Bernie Sanders is now even with Clinton in Reuters Tracking Poll

Funnily it’s pretty much the same choice as on the 30ies:

Front Populaire vs Fascism

More off-topic but important news:

Justice Scalia has died.

http://www.theguardian.com/law/2016/feb/13/supreme-court-justice-antonin-scalia-dead-at-79

*yawn*

Before I start taking the prospect of a Sanders nomination seriously, I need to see him win a state which is neither low-population nor a Paleface Bantustan.

I can’t turn my back on a man with a plan for tax supported (not free but a hell of a lot better than the 20% of our take home pay we’re currently paying …. And UppityWoman doesn’t know anything about why I support him) medicare for everyone

Hillary Clinton jumped the shark when she declared she is a progressive. Talk about cognitive dissonance. I mean is there a progressive anywhere whom she convinced, one who said, “All right then, let’s move on”? So why did she do it? Because she has an incredible tin ear when it comes to politics. It’s not so much that she’s disconnected from ordinary Americans. It is that she has an ill-concealed contempt for them. I would say most politicians nowadays do, including husband Bill, but the difference is that while Bill knew how to smooth talk the rubes and feel your pain, Hillary’s brand of phoniness is just jarring, and made even more so with the inevitable comparisons to her husband. Say what you will but Bill was a consumate con man. The perfect con is not where you don’t even know you’ve been conned. It is where you know you’re being conned, but you are so charmed by the con man that you allow yourself to be taken anyway. Bill Clinton was that kind of guy. Hillary isn’t. She always gives the impression that she would rather be some place else, and that she is only where she is as long as she absolutely needs to be and then she’s gone. You see that in the debates but also recently when she left a crowd waiting for hours, arrived, gave a five minute canned speech, and left, leaving people gaping. And this is how she treats her supporters. If it had been Bill, you get the feeling he would have made of point of spending extra time with them, feeling their pain, and with that extra effort turning out a great news story and turning them and a lot of others into diehard partisans. With Hillary, the thought never even occurred. Those people were just something on a checklist. She checked them off and moved on.

Her handlers want to cast this as a “perception” problem. But it’s really the message, and hers is thoroughly incoherent. She is the candidate who can get things done. It’s not a question of whether this is true or not, but rather what does it even mean? What “things”? Done ??? as in what? You can almost hear the ghost of Bill whispering, “It depends upon what you mean by ‘done’.”

She called the TPP the gold standard, then under pressure she came out against it “in its present form”. Again what does this non-rejecting rejection mean?

She is the feminist candidate. But would a feminist stay with, even out of political calculation, or maybe because it is so calculating, a sexaholic husband who preys on women? Would a feminist candidate trot out a couple of antiquated warhorses like Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem to insult young women voters, a demographic Hillary Clinton has clearly lost. I mean if essentially calling them emptyheaded, sex starved traitors doesn’t entice them back, what will? Along these lines, Bill Clinton was asked why younger voters (of both sexes) were supporting Sanders and he reeled off a list of proposals that Sanders had made addressing issues of concern to young people. I suppose he was trying to make these sound pie in the sky but the effect was glaringly the opposite. It just underlined that Hillary had not even bothered to think about, let alone address, what was important to this group.

Hillary has played the experience card, but this is ironic for all kinds of reasons. As I have pointed out before, husband Bill’s “experience” before becoming President was that of being the Governor of a state with less than one percent of the US population. She was an undistinguished Senator from New York, and given her name recognition, her tenure was thoroughly forgettable. She then ran a bitter campaign against Barack Obama whom she now so tightly embraces. So was she wrong then to disagree with him or wrong now to agree with him? And if Obama can now (or until the South Carolina primary is over) do no wrong, how does she rationalize her supposed rejection of one of Obama’s signature legacies, the TPP? As for her time as Secretary of State, it was noteworthy principally for self-inflicted disasters like Libya.

Hillary Clinton criticizes Sanders as a one issue candidate: he’s against Wall Street. But Bill Clinton ran on “It’s the economy, stupid.” Meanwhile she takes millions from Wall Street all the while she maintains she is somehow exempt from its influence. How to square all this? Well, you can’t. It’s more incoherence.

And that’s the problem. Voters want to have some idea where a candidate stands, even if as with all the Republican candidates, where they stand are on corners of Goofyville. But Hillary is all about triangulation. And triangulation is not about where you stand but where you are willing to move to. What Hillary can’t say because it would be taken negatively, that is accurately, is that in a country hungry for change, she is very much a candidate of the status quo. And running on a platform of the status quo, ONLY BETTER is as uninspiring as it gets. It’s not what the country wants. She’s not what the country wants. So she has to dress it up differently. She’s just not very good at it is all.

Finally, there is the issue of corruption, which infects our entire political system and which the Clintons epitomize. They have always had an obvious, and deeply pathological, love of money. Remember Hillary’s “luck” way back when in her short, but very lucrative stint trading commodity futures? Or her incredible statement about how she and Bill were nearly bankrupt leaving the White House as some kind of a justification for their making over a hundred million giving “speeches”? Or their funky foundation with its billions and influence peddling? Or Bill Clinton’s in your face, you rubes, assertion that he was going to keep giving his “speeches” because he had to pay the bills (Well, at least one Bill, anyway).

You see it’s not about Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy, it’s not about whether her handlers are doing a good job, it’s not about perceptions. Hillary’s problem is with reality. No matter how much she tries to tamp it down, it continues to leak out from every pore of her campaign and every statement she makes. We have a political, electoral, and financial system that is endlessly corrupt, and she is an avatar of that system. Although I do not support Sanders (I do identify as progressive), he has turned out somewhat better than I thought, but the truth is that even a ham sandwich would have more integrity than Hillary Clinton. That’s why national polls are narrowing. I think the Democratic party machine has 3 positions. They would prefer Clinton to Sanders. If despite their rigging Sanders became the nominee, they would hope he loses in the general. If he wins the general, then they will obstruct his Presidency.

Pipe dreams.

Sanders would get demolished in a general election, not by Trump, but the mainstream media.

But he’s not even going to get that far. Clinton leads strongly outside the ultra white states. Anyway, I think that’s what Bloomberg is hoping for too.

Sanders is getting attacked by the mainstream media?

Where? In the Mirror Universe?

As for the GOP, they’re treating him with kid gloves. They want him to win the nomination. See the Uppity Woman link I posted above for why.

@Ivory Bill Woodpecker —

I suspect Republicans are rather more eager to face off against HRC. She’s a lousy candidate who practically guarantees that, with just a little digging, an election-hobbling scandal can emerge right around the end of October, 2016.

Anyway, given that Republican “strategists” have been and still are totally blindsided by Trump, maybe possibly they’re not exactly clairvoyant. So it’s stupid (and cowardly) to rely on their (imagined) insights for assessing the Dem candidate.

Hugh, I agree with your assessment completely.

Hillary Clinton manages to be her own worst enemy when it comes to campaigning: her status quo policies seem astonishingly out-of-sync with what the public seems to want and to the extent that she has aligned herself with what the public wants (e.g., her changed stance on the TPP), she seems completely inauthentic. Bernie Sanders, whatever one thinks of the chances of getting his proposals enacted, at least has properly gauged the mood of the public and has consistency and authenticity on his side.

given that Republican “strategists” have been and still are totally blindsided by Trump…

True…and also we haven’t had a candidate on the Democratic ticket who was anything but a neoliberal in the past 20 years. The entire debate during that time has been framed in neoliberal terms. Sanders doesn’t do that—he actually makes the argument on other bases (e.g., liberal/progressive bases, historical bases, etc.), something that recent Presidents have not done. Whether that argument is enough to persuade US voters, we don’t know—it’s been persuasive for some of those responding to the Reuters poll, apparently—but we do know that it’s something that the GOP hasn’t seen, much argued less against, in a long time. So the GOP strategists might be overestimating the GOP’s ability to win in a presidential contest in which Sanders is the Democratic party nominee. (It’s similar to the media overestimating Hillary Clinton’s performance so far—they’re undervaluing the arguments and policy choices that Sanders is making and overvaluing his supposed weaknesses (e.g., the “socialist” label).)