Category Archives: Bernie Sanders

Here’s a man who thinks he can govern

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Howard Coffin is an eminent historian, a learned scholar, and a real Vermont treasure.

And he said something really stupid.

The subject was Peter Galbraith’s bid for governor. Coffin was commenting on Galbraith’s, shall we say, checkered record as a state senator.  (Everybody hated him, to put it briefly.)

“I’m not sure that he was put on earth to be a legislator,” Coffin says. “I think he was put on earth to be a leader.”

Yyyyyyyeah. Just like Marco Rubio can’t stand being a U.S. Senator, so let’s make him President.

Here’s the thing. Being a “leader” involves a hell of a lot of negotiating, compromising, dealing with other folks — and particularly trying to make friends and influence people in the frickin’ Legislature.

Peter Galbraith was a heavy-handed, arrogant lawmaker who offended a lot of people and frequently roadblocked the Senate for the sake of some principle detectable only to himself. Those traits are going to be just as unfortunate in a governor — but they’ll be even more impactful. And not in a good way.

Now, if you’re talking about “being a leader” in the Donald Trump sense, then Coffin is dead on.  Otherwise, no.

Enough about that. Let’s move on to Galbraith’s candidacy itself.

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Tomorrow’s a big day

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March 15 is a crucial day for us Vermont Political Observers, capitalized and otherwise. Not only is it a potential make-or-break for Bernie Sanders, but it’s a deadline day for campaign finance reports from state candidates. And because of Vermont’s relaxed campaign finance law, it’s the first deadline since last July — an eternity in politics, especially in a campaign season that started so darn early.

We will, of course, be watching the primary returns from Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina. I expect Bernie to do better than predicted, as he almost always does; but not well enough to close the delegate gap with Hillary Clinton. The Michigan win, nice as it was, did virtually nothing to close that gap. Hillary’s won a bunch of states by one-sided margins, thanks largely to her yooooge advantage with the black electorate; in order to catch up, Bernie has to not only win a bunch of states — he has to dominate them. That would require some kind of massive unforced error by Clinton, or some kind of unexpected and decisive bad news that would hurt Clinton and help Sanders.

The statistical website FiveThirtyEight has a formula for keeping track of how candidates are faring in the hunt for delegates. It sets a delegate target for each candidate in each state. Right now, it shows Clinton beating her target by nearly a hundred delegates — not including superdelegates. Bernie’s almost a hundred below his target.

Bernie’s Michigan victory netted him a mere seven delegates. He’ll have to pick up that pace substantially and very quickly.

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Bernie and the black vote

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Here’s something I don’t write very often: Chuck Todd, NBC’s intellectual manifestation of the Beltway mindset, offered a real insight on the Democratic primary race.

On the night of March 8, during MSNBC’s coverage of the Mississippi and Michigan primaries, he noted that this would be an entirely different campaign if Bernie Sanders were simply holding his own among black voters.

It’s true. It’s damn true, as Kurt Angle would say. The number-one reason Hillary Clinton has a substantial lead among pledged delegates, and in total votes cast, is her overwhelming support from African-Americans. In Southern states, she’s drawing 80 percent or more of the black vote. In Michigan, she drew a “disappointing” 68 percent — still holding a better than two-to-one margin over Sanders.

That’s the single biggest handicap to Bernie’s candidacy. Bigger than the mainstream media coverage or lack thereof; bigger than the superdelegate system; bigger even than the occasional sniping of Your Obedient Servant.

This problem goes back to the very beginning, before the mainstream media even began to underplay Bernie’s chances or “anoint” Hillary. It goes back to sometime before that first confrontation with Black Lives Matter, when a couple of black activists usurped the microphone at a Bernie rally. That event was a symptom of a pre-existing ailment.

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Primary reax: Big Bernie, Little Marco, voting rights

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Three Brief Posts In One! (Ignoring what the experts would say about fostering pageviews, oh well.) In descending order: Big night for Bernie (but not big enough), a bad night for GOP establishment, and A Tale of Two States on the voting process.

1. Bernie continues to confound the experts, and people like me. His Michigan victory plants his flag in another area of the country and reinforces the idea that The Left Cannot Be Ignored by the Democratic Party. However, he comes out of the night in even worse shape delegate-wise, thanks to Hillary’s thumping victory in Mississippi.

The clock and the delegate math are not in Bernie’s favor, but the Michigan win gives him every reason to keep on fighting. Which, in my view, is a good thing for the Democratic Party: the longer he keeps going, the stronger the case for making the progressive agenda front-and-center in the next administration.

2. Boy, does it ever look like the GOP establishment blundered big-time. They’re being outfoxed by a guy who uses an election-night speech as an infomercial platform. Their big move to back Marco Rubio is looking awfully sour, isn’t it?

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“Maybe they’re going to put him on the ticket”

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I’m sure this will earn me a fresh round of ire from the Sanderistas, but this time you’ll have to blame Bernie’s top campaign adviser Tad Devine. In a wide-ranging interview with Politico’s Glenn Thrush, he delivered a rather astonishingly frank overview of the state of the campaign. And it included some definite indicators that Bernie’s quest for the presidential nomination is coming close to its end.

Not his campaign, mind you. Devine remains committed to, in Bernie’s oft-repeated words, fighting all the way to the convention. As well he should. But Devine threw out some unmistakable hints that time is running out on a serious quest for the big prize.

Starting with the headline, in which Devine openly mulls the possibility of Bernie as the vice presidential nominee.

“I’m sure, of course, anyone would,” Devine says when I ask if he could see a scenario where Sanders would actually say yes. They haven’t talked about the possibility, Devine adds, and he says Sanders would never, ever consider it “unless you know, it was done in the right and proper way.” That’s a far cry from last year, when Sanders and Co. rebuffed the second-banana suggestion by countering with an offer to give Clinton the vice presidential slot on his ticket.

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Endorsement Wars: Backstage with Bernie

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There was some excitement behind the scenes at Bernie Sanders’ Super Tuesday shindig. Sharp elbows, bruised feelings. In the long run, it won’t mean much; but hey, this is a blog about politics, and backstage maneuverings are part of the deal.

Both Democratic candidates for governor spoke from Bernie’s podium — a big opportunity, a very visible platform. Important for both. Well, here’s what happened beforehand according to multiple sources, some on the record and some off.

“[Sanders campaign manager] Jeff Weaver reached out to Matt and asked him to speak before Bernie,” says Matt Dunne’s campaign chief Nick Charyk. “They had a history; Jeff did fundraisng for Matt [in 2010] and endorsed him.

“It was an incredible honor. We had a busy Town Meeting Day schedule, but Matt was jetting up to Burlington when the Sanders campaign contacted us, and told us that Sue Minter had reached out, said she was now endorsing Bernie, and wanted to share the stage.”

Parenthetical: Minter had earlier said she would vote for Bernie in the primary but wasn’t formally endorsing — a rare distinction, but one she chose to make. On Tuesday, with the chance to appear with Bernie in the balance, she changed her tune.

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Bernie’s Trickle-Down Politics

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In the aftermath of the Vermont primary, in which Hillary Clinton failed to reach the 15 percent threashold needed to qualify for convention delegates, there’s been more pressure on superdelegates who back Clinton to switch to Bernie Sanders. Because to vote for Clinton, the story goes, would be to ignore the wishes of the electorate.

Which fails to consider the disenfranchisement of the 13.6 percent who voted for Clinton. I’m not making that complaint; I have said the parties have the right to determine rules for choosing a presidential candidate, and I stick by that. I’m just pointing out the hypocrisy, that’s all. Both candidates benefit, and lose, in different ways that roughly cancel out.

What I am here to say is there are very good reasons for Pat Leahy and Peter Shumlin and Billi Gosh to support Hillary. They may believe she’s the stronger general-election candidate. They might value her long and loyal service to the Democratic Party, contrasted with Bernie-come-lately who has been harshly critical of the party but has also benefited, throughout his political career, from his arm’s-length affiliation with the Democrats.

And here’s another one, a big one, courtesy of the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank:

Hillary Clinton has raised $26 million for the Democratic National Committee and state Democratic parties so far this campaign. And Sanders? $1,000.

That’s no typo. Clinton is doing more to boost the party’s 2016 prospects than Sanders by the proportion of 26,000 to 1.

… Clinton has pledged to rebuild the party and has begun to make good on that promise. Sanders, by contrast, has shown little concern for the very real crisis the party faces beneath the presidential level.

Let me pause here and state, clearly, that I don’t blame Bernie for making this strategic choice. He has a revolution to build, and that costs money. His first priority is fully funding a presidential campaign, which is a very costly undertaking. He is doing what he needs to do.

However, as Milbank documents, the Democratic Party structure is in critical condition.

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Resilience, but no revolution

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Bernie Sanders won’t be the Democratic nominee for president. And it’s not because of superdelegate shenanigans or imaginary Clinton conspiracies* or the media’s reluctance to validate his candidacy. It’s not even because I endorsed Hillary and voted for her in the primary.

*Honestly, I don’t get the Clinton hate. To hear some of my leftish acquaintances tell it, the Clintons are somewhere between Richard Nixon and Attila the Hun on the universal scale of evil. 

But give the guy credit. He did better than expected on Super Tuesday. Not well enough to give him a shot at the nomination, but more than well enough to keep his candidacy going all the way to the Democratic convention.

Which is an absolutely worthwhile goal: get all the publicity you can for progressive ideas, and compel the Democratic Party to honor the left wing for the first time since, oh, 1972. Bernie has proven that the left wing is as strong a potential source of energy (and even money) that the party can’t afford to ignore. That is his enduring gift to our political discourse.

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For Bernie, the going only gets tougher

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Bernie Sanders has gotten farther in this presidential race than anyone this side of Tad Devine ever believed. I am among the happy throng that has tried to glass-ceiling the Bernie Insurgency, only to see him smash right through. And I’m prepared to be wrong again, but I firmly believe what I’m about to write.

Bernie Sanders has reached his high point.

And I have the numbers to back that up.

Yes, he finished a strong second to Hillary Clinton in Nevada. Yes, he has one strong win and two narrow losses so far. But when I look at the upcoming primary calendar, I see a lot of bad news in Bernie’s future.

Let’s start with South Carolina, where Clinton has a decisive edge — and Bernie’s own campaign appears to be waving the white flag. They deny it, naturally; but his schedule argues otherwise. South Carolina Democrats vote on Saturday, but Sanders is spending almost the entire week in states that vote on Super Tuesday and beyond.

When asked about his Palmetto prospects, Bernie put on a happy face.

“We came to South Carolina, and, if you look at the polls, we were at 7, 8, 9 percent in the polls. We were 50, 60, 70 points behind. We have waged a very vigorous campaign. We have closed the gap very significantly,” he said.

He said the same thing after losing in Nevada. And it’s true; but it sounds a lot like Marco Rubio claiming victory after the latest loss. At some point, you have to start winning.

Beyond South Carolina, you look at the upcoming contests, and the odds against Bernie become crystal clear. (Like a glass ceiling, heh.)

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A bit of an own goal by the Minter campaign

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“So, because you are lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.”

— Revelation 3:16

One of the minor sidelights of our state campaign season is the issue of endorsements, especially on the Democratic side. Do you support the hometown favorite, or the party stalwart? The one who wants to be the 44th male president, or the one who wants to be the first female?

You can sense the pressure in the way things filter out. Established officeholders who don’t have to face the electorate? Peter Shumlin and Pat Leahy go for Hillary Clinton. Officeholder who will be on the ballot this year? Peter Welch is studiously neutral.

Non-officeholders contending for top Democratic nominations? Matt Dunne, Dave Zuckerman, and Kesha Ram have all endorsed Bernie.*

*As a correspondent informed me, I made a quick-draw mistake there. Zuckerman and Ram are officeholders, of course. I wrote in haste, and I apologize to Zuckerman and Ram for the attempted impeachments.

And then there’s Sue Minter, who hadn’t said anything publicly about the race until this week, when she half-heartedly indicated a preference in an interview with WCAX’s Kyle Midura. It wasn’t pretty.

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