Tag: Bernie Sanders

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Opinion Viewpoint

Tennessee Politics: Restless Bedfellows

Anybody who’s been paying the slightest bit of attention to Tennessee state government in recent years has surely noticed that we have what amounts to one-party government. Republicans run the roost, and Democrats are a rump group with minimal numbers and no power.

This state of affairs has existed for less than 10 years. Going into 2008, the year of Barack Obama’s election as president, Tennessee still had a nominally Democratic governor in Phil Bredesen, control of the state House of Representatives, and near-parity in the state Senate, where Republicans had the narrowest possible majority.

The turnover of a handful of seats in 2008 gave the GOP a majority of one in the House. 

It was only in the presidential off-year election of 2010 that the Republicans essentially swept the Democrats in legislative races and took firm control of both houses. That year, the gubernatorial race was basically a three-way affair involving Republicans Bill Haslam, Zach Wamp, and Ron Ramsey, with the general election contest between primary winner Haslam and Democrat Mike McWherter being a no-contest walkover for the GOP.

President Obama was reelected in 2012 with no help from Tennessee, an erstwhile bellwether state which at that point had firmly realigned with the Deep South politically. In the off-year election of 2014, the Republicans won their present super-majority. End of story?

Nope. What has gone on since has been the slow, but now obvious, development of a fissure in state Republican ranks. As it turns out, nature not only abhors a vacuum; failing an iron-handed dictator, it pretty much rejects a monolith, too, and, under easy-going Republican Governor Haslam, the natural yin and yang of things has begun to reassert itself.

Among state Republicans, this fragmentation first became noticeable in several of the legislative fights over gun bills — particularly those imposing official toleration of concealed weapons on or around business property. Those battles pitted Republican legislators loyal to (or indebted to) established corporate interests against Tea Party insurgents who were susceptible to the blandishments (or threats) of the faux-populist NRA.

The estimable journalistic-workhorse-turned-occasional-columnist Tom Humphrey did an insightful take this past weekend about a legislative Republican split over two matters — one, the so-called “bathroom bill” that would force transgendered persons to use only the public lavatory facilities of their birth gender; the other, a bill enshrining the Holy Bible as the official state book. Leaving aside the very real civil-liberties and First Amendment aspects inherent in both bills, the aforementioned corporate interests opposed them both because they were, in simplest terms, bad for business.

The Republican Party’s right-wing populists, on the other hand, favored the two bills as emblematic of their “values” issues, in defense of which they had drifted away from what they saw as an over-secularized, over-diverse Democratic Party.

This time, there was no powerful lobby like the NRA intervening, and business (aided by the Democratic minority) won, forcing the eventual scuttling of both bills. But there will be other such battles on the state front — each corresponding in rough (if inexact) ways to the current national schism between Trump supporters and the GOP establishment.

If all this bodes ill for the future unity of the Republican Party, the Democrats have their own fissures to worry about. The presidential-primary contest between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders has outlined an ongoing struggle within the Democratic Party as well — one similar in some ways to that afflicting the Republicans.

Sanders is clearly on to something with his unflagging emphasis on the core issue of economic inequality. He’s the one attracting the multitudes, building out from that central issue, while Clinton’s political base is more a matter of putting together a collection of special interests, patchwork-style, working from the outside in.  

Many of these she shares with Sanders — blacks, gays, women, civil libertarians, low-income voters, et al. — but one of them is hers alone: big money. She is still the likely primary winner, but her ties to the financial establishment leave her dependent on the amorphous appeal of “diversity” instead of the central one of reform.

If not this year, down the line, the Democrats in Tennessee as elsewhere will have to have their own internal reckoning.

Senior editor Jackson Baker is the Flyer‘s political columnist.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Blind Pigs

If you suck at your job, you’ll get fired.

If you suck because you’re lazy, you’ll definitely get fired.

Unless you’re a member of the political and economic establishment of a disintegrating superstate. If you’re incompetent and indolent but reliably loyal and unquestioning, your sinecure in the system that props up the powers that be is safe.

The New York Times, an institution so beholden to the establishment that it subjects a major presidential candidate, Bernie Sanders, to a virtual media blackout, is this week’s case study in establishmentarian unaccountability.

After effectively donating nearly half a billion dollars of media coverage to the campaign of Donald Trump, corporate media is finally beginning to wonder whether teeing the country up for its first potential bona fide fascist dictatorship was a good idea.

In the Times, reliably mistaken op-ed columnist David Brooks allowed that, just maybe, opinion mongers like him ought to have noticed the building voter outrage over “free trade” deals like NAFTA and TPP — agreements supported by him and his paper’s editorial board — that gutted America’s industrial heartland and are driving the Sanders and Trump campaigns.

“Trump voters are a coalition of the dispossessed. They have suffered lost jobs, lost wages, lost dreams. The American system is not working for them, so naturally they are looking for something else,” Brooks wrote on March 18th.

“Moreover,” continued the man who thought invading Iraq would be a cakewalk, “many in the media, especially me, did not understand how they would express their alienation. We expected Trump to fizzle because we were not socially intermingled with his supporters and did not listen carefully enough. For me, it’s a lesson that I have to change the way I do my job if I’m going to report accurately on this country.”

This is a stunning admission.

Let’s set aside the question of how likely it is that Brooks really will make the effort to get out more. (My guess: not very.) Why should the Times — and, more to the point, the readers whose paid subscriptions pay Brooks’ salary — keep a man on staff who admits that he sucks at his job because he’s too lazy to interact with the American people?

Brooks deserves to have plenty of company as he walks the unemployment version of the long Green Mile.

On March 28th, fellow Times writer Nicholas Kristof went even further, in a piece titled “My Shared Shame: The Media Helped Make Trump.” “We were largely oblivious to the pain among working-class Americans and thus didn’t appreciate how much his message resonated,” Kristof wrote.

Most Americans are working class. In other words, Kristof and his colleagues admit they don’t cover the problems that affect most Americans. Again, why does he still have a job?

Believe it or not, there are scores — maybe hundreds — of opinion writers who do know what’s going on in their own country. They write well. They get stories right. They saw the Trump and Sanders populist phenomena coming. But you won’t find any of them in the print pages of major newspapers like the Times, or even in the low-pay ghettos of their web-only content. 

Because you can’t be a good journalist and a shill for a corporate media obsessed with access to the powers-that-be.

As usual, in these moments of MSM navel-gazing, they almost get it right. Kristof continues: “Media elites rightly talk about our insufficient racial, ethnic, and gender diversity, but we also lack economic diversity. We inhabit a middle-class world and don’t adequately cover the part of America that is struggling and seething. We spend too much time talking to senators, not enough to the jobless.”

Class diversity is a real thing. Newsrooms at stodgy institutions like the Times have their token women and people of color, but most are women and POC from well-off families. They attend expensive journalism schools with few graduates from poor families and struggling small towns. As Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton prove, coming from a traditionally disadvantaged group is no guarantee that someone understands or cares about the troubles of the economically oppressed.

More to the point, we need a new class of intuitive journalists. Men and women with empathy. People who have a clue about what’s happening in their own country.

Ted Rall’s next book is After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back As Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan.

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Letter From The Editor Opinion

Medium Cool

We’re reading and hearing a lot about “electability” these days, which is broadly defined as “fitness or ability to get elected to public office.” That covers a lot of Tarmac, to say the least. For example, ingrained party affiliations, gerrymandering, and family or religious affiliations can make a candidate electable for state or local office, but he or she may have little electability in a national contest.

Witness Texas Senator Ted Cruz. Anyone with a minimal ability to read character can see that he’s, well, just creepy. He has a base of right-wing, evangelical voters and not much else. His chances of winning 51 percent of the voters in a national contest are nil. Cruz could easily be president of Utah and the Confederacy, but unfortunately for him, the rest of the country still exists.

The bottom line is, Cruz lacks “cool,” and cool wins elections. And by cool, I mean, basically, being comfortable in your own skin. President Obama has been the coolest president of my lifetime. He smiles and laughs a lot. He doesn’t get flustered in public. He doesn’t gratuitously insult or flatter. His speaking pattern is masterful, full of seemingly thoughtful pauses that lead to complete sentences. You may not like what he says, but he says it well. Our next president will not be as cool.

Oh, sure, other factors are important — competency, experience — but I’m convinced that cool, or its corollary, “likability,” is how we most often elect our president. In a national election, you need to win across a broad landscape, millions of people of all ethnicities and political persuasions, a large percentage of whom, unfortunately, are not particularly well-versed on the issues. It’s been said, ad nauseum, that voters are drawn to someone they could “sit down and have a beer with.” And it’s true, especially in this era of 24-hour media coverage, where candidates are exposed to public scrutiny as never before. If you’re not cool, you can’t hide it.

Reagan was cooler than Carter and Mondale. George H.W. Bush was cooler than Dukakis (though there was something of a coolness deficit in that contest). Bill Clinton was cooler than the elder Bush and Dole. Like it or not, George W. Bush was cooler than Gore or Kerry, who were smart, but stiffs. And, it goes without saying, John McCain and Mitt Romney were no match for Obama’s cool.

Bernie Sanders is the coolest of the remaining candidates. It’s a crotchety cool, but he comes off as authentic. Hillary Clinton is not cool. She is, by her own admission, “not a good politician,” and her speaking style, while substantive, can be abrasive and mannered. Fortunately, if she gets the nomination, she’ll probably be going up against the uncoolest candidate of my lifetime — Donald Trump.

Trump is a siding salesman, full of bluster and insults, with no coherent national or foreign policy positions that anyone’s been able to discern, unless you consider, “We never win. When I’m president, we’re going to win” some sort of policy.

Non-doctrinaire swing voters look for likability, certainly, but if they can’t have that, they look for competence and sanity. And they don’t want an uncool jerk as president. As Jeb(!) Bush said to Trump, “You can’t insult your way to the presidency.” Trump has basically insulted himself out of the presidency, turning vast constituencies against himself and his party. The last poll I saw had Trump’s unfavorability rating among likely voters at 67 percent! If the Republicans nominate Trump (or Cruz), they’re looking at a Goldwater-level wipeout election, no matter who the Democrats select.

Hopefully, such a result would make Trump go away for good — which would be cool with me.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

GOP Tilt Holds in Tennessee

According to the Tennessee secretary of state’s office in Nashville, a total of 385,653 Tennesseans, 43,000 of whom were Shelby Countians, cast ballots in the early-voting period that ran from February 10th to February 23rd.  

That’s an early-voting record for the state and a 17.1 percent increase over the 2008 primaries in Tennessee, the last time that both parties had contested primaries on Super Tuesday.  

Some 257,209 early votes were cast statewide in the Republican primary, as against 128,374 in the Democratic primary. That’s roughly a two-thirds tilt toward Republicans, a piece of math that would seem to coincide with the statewide shift of voter sentiment to the GOP in recent years — a trend that accelerated with the 2008 general election, when Republicans won a majority in the state House of Representatives to go with one already achieved in the Senate. 

Two years later, with then-Knoxville Mayor Bill Haslam as their nominee, the Republicans won the governorship over Mike McWherter of Jackson.

The GOP edge in early-voting stats would also seem to reflect the disproportionate amount of time that Republican presidential candidates spent in Tennessee or adjacent areas. All five remaining Republican hopefuls — businessman Donald Trump, U.S. Senators Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, Ohio Governor John Kasich, and retired surgeon/author Dr. Ben Carson — made appearances in the state in the run-up to this week’s primary.

Kasich, Trump, and Carson were all in Memphis on get-out-the-vote business this past weekend — Kasich for a well-attended town hall at the Central Avenue Holiday Inn on Friday, Trump for one of his patented monster rallies at the Millington Jetport hangar on Saturday, and Carson for a round of visits to churches and a local veterans’ service center on Sunday.

Active headquarters operations are up and running — within a block of each other on Poplar in Midtown — for the two remaining Democratic presidential candidates, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders. 

But only Clinton visited Memphis in the course of her campaign, appearing at LeMoyne-Owen College for a rally last November and speaking at two local churches — Greater Imani Church and Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church — this past Sunday. Husband Bill Clinton, the former president, addressed a large crowd at Whitehaven High School last month on his wife’s behalf.

Sanders has been rumored as coming to Memphis once or twice but has not yet shown. The senator had also been scheduled for a visit to Tennessee State University in Nashville in January but evidently changed his plans and was represented there by campaign aide Matt Kuhn of Memphis, among others.

• As expected, Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell has thrown his hat into the ring as a candidate for the soon-to-be-vacant 8th District congressional seat. The mayor’s bid, which was not unexpected, was announced at a Reagan Day dinner of Madison County Republicans in Jackson on Monday night.

Luttrell instantly becomes one of the favorites in the GOP primary field, which also includes state Senator Brian Kelsey of Germantown, Shelby County Register of Deeds Tom Leatherwood, Shelby County Commissioner Steve Basar, former county commissioner and radiologist/broadcast executive George Flinn, and former U.S. Attorney David Kustoff.

While the field of Republican contenders proliferates for the seat now held by Stephen Fincher of Crockett County, who has chosen not to run for reelection, the field of  Democrats has not developed in kind.

Shelby County assistant District Attorney Michael McCusker had indicated an interest in running as a Democrat but late last week bowed out, saying, “Simply put, I do not believe I can properly balance both the demands of my career and my family life with a campaign of this magnitude.”

Luttrell’s race is good news for Shelby County Commission chairman Terry Roland, who, in something of a ripple effect, would become interim County Mayor should Roland still be chairman if Luttrell wins the congressional race and has to resign his mayoralty in January 2017. That circumstance would require that Roland’s colleagues elect him to a second straight term as chairman this September, a real possibility for someone with his deal-making and arm-twisting skills.

Whoever gets to be interim mayor (for a charter-mandated 45 days) would have a leg up when the County Commission then chooses someone to serve out the balance of Luttrell’s term.

There is an irony in that fact, in that the mayor and the chairman have been seriously at odds for months over issues relating to which branch of county government should have priority over the other. Conflicts have raged over matters ranging from the reliability of the administration’s accounting statistics to the issue of whether the commission is entitled to have its own attorney.

But there has clearly been a thaw in their relations of late. Luttrell told the Flyer last week that Roland was one of the people he consulted in advance of his decision to make the congressional race. 

And at the Shelby County Republican Party’s annual Lincoln Day banquet the weekend before last, the mayor, speaking from the dais, threw a verbal bouquet Roland’s way, calling him a “great chairman.” The mayor coupled that with a similar grace note for GOP Commissioner Heidi Shafer, Roland’s ally in the procedural wars with Luttrell.

Just as Roland, who has planned a race for County Mayor in 2018, might profit from a Luttrell victory in the congressional race, so would Shafer’s ambitions gain from a win by another congressional candidate, state Senator Kelsey.

Shafer, who served two consecutive terms as Commission budget chair, raised eyebrows last fall when she opted to shift to the chairmanship of the legislative affairs committee. But the change, she confided, was in line with her intent to run for the legislature at the soonest feasible opportunity. A Kelsey win for Congress, and his subsequent departure from his Senate seat, would occasion a special election and give her that opportunity.

Roland, incidentally, is in line for a possible serendipity in yet another political lottery. He has become West Tennessee chairman of the Trump campaign and was principal organizer of Trump’s giant rally in Millington last weekend. Whatever the local dividends might be from a Trump victory, either in the nomination process or for the presidency itself, Roland would likely be first in line to receive them.

• Bills relating to criminal justice are getting good play during the current legislative session in Nashville. Students from Soulsville in Memphis were on Tuesday’s schedule to testify in a hearing before the house Criminal Justice subcommittee on a bill — HB 2483, sponsored by Representative Raumesh Akbari (D-Memphis) — that would reduce fees  to have criminal records expunged after successful completion of a pretrial diversion program.

Also to be heard by the subcommittee were HB2370, which would increase penalties for assaults against correctional officers, and HB2043, which would eliminate penalties for persons substituting prayer for a child’s medical or surgical treatment.

“There have to be ramifications for what people do and say, or else they’re going to continue to do whatever they want. It’s very hard for us, like I’m sure [for] Memphis and Nashville, because we make decisions worried about whether the state is going to come in and overrule them. It’s hard to run a city that way. … Look at Nashville; for better or worse, the voters adopted an amendment about local hire, and, like it or hate it, two weeks later the state overrules it. …We’ve got to change the people.” — Chattanooga Mayor Andy Berke, at a reception at the Henry Turley Company in Memphis, on the need to overhaul the membership of the current legislature.

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Editorial Opinion

Post-Super Tuesday Thoughts

As longtime Flyer readers know, we don’t endorse candidates at election time, and didn’t on the occasion of this week’s presidential primary in Tennessee. But we do have some opinions. By now Super Tuesday is over, you’ve already voted, and we invite you to join us for a little bit of post-election armchair-quarterbacking:

On the Republican side, is there an alternative to Donald Trump?

There are things we find attractive about Ohio Governor John Kasich, who seems unique among the GOP contenders in that he appears to be both an experienced administrator and a pragmatic centrist, not a trash talker, a negativist, or a partisan demagogue. But maybe the punditocracy has it right: Only the Mambo Brothers, right-wing Senator Ted Cruz or former Tea Party darling and now ad hoc establishmentarian Senator Marco Rubio are serious alternatives to Trump.

The trouble with Trump, when you get down to it, is that he has no fixed principles. Like a hypocritical preacher, he can preach the world round or he can preach it flat. He can be free-trade or protectionist, pro-choice or pro-life, “liberal” or “conservative.” In one campaign, he can rebuke Mitt Romney for advocating self-deportation of illegal immigrants; in another campaign, his own, he can advocate forced deportation on a massive scale. He is what you want him to be, and he wants everybody to want him to be something, namely, president of the United States. That, we hazard, is why he had so much trouble repudiating David Duke to Jake Tapper on CNN once he’d heard that Duke had endorsed him. He’d want the Miley Cyrus vote, too, if he thought he could get it.

Trump is all over the map. That said, we wonder if that gives Rubio and Cruz, who restrict themselves more or less to one side of the map, the reactionary one, any claim to superiority over Trump. The Donald tries to go along to get along. He will, for example, give lip service to the GOP shibboleth that “Obamacare” should be abolished, but he hints that he might replace it with something amorphous that sounds like universal health care. There is no such ambivalence on the part of Rubio and Cruz; they would insist on a full return to the Darwinian system of health-to-the-highest-bidder medical rationing.

And on the Democratic side, is there any alternative to Hillary Clinton? 

We find much to admire in Secretary Clinton. She is strong, determined, and resourceful (all adjectives that she earned all over again in her redoubtable 11-hour standoff of a GOP lynching party at last fall’s Benghazi hearing). A little too calculating sometimes, and almost clam-like in her self-containment, but she’s smart and vetted, and her heart is in the right place — or near it — on numerous humanitarian and social issues. 

In fact, she seems right on so many things that we find it frustrating that she can’t be as simple and direct and, as they say, proactive on the issue of economic inequality as Bernie Sanders can. And because he can, frankly, we’d just as soon the Democratic contest went on long enough for the right kind of osmosis to occur between her point of view and his. Regardless of which one wins.

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Opinion The Last Word

Backpfeifengesicht!

For Lent this year, I’ve given up paying attention to election coverage. Just kidding! Instead of staying engaged, I’m hate-watching “Decision 2016” like it’s the last season of How I Met Your Mother. Hopefully I won’t hate the ending as much.

The story lines haven’t changed much since last summer. Ted Cruz is still the poster child for backpfeifengesicht. Seriously. Google “punchable face.” There is actual science behind this. Donald Trump hasn’t run out offensive things to say, nor has he suffered any consequences for saying them. Hillary Clinton hasn’t worn the same pantsuit twice. Jeb Bush? Pretty sure he’s the inspiration for Arrested Development‘s Buster Bluth. I’m still waiting for Marco Rubio’s alleged charisma to make its debut. Oh, and Ben Carson’s still out there giving hope to aspiring brain surgeons who are, um, not smart.

Somebody call me when someone manages to hold Bernie Sanders down long enough to get a comb through his hair. Or when the primaries are over. Whichever comes first.

Election Day is more than eight months away, and I am already over it. It’s going to be a long year, and not because there is an extra day in February.

I’m over the constant emails with the ambiguous subject lines, always asking me for a dollar, or $27, like the world’s most persistent panhandlers. I have opened exactly one of these messages, from James Carville, titled “whackadoodles.” Spoiler alert, it wasn’t actually from the Ragin’ Cajun. I only opened it because I wanted to reward the copywriter for capturing my attention. Game recognize game, or something.

Then there are the debates. Surely after nine episodes of the GOP Clown Car Hour, the candidates must be weary of trying to think of new and innovative ways to express how much they hate Obama, Muslims, women, minorities, immigrants, taxes, and poor people, and love guns, Jesus, corporations, and Reagan. We get it. Yet there are three more scheduled. Might I suggest a Thunderdome format? Or the Eliminator from American Gladiators? Let’s just get this thing over with already.

Of course the Democratic debates are more substantial in terms of policy discussion — there are only two candidates. They still have to talk it out a dozen times, though, so every network gets a piece. And the debates are no more illuminating or informative unless you consider the number of millennials who probably had to Google “Henry Kissinger” during the last one. Because he’s relevant in 2016. Thanks for reminding us how old you are, Bern and Hillz! Your Snapchats and emoji tweets are bae and so on fleek, it’s easy to mistake you for fellow youths.

Thanks to the internet, social media, and TV news, we have rapid access to just about everything there is to know about every candidate. Why is it that, when technological advancements have streamlined and simplified every other facet of life, national elections take longer and longer? That’s a rhetorical question, of course. It’s money. It’s always money. Ted Cruz was the first to declare his candidacy last March, and it wasn’t to give us extra time to learn to like him. No, he needed to start raising money. Because running for president is really, really expensive. Which contradicts the whole idea of government being “by the people” and “for the people.” Good thing that line is from the Gettysburg Address, not the Constitution, or we’d be in big trouble.

Candidates spent more than $70 million on advertisements in Iowa, a state that is 90 percent white and one that has little impact on the outcome of the general election. It derives its “importance” from the fact that its caucus system is so complex and convoluted it has to go first. Local businesses — restaurants, hotels, coffee shops and the like — reap economic benefits.

All together, the candidates spent $27,000 on pizza. That’s a lot of pepperonis.

Jeb Bush spent $15 million in Iowa and placed sixth. If I were him, I would have bought fewer ads and more pizza. Instead he went and spent more than $30 million in New Hampshire. He placed fourth! These are supposed to be the “fiscal responsibility” guys! Think of all the problems $30 million would solve. The amount losing candidates spent in that tiny state could have bought new pipes for the entire city of Flint, Michigan.

The longer the election takes, the more it costs. That’s why everyone who runs for president is either a millionaire or a corporate puppet, or is constantly in your email begging for money. Or all of the above. It’s the American way, until it’s no longer profitable.

Jen Clarke is an unapologetic Memphian and digital marketing strategist.

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Cohen Touts Hillary at Opening of Local Campaign HQ

CREDIT: JB

JB

Cohen at Clinton HQ opening. Note that the cardboard cut-out of Hillary (far right, back) appears to be smiling at the congressman’s words of support.

If Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush goes looking for some kind of satisfaction this weekend, he may have to settle for a backhanded compliment from 9th District Democratic congressman Steve Cohen of Memphis.

Addressing Hillary Clinton supporters at the formal opening of local Clinton-for-President headquarters on Poplar Avenue Thursday night, Cohen gave a serious of harsh reviews of other GOP field presidential contenders (Example: “Marco Rubio, he’s a Barbie doll. They tell him what to say, and he smiles.”)

Then, by way of acknowledging that Bush, whose polling numbers have been consistently low, could be experiencing his last stand in this weekend’s Republican presidential primary in South Carolina, Cohen said, “It’s unfortunate that probably their best candidate is Jeb Bush.”

“Best of a bad lot” was roughly the connotation had in mind. In making the case for Clinton apropos the advent of early voting for the March 1 “Super Tuesday” primary in Tennessee and numerous other states, Cohen scourged the GOP presidential field in general as being threats to “women’s rights, voting rights, union rights, everything that has to with the fiber of the middle class , and the things we’ve fought for.”

The congressman was much kinder toward Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Clinton’s opponent in the contest for the Democratic presidential nomination. Noting that Sanders, whose Memphis supporters have also opened a local office on Poplar, a short distance away, is making a race of it in the primaries, Cohen said, “Bernie Sanders is my friend, I’ve worked with him on many issues.”

He said that he and Sanders have co-sponsored a number of bills and made numerous joint appearances for various causes, but that, in most of those cases, “we haven’t been successful, because we see things in a big way,” and, given the realities in Congress, most of those things “are not going to happen.”

“Don’t say anything bad about Bernie Sanders,” Cohen cautioned the 75 or so Clinton supporters crowded into the office’s front room. “We want all those Sanders people to work with us, come the fall.”

Cohen began his remarks with the good tidings of an endorsement of candidate Clinton from U.S. Rep. James Clyburn of South Carolina, an African-American luminary and assistant Democratic leader in the House of Representatives.

The opening of the local Sanders office took place last Saturday and drew more than 100 people, many of them in the “millennial” age group. Matt Kuhn of the Sanders campaign had addressed that group.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Making a President 2016

MUSINGS FROM MANCHESTER AND MEMPHIS — Not to overstate the omens, but the past two weeks have seen some lousy weather, both in New Hampshire, whose presidential primary accomplished some crucial winnowing down of the candidate field, and here in Tennessee, where voters get to make what could be an even more defining choice in less than two weeks.

In the meantime, along with more cold, rainy weather, and maybe even some sleet and snow, we are quite likely to get some close encounters with the candidates — like Donald J. Trump, the reality TV star and Manhattan real estate mogul, who, on the eve of the New Hampshire voting, addressed a rally of his supporters with the following exhortation: “I want to finish up, because you’ve got a bad evening out there. You have to do me a favor. I don’t really care if you get hurt or not, but I want you to last ’til tomorrow. So don’t get hurt!” 

That characteristically cheeky bit of tough love was uttered at the Verizon Wireless Arena in Manchester, before an audience of thousands who had crammed into the arena on the night of what Trump, more or less accurately, had called a blizzard, one which, he had proclaimed upon arriving late, had caused at least seven accidents outside.

Hillary Clinton among the crowd at Henniker

Not that Trump’s exhortation had been his most memorable statement of the night. Just minutes earlier, following half an hour or more of heady ego-tripping boasts (all free of any taint of political-platform logic), The Donald lambasted Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and Republican rival Ted Cruz for taking issue with the “tone” of his stump speeches. Whereupon, via a reference to Cruz’s performance at a just-concluded debate event of GOP candidates, Trump upped the verbal ante.

TRUMP: “They asked Ted Cruz a serious question: ‘What do you think about waterboarding?’ and, I said, OK, honestly, I thought he would say, ‘Absolutely.’ And he didn’t. He said, ‘Well …’ You know he was concerned about the answer because some people …” 

Distracted by a woman supporter in one of the front rows, Trump interrupted himself. Pointing to the woman, he said, “She just said a terrible thing. You know what she said? Shout it out, because I don’t want to say …” 

WOMAN: “He’s a pussy!” 

TRUMP (chuckling): “OK. You’re not allowed to say … and I never expect to hear that from you again. She said … (mock scolding tone) … I never expect to hear that from you again…” (crowd now chuckling along with him) … She said, ‘He’s a pussy!'” 

What ensued from the crowd, not all of whom had heard the interloper distinctly but all of whom now heard Trump loud and clear, was first shock, then awe, then delight, then pandemonium and chants of “TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!” It was Donald Trump’s latest Gettysburg moment in his campaign to Make America Great Again. 

It would surely be a waste if the surprise front-runner in Republican ranks should — in the interval between now and Tuesday, March 1st, when Tennessee and almost a dozen other states hold primary or caucus events — choose to bypass Memphis, known to music-lovers and NBA fans alike as a citadel of Grit ‘n’ Grind, wide open to down-homey talk and artists of the vernacular.
Caucuses in Nevada and primaries in South Carolina will have intervened between now and March 1st, and each of those states will have had an effect on candidate fortunes, but nothing comparable to the scale of what will happen on “Super Tuesday,” as the date is called on the 2016 political calendar.

By the close of voting on March 1st, we should know if Trump has maintained his edge over Texas Senator Cruz, a chilly avatar of the hard right almost as unpopular with the GOP establishment as Trump himself, the grand interloper, and we should know also which one of the three establishment-friendly candidates — former Florida governor Jeb Bush, Florida Senator Marco Rubio, and Ohio governor John Kasich — has been able to survive for an expected three-way battle that could last all the way ’til July, when the Republican National Convention convenes in Cleveland.

There’s an ongoing battle between Democratic contenders, too — former First Lady, Senator, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and septuagenarian Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a self-professed “democratic socialist” whose advent as a serious competitor in 2016 has been as breathtakingly unexpected as was Trump’s, but whose proposed reform policies are as rigorously defined as Trump’s are amorphous.

Both Trump and Sanders are considered outliers, both have developed bona fide followings, and both have been identified by political pundits, somewhat lazily, as exponents of an undefined “anger” in the body politic. The term may fairly characterize Trump’s generalized complaint that “we [Americans] don’t win at anything any more,” and Hillary Clinton has attached it to Sanders in a widely publicized sound bite suggesting that anger is all well and good, but “Where’s the plan?”

Arguably, Sanders’ plan is fairly specific. Among other things, his version of a “political revolution” would provide for free education at public colleges, universal health care (under the rubric “Medicare for All”), a return to strict controls over both political spending and banking practices, and a crash program to renew the nation’s infrastructure. All this to be paid for in large part by “a tax on Wall Street speculation.”

It may be pie in the sky, as Clinton and her supporters imply, since it is hard to see how any program so thorough-going could make its way past Republican road blocks in Congress. But it is real pie, all the same. Or, to amend the metaphor, food-wise, it is whole-loaf reform, reasonably close to everything the term “socialism” implies.

It is no accident that Bill Clinton, spouse of candidate Clinton and a former president who still commands wide popularity, both within Democratic ranks and without, played off on that metaphor last week during a hastily called rally for his wife in Memphis, citing a saying of another former Democratic president, Lyndon Johnson, that anyone who would spurn half a loaf “has never been hungry.”

It is no accident, either, that former president Clinton chose to come to Memphis in the run-up to Super Tuesday. Hillary Clinton’s game plan is to prevail here and in other so-called “SEC’ [for Southeastern Conference] states on March 1st, thereby putting a comfortable distance between herself and Sanders (who tied her in the Iowa caucuses and beat her soundly in New Hampshire), and to do so largely on the basis of massive support from black voters, whose loyalty to the Clintons has been assumed for the last generation and a half.

Bernie Sanders lays out his plan for a revolution

Whereas Sanders is correctly considered a socialist (though hardly in the now-obsolete Marxist-Leninist sense of the term), Clinton is with equal appropriateness best considered a liberal. Her politics are avowedly those of compromise, and in several different senses of that word. As her husband pointed out in last week’s Memphis rally (held at Whitehaven High School), she is one who can work across the aisle (or, as the former president put it, can “stand her ground” while seeking “common ground”). President Clinton cited as an example her cosponsorship, with arch-conservative GOP House majority leader Tom DeLay, of legislation to facilitate post-infancy adoptions.

And Secretary Clinton is, for better or for worse, willing to render unto Caesar —accepting the insurance-company proprietorship and not quite universal health-care coverage of the Affordable Care Act as the continuing basis of health-care reform, and advocating the means-testing of college tuition aid rather than blanket guarantees of free education, while endorsing both choices as limited but feasible in their application. She is consistently faulted by Sanders for her acceptance of both large speaking fees from organizations like the Goldman Sachs financial house and campaign assistance from a “Super-PAC.”

For all that, there is significant policy overlap between the two Democrats, both of whom seek significant criminal justice reform, a raise in the minimum wage, and workplace equality for women, while approving same-sex marriage.

Jeb Bush putters along at Salem

There is a sameness of outlook among the Republicans, too, along with some distinguishing gradations. All by himself, Trump largely scuttled the GOP’s expressed resolve, after the party’s debacle in the 2012 presidential race, to court the nation’s growing Latino vote. When on June 16th, at his own Trump Tower in New York, he rode down on an escalator for a ceremonial announcement of candidacy, Trump also descended into a round of vigorous bashing of Mexicans as rapists and boundary breakers.

When his invective not only did not damn his candidacy but instead resulted in good poll numbers, the other Republican candidates basically followed suit, and stiff-necked resistance to any form of immigration reform is now a given among them, including the two sons of Cuban emigres, Cruz and Rubio, the latter of whom had once sponsored, but has since renounced, a path to legalization for selected illegal immigrants.

Other aspects of the GOP candidates’ litany include a resolve to terminate “Obamacare,” their preferred name for the Affordable Care Act; a pro-life stance on abortion; continued tax cuts for the corporate sector; opposition to same-sex marriage; holding the line on the minimum wage; and condemnation of the deal reached with Iran, forestalling that country’s pursuit of nuclear weapons while phasing out economic sanctions against it.

Of the Republicans still running, only Kasich, who finished a respectable second to Trump in New Hampshire, attempts to take moderate versions of these positions or to suggest that bipartisan solutions are still possible, and he tends to avoid the ritual Hillary and Obama-bashing of the others, which is virulent and nonstop. That fact, plus his relatively cash-poor status, probably doom him to lose the battle with Bush and Rubio for the establishment-backed position in a final three-way for the nomination with Trump and Cruz.

Florida Senator Marco Rubio is a Republican Ichabod Crane

Rubio, who had been considered a rising star after his strong third-place finish in Iowa, sagged in the polls after being all but eviscerated in the last New Hampshire debate by the now-absent New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who played Brom Bones bully-boy to Rubio’s Ichabod Crane, not only exposing Rubio’s tendency to repeat his own talking points, parrot-like, but actually unnerving the Floridian into doing so. It remains to be seen whether Rubio, who made a strong comeback in last weekend’s South Carolina debate, can regain his former status.

The real unknown quantity is Jeb Bush, yet another scion of a dynastic GOP clan, who hasn’t won, placed, or showed yet in any poll or vote for the record but putters along in striking range on the strength of his blue-ribbon connections, the family name, and enough of a campaign bankroll to hang in, right up to what could turn out to be an old-fashioned brokered convention.

If Trump and Sanders had not existed, they might have had to be invented. The mere presence of these two outliers in the 2016 presidential race, not to mention their wholly unanticipated viability, has utterly confounded the expectations of party regulars and the pundit class.

Sanders’ vision of a revolution directed at what he sees as control of the social and political process by an oligarchy has not only generated the beginning of a movement among Democrats and independents, it has had unexpected resonance in Republican ranks as well — and where you would least expect to find it.

The first week of February, which was also the last week of the New Hampshire primary, was an especially brutal one, weather-wise. Temperatures flirted with single digits all week (they would eventually get there), snow fell in four- or five-foot heaps almost everywhere, visibility largely vanished along with the day’s light, and ice coated the state’s highways and walkways in thick and perilous veneers.

One reason for the New Hampshire primary’s historical relevance has been the state’s relatively small size, with most of the major towns and cities located in its southern rim, a circumstance that makes candidates and their campaign events unusually accessible to anyone who cares to seek them out.

What is remarkable is that, even when the weather was at its most treacherous, people still turned out in droves, not only New Hampshire natives, but imports from neighboring and even distant states, all anxious to catch the final act of this quadrennial New England drama.

I found this out on Friday, February 5th, when I decided to brave the elements and check out a Ted Cruz town hall in a school gymnasium some six miles from my Red Roof Inn in Salem, New Hampshire, hard by the border with Massachusetts. Creeping along on the moonless night with a death grip on the steering wheel of my rental car, I finally got to the site after a half hour’s driving along roadways that the town’s fleet of snowplows were even then trying to work in shape.

I was astonished to find that, even on this night and even for Cruz, who was not considered a real contender in the primary despite his victory in the previous week’s Iowa caucuses and so heavily influenced by religious fundamentalists, there was a turnaway crowd, with no parking available except on especially slippery side streets, blocks away.

Once inside, I found a place in an overflow room and heard Cruz go through his usual hard-nosed litany of conservative positions on social, fiscal, international, and philosophical issues. But Cruz — yes, Cruz — has a populist side as well. He spoke to his crowd of wanting to rebuild “the old Reagan coalition,” one composed of “conservatives, evangelicals, libertarians, Reagan Democrats, and young people.” Because, as he said, “you’ve got to build a broad and diverse coalition to win.”

Ted Cruz with supporters at Salem

All of that was standard boilerplate, but then came a statement from Cruz that was downright shocking — and a key to his wiliness as well as a partial explanation for his better-than-expected electoral success so far. He mentioned Bernie Sanders, he of the youthful following and the resounding call with which Sanders begins each speech: “I think you want a political revolution.”

Said Cruz to his true believers: “I agree with a lot of what Bernie says about the problem, that Washington is fundamentally corrupt, that politicians are on the take, that the system is rigged for the giant corporations and Wall Street. I agree with all of that. Where I disagree with Bernie is in the solution. If government is corrupt, the answer isn’t a heck of a lot more government.”

OK, so those last two sentences amount to a rhetorical bait and switch — a take-out, away from the idea of radical public action toward old-fashioned notions of laissez-faire. The point is that Cruz, too, can sense the revolution in the air. It means something that even this dark knight of the right can recognize it.

It means something, too, that Trump, the same Trump who in last Saturday’s GOP debate unloosed the kind of intense attack on the G.W. Bush administration’s “lies” about WMDs in Iraq that most partisan Democrats have shied away from (think John Kerry … or Hillary) … that that Donald Trump begins and ends his speeches to the opening guitar strains of the Beatles’ “Revolution.”

Who knows? Maybe, lousy weather or no in this often toxic political season, some version of that hopey-changey stuff so decried by Sarah Palin might just win out after all.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

America’s Messy Democracy

So what are we watching? Just what is the point of these extended quadrennial primary rituals, lasting for a year or more, that lead up to the selection of a national leader? Questions like these are often raised in a presidential

election year, usually by people who maintain that all the fuss and bother are unnecessary — that a presidential campaigns is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury and signifying nothing.

We don’t deny that an idiot or two may be in the primary mix this year, along with a surplus of blowhard rhetoric. But that’s the point of these endurance contests. Presidential primaries are the boot camps of American democracy. Whether by conscious design or not, they go on long enough to winnow out the pretenders, to root out the unfit, and to expose and expunge fringe candidates and fuzzy philosophies.

The process usually works out that way, anyhow — although the advent of omnipresent social media have arguably taken everything to an extreme, replete with hasty judgments and complicated tangents. But in the age of Citizens United, the handheld media also offer the best — perhaps the only — corrective to outright control of things by a moneyed oligarchy. 

The difference between the American political system and most of the regimes in other countries that also call themselves democracies is rooted in the very wear and tear that critics of the process deplore. We do not — as, say, Great Britain does — allow for a change of leadership based on haphazardly scheduled and quick-running special elections or on votes by party caucuses. The Constitutionally ordained calendar of a national election every four years, and only every four years, necessitates the prolonged period of advance testing our would-be leaders are forced to go through. It also provides a means whereby outsiders have time to convert themselves into insiders.

And it works for both sides of the political dividing line. Small-town Democrat Jimmy Carter was able to break into what had been a preserve of big-state establishments and urban bosses, and his successor, Republican Ronald Reagan, came from the other direction, as a self-made man from the entertainment world into a hierarchy long controlled by corporations. This year’s candidate field has yielded even stranger prospects — of a TV celebrity on the GOP side and a bona fide (democratic) socialist on the Democratic side.

Ironically, Donald Trump’s own colossal fortune allows him, for better or worse, to circumvent the wishes of his party’s corporate elite, and Bernie Sanders has employed the simple force of ideas and the nickels and dimes of a mass following to make the special interests of his party pay heed. And, if they don’t succeed, whichever two candidates eventually become their party’s nominees will have been influenced by these two outliers.

It’s a messy process this year, to be sure, but then it always is. And, arguably,  it works as well as anything else that has so far been dreamed up.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Donald Trump’s No Pussy: Jackson Baker in New Hampshire

CREDIT: JB

MANCHESTER, NEW HAMPSHIRE — Give this to Donald J. Trump: Whatever his ultimate fate as a candidate for president of the United States, he can be credited with expanding the boundaries of what is publicly sayable by someone seeking that high office.

The Manhattan-bred billionaire’s previous contribution to the political vocabulary was his use some weeks ago of the participle “schlonged” to describe the defeat administered by Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton in their contest for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

JB

That piece of Yiddish vernacular — long familiar to anyone who, like Trump, grew up in the environs of New York and now equally well known to the nation at large — denotes an activity of the male genital organ, of course. It was inevitable that — fair and balanced as The Donald strives to be, despite his quarrel with Fox News, the appropriators of that term — he would eventually do equal duty by the female anatomy.

And now he has — appropriately enough, at the, um, climax of his last major address of the New Hampshire presidential-primary season, before a huge audience of media and supporters in the cavernous Verizon Wireless Arena of the state’s capital.

For anyone who has not yet seen a video clip of that henceforth-to-be-memorial moment, here’s a brief transcript of what Trump had to say as his stream-of-consciousness speech moved him to recall being chided by Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush about his “tone,” which reminded him of a moment of reticence on rival Ted Cruz’s part during this past week’s Republican presidential debate.

TRUMP: “They asked Ted Cruz a serious question: ‘What do you think about waterboarding, and, I said, Okay, honestly, I thought he would say, ‘Absolutely.’ And he didn’t. He said, ‘Well …’ You know he was concerned about the answer because some people …”
Distracted by a woman supporter in one of the front rows, Trump interrupted himself. Pointing to the woman, he said, “She just said a terrible thing. You know what she said? Shout it out, because I don’t want to say …”
WOMAN: “He’s a pussy!”
TRUMP (chuckling): “OK. You’re not allowed to say … and I never expect to hear that from you again. She said … (mock scolding )… I never expect to hear that from you again…” (crowd now chuckling along with him) :She said, ‘He’s a pussy!’”

What ensued from the crowd, not all of whom had heard the interloper distinctly but all of whom now heard Trump loud and clear, was first shock, then awe, then delight, then pandemonium and chants of “TRUMP! TRUMP! TRUMP!”” It was Donald Trump’s latest Gettysburg moment in his campaign to Make America Great Again.

Granted, Trump was only repeating what his supporter had said, and he went through a tongue-in-cheek moment of propitiating potential critics with a mock “reprimand,” but when he playfully asked, “Can she stay?” and the crowd bellowed its approval, he smiled broadly in satisfaction.

So, okay, the battle lines are now clear on an issue, perhaps the defining one, of Trump’s campaign — that of political correctness. Oh, go ahead and heap some other adjectives on: social correctness. verbal correctness. philosophical correctness. What you will. The man is come not to uphold the law but to abolish it.

In a campaign based on the most broad-brush attitude imaginable toward political issues, it is Trump’s fundamental iconoclasm that stands out. Be it ethnic groups, war heroes, disabled persons, gender equities, or linguistic norms, Trump is simply dismissive of all protocols.

He had arrived late for Monday night’s address, marveling at the sight of thousands crammed into the Verizon arena on the night of what he, more or less accurately, had called a blizzard, one which, he said, had caused at least seven accidents outside. He boasted of his up-scale, successful friends and of what he, and they, along with his supportive hordes of ordinary folks, could do to change the country.

He had his wife Melania, a former pin-up model from Slovenia, say to the crowd, in her heavily accented voice, “We love you in New Hampshire. We together will make America great again.”

And then, at the close of his remarks, mindful again of the weather on this primary eve, “I want to finish up, because you’ve got a bad evening out there. You have to do me a favor. I don’t really care if you get hurt or not, but I want you to last ’til tomorrow. So don’t get hurt!”

The crowd cheered.

Up until Saturday night’s debate, I had thought there was a fair chance of Trump’s being overtaken on the Republican side in New Hampshire by Florida Senator Marco Rubio, who entered this last week of the primary on a roll after finishing third in the Iowa caucuses (won by right-wing poster boy Cruz) and coming close there to catching Trump for the silver.

But that was before Rubio and New Jersey Governor Chris Christie did their impromptu version, at the weekend debate, of a well-known Washington Irving short story, the one in which schoolmaster Ichabod Crane has been dazzling everybody as a fine young dandy until village bully Brom Bones, played in this case by Chris Christie, runs him right off the reservation.

Maybe that’s overstated as a comparison to the verbal pummeling Christie, obviously desperate to keep his own diminishing hopes as a suitor alive, gave to Rubio on the score of the latter’s talking points, rote-sounding to the point of self-parody, but it was pretty brutal. A thought: Anybody who went to high school in New Jersey with Christie and fancied the same girl that he did was ipso facto risking a serious ass-kicking.

But there was a serious point to the mayhem, which Christie duly made. And that was that the GOP field’s three governors — Christie, John Kasich of Ohio, and Bush of Florida — were all seasoned in actual administration rather than in the kind of parliamentary fencing that both Rubio and Cruz were skillful at.

Up to now the gubernatorial types have been puffing hard trying to stay within hailing distance, not only of the two clever young senators, but also of such untutored originals as Trump and Dr. Ben Carson.

Kasich inevitably talks a good civics-class game in public, and, after attending a Bush town hall on Sunday morning, I found myself more impressed with his comprehensiveness than I had expected to be. (He even acknowledged the reality of man-made climate change, albeit somewhat left-handedly, in response to an attendee’s question.)

As for the Democrats, they should really take heart that they have two candidates with significant followings, Clinton and Bernie Sanders, and that Thursday night’s debate between the two of them, beginning with such blazing dissonance, should end on a note of genuine respect.

When I saw Bernie at a rally at Great Bay Community College at Portsmouth on Sunday, it was precisely what I expected — an overflow crowd not only composed of today’s youth (lots of them) but one significantly leavened by graying ex-hippies from another time.

Pundits keep comparing Sanders to the charismatic Obama of 2008 or even, in his populist appeal, to Trump. But he is neither an inspiring New Thing like the former nor an exciting celebrity scofflaw like the latter. He is a bona fide revolutionary with a program that is authentically socialist — free college, state-supported medical care for everybody, guaranteed living wage for all workers, sticking it to the too-big-to-fail corporations.

A program of reform that attacks economic inequality directly and isn’t, like so much liberalism of the present, siphoned off into purely social issues, a la what Marcuse called repressive desublimation. (Although Bernie endorses the social issues, too.)

Still, Hillary, the former first lady, senator, and secretary of state, has IOUs and a skill-set that shines through in extended give-and-take sessions like one I witnessed at New England College in Henniker and are built for the long haul. We’ll see.