I move around in circles that are pretty much entirely supportive of Democrats and hate Donald Trump. But when they express reservations about Bernie Sanders as the nominee, they frequently say that this is because while they may like his plans, they feel that they have zero chance of being passed by Congress. They seem to think that they are being ‘realistic’ and that the Sanders supporters are hopelessly idealistic.
This is truly weird. For one thing, the Republicans in Congress and the Democrats who have similar class interests will fight against any Democratic proposals, however weak, that harms even slightly the powerful interests that control them. That is true whichever Democratic candidate becomes president. They will actually have more success in opposing any ideas with the so-called moderates like Joe Biden who, like Barack Obama, seek to appease Republicans.
These ‘realists’ also seem to be saying that the starting point of any proposal is what the Republican controlled senate will accept. This guarantees that they will get even less than that because whatever they propose, the Republicans will fiercely oppose it. It is the same strategy that Obama followed with his health care plan where he ruled out single payer and even the public option before he even started, and gave the drafting of the health care bill to the Senate finance committee whose Democratic chair was in the pockets of the health care industry and whose chief staffer on drafting the legislation came from that same industry and went back to it afterwards. The resulting Affordable Care Act was very friendly to the health industry.
This is not an accident. This is how Democrats manage to ‘lose’ even when they win and shows why Democrats are often so ineffective.
I can understand why the Democratic establishment adopts this strategy because they do not want major change that would alienate their corporate paymasters. What is troubling is when ordinary people internalize that logic by listening to the pundit class in the media that propagates this view and argue along the same lines. They do not seem to realize what any trade union member knows, that you have to start any negotiation with maximal goals if you want to achieve anything meaningful. Starting with what you think the other side will accept is a mug’s game because the other side are not reasonable people who want the best for everyone. They are fiercely protective of the interests of their masters and will try to give away as little as possible.
Meanwhile the panic in the Democratic party establishment is palpable and they are flailing around to find ways to stop Sanders.
Chris Matthews of MSNBC and fiercely anti-Sanders continues his slide into gibberish, comparing his Nevada win to the fall of France to the Nazis in 1940.
Let’s try to detangle this. Bernie, a Jewish man whose family members were killed in the holocaust, wins the Nevada caucus, and Bernie and his unprecedented diverse coalition are the Nazis and Chris Matthews, the DNC and MSNBC are now occupied France?
— jeremy scahill (@jeremyscahill) February 22, 2020
And Democratic party establishment operative James Carville, a worshipper of the Clintons who had earlier called Sanders a communist, continues his own rapid slide into irrelevancy, pushing the line that Russian president Putin is supporting Sanders so that Trump has a better chance of winning.
James Carville says the big winner in Nevada is Putin pic.twitter.com/KV2TjpNiCD
— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) February 22, 2020
And in another sign of how the Democratic establishment is panicking and desperate, Bill Clinton’s press secretary Joe Lockhart calls on Michael Bloomberg to ‘take down Sanders immediately’ by turning the focus of his ads away from Trump and aiming them at Sanders.
These people are showing their true oligarch-loving colors.
The anti-Sanders narrative is already shifting. They are saying that while he may be doing well in the primaries, he has not been truly ‘vetted’ despite the fact that he has been in elected office forever and that in the 2016 campaign, Hillary Clinton and her opposition research team did not pull any punches. Then there is the absurd claim that Donald Trump will use the socialist label against him and that it will be devastating. That Sanders is a democratic socialist is old news and will not come as a surprise to anyone. By labeling the popular proposals that Sanders is advocating as socialist is less likely to harm Sanders and more likely to make people have a favorable impression of socialism. Even Chris Christie knows this.
The idea of finding a candidate against whom Trump cannot and will not make scurrilous charges is utterly absurd. Why do Democrats let Trump and the Republicans set the bar for who would make a good nominee? Haven’t they realized by now that the Republican strategy is to paint everything that happens as being good news for Trump and their party, in order to sow doubt and confusion among Democrats and make them vacillate and unsure about what to do? Why do Democrats keep falling for that obvious tactic, instead of saying that the Democrats will pick a nominee, unite behind them, and vigorously fight to get them elected, so just butt the hell out?
Trump lies shamelessly and will make up scurrilous attacks against anyone. If Mother Theresa ran against him, Trump would allege that she was a prostitute. What Democrats need is not a spotless candidate because such a person does not exist but a vicious counterpuncher, who will take the fight right to Trump and has the passion, factual knowledge, and debating skills to hit back at Trump hard and often. Of the current crop of Democratic candidates, only Sanders and Warren fit that bill.
Mike Cesca (who is not a Sanders supporter) writes that the fear of many Democrats that the socialism card that will be played by Republicans will be fatal to a Sanders candidacy are overblown.
I’m definitely going to catch hell in buckets on social media, but here it is: Bernie Sanders can absolutely defeat Donald Trump in November. I might be the only non-Bernie supporter saying it, but there it is.
…[R]emember the months after Barack Obama’s inauguration? Glenn Beck and the entire conservative entertainment complex lost its bug-eyed shpadoinkle, accusing Obama of being the new Stalin-meets-Hitler (somehow). It was a mini-Red Scare, with Obama and his economic team being labeled with all varieties of Cold War-era nicknames and awkward portmanteaus, none of which actually made sense.
The point, which is also being made by former Reagan-era Treasury official Bruce Bartlett, is that no matter who the Democratic nominee is, he or she will be framed as a commie pinko fascist, as if something like that could even exist. Avoiding Bernie like the coronavirus because his policy platform is slightly to the left of the other candidates is a pointless exercise, given how dishonestly the Republicans will play the socialism card.
In the new paradigm, authenticity rules the day, and Bernie, more than most, comes off as authentic, complete with crumpled suits and freeform hair. We might not agree with everything he says, and we might be turned off by his “bro” supporters, but one thing we can’t say is that he’s bullshitting people. Well, on some level, all politicians are bullshitters, but compared with many of them, Bernie doesn’t seem like one, and that’s important, especially in those aforementioned states like Wisconsin and Pennsylvania.
The red-baiting continues apace. They are now using the fact that Sanders made some very reasonable statements about Cuba to attack him, as can be seen by a clumsy attempt by Michael Bloomberg. This is a great example of a blind spot that people have. Americans are quick to claim that they have a great and good country. But nowadays it is a given among most Democrats that the invasions of Vietnam and Iraq were disasters. We also have the history of genocide in the US, slavery, torture, the many, many other invasions of countries, not to mention the abuses of the FBI, the CIA at home and abroad. They will point to the many good things in America to argue that these are all aberrations in an otherwise good country. However, they will refuse to take a similar attitude with countries that are designated enemies which they will demand be condemned across the board, without a single mention of any good things.
The poet Robert Burns wrote those famous lines about how beneficial it would be to see ourselves as others see us.
O wad some Power the giftie gie us
To see oursels as ithers see us!
It wad frae mony a blunder free us,
An’ foolish notion
It would also be good if we could see others as we see ourselves.
“why Democrats are often so ineffective.”
I disagree with this part. Obama for instance did a fine job protecting the financial interests of the health care industry.
“Russian president Putin is supporting Sanders so that Trump has a better chance of winning.”
This is probably correct. The remedy is simple: Carville and co need to stop libelling Sanders and start discussing political content, plans etc.
“they will refuse to take a similar attitude ….”
Worse, they use it as an excuse to do nothing about those aberrations.
I am not so sure about that. You HAVE seen the video of the woman in Iowa that did not previously know that Mayor Pete was gay, right? THAT is how stupid some of the voters in this country are.
Full marks, Mano. One of your all-time best posts.
Cheers.
If Putin really was interested in keeping Trump in office he would do everything he could to make sure either Biden or Bloomberg is the nominee, not Sanders. That whole story about the intelligence analysis linking Russian cyber activity to support for Bernie is starting to fall apart anyways. They discuss it in this week’s Useful Idiots podcast (hosted by Matt Taibi and Katie Halper).
Yep.
That’s interesting, MSNBC commenter. Why do you think your network is so incompetent as to fail to vet the candidate who ran a close second throughout the 2016 Democratic presidential primary? And if your network is that incompetent, surely you wouldn’t want them to try to vet Sanders now, would you?
Exactly.
Bravo, Mano. As at least one other has said, this is an excellent post.
I think this will all become irrelevant in the coming months because of the coronavirus. The US is the perfect place for a major outbreak. The stupid incompetence of the current administration coupled with the completely inadequate healthcare will make the US one of the worst places to be. The next couple of months are going to be ugly.
The only reason I see for not having 1000s of infected people by the end of March/April is because there is almost no testing being done and/or there will be a cover up of the actual number.
All this will completely change the political landscape in unpredictable ways such that all the current talking point will be irrelevant.
Well, it sort of depends on what you mean by “current talking points,” no? Most of the garbage in the mainstream press, definitely. It’s always been irrelevant, so they just move on to slightly different garbage in a few days. Wash, rinse, repeat.
If that includes serious policy issues, then the more people learn about things like herd immunity and why it matters, the better it is for Medicare for All (and Sanders). That’s very predictable, if you ask me.
It’s not often noted that funneling tons of our money into a tiny corner of the economy (insurers, pharma) hurts the rest of it. To the extent they can even afford medical care, poorer folks would be spending that money elsewhere on food, clothes, rent/mortgages, cars, and whatnot. The rich toss most of their income down a money black hole, until it’s inherited and reinherited and on and on, never to return. But poor folks who spend all of their money … well, they spend all of the money, and it goes to all sorts of different places which also keep recycling it, to everyone’s benefit.
With a pandemic like this, and markets dropping, it shows another big way that our public lack-of-healthcare crisis can infect the rest of the economy. So I expect more people to start taking it more seriously, when it hits them in a lot of tender places they didn’t expect. Also, the only way Pres. Swamp could benefit from all this is by lying to his base constantly and actually getting them to believe it. (To be fair, I would’ve predicted that he would be lying about something-or-other anyway, but it is predictable.)
Yep. This is also another way that Social Security aids the larger economy: if you have to have private savings for retirement, then you’re stashing money away instead of spending it. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s important to have some savings if you can manage it, but just pointing out that over-focussing on savings benefits the ownership class.
It’s one of the many reasons that “health savings accounts” are so evil. “Put more money in the stock market to drive up prices and allow CEOs to cash in their options!” It sounds great, since wouldn’t you be able to cash in as well? Except you take money out of your savings account not when the market is high, but when you get sick. Since you can’t control when you get sick, it’s inaccessible to the poor, a lottery for the middle-class, but a cash cow for the already rich.
I’m mostly with you, but I’m doubtful that herd immunity is going to get a whole lot of discussion here. The very danger of this virus is that by virtue of its novelty we have neither immunity nor ready vaccines. Instead what’s going to become clear if our media reporting is any good (which, I suppose, is a long shot), is the benefit of paid sick leave to make sure that low-paid people whose jobs mostly involve interacting directly with other people don’t come to work sick and pass the virus from the lower-paid employees to the wealthier people trying to enjoy a double-fap, chocolate-pumpkin grandiose coffee to take their minds off their stock portfolios. Reported correctly, even the corporate owners might actually begin to understand that paying people for time off when sick is really in their best interest.
Getting cross-class support for minimum standards in paid sick time would be amazing, but is definitely one possible outcome here. (I don’t think it’s likely, but it is possible and I’d love to see it.)
I agree that maybe there would also be some generally increased support for M4A as well, but I don’t think it would come from the “herd immunity” angle.
I don’t see what herd immunity has to do with the current situation. And when people start dying in the streets, I don’t see how anyone can predict what sort of fantasy bubble will be created to try and spin this and what game the media and the oligarchy will play to try and keep the status quo. Somehow I don’t see a socialist revolution as being seen in a positive light even though that would save (mostly disposable) lives and the (precious) economy.
@ 4
That whole story about the intelligence analysis linking Russian cyber activity to support for Bernie is starting to fall apart anyways.
It did not really have to fall apart. It was so stupidly a political ploy that it was almost painful to see.
Next FBI affirms that Bernie Sanders campaign was the unwitting the unwitting recipient of El Chapo cartel drug money?
Intelligence sources deny that Sanders eats babies for breakfast?
Well, look, in the sense of “having many vaccinated people,” then of course we can’t rely on herd immunity until an actual vaccine is tested and released. That will always take a significant amount of time, without or without M4A.
But as you know, with M4A, it’s not question anymore whether people can afford to get tested or treated by a doctor, whenever they’re showing some symptoms of something. People aren’t discouraged from getting proper care, not to mention from sounding the alarm to epidemiologists who need to know what’s happening.
I shouldn’t have put it as “herd immunity” perhaps, since that could be taken too literally, because like I just said there’s a broader set of issues to worry about, well before we have a vaccine. But it is similarly about containing and counteracting the problem before it gets out of hand. And the basic idea that you really do want to help everyone else with their own health issues, for the simple reason that this aligns with your own self-interests (even if you’re a total sociopath/misanthrope), is the same. The more that kind of idea floats around and becomes accepted as obvious or common sense, the better.
Well, it seems I’m not quite one of these Democrats of which you speak. I am concerned that Bernie won’t be able to get anything passed, but I consider myself much more cynical than “realistic.” But I must ask if you don’t believe this is realistic and, if not, why not? Is not the reactions of the likes of Carville and Matthews evidence of the resistance Bernie will face from Democrats?
I’m also very concerned what an ineffective Bernie presidency might do to the progressive movement. I’m already concerned we’re overly invested in Bernie as it is.
But at least it’d be unlikely that he’d put incompetent people in charge of a major health threat.
We are the 99%. You are afraid of how the 1% reacts to us (or maybe you’re one of them). We have to make this a proper democracy, and your regard for the likes of them at the expense of all of us is counterproductive at best. That’s why.
This is James Carville’s ridiculous mansion in Virginia. Don’t be fooled by his ballcaps and thick Lousiana accent, first of all. But also don’t think he has the slightest clue about the needs and concerns of most voters.
If your past comments are any indication, I think you’re just concern trolling about what an ineffective Bernie presidency might do to the progressive movement. And maybe you don’t even know what an ineffective one would look like or what the progressive movement is about.
Let’s go back to the top: we’ll still be the 99%, and we’ll still have to make this into a proper democracy. That will not change.
Closer to home, I’m beginning to hear fears of Huey P. Long. What next: Willie Stark?
😉
My mother always said, it doesn’t matter if it looks like you probably won’t be able to get a good picture, take the shot anyway. A shot you don’t take is guaranteed to not come out. Take the shot, at most, you’ve wasted a bit of film. (Remember film?)
Not voting for Bernie Sanders because he can’t get his policy’s through is not taking the shot. No one else is going to enact his policies either! What’s the point of guaranteeing failure?
@12
A significant chunk of Bernie’s platform could be achieved unilaterally by executive order. The things that Congress could block would be an extreme minority, and they would just as eagerly water down whatever watered-down half-measure legislation a Warren or Buttigieg would try to pass.
Congressional republicans have already made it clear that they will literally shut down the government rather than support republican-lite policies, just because they were put forward by a Democrat.