parties that differ by only a couple of degrees of neo-liberalism.
Some of it was that they discovered that winning lots.or.most of the elections not only gave them the opportunity to grift the system, it also eliminated their excuses for not getting anything done. Our DLC Dems are hamstrung in manners that their Republican counterparts are not. Except for abortion the Republicans campaign as they mean to govern. The majority of national Democrats actually want those same things but have campaigned for a different agenda. An agenda they are supposed to start enacting when they have majorities. Now they certainly never expected, or wanted, to win the House, but having the Presidency and the Senate would mean they are necessary to the owners/donors/oligarchs, but no longer can do anything for the rubes who voted for t hem. Perfect, until it didn’t happen.
The message of the Democrats to the upper crust was, “we would rather lose with Hillary than win with the one candidate who might harm your interests”.
While losing with Hillary was not a victory, it was something the Democrats could live with, a loss that signaled that Democrats would continue to behave as they had before, supporting capital over labor, for big finance, for big pharma, for foreign military actions, for big healthcare and for globalization and “free trade”.
The people who knew Hillary’s private positions were comforted by her nomination.
Further comfort was that Tim Kaine was ready to step in if HRC was incapacitated..
Admittedly, the Democrats could drop below critical influential mass if they lose enough, but the Blue Dog label applied to some indicates a lot are Republican lite anyway.
Hillary’s fundraising and media/prominent people endorsements indicated that HRC was the only choice for the real constituency of the elite Democrats.
I expect no real change in the Democrats as a result of this loss, politically HRC was the only choice safe for them to promote.
I want President Trump to do very well, as that might push real change on both the Republicans and Democrats.
Trump might embarrass both parties enough to cause reform by actually doing something for the American middle (and never mentioned, lower) classes..
One can hope, but after Obama, realized “hope” is in short supply.
Because they have been actively vying to become the GOP since 1990.
If it’s good for the goose and all that.
An opportunity to use fancy talk: 16 yrs= prima facie evidence
As for the why,
I conclude the DNC is so corrupt, they would rather run and loose with a rigged primary selected insider candidate than win with a outsider legitimately selected one. The asshats protesting a legitimate election result should back up their Train and redirect their vitriol at the DNC primary rigging schemes, specifically the “Superdelegate” scam.
The Democrats I believe are satisfied to be a perpetual opposition party, it’s part of the schtick.
It’s always easier to offer lamentations and handwringing while collecting funding then do something productive and sensible. Case in point, what are BHOs and HRCs achievements other then running a stalling campign to run the statute of limitations for Corruption, turning health care into an annuity for insurance company executives and cultivating a state of perpetual mayhem, death and long tetm animosity globally???
Case in point this last election the DNC shills campaign focus on why I should fear and loath the “crazy” opo candidate instead of offering up reasons for me to be enthusiastic about the track record of success and good judgement of the smart D candidate, as well bask in the glow of the last eight years of enlightened leadership
BHOs legacy? I read in the elevator the electorates first priority for Trump is unwinding the ACA debacle. And Debacle is the polite word choice.
@Optimader – Excellent points. I like “…perpetual opposition party, it’s part of the schtick…”; fits very well.
More importantly, is your point about the focus on “fear the other” without any reason to feel good about HRC. Of course, I don’t think they had much to promote that is good about HRC in the first place. Experience? Yeah, but the wrong kind of experience since it led to failing upwards. And, one of the big negatives I heard, and felt personally, was HRC’s warmongering. I was as scared that she would start WWIII with Russia as I was afraid of a nuclear conflict in the 1960’s with the Cuban Crisis.
At the rate your going Lambert, with ever more debunking, we’re gonna hit an infinite number of reasons the dems lost soon….and that’s just unpossible. Maybe a squillion pretty soon though…
To be fair, the Democrats themselves could come up with a squillion reasons why they lost.
None of them having to do with Hillary Clinton, though.
Hi, I’m new here but I have been reading your blog for sometime, and I was commenting because there’s a question thats been lingering on my mind and I wanted to get your guys input on it: Had Hillary Clinton won 2008 primary and somehow managed to become President of the United States during the Great Recession, do you think, given the chance, she would have attempted to pass a Stimulus Package in the vein of Obama, or some kind of fiscally expansive policy to deal with the downturn ? Because my gut instinct tells me no, and it frightens because I worry that gives us considerable insight as to what kind of leader she would/would’ve have be/been. Any thoughts?
If there are any fortune tellers in the crowd, please pipe up. My view:
Readers may not know that I supported Clinton in 2008 (pre-Foundation, pre-email) because I felt she was marginally better on domestic policy, that foreign policy would be a wash (because Obama was such a cipher), and because the misogyny of the Obama campaign really repelled me. (I also didn’t like being called a racist at the drop of a hat because I wasn’t an Obama supporter.)
All I can say is that it’s possible. Her domestic policy on the foreclosure crisis was an echo of FDR’s HOLC, far superior to what Obama proposed during the campaign, and far superior to HAMP. It’s possible that she wouldn’t have appointed Larry Summers, who suppressed Christina Romer’s adequately-sized stimulus package, instead of the one Summers picked for Obama. And I thought, although it’s hard to believe know, that Clinton would want to stick it to the Republicans but good because of what they did in the impeachment saga. And I’ve heard stories of people who were connected to the Clintons pre- and post-2008, who came away from dealing with the post-2008 Clintons shaking their heads.
But I could be wrong about all those things.
Thank you so much for the response. I feel as if Hillary Clinton 2008 did have legitimate left wing positions, but after losing to Obama and witnessing here window of opportunity narrowing and not wanting to rock the boat, succumbed to the Very Serious People who were the reason why the entire “Hope and Change” mantra collapsed barely a year into his administration (Tim Geithner wth are you SoT). Claiming to put her husband back in charge of the economy clearly did nothing to help her perception.
You bring up misogyny, which is warranted, but I distinctly remember a lot of Clinton supporters being extremely hostile to competition of any sort, and would immediately label anyone who didn’t support her as sexist, even when it didn’t make sense. Thats actually what put me off with her team, because (and not to defend him), but to their credit Team Obama never insisted that not supporting him amounted to racism.I felt like I saw this again with the “Bernie Bro” fiasco, where Team Hillary vehemently branded Bernie Sanders and his supporters as sexist, woman hating racist(?!), simply because it meant Hillary Clinton might not get her shot at being Commander In Chief.
I believe Lambert’s comment about Obama’s misogyny referred either to
1) Lambert responding to what he learned about how misogyny impacted voter response to different primary candidates, as analyzed in detail, or
2) –guessing, but likely because of how Lambert phrased it–on Obama possibly having had a poor record of including women or women’s voices adequately during the 2008 primary campaign (if this is the case–I couldn’t find info on the internetz).
Perhaps Lambert can clarify if one or both (or neither) were part of his thinking.
2008 supporter. Clinton ran to Obama’s left on domestic policy. Attempted to give the impression she was ‘lefter’ on foreign policy by keeping her mouth shut, but her acts as SoS quickly dispelled any doubts. I thought she was atrocious on foreign policy and knew I’d wouldn’t vote for her again.
2016. Maybe they thought it was such a done deal, she was able to be publicly farther right as that was how she was going to govern and that’s how it is. The Ds kicked the left out long ago. I think Clinton’s campaign and the DNC strategy (elevating the right, algorithm to appeal to moderate conservatives, abandoning working class regions) was a blatant demonstration they don’t like their coalition and want it to mirror themselves – R lite.
Much farther right on foreign policy and farther to the right this campaign. I think she would have been even farther to the right that Obama.
I don’t see Clinton as anything other than a conservative. Low taxes at the top where it counts, private ownership, maybe a few more crumbs in the safety net, religiosity and pandering to the religious and full bore supporter of national security.
Unfortunately, it looks like too many elected Ds are shifting right on every R defined aspect of governing.
To be fair, Hillary ran and whenever Obama needed to say something he borrowed from Hillary. Obama’s whole platform was “I agree with whatever she said except I should be President not her.” If you knew nothing about the Clinton cronies, it’s reasonable to conclude not voting for Hillary was steeped in sexism when the alternative was an empty suit.
Ah yes, I remember…. everyone would laugh ‘me too’! and that brings back fond memories of ‘worm’… what Obama really meant. haha!
I liked making a check list of his speeches (could never listen to him), one for the left and one for the right. Something for everyone, nothing for anyone.
@Waldenpond
November 17, 2016 at 4:21 pm
“I don’t see Clinton as anything other than a conservative.”
Exactly. She was a Goldwater Girl for g-d’s sake! …leopards and spots…
It’s possible, but MARK PENN. Sure, he’s not a policy guy, but the Clintons have always attracted a less than savory element.
I highly doubt President HRC would have delivered anything substantively different from what we got through Obama. That is because what Obama executed was largely dictated by the corporations; it stands to reason to think HRC would have been applied to follow the same may maters. All you really need to do is follow the money – AKA your “fortune” teller. Get it! Get it! Hahahahah!!!! ?? I… guess you needed to be there.
But I digress. This is precisely the point as to why she lost. The Democrats are too beholden to the corporations and too quick to try and drag the voter along like so much baggage. Voters revolted in the only way presented to them.
Lambert, I laughed and laughed, reading this post. You want to secure film rights for your thesis! Might have to be an independent film. It could be a comedy/road movie. Whiley Coyote (Dems) “outwitting Roadrunner, or “Dumb and dumber”, political comedy? Jim Carey could be Podesta? I loved how they hand picked Trump to run against! Comedy magic
As Obama was given a list of picks to choose from by Podesta, a list produced by a revolving-door Dem then ensconced in one of the major TBTF Wall Street banks, it’s pretty safe to say Summers was where the bar was set – about an eighth of an inch off the ground.
The thing these idiots who are screwing with voter lists don’t seem to grasp is that they are further delegitimizing the system, thereby jeopardizing the system upon which they rely.
At least when people vote, if they lose, they feel that they had a chance – so they accept the result. When their votes are denied, that’s when things heat up.
FWIW, I’ve voted in the same place for over 20 years.
This year, I did not receive my ballot.
I called the local Elections Division, and was horrified (and pissed) to discover that in Feb of this year, someone walked into the Elections Division and altered my birth date. Not my address, name, or anything but my birth date.
That altered birth date kicked me off the rolls.
Just to add irony, I was an early donor to both my US Senators, was acquainted with both ‘back in the day’, and have served as an appointed public official.
IOW, I’m not the person that you want to knock off the voters’ rolls (!).
My voting right was restored with a phone call, partly because it is very easy for them to confirm that what I’m saying is accurate, and I am who I claim to be.
But after the phone call, it occurred to me that I gave my first contribution to Bernie Sanders in January.
The next month, weirdly, someone changed my birth date to knock me off the voter’s rolls.
I find this whole business unspeakably creepy.
But the bottom line is that excluding people from the system, even when you disagree with them, is the level of stupidity involved in cutting off your nose to spite your face. Anything that delegitimizes the system is stupid beyond belief.
The Republicans don’t rely on the electoral system in any meaningful sense. They don’t care about legitimacy. They care, for the moment, about the appearance of having an electoral system, the legitimacy of which is measured by how much power it gives Republicans.
But the Republicans stopped being a political party which cared about the norms of democracy in the Newt Gingrich era, when they finally and completely adopted the politics of the planter aristocracy. What they want is to rule or ruin.
Sure looks to me that since there is not 0.00001 mm distance between the “policies” of the real positions of the people who run things, the same thing can be said of the Democratic Party.
All of this biennial charade is about creating a simulacrum of “legitimacy” to sucker us mopes into believing anything better is possible, and resigning ourselves to the reality that it is not.
Neoliberalism is an end-state condition.
Well done Lambert. Well done.
To Holden Pattern:
Democrats should flip now, because we know, we know that Democrats know about these purgings and other methods of election theft, that Democrats try to accommodate the right wing owners…
http://freepress.org/departments/display/19/2012/4719
Who owns Scytl? George Soros isn’t in the voting machines, but the intelligence community is
by Gerry Bello
… of the these machines/registration rolls, by running further right candidates themselves, that they benefit from this during the primaries, but, obviously do not control these methods during the general election.
But, it is my understanding that some congressional leaders are in discussions with election integrity activists, among them:
https://www.electiondefense.org/
NATIONAL ELECTION DEFENSE COALITION
WE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY
……….
And, it is important to save Democracy despite the past culpability of the major parties. We have to get beyond that original sin to save Democracy.
http://markcrispinmiller.com/2016/11/why-isnt-hillary-contesting-trumps-weird-win-is-it-because-she-stole-her-nomination/
Why isn’t Hillary contesting Trump’s weird “win”? (Is it because she stole “her” nomination?)
EXIT POLLS INDICATE HILLARY CLINTON MIGHT HAVE WON
Pointing to the deafening silence from the Hillary campaign itself, but also its many famous surrogates and endorsers, Miller wondered where “all the other lefty stars who worked so hard to get us all to vote for Hillary” have gone “in the face of ever-mounting evidence that Trump ‘won’ this election just as Hillary ‘won’ her party’s nomination: through rampant vote suppression and computerized election fraud.”
“With millions disenfranchised, coast to coast, through purges of the electronic voter rolls, and voter caging, and voter ID requirements, and partisan interference by election officials, and the deliberate placement of too few machines in certain precincts, and volleys of disinformation on the times and places to go vote—and as the exit polls suggest widespread manipulation of the vote counts throughout the swing states—why are we not hearing anything at all about it?” he said, going on to list the vast array of celebrities who were vocal during the campaign for Hillary, but are now conspicuously silent.
Dr. Jill Stein, Green party candidate and vocal campaigner for fair elections is also voicing her concerns. She told Inquisitr “These discrepancies have come to our attention and we have some people who are looking at them, so stay tuned.”
snip
Considering the outpouring of anger from Hillary supporters over the result and their many efforts to challenge the legitimacy of Donald Trump’s win, it would appear a given that the Democrats would pursue these exit poll anomalies which, if proven correct, would almost certainly give Hillary the presidency.
The silence about this avenue of pursuit from the Hillary camp is deafening.
“Have they ever pursued fraud like that? I don’t think they ever have; they all back away from it,” Dr. Stein told Inquisitr. “It’s only the Greens who take up these cases you know and just for the sake of election integrity, and we’ve been losing them anyhow, but I think it’s very important for the public to have our guard raised about this stuff.”
The Green Party are campaigning for ranked voting and hand-counted paper ballots among other measures to bring up the standard of American elections.
Dr. Stein remains hopeful that there will be movement in this area soon. “I know that people are poring over these numbers right now, and I’m hoping there will be some light to shed on this soon.”
……
Protesters need new signage.
Out of curiosity, what’s the best guess as to how many ‘surplus’ Republican votes were cast and where were they cast, versus how many ‘deficit’ Democratic votes? In elections in my country, names of individuals who are given a ballot are stroked off master list printouts with names and addresses which each recognized Party (there are several) is entitled to review. Are there no means at all to do an audit, i.e., something like: Here’s the pre-purged list versus the purged list. Select a random sample of the purged, contact them and prove it one way or other?
My second question is how many Clinton votes were counted after the Election was called? Is there any way ‘surplus’ Republican votes in ‘battleground’ States, especially those where Rep turnout was far higher than expected – historically high – could’ve been counted as Republican in one State, then, via these infernal computerized voting methods, simply transferred to be counted again in a ‘Blue’ area? Are the two numbers comparable? I mean, if they can monkey around with duplicate names like that I don’t see why the trick couldn’t be turned around. So ‘Jose Garcia’ is a phantom in small-town Michigan and legitimate in Detroit or even LA. As nobody ever heard of ‘Jose’ in the small town, and nobody’s looking, it’s simply assumed next time he ‘moved’. Which States have systems that can communicate?
I too believe the purged voters should be contacted/allowed to vote after getting the GOP to release their list of “double voters”…the lie that they spread to get rid of minority voters. This is very racists. And, there had to be cross referencing between states, as someone in one state with a similar name in another was stricken from both states, even if the middle name did not match. I tried to find the story again, but failed, that in several states anyone named Jackie Brown was purged from all voting lists. That would be a start place, perhaps.
http://thebestdemocracymoneycanbuy.com/petition/
Help us stop the “Lynching by Laptop”
A petition to release the names of voters on the “Interstate Crosscheck” Purge List
http://www.gregpalast.com/election-stolen-heres/
Greg Palast on the ground in the battleground state of Ohio: where he finds three ways the vote is, indeed, “rigged” – but FOR the GOP.
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/8/greg_palast_in_ohio_on_gop
Greg Palast in Ohio on GOP Effort to Remove African Americans from Voter Rolls in Battleground State
TRANSCRIPT
Bingo. This is why election officials constantly promote the importance of “trust” and “having confidence” in our election systems. They want us to trust even though they and our election systems do not deserve that trust.
We should never trust any election system that cannot be 100% audited by non-specialist members of the public.
Similarly, election results should not be accepted based only on trust. We should start insisting on legislation at local and state levels so that public verification is included in every aspect of our election systems.
But the GOP primary was far and away less corrupt than the Dems’.
A Republican election official is accused of helping the DNC/HRC campaign rig the Democratic primaries for private corrupt means. (She sold property at a bargain price to people linked to well-connected Democrats. She is accused of the sale being a disguised payoff for her help in changes to voter roles that denied many likely Bernie-supporting Democrats their vote in the Democratic primary.)
This could also be an instance of the GOP’s successful attempt to influence the Democratic primary, similar to how the DNC worked with media to support Trump’s selection as GOP candidate.
Well said to TheCatSaid from the Howling Green Dog.
No, Trump was given between app. 4 Billion Dollars of Free Advertising while Clinton was given much, much less. That itself made the difference. I would guess that although free to Trump, someone paid for that over they top exposure…who? Let’s ask.
What a tactic, less need for election theft up front for Trump, but back loaded to the hilt for Trump. And, while Hillary was helped by these same right wing owned voting machines, purging of Bernie voters, etc., she was robbed by them during the general, as planned, I would bet.
Hillary owes the right wing nothing. She with many others should save our Democracy now and then promote Bernie’s and Jill’s Green New Deal which will help people and the planet. This would maintain the popular vote needed when you have a Democracy. We must forgive the original sin of silence or culpability of both parties and move to save Democracy together. Let those voters who were purged, vote. Count the ballot images where they may have been saved. Request that the electoral college save Democracy.
The purging of Legal minority voters while lying and calling them illegal double voters was election theft by Trump and the GOP. No wonder racist back him, but, even more, big money via media.
http://thebestdemocracymoneycanbuy.com/petition/
Help us stop the “Lynching by Laptop”
A petition to release the names of voters on the “Interstate Crosscheck” Purge List
http://www.gregpalast.com/election-stolen-heres/
The Election was Stolen – Here’s How…
Before a single vote was cast, the election was fixed by GOP and Trump operatives.
Starting in 2013 – just as the Supreme Court gutted the Voting Rights Act – a coterie of Trump operatives, under the direction of Kris Kobach, Kansas Secretary of State, created a system to purge 1.1 million Americans of color from the voter rolls of GOP–controlled states.
The system, called Crosscheck, is detailed in my Rolling Stone report, “The GOP’s Stealth War on Voters,” 8/24/2016.
Crosscheck in action:
Trump victory margin in Michigan: 13,107
Michigan Crosscheck purge list: 449,922
Trump victory margin in Arizona: 85,257
Arizona Crosscheck purge list: 270,824
Trump victory margin in North Carolina: 177,008
North Carolina Crosscheck purge list: 589,393
On Tuesday, we saw Crosscheck elect a Republican Senate and as President, Donald Trump. The electoral putsch was aided by nine other methods of attacking the right to vote of Black, Latino and Asian-American voters, methods detailed in my book and film, including “Caging,” “purging,” blocking legitimate registrations, and wrongly shunting millions to “provisional” ballots that will never be counted.
Trump signaled the use of “Crosscheck” when he claimed the election is “rigged” because “people are voting many, many times.” His operative Kobach, who also advised Trump on building a wall on the southern border, devised a list of 7.2 million “potential” double voters—1.1 million of which were removed from the voter rolls by Tuesday. The list is loaded overwhelmingly with voters of color and the poor.
…….
Greg Palast on the ground in the battleground state of Ohio: where he finds three ways the vote is, indeed, “rigged” – but FOR the GOP.
http://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/8/greg_palast_in_ohio_on_gop
Greg Palast in Ohio on GOP Effort to Remove African Americans from Voter Rolls in Battleground State
TRANSCRIPT
………
https://www.electiondefense.org/
NATIONAL ELECTION DEFENSE COALITION
WE FIGHT FOR DEMOCRACY
……….
http://markcrispinmiller.com/2016/11/why-isnt-hillary-contesting-trumps-weird-win-is-it-because-she-stole-her-nomination/
Why isn’t Hillary contesting Trump’s weird “win”? (Is it because she stole “her” nomination?)
……….
Protesters need new signage.
I can understand the R party doing all the voter suppression things that Greg Palast describes beFORE Trump got the nomination . . . in order to pre-shape the election battlespace to favor the R nominee which the R party leaders all thought would NOT be Trump.
But since the R leadership ( and many other elite leaderships) were upset to find themselves facing R nominee Trump, and many elite leader spokesmouths openly supported Clinton, why would the R machinery be instructed to steal the balloting and counting part of the election aWAY from Clinton and FOR Trump? Wouldn’t the OverClass have instructed the R party to try stealing the election aWAY from Trump and FOR Clinton?
Wasn’t the 4 billion dollars of free media for Trump beFORE the R Convention all about pied-pipering Trump into the Nomination so that Clinton could defeat him easiest of any R nominee in the election? If so, wasn’t Trump a petard of the Clintonites’ own devising, and hasn’t Clinton been thereby hoist on her own petard?
No wonder the Clintonites have better sense than to make an issue out of “stealing the election”, since the Clintonites were the ones engineering the theft. And so incredibly many votes still went against Clinton that all the Clintonites’ election-theft plans didn’t work.
Does that hypothesis deserve to be considered?
Yes, I think you hit the nail on the head, or the petard, as the case may be.
Hillary and her campaign were stuck in an echo chamber with the NYT, WaPo, CNN, etc.
It’s a shame because Biden, Sanders, Warren, any number of other Ds would likely not have been stuck in the same echo chamber as Hillary. Any one of them could have captured the rural white working class voters that Trump mopped Hillary’s floor with.
One word: SCOTUS
I recommend people re-register with each election. I have been flagged for signature (refused a ballot, take time to go to elections office, vote), switching party (didn’t go through, try again, didn’t go through, try again, success)(didn’t go through, can’t vote in primary) and addresses (didn’t go through, go back to your prior precinct). These are just incidences of basic incompetence, not any funny business.
“it occurred to me that I gave my first contribution to Bernie Sanders in January.”
In Brooklyn 125,000 people who had a profile of registering from November 15′ to April 16′ who were young, male and female, relatively new arrivals to Brooklyn, white, were taken off the roles for the primary – systematically the Board of Elections lost the registrations. They were uniformly Bernie supporters. Hillary was definitely tapping multiple data bases to subvert the vote to win
Nita Lowey – Representative Democrats in Westchester- (A Clinton Operative) had her Daughter working – at the B of E – and was fired for the whole debacle – she was later found to be in a questionable real estate deal on the upper west side with big payoff.
Now Nita herself is rumored to be giving up her position potentially for Hillary’s Daughter in a run for the house in Westchester – she did the same in early 2002-04 period for Senate in NY for Hillary.
Crooked Hillary had huge bag of tricks
Having grown up liberal in a red state, I’ve always marveled and been taught to marvel at how stupid working-class white people are bamboozled into voting against their interests – i.e., into voting Republican. With their canine intelligence, they are driven into the ranks of the perfidious Repugs by dog-whistle politics.
Welp, I’ve gotten over that particular type of snobbery. First, I couldn’t help but notice how properly hippie-dippie types cheered on the Big Dog’s bombing campaign in Serbia – a radicalizing moment for me. Then, I couldn’t help but notice how the moveon types swooned for Obama’s content-free hopey-changy pablum, while he bailed out Wall Street and crusaded against whistle blowers. Finally, I couldn’t help but notice that Hillary’s campaign was predicated exclusively on dog whistle politics.
In the context of bourgeois sentimental politics, “stupid” and “smart” don’t really mean what we would normally expect those terms to mean. Rather, they are dog whistles – but for the dogs found in runs in places like Prospect Park Brooklyn, not for the mutts of flyover America.
‘Obama donor and hedge fund boss William Ackman told Reuters in July 2008: “My goal is to elect an incredibly smart and capable guy.” ‘ (my emphasis)
This leads to the question: On whose behalf did Obama use his smarts and skills? Whose interest was served – the hedge fund bosses?
What about Putin rigging the election in favor of Trump? You know, I’d just post a picture of Rocky and Bullwinkle with the quote “‘Nuff said” to debunk that theory.
I, for one, would not be one tiny bit surprised if that turns out to be case. As if we’ll ever know….
“I, for one, would not be one bit surprised if Putin lives on Mars and is an omniscient llizard and has 3 hearts and brought down the Renaissance Papacy and…”
Powerful nations regularly conduct “cyberwarfare” against each others interests. There have been numerous cases, a few quite serious, of China and Russia being blamed for breaking into USG and US-based corporate computer networks. The government and the media tried to pin the blame on Snowden once and generally scolded the Russian and Chinese governments and eventually let the matter drop.
And in every case, before for the DNC/Podesta fiasco, the media lambasted the organizations that were “hacked” – from the DoS to Home Depot – for having crappy network security. It was taken as a given that foreign states would try to break into American computer networks and steal or manipulate data. Kind of like what the NSA does to other nations. The focus was on “how can government and businesses protect their data from these inevitable attacks?”
Contrast that with Clinton’s bellicose saber rattling, comparing Putin to Hitler and the media’s ongoing insanely over the top Russia bashing frenzy. No criticism of the DNC’s weak network security protocols….just outraged bellowing at the uniquely evil Russkies and their nefarious ways.
The evidence linking the Russian state to the “hack” isn’t conclusive. It may well have been the Russian government that dunnit, but there was no smoking gun. Either way, the reaction of Team Hillary and its media “partners” was hypocritical and dangerous…and conveniently took the public’s focus away from the content of the leaked emails.
That whole sideshow was embarrassing and depressing to behold.
Yup! Boris and Natasha rule!
Re: Dems not caring about expanding the franchise…I have an anecdote that supports that as the mildest possible interpretation.
I know someone who worked on the Obama ’12 campaign here in Chicago who was part of a team (mostly composed of finance computer people, I think) tasked with looking for clear evidence of Republicans systematically disenfranchising minorities. The campaign put a guy who was brilliant but VERY unstable at the head of this team — charitably, they were taking a chance on his talent? Well, the guy flamed out but the team soldiered on regardless and did in fact come up with what was described to me as exceedingly strong, clear, and unambiguous evidence that this is exactly what was happening, systematic Republican disenfranchisement of minorities, proved and tied up in a bow. They proudly presented their conclusions to the campaign — success! — which said “thank you for your service” and then buried all their findings.
I noticed the same thing here in AZ while I was volunteering for Bernie. You couldn’t go to a Bernie event without seeing at least one person with a pile of voter registration forms.
Meanwhile, the AZ Democratic Party couldn’t have cared less about registering voters.
Bernie was the only reason I was willing to have anything at all to do with the Dems again (other than for local races, as Dem affiliation is still kind of unavoidable here). I’m not sure what they have in mind for him with this “outreach” leadership position — I find myself fundamentally left pretty cold by it, though I guess we’ll see. But maybe it’ll at least involve registering voters (and keeping them registered)!
Interesting. In Chicago, I suspect that a lot of the disenfranchised minority voters would be almost as opposed to the establishment Mayor Rahm Emanuel as to the Republicans. So the Republicans were helping the establishment Democrats.
That makes sense and would not surprise me a bit! (Especially given what I saw and heard when canvassing for Chuy Garcia…) Though Reps would have a hard time doing much inside Chicago (though they certainly could in Illinois). The team was looking nation-wide — they were tasked with looking all across the country, and they found evidence all across the country.
That’s sixteen years that Republicans have been running the same kind of scam, and what have the Democrats done?
Not only have the Democrats as a party done absolutely nothing, the last eight of those sixteen years have been overseen by a Black POTUS who has employed nothing but Black Attorneys General and yet done nothing.
Is it really the Republican’s fault if they are allowed to so easily pull something like this off?
Very unfair to Eric Holder, he was busy raiding California Medical Marijuana Dispensaries, while ignoring control fraud in the financial industry, foreclosure fraud in the mortgage industry, Medicare fraud in the Health Care Industry. In the old days organized crime hired smart lawyers, today the credentialed classes hire politicians to legalize crime, that was the genius of Bob Rubin, Larry Summers, the Clintons et alia. Financial engineering don’t you know. Brilliant!
I recently heard a commentator talking about corruption say that in today’s society if you weren’t on the take you were a loser. Interesting how the word “loser” was the favorite pejorative in the Podesta emails. I believe that is what is meant by Democrats being smarter. The fact is that our government is run by a cabal of thieves and murderers, it is no longer about honest differences of opinions, it is about criminal intent looting the commons. When there is this level of criminality, electoral politics is no longer enough, stronger measures are called for. At the very least giving up the conceit that these are well meaning if deluded actors. The constant call to civility is used to cover this up. The astro turf tea partyers with their gross veneer of racism and no nothing nativism at least had the balls to call a spade a spade. These are not ordinary times and call for extraordinary means.
You piqued my curiosity, so I did this web search:
and I got 625 hits.
Excellent point. The definition of “smart” depends on one’s position within the power structure. It’s probably one of those code words that insiders understand in a different way than the rest of us.
When did Dems try to do anything about Voting Rights Act getting gutted by the Supreme Court? Obama looked like he cared, slightly, about voter suppression when I saw him speaking in NC a day or two before the election when he was upset about a 90-something year old woman getting purged and talked about all the hassle her son had to go through to get her put back on the voter rolls.
Dems were mostly fine with voter suppression (purges, closing of voting locations) in NY, AZ, Puerto Rico in particular, during the primaries. If they’d have their way, they’d keep suppression during primaries and push it back during the general election.
Wile E. Coyote, SUPERGenius.
Splat.
Yes, if the Dems won’t push back against voter ID laws, caging, etc., i.e defending the rights of ALL Americans to vote, what good are they?
I thought Thomas Edsall in The Times today was very good as well:
“Gingrich claimed responsibility for his party’s 1994 victories. Bill Clinton’s initial abandonment of the themes that he campaigned on in 1992 was, in fact, more important.
In his first presidential run, Clinton promised welfare reform, a middle-class tax cut and to commit his presidency to the “ideal that if you work hard and play by the rules you’ll be rewarded.” Clinton’s first two years in office, however, were dominated by the issues of gays in the military, health care reform and his attempt make good on his vow to pick a cabinet that “looks like America.”
The changed agenda proved disastrous for Democratic members of the House and Senate.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/17/opinion/the-not-so-silent-white-majority.html?_r=0
There were several times during the campaign when Mrs. Clinton’s rhetoric sounded much like Bill’s from almost 25 years ago, which is to say both stale AND (now) unbelieveable. Ultimately, the Dems’ wipeout is the responsibility of the DNC, President Obama (for neglecting to effect any of the change he promised in 2008), and Hillary Clinton herself.
Cogent and compelling analysis by Edsall…he also notes that despite WWC votes going strongly for Trump, neither major party really has a “plan” to deal with continuing problems and issues of lower-middle- and working-class whites in a wholly meaningful manner. Very easy to exploit the “politics of resentment” to jerk around that particular white voter cohort, far more difficult to actually represent and legislate on their behalf.
In re Edsall – again, the racist meme, White people are racists and that’s why they vote against the benevolent cognoscenti. Yes because racism, because the divide and rule principle of ethnic privilege, millions of hours of media devoted to how all crime is committed by black people. Those lazy black people living on welfare, taking away the jobs of us hard working Euro-Americans. Bullshit!
It’s about real crime, stupid, not TV crime It’s about banks usurping the government’s role in creating money and then using this unlimited supply of cash to buy up everything and collect usurious rent on it. It is about the 5 trillion dollars unaccounted for in the Pentagon budget. It’s about the DC zip codes being the richest in the country. It’s about control fraud, mortgage fraud, medicare fraud, military procurement fraud, insider trading, libor fraud, comex fraud. It’s about too big to fail and too big to jail. It’s about forklift fulls of cash disappearing in Iraq. It’s about NGO fraud. It’s about computer fraud. It’s about Clinton Foundation Fraud, It’s about media monopoly fraud. It’s about quantitative easing where the central bank buys phony securities from the .01% at full face value. It’s about monopoly rent seeking. Wait, I just printed up some securities on my computer, do you think the Fed will take them off my hands? Fat chance. Now if I was one of the ethnically privileged. It’s about zero % interest rates used to privatize American corporations, where .01% of the population owns 90% of the wealth. It’s about burdening students with immense debt extracting wealth from their professional careers. It’s about deindustrializing the country, commodifying labor, land; extracting resources and leaving wastelands in their wake. It’s about obscene wealth for some and austerity for the rest of us.
Yes, Virginia, there is racism, but that is not what this election was about, though it is a convenient cover to hide behind as well as a tried and true way to pit the working class against itself. If Donald Trump thinks he can get away with moving on and not holding those criminals to account, he better think again. That is the real source of everyone’s disappointment with Obamanation. That’s not to mention all the war crimes trials and crimes against the constitution that need to be prosecuted before we can truly move on.
‘There were several times during the campaign when Mrs. Clinton’s rhetoric sounded much like Bill’s from almost 25 years ago, which is to say both stale AND (now) unbelieveable.’
Way too true. She had literally no idea with which to anchor hers or anyone else’s US Presidential campaign – nothing came to mind, over and over. She never left the ’90’s in terms of the alignment of forces.
Not that I’m any great admirer of his, but O’Keefe and his Project Veritas showed videos that showed Democrats engaging in voter fraud, albeit of a different sort: buses of fake voters were one example. The allegations were serious enough to cause the resignations of Dem operatives Scott Foval and Robert Creamer. Although contrariwise I am a long-standing admirer of Palast’s journalism, and respect his exposes, I have to conserve my umbrage so I have enough to go around.
https://www.thenation.com/article/theres-no-evidence-of-voter-fraud-in-the-latest-okeefe-sting/
http://www.snopes.com/2016/10/19/scott-foval-reportedly-fired-from-political-organization-over-sting-videos/
which is probably why neither party does anything serious about it – they’re both guilty of it in some fashion and probably believe their efforts merely cancel the other side’s.
Have to question the argument in the “Stupid Democrats pushed to get an opponent they eventually lost to” section. Just because Hillary lost to Trump, her chosen opponent, doesn’t mean she would have done better against some of the other options that were available (Kasich, Bush, Rubio…). It could be that they chose correctly, at least in the sense of minimizing the loss.
The focus should be on the choice of Clinton as the Democratic candidate. That’s where the intelligent herd ran itself off the cliff.
You ignore the fact that Trump was the only Republican opponent talking about de-industrialization, globalism, corruption, rigged systems, a left critique in a Republican primary. Clinton was blind to these issues being relevant to the electorate, since we live in the best of all worlds for the .01% the only electorate she identified with. I do think it is ironic that the “smart” Democrat enabled the only opponent who could beat her on the issues, despite running the worst campaign ever in terms of political correctness. To Hillary Clinton political correctness was the only issue, covering up the crimes of her paymasters the only cause.
Definitely agree that Trump fit the zeitgeist better and that the Dems ignored key issues. This predicts that, if it had been Kasich (for example), we would have seen a reduction in enthusiasm of the R candidate’s core supporters. And maybe the small fraction of usual-D voters who crossed over to Trump might have been even smaller. But there also would have been more regular Republicans voting R instead of 3rdparty/Clinton/novote (in reaction to Trump’s deplorability), and fewer Democrats voting Clinton solely to avoid “Trumpocalypse”.
Even an establishment R candidate would have benefited from the anti-incumbency factor to a degree. Kasich was outpolling Clinton substantially by May.
The fundamental problem was the weakness of the Clinton candidacy.
Did Trump do that poorly with R’s? The GOP is dying with young people already.
Yes, elite Republicans in DC threw public tantrums and I think Trump lost Republicans in Northern Virginia who are worried about federal spending being moved out of Washington (they have bad mortgages on crummy homes). Outside of this, Trump did pretty well.
It’s a conceit of Democrats, but the 50 state strategy was based on the idea there are more Democrats out there who simply don’t vote for one reason or another. On the flip side, there aren’t many Republican sympathizers who don’t vote. Kerry and Gore were both poor candidates with even poorer campaigns (Donna Brazille does get around), but even they made it close enough to steal. The Democrats don’t need to do much to win. They need to stop insulting their potential voters.
The biggest myth of all: Hillary Clinton is a good, homest person with a lifetime of working for the downtrodden. I keep seeeing this myth being repeated and I just don’t get it.
Most qualified candidate, EVAR!
and with girls parts, to boot.
And she’s sooo leftwing. She’s adopted all of these progressive things from Sanders’ campaign. You’ll see: she’ll be so much more leftwing than you give her credit for!!
Endorsed by:
The Bush Crime Syndicate
Henry Kissinger
Loads of rightwing newspapers
etc.
And a Goldwater Girl!!!!
And “HRC has been working for women and children her whole career”…..when she’s not bombing them into pink mist or reduced to desperation and fleeing for their lives with nothing, nowhere to go…..
In all this discussion about the causes of the Clinton / Democratic defeat, I haven’t seen a lot of focus on globalization. Trump’s motto after all was “Make America Great Again”. In this morning’s paper I saw an article with Obama (in Greece of all places!) exhorting people (the Democratic Party’s constituents??) to “look forward”, i.e. to live with globalization:
IOW – ‘globalization – Live with it! Live with the race to the bottom as US workers are forced to compete with a global labor force for a dwindling number of jobs under working conditions that would have made even Henry Ford grimace.’
My theory is that this has a lot if almost everything to do with the U.S. and increasingly the West’s ‘financialization’ – where it is ALL about the opportunity for the 1%’s money (created on the ‘printing presses of Wall Street and in Washington to pay off the crony capitalists in the ‘Defense Department’ and elsewhere throughout the ‘people’s government’, to support and extend the US “Empire of Debt”.
End the pretense that all that money created since 1971 (and even before under the fake Bretton Woods ‘gold standard’) has value, that it represents “debts that CAN be repaid” and the 1% – and its offspring – will have to compete with those whose jobs it has off-shored and automated.
Obama accuses those who want to preserve whatever advantages this country still enjoys in the way of natural resources of the “impulse of isolationism” (because they want to stop making the world safe for Wall Street). Got to stop. I’m going to through up.
oops! Make that “throw up”
Michael Hudson agrees with the points you make. There’s an excellent recent interview here discussing exactly these issues (e.g., the impact of financialization).
Smart? Just how “smart” does one have to be to win the popular vote but still lose in the Electoral College?
“Do you think that if Democrats were running a 24/7/365 voter registration operation that the Republicans would be in power to run the CrossCheck scam in the first place?” Or, even more directly, if they were constantly in court knocking down these obvious frauds?
This raises a question: what is a political party for? Surely insuring that its own partisans can vote is on the list. And how smart is it not to do these things?
That said, there is study evidence that Democrats or people to the left have higher IQs; they also tend to have more education. That’s what this meme is referring back to. On its face,it’s anti-democratic (small d), besides being called into question by failure.
I’m not sure that higher IQ or education are adequate proxies for being smart.
I am sure that neither of those are adequate proxies…you can take my word for it, I’ve got a college degree.
So true! But too many people equate them.
Accent and vocabulary are other proxies that might feed into the “smart” or “not-smart” assumptions, particularly when contemplating maps showing Dem/Rep geographical distribution. Some people might assume certain kinds of regional accents, or less-than-perfect command of the English language as reflecting “less smart”. Which is a stupid assumption.
I’m hesitant to get into this issue here, but as someone with an officially ridiculously high IQ who has been involved in numerous organizations focused on the actual upper identified intelligence tier (not MENSA, which focuses on a much broader segment, but the actual 0.1 percentile currently termed “profoundly gifted,” I can promise you that there are tremendous problems with identifying intelligence and what that means. There are so many layers to the problems that Ada’s mistakes identifying where and how Hillary Clinton needed to campaign pale in comparison.
One aspect of this means that when you read something like “Democrats have higher IQs,” you need to be immediately suspect. Same with “people on the left,” in part because what “left” means is just as open to question as what “smart” means, or how to identify it.
So, I am a leftist, and used to be a Democrat, with an IQ so high I actually ceilinged the test, meaning they ran out of questions that I couldn’t answer and there was no way to determine my upper bound. You could use me as an anecdotal example of “left/Democrats” are smarter. But you should not, for many reasons. And many of the people I dealt with who can quote their number or their kid’s number and it’s officially quite high, have all the biases everybody else has, and the higher their number, the less likely they are to fit the duopoly definition of ideology. Some of them are quite reactionary. Some of them also, frankly, struck me as quite dumb, again because whatever we’re calling intelligence in this culture is no protection from cognitive bias or motivated reasoning in and of itself. What your knowledge base is matters. Whether you’re open to learning — which means acknowledging when you’re wrong, among other traits — matters.
Also, frankly, the hyper-intelligent are less likely, not more, to be able to grind and plod their way through the credentialing process. So there’s no evidence that our current identification process is accurate, it measures something very limited, how people use their cognitive capacity is massively influenced by temperament and other “non-intellectual” functions, and it’s been known for decades that hyper-intelligent people often do badly in the education system and don’t get graduate degrees in proportion to their occurrence in the population.
So, yeah — I’m with Lambert. A high IQ score or advanced degree is a pretty suspect proxy for being smart. Chelsea Clinton, anyone?
interesting the neolib Dem party focuses on “smart”, instead of “decent” or some other character-linked word. (yes, politics is a dirty business, but in whose interest and for what purpose will the pol act? Does the pol care?)
“smart”.
Character seems not to matter at all as long as the right people are getting rich. imo, better a “first-rate temperament” than a “first-rate mind”. Too many of these “first-rate minds” have been seduced by the plutocrats’ thin flattery of their “smartness” and large salaries on offer. Now they look up from the wreckage of Main Street and say something to the effect of , ” not my fault, I was just doing what I was hired to do, I was hired because I’m credentialed and smart!”
shorter: the term ‘educated idiot’ describes a real phenomina.
erm… that was harsh. It’s not the functionaries, it’s the top of the party I direct my ire toward. They are the ones that do the hiring.
Character. We’ll have to speak up within political parties and media to make this a high-priority talking point. Ditto for evaluating high-level appointments, or whenever candidates are being selected (think local elections).
“Best and brightest”
The first obligation of a political party is to control the system for their own and their constituencies benefit. They enact change on behalf of their constituents for future support/votes. Multi-party elections must entice a broader range of constituents (owners, money, labor) to have a turn to control the system and return benefits to those constituents. If they don’t return benefits, their constituents shift to another party.
That only works in a two party system if they are in opposition. Currently, Ds and Rs both look to exclude interests (labor) when they can maintain control of the system for their own benefit by focusing on enticing other interests (owners, money).
People that make the IQ tests have higher IQs?
I was just speaking to my mother in law and heard a new reason why Hillary Clinton lost (at least on NC as I don’t watch MSM so not sure if this meme is flying around) which is that Bernie Sanders should have pulled out of the race much sooner rather than going to the convention damaging HRC candidacy. Anyone else aware of this? I politely disagreed with my MIL, but thought this completely missed the point that she was a flawed candidate with a flawed strategy both during the primaries as well as during the general.
That was one of the lines the Clinton campaign used at the time; I’ve never seen evidence supporting it (though at this point the literature is so vast I can’t claim to have seen everything).
in most cases, a rigorous primary that toughens up the eventual party nominee for the battle of the general election is desirable. This makes sense, as the other side is unlikely to go easy.
but not for HRC, apparently. Bernie telling voters to “forget (Hillary’s) damn emails” just wasn’t nice enough, I guess.
Just realized that today’s AM links included the Time article bringing this up again.
This theory was advanced for months by pro-Clinton commenters ( and to a lesser extent by blogger Riverdaughter herself) at the The Confluence blog. And it is one of several theories clung to up to this very moment. That blog would be worth reading to get a sense of the state of mental play over in Clinton Land.
CBS NEWS. HUGE anti-Obama protests in Greece. How do the Germans feel?
Consider giving a link and staying on topic?
http://www.ekathimerini.com/213823/article/ekathimerini/news/clashes-mar-anniversary-of-student-uprising
Not specifically Obama.
It’s the anniversary of a student uprising which was put down by the military dictatorship in 1973. Guess which side we Americans were on ….
It doesn’t appear to be a myth that voter suppression affected the Presidential race, however I do suspect that voter suppression is a bigger factor in helping republicans win down ticket races.
The myth appears to be that the democratic party cares about stopping it.
I agree with both points. I think the Republicans engage very much in voter suppression in many ways, but I fail to see Democrats doing anything about it.
Someone above noted how Obama & the Democrats could barely be moved to shrug about the Supreme Court’s gutting of the Voting Rights Act. Why did they all sit on their thumbs? Most especially epic AA POTUS the Barackstar??
It’s anecdotal, but I have heard snippets of some interviews of both AA voters and Latino voters who voted for Trump. To a person, the AAs interviewed basically said that Obama was a wash out and did absolutely nothing to support minorities during his whole 8 years in office. So why not take a chance on Trump when the D party couldn’t be bothered?
I, too, wonder why the D party is so pathetic. They really can’t seem to be bothered to do much of anythign except show and collect their payola from whichever Oligarch is their patron. The party isn’t much better at state and local levels either, at least in my experience.
What an important point. We know the GOP developed a strategy many years ago to take over the political machinery at local and state levels, with gerrymandering as an important element. The pressure for restrictive “Voter ID” requirements (supported by ALEC) is another method the GOP uses towards this end.
It’s a mistake to focus only on these strategies’ impact Presidential races. It’s easier to take control at state/local levels, and this is where much power is exercised. GOP has been extremely effective (smart!) in this regard.
If it was legal it seems to me that the dems could help folks they think would vote their way could pay for id documents for folks. Get volunteers to help folks get birth certificates (if commercial services can do it for a significant fee, the party should be able to do it for less). Then if needed transport to offices where ID’s are issued. Further I suggest that if legal they subsidize folks getting state IDs more than just voting ids, so they can actually also open bank accounts.
Lambert, thanks for your perspective on the Palast post regarding cross check, claiming that the election was stolen. A friend of mine (a MoveOn follower) sent his post to me, and I replied that he’s the same guy who called out the DNC primaries being rigged against Bernie. Cross check has been going on for at least 16 years, so why doesn’t the Dem party call it out or do something to stop it? Because they like it that way – they simply don’t care anymore. It reminds me of people saying Obama just couldn’t get what he wanted because of those mean Repubs.
By the way Lambert, I think you’re a really smart guy – thanks for slogging through the post-mortems.
Tangential but important to Lambert’s excellent deconstruction of “why Clinton lost” myths–we’ll know even more after we look at the actual votes. Just out, this article on The Brakey Method shows how we can get “ballot images” even from the paperless voting machines. (Important because the “images” are made pre-counting, so they’re a way to verify an accurate vote count.) The article tells ordinary people how they can request these records from their local election office and get them on a USB stick.
The Brakey Method addresses how we can get rid of the “flip” side of the “Strip and Flip” as per Bob Fitrakis’ new book of that name.
The excellent “This is Hell” Greg Palast video Lambert links in this post describes the “strip” part. Another excellent recent interview with Palast is just up on The Real News Network. It, too, is better than what’s in print in describing the purging/caging/suppression (“strip”) part of the equation.
Brakey and Harris address the “flip” aspect; Palast addresses the “strip” aspect. It’s useful to understand both, and how they’re used together. Only when we understand both sides can we figure out what combination of actions are needed to improve elections. (If we ask for the wrong “solution”, we can inadvertently make things worse.)
The smart people’s party has a long streak of losing seats and failing to get out the vote. If, from their perspective, voters are donors and their votes are tallied as dollars, GOTV the old-fashioned way (registering people and caring what can be done to earn their support) is no longer a relevant operation. As for losing seats, perhaps the extension of their power in a globalized world via non-governmental positions is the dominant exercise because that is the degree to which government power has already been usurped.
This would account for their behaviors and their attitudes. They are smart and forward thinking because they know how to get things done and have adopted the relevant paradigm. People are stupid and backwards because they still think they are entitled to government representation. I don’t like the implications, but it explains some of the things about these trends that otherwise seem absolutely bizarre.
sorry, I cant resist this rant:
the smart people’s party has a long streak of locking up more people (mostly black) than any other country (mid-1990’s crime bill), letting the financial sector prey on middle america and crash the global economy without consequence (deregulation and failure to prosecute), supporting monopoly power and out-source good jobs (trade deals, bank mergers, business mergers).
the “smart” people’s party is also, imo, the “cruel and selfish” people’s party. that’s a talent vs. character comparison and those comparisons aren’t made anymore. Too old-fashioned.
end rant
Flora, my comment was in no way a defense of the ‘smart’ people’s party. They are as barbaric, cruel and selfish as you say across both sides of the aisle.
I was only positing that ‘their’ notions of “smart” are not ‘our’ notions of “smart”. I’m trying to view the results as if through a camera and am switching out lenses because doing so might be helpful going forward.
What if these politicians have come to regard elections, which are important to the exercise of democracy for the people, as an elaborate charade to be orchestrated and tolerated in order to keep the people from recognizing how completely their power has been stripped? Might they be maintaining pretenses merely to win a seat here or there when it suits their agendas? When they can arrange for a subsidy that benefits them? To dismantle protections that frustrates their looting schemes? They seem to be interested in government seats only when it’s a useful tool to create the schisms you cite. Based on the data, this has nothing to do with governing.
I’ve had the misfortune of being involved in projects with ‘smart’ types of this ilk, at great personal and financial devastation. It’s what happens when one party pretends to share the same goals while undermining the other at every possible step. The great pretenders never honestly say, “Hey, I’m out. I wish you well, but I have other plans.” They selfishly keep the project going, knowing it will fall apart (in fact, purposely destroying it). You become the marionette and they the puppet master. It just so happens that the puppeteers in my anecdote are Clinton democrats. I learned my lessons and have excommunicated them.
There is nothing old-fashioned or stupid in believing in democracy, justice, fairness and an un-corrupted politic. It just won’t be had in alliance with the ‘smart’ party.
Seeing Trump’s campaign through another lens is revealing, too.
Newsweek’s Kurt Eichenwald Continues His Sad Spiral of Dishonesty and Delusion. This is a response to the hippy-punching piece Eichenwald wrote. It’s therefore countercountercountermythical, which is good.
It’s a neoliberal world.
2016 – “Richest 62 people as wealthy as half of world’s population”
Elites around the world will sell their people down the river to feather their own beds as we have seen.
Looking at 5,000 years of human civilisation the Classical Economists of the 18th Century believed the poor would never rise out of a bare subsistence existence. This was the way it always had been and always would be.
Every social system since the dawn of civilization has been set up to support a Leisure Class at the top who are maintained in luxury and leisure through the economically productive, hard work of the middle and lower classes.
The lower class does the manual work; the middle class does the administrative and managerial work and the upper class lives a life of luxury and leisure.
Our UK Aristocracy are still enjoying their life of luxury and leisure today as they have been for at least a thousand years.
After a one hundred year anomaly, they are trying to get us back to the traditional status quo where there is no welfare state for those at the bottom.
Nothing has ever been given freely and the aim is to keep a few at the top in luxury and leisure whilst giving as little away as possible for everyone else. Some near the top will do pretty well, because this is necessary to maintain the system. Those at the bottom will get just enough to keep them alive and enable them to breed (the system must be maintained).
The absolute monarchs came to an end when they were forced to give up their old powers by the barons in the Magna Carta.
In the early days of capitalism those at the bottom still lived a bare subsistence existence and it was only Marx’s ideas and collective labour movements that got them a larger slice of the pie.
New left wing ideas began to proliferate and those at the top needed to give more to ensure the system was maintained. The Russian Revolution and the rise of Communism led to more panic at the top making things better for those at the bottom to maintain the system.
In the 1950s and 1960s it was necessary to demonstrate the average US citizen had a much better standard of living than that of the average Russian under Communism.
When the Berlin Wall fell, it was thought that there were no competing ideologies and it was time to start rolling things backwards, there is no alternative (TINA).
Everyone should get the absolute minimum necessary to maintain the system and keep those at the top in luxury and leisure.
The whole aim was to get rid of the “New Deal” entitlement programs (as they call them in the US).
Elites are the right target, stop this identity politics.
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Warren Buffett
It’s a class war, always has been and always will be.
The globalist/internationalist outlook of the left leaves them wanting to belong to an atrocious neoliberal world.
Trump supporters and the Brexiteers have to carry the flag of change.
They may be offered only promises but that is enough, the left offers more of the same.
In Greece they can’t even afford bread.
Bakers put aside yesterday’s bread for the poor and more wealthy customers are asked to buy an extra loaf that can be given to those that cannot afford it.
“Richest 62 people as wealthy as half of world’s population”
These people must get richer.
2014 – “85 richest people as wealthy as poorest half of the world”
2016– “Richest 62 people as wealthy as half of world’s population”
Doing the maths and assuming a straight line …….
5.4 years until one person is as wealthy as poorest half of the world.
It’s neoliberal.
The left think its important to fight to preserve this world.
They are more stupid than they look and that is saying something.
Here’s a video of Greg Palast’s IMHO best and latest synopsis of the 2016 fraud. The first point made is startling enough. The US nails countries like the Ukraine for fraudulent elections based solely on exit poll versus result discrepancies–of exactly the sort found in the 2016 US election–except that the US has a rule requiring that official exit pollsters in (un)due course conform their results to the “final” counts.
How come I can’t find a single mention of this hot crosscheck fraud news in the New York Times? No wonder the Democrats aren’t speaking up about it.
Surely it should be communicated to all of the electoral college voters before they vote on Dec 19. There isn’t a mailing list for the electoral voters, is there?
The Wall Street Darlings share their economic agenda with the GOP and are quite happy if you do not vote, hence lack of interest in expanding the franchise. The 1% don’t need real liberals and progressives who will demand the Democrats start supporting the 99% or be retired putting pressure on.
They’re quite happy to leave the rabble to fight over wedge issues while they continue to rape workers all over the world with their “global economy.”
Lacking global labor standards and commensurate wages, it’s more of a global plantation.
This. Must. Stop.