Democratic Party Establishment Interests Do Not Align With The Grassroots Of The Party-- Not Even A Little

Siena is a generally useless poll--except in New York state. For some reason, they tend to be fairly predictive there. Their new poll, released yesterday, shows Bernie winning the primary with Bloomberg in the #2 spot. Among registered Democrats:

• Bernie- 25%
• Bloomberg- 21%
• Status Quo Joe- 13%
• Elizabeth- 11%
• Mayo Pete- 9%
• Klobuchar- 9%

All 6 Democrats beat Trump in head-to-head match-ups, although Bloomberg does best-- beating Trump by 25 points. Although Bernie and Biden have more support from Democrats, Bloomberg manages to garner more support from Republicans than any of the Democratic candidates and also leads with Independents, presumably Republican-leaning Independents.

Biden, Bernie and Elizabeth have very high favorables among Democrats, while NY Dems rate Mayo Pete and Bloomberg significantly lower. And when it comes to unfavorables, Bloomberg is the most disliked by Democrats. Bloomberg has the highest favorables among GOP voters. Bernie has the highest favorables among Independents.

New York's 274 pledged delegates will be up for grabs on April 28 in a northeast Super-Tuesday that also includes Pennsylvania, Maryland, Connecticut, Rhode Island and Delaware-- for a grand total of 663 delegates, the most of any day besides March 3. It's possible that Bernie will have-- despite corporate media anti-working class hysteria-- enough delegates in his pocket to be unstoppable. Reporting after the Nevada blowout, BuzzFeed's Ruby Cramer noted that "David Plouffe, who was Barack Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, said on MSNBC Saturday night that if the primary stays crowded after Super Tuesday, Sanders could have a hold on the nomination."

“If it is more than a two-candidate race, certainly, if it’s a four or five-candidate race, Bernie Sanders can walk to the nomination getting 35, 36, 37 percent of the vote,” he told NBC’s Brian Williams.

He later made that more explicit. “But basically, if we’re-- Brian, if it’s March 3rd and we’re talking about Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Warren, Biden, Bloomberg, and Sanders, and everybody’s in, Bernie’s going to win almost all the delegates he needs to build an impenetrable delegate lead. That’s just math. It’s not my opinion, it’s just simple math."

The final vote in Nevada was released late yesterday-- along with the delegate assignations. Bernie wins, establishment loses

Even as anti-progressive an operative as Hillary's losing campaign manager and the DCCC's all-time worst disaster-maker, Robby Mook-- a walking onomatopoeia-- said that "If he has a three-figure lead, there is no catching up. It’s too late after Super Tuesday. Even if the field drops down to two people, that person still has to be beating him by 10-20 points in the remaining contests. This is the fog everybody is in right now. If you aren’t Sanders you have to deal with this problem before Super Tuesday."

On Sunday, William Rivers Pitt wrote that "Plouffe’s sober assessment of the state of the race, combined with Sanders’s resounding Nevada victory, had a strange and terrible effect on the minds of a number of MSNBC regulars. No longer content to ignore or dismiss Sanders’s status as frontrunner, that network’s top names spent the bulk of Saturday evening in a state of near panic, weaving a tapestry of impending doom out of literal Nazi analogies and Russia scaremongering."

“Right now, it’s about 1:15 Moscow time,” said James Carville, the longtime Democratic establishment strategist and occasional Gollum impersonator. “This thing is going very well for Vladimir Putin. I promise you. He’s probably staying up watching this right now. How you doing, Vlad?”

MSNBC Host Joy Reid, for her part, smashed the panic button straight through the table in a breathless aria for the ages regarding the seeming menace of Sanders supporters in the face of puddle-bound Democratic establishment candidates.

“They’re turning the tables over and they don’t care what the potential result is,” said Reid of Sanders voters:

They’re the hungriest. He only had to consolidate them, and the moderates, the sort of mushy moderates, think that they have the luxury of luxuriating on whether they’ll have someone who can speak six languages, you know, maybe today I want this woman who’s from the Midwest and, you know, maybe I’ll go with the vice president…. No one is as hungry, angry, enraged and determined as Sanders voters. Democrats need to sober up and figure out what the hell they are going to do about it.

On Friday, Dr. Jason Johnson, another regular MSNBC contributor, went on SiriusXM’s The Karen Hunter Show earlier this week and referred to Black women who have appeared in the media to support Sanders’s campaign as “the island of misfit black girls.” The group of women to which he was referring includes Barbara Smith-- the respected Black feminist critic who co-founded the Combahee River Collective and coined the term “identity politics”-- and Nina Turner, the Ohio politician who is now national co-chair of the Sanders campaign.

Sanders’s national press secretary, Briahna Joy Gray, offered this response:

On Saturday, Johnson apologized for the remark.

Meanwhile, Nicolle Wallace, MSNBC host and former press secretary to George W. Bush, went scratching for whatever wildly discredited anti-Sanders rocks she could throw, arguing that Sanders “hasn’t been vetted by either the press or the other candidates.”

Apparently, Wallace is unaware-- or is pretending to be unaware-- of the decades during which Sanders has served in politics, and his presidential primary run against Hillary Clinton and the Democratic establishment in 2016. If that isn’t “vetted,” then nothing is.

But it was MSNBC’s own human weathervane, Chris Matthews, who took home the prize for Most Offensive Anti-Bernie Slander on Saturday night. “I was reading last night about the fall of France in the summer of 1940,” he lamented, “and the general, Reynaud, calls up Churchill and says, ‘It’s over.’ And Churchill says ‘How can it be? You’ve got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?’ He said, ‘It’s over.’ So I had that suppressed feeling.”

Suppressed feeling? Not so much, Chris. By Sunday morning, #FireChrisMatthews” was the top trending topic on Twitter.

The Sanders campaign’s communications director, Mike Casca, responded with somber astonishment that a national news network would liken the campaign of a Jewish presidential candidate to the Third Reich:

I expect Sanders’s opponents to say ridiculous things as they watch him pull away. It’s primary season; if you’re losing and still acting reasonable, you aren’t trying hard enough. But to watch MSNBC, the so-called “liberal” network, sink into this kind of venomous Fox News-worthy nonsense is a bright, blinking warning light for the entire institution of U.S. journalism.

The establishment wing of the Democratic Party and its cohort of faux-progressive media mouthpieces have been confronted by their own senescence after so many decades of poorly managed control, and they are not liking the taste of it. Even if they manage to thwart Sanders’s nomination with brazenly undemocratic power moves at the convention, the party will never be the same after 2016 and this year’s elections. The writing is on the wall, and it is making them scream on live television.

The dinosaurs have seen the meteor, and it’s coming by way of Brooklyn and Vermont.

Shaniyat Chowdhury is the progressive Democrat running for Congress in southeast Queens, for a seat held by one of DC's most corrupt swamp residents. Chowdhury has endorsed Bernie while his opponent has been bought by Bloomberg. "Give the people what they want! I think members members of Congress forget they are in a job as public servants and not to serve themselves. It’s clear the people want Bernie to win because he is speaking to their pain. Denying them the right to healthcare is a big F-you to the American public and those members need to be primaried. My opponent for example, endorsed the racist oligarch Bloomberg who was a democrat for fifteen minutes. Against the interest of the people in NY-05 he is taking Bloomberg’s money to be his campaign for-chair so Democrat’s like Bernie cannot win. We are going door-to-door and not one person is happy about Meeks and Bloomberg. No matter how much power one person may have, the people will always revolt to win back power."


 

The Resistance to Sanders Is Led by Cable News Anchors

Click through to the source for the video

by Thomas Neuburger

There are growing signs that the resistance to [Sanders'] campaign will be led by cable news anchors.
—Alex Shepherd, The New Republic

The "Resistance" has been almost clichéd to death these days, bludgeoned into meaninglessness. Nancy Pelosi has been leading a "resistance" to Donald Trump that includes approving all of his spending and expanding all of his war and domestic spying powers.

"Every single day,"she wrote via Twitter, "I find myself asking: what do the Russians have on @realDonaldTrump personally, financially, & politically?" But that doesn't stop her and the rest of Democratic Party leadership from giving him almost all the money and power he wants, stopping only at approving the worst of his policy choices, such as war with Iran.

"Wow!" [Trump] said on Twitter. "All of our priorities have made it into the final NDAA: Pay Raise for our Troops, Rebuilding our Military, Paid Parental Leave, Border Security, and Space Force! Congress – don't delay this anymore! I will sign this historic defense legislation immediately!"

The establishment of the U.S. Space Force as the sixth Armed Service of the United States, under the Air Force, fulfills one of Trump's most high-profile requests.

Despite broad bipartisan support, a handful of left-leaning Democrats and libertarian-leaning Republicans opposed the measure because it did not include policy planks that would have restrained Trump's war powers, including a ban on support for Saudi Arabia's air campaign in Yemen.

Some "Resistance" to the man Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer called "the most dangerous and worst man in the presidency we have ever had in the history of this nation."

The Real "Resistance"

The real resistance by Democratic leaders, of course, is to its own base of anti-Establishment voters, candidates and office-holders, a resistance that's been too well documented to be repeated here. One of those candidates, Bernie Sanders, is right now making a credible threat to take over the Party in the name of that anti-Establishment base — an outcome that all donor-defending Democrats look upon with horror.

But what can they do, aside from the odd and opportune tilting of the balance? If they declare outright war — instead of the obvious but pretend-covert war they're now waging — they risk making a mockery of their own battle cries, Blue No Matter Who and Unity Unity Unity.

Enter the next line of defense, the Party-supporting mainstream press, including and especially cable news channels CNN and MSNBC. The real resistance for now against the Sanders-led revolt against the swamp in which they all swim has been handed off to Chuck Todd, Jake Tapper and all the colleagues and "analysts" who occupy million-dollar seats on TV's cable news stations.

Alex Shepherd is by far the only person to have spotted this, but he's one of the few mainstream writers to point it out. In a piece for The New Republic, Shepherd says:

Bernie Sanders Has an MSNBC Problem

Cable news networks, particularly the "liberal" one, are a growing barrier to his surging campaign.

...Sanders has framed himself as an outsider, taking on the political establishment as a democratic socialist. But as he has surged in the polls—he now leads Biden with all voters—he is increasingly running up against another establishment: the media, and particularly cable news.

Trump’s takeover of the Republican Party was aided by a coup at Fox News. After some early turbulence, Fox quickly got in line and has become something like state TV, an echo chamber for the president’s point of view. Sanders has fewer natural allies in cable TV. In fact, the supposedly liberal network, MSNBC, has become a serious obstacle, pumping out Republican anti-Sanders talking points with increasing frequency.

After last Friday’s Democratic debate, Chris Matthews waxed apoplectic about what electing a socialist could mean for America. “I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro,” he said. “I believe if Castro and the Reds had won the Cold War there would have been executions in Central Park, and I might have been one of the ones getting executed. And certain other people would be there cheering, OK?” Matthews’s colleagues pointed out that Sanders was more of a Danish type of socialist than a Castro type of socialist, but to little avail.

Two days later, James Carville, Bill Clinton’s former campaign guru, went on Morning Joe to rant about how a Sanders nomination would bring about the apocalypse. Literally. “The only thing between the United States and the abyss is the Democratic Party,” he said. “That’s it. If we go the way of the British Labour Party, if we nominate Jeremy Corbyn, it’s going to be the end of days.” The same day, Chuck Todd, who also hosts NBC’s Meet the Press, read from an article from the right-wing website The Bulwark comparing supporters of Sanders, who is Jewish, to “brownshirts.”

And in the lead-up to Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, Lawrence O’Donnell argued that the real story was that Bernie was losing momentum because his poll numbers were down from the last Democratic primary—even though he is now facing more than a half-dozen opponents, compared to 2016, when he faced one. “The story of the Sanders campaign so far this year is how much ground he’s lost from four years ago,” O’Donnell said. He also ignored the fact that Sanders is leading nationally, which wasn’t the case in 2016.

This is not a new phenomenon....

The Sanders surge is real. Most polling sites give him a greater chance to win the Democratic primary than any of his competitors, prognostications that have been validated by Sanders' clear win in New Hampshire, his arguable win in Iowa despite the obvious and questionable machinations of the Iowa Democratic Party (see "Orwell Goes to Iowa" for more), and the likelihood, as I write today, of his winning most of the Super Tuesday contests, including the one in delegate-rich California.

But as the Sanders campaign ups its game, the Cable News Resistance is upping theirs. Most recently, Chuck Todd has likened Sanders supporters to actual Nazis ("brownshirts"), and Chris Matthews, as Shepherd notes above, publicly fears being hung by the neck by Sanders-supporting "socialists" from a tree in Central Park, America's Place de la Concorde apparently.

The battle is clearly on. Who will win this "primary within the primary," this war of insiders against insurgents? Establishment-defending media, or the mass of voters (the actual real Resistance) who are putting their trust in Sanders to drain the DC swamp of creatures like Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and yes, Chuck Todd and Chris Matthews?

Smart money is on Sanders to win the nomination (even David Plouffe agrees with that). If he does, how far will Establishment and donor defenders in the mainstream press, people like Chuck Todd, go to stop him in the general election?

Smart money is sitting that one out.