Much, Much Greater Of Two Evils... Much

I spent much of my fifteenth year on earth stealing. I had a plan. Every day after school, I would go to the Woolworth's five and dime and steal something-- a packet of turnip seeds, a dish, a dish towel, a gardening implement, bug repellent... I carefully packed the loot in big boxes a shipped the boxes to myself care of Poste Restante in Nukuʻalofa, the capital of Tonga. When I was 16 I waited for the school year to be finished-- that's the other side of me-- and I said goodbye to my parents and sisters and friends and headed out... for Tonga... forever. I had never been on a plane so I never even considered that option, not that there was any air service at that time to Tonga anyway. I had $54. I hitched-hiked to Los Angeles and stowed away on a ship. The plan was to stow away to Hawaii and then stow away on another ship from there to New Zealand and then somehow get on the twice a year mail ship from New Zealand to Tonga, pick up my seeds and tools and household goods and live happily ever after. I got caught on the ship in San Pedro harbour and had the shit kicked out of me. I decided to hitch-hike home. A child molester picked me up and I pulled a boy scout knife on him and he threw me (literally) out of his track. I met beatniks in Colorado in campers and they turned me on to pot for a week-- not a common drug for middle class white boys at the time-- and then I took a bus home. Point: I was always a rebel.

When it came to politics, my grandfather, a committed socialist, taught me to never trust the Democratic Party. "They're not much better than the Republicans," he told me when I was 14 as he was going to vote to reelect Jacob Javits, an outspoken liberal Republican who had been accused of being a Commie by the Democrats.

When I went to college I quit as president of the Young Democrats to join the SDS (Students for a Democratic Society), spent my time getting high, protesting the war against Vietnam, booking music for the school's concert program, dj-ing overnights on the college station and developing a thriving pot business. I dropped out for a semester to sell drugs to Harvard students, figured it would be a good way to change the riling elite. I went back to school, finished-- although my profs were almost all clients of my flourishing drug business-- and went to live abroad. I traveled around Europe, Africa and Asia for almost 7 years, mostly living day-to-day. Rebel enough?

So why am I so so opposed to Trump, the political outsider candidate if there ever was one? Hillary, no matter what you think of her, represents the status quo. She's being endorsed by so many conservative newspapers and by so many prominent conservatives because she's a safe, mainstream conservative who they feel will better protect the status quo, everything I've always detested. Wall Street fears Trump, shouldn't that be a signal to me to back him? (When I was elected freshman class president in college I made sure no fraternities would be allowed on campus and I voted against something call moleskins that the basketball team requested from the student budget. I delighted in booking bands like the Fugs and Country Joe and the Fish to infuriate conservatives.) Blue America was the first national PAC to endorse Bernie and raise money for him. How do I know we were first? Even before he announced we were raising money for him as a Draft Bernie campaign.

So, I live in California now and I'm not voting for Hillary. If I lived in Ohio or Florida or North Carolina I would hold my nose and vote for her. I urge my friends in swing states to do so. I explained why a few days ago here. I find myself agreeing, warily, with the very conservative San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board which bragged in it's Hillary endorsement Friday that it "has not endorsed a Democrat for president in its 148-year history. But we endorse Clinton. She’s the safe choice for the U.S. and for the world, for Democrats and Republicans alike." Bleccchhh. True... but blecccchhh. But what I agreed with them about was that Trump is a manipulative entertainer, a very dangerous one. I'm from New York. I learned at a very young age when a con-man is. Trump is a classic "con man"-- slang from the late 1800s describing someone "who gains the trust, or 'confidence,' of his victims (often called marks) in order to manipulate, steal from, or otherwise predate upon them." Can you think of a better definition of Trump? The Union-Tribune tries out "vengeful, dishonest and impulsive." That works. Dorothy Rabinowitz, part of the Wall Street Journal's editorial board also endorsed Hillary. She never would have except for the Trumpist danger to the status quo. You can't imagine a more establishment New Yorker, albeit a refined literary one.

[I]t was the view of Donald Trump as a fearless foe of liberal piety, that image of him as an outsider, untainted by experience in government-- itself one of the more remarkable boasts of any presidential campaign in memory-- that persuaded so many Americans he is the leader the country needs. As opposed, that is, to Mrs. Clinton-- the educated former secretary of state, with lengthy experience in government... No one witnessing Mr. Trump’s primary race-- his accumulation of Alt-Right cheerleaders, white supremacists and swastika devotees-- could fail to notice the menacing tone and the bitterness that came with it.

Not for nothing did the Democrats bring off a triumph of a convention, alive with cheer, not to mention its two visitors whose story would lift countless American hearts. They were, of course, the Muslim couple Khizr and Ghazala Khan, whose son, Capt. Humayun Khan-- brought here as a child-- died in Iraq in 2004, saving his men from an explosive-rigged car.

His countrymen now go streaming to his grave at Arlington National Cemetery to leave notes and flowers. He reminded us of who we are—the nation that takes its newcomers and transforms them into Americans. After 9/11, Capt. Khan, American, could scarcely wait to serve his country. The national response to the Khans injected a sense of unity and affirmation, however brief, into an atmosphere of embittering divisiveness.

The end of the election is now in sight. Some among the anti-Hillary brigades have decided, in deference to their exquisite sensibilities, to stay at home on Election Day, rather than vote for Mrs. Clinton. But most Americans will soon make their choice. It will be either Mr. Trump or Mrs. Clinton-- experienced, forward-looking, indomitably determined and eminently sane. Her election alone is what stands between the American nation and the reign of the most unstable, proudly uninformed, psychologically unfit president ever to enter the White House.

I voted for Humphrey against Nixon in 1968. Not all liberals did. At Vox last week Michael Ansara, who, like me, was an SDS organizer at the time, explained that he didn't, why he was wrong then and won't make the same mistake in November by skipping out on Hillary. "The rules of the election game are rigged to favor the corporate elites," he wrote of the 1968 election. "We are so habituated to being the prophetic minority that we cannot understand that a majority of the country is swinging against the war. We are so disgusted by all we have experienced that we want to "up the ante." We think our job is to create so much disruption that the elites will be forced to end the war. Our slogan is Vote with your feet, vote in the street."

Those of us in the student antiwar movement see Humphrey as profoundly corrupt, profoundly tainted by his support for the war. We hate Nixon, but in truth we have not experienced what a right-wing government can do. We have come of age and to activism in the years since 1960-- so we only know Kennedy and Johnson as presidents, we have only experienced a liberal domination of national politics, and, more often than not, the policies we are protesting are the policies of liberal Democrats.

In the fall of 1968, we experience a great failure of political imagination.

We think it doesn’t matter if Nixon or Humphrey wins. We think the war will keep going the same no matter who wins. We cannot imagine that it will expand, that there will be a simultaneous policy of "Vietnamization," so that the American body count decreases, and escalation that will claim another million more Asian lives. We cannot imagine the disaster that will befall Cambodia because of Nixon and Kissinger and the Christmas bombings of Hanoi and Haiphong. We do not see what is coming-- at home as well as internationally.

We do not understand that soon Nixon will invite to the White House and celebrate the leaders of building trades unions who led violent attacks on antiwar protesters in New York. We think the well of black sadness cannot get any deeper. We are wrong. We cannot imagine what will be unleashed against black leaders and the black community. We do not imagine that the FBI and Chicago police will shoot and kill Black Panther leader Fred Hampton as he sleeps in his bed, possibly drugged.

We have no idea the damage that will be done.

We cannot conceive of the manipulative use of a "war on drugs" to go after black communities and the antiwar movement. As cynical and as sophisticated as we think ourselves to be, we cannot conceive of policies that, years later, Nixon’s top aide, John Ehrlichman would bluntly describe to Dan Baum of Harpers thusly:

The Nixon campaign in 1968, and the Nixon White House after that, had two enemies: the antiwar left and black people… You understand what I'm saying?

We knew we couldn't make it illegal to be either against the war or black, but by getting the public to associate the hippies with marijuana and blacks with heroin. And then criminalizing both heavily, we could disrupt those communities… We could arrest their leaders, raid their homes, break up their meetings, and vilify them night after night on the evening news. Did we know we were lying about the drugs? Of course we did.

Despite our growing dread, we do not imagine that protesting students will be gunned down at Kent State and Jackson State. That Hoover’s FBI will get the green light to go after Nixon’s enemies.

We have a failure of political imagination. We have a failure of moral imagination.

We sit out the election. We organize street protests. We march. We mock. We do not organize young people to vote in one of the closest elections in American history. There are tens of thousands of young people looking to us for direction. We do not say, "Make history. Swing this election to Humphrey and show how powerful we as a group now are." No, we say, "A plague on both your houses," and walk away.

Nixon wins. Without knowing it, we have missed our moment.

Looking back, we young idealists and activists were not so much wrong in our assessments of Humphrey as we were totally wrong in our assessment of whether it matters if a corporate center liberal is elected over an insecure, unstable, right-wing candidate who does not respect the Constitution.

Our failure was not in our assessment of Humphrey but in our failure to understand Nixon and what was at stake. We could have turned the close election in favor of Humphrey. We could not have moved the election results by 5 points, but we certainly could have moved the needed one.

Our refusal to participate started a process of making our movement profoundly irrelevant. We allowed Richard Nixon to come to power.  We allowed a right-wing counter-reformation to hold power and warp American politics for most of the next four decades. Within our movement, we allowed militancy to replace strategy.

Any history with "ifs" is hugely problematic. I cannot predict with any confidence what a Humphrey administration would or would not have done. I am sure it would have had its share of evils. However, the difference between a president who is not doing enough for progress-- even one wedded to the national security state-- and one who is using the power of the office actively to reverse progress and mobilize racists, the xenophobic, and the elites against progress is enormous.

The toll of the Nixon administration is long and heartrending. Internationally, more than a million Cambodian lives lost and a million additional Vietnamese and Laotians killed. In South America, the cost is perhaps best symbolized by the pain of Chilean singer Victor Jara, as the soldiers in the US-backed coup against an elected socialist president first chop off the fingers of his guitar-playing hands and then shoot him dead.



Domestically there was a cost, too, as Nixon started the counter-reformation to the ’60s, flouted the Constitution, created enemy lists, launched the war on drugs that would eventually lead to mass incarceration, and cynically did everything he could to destroy the leadership of the black community and the antiwar movement.

We who want to revitalize our democracy, fight against inequality and for justice, and work for change need to be able to imagine a very different, exciting alternative future. We need that positive vision. However, we also need the imagination to understand how profoundly bad it can get when demagogues come to power.

You know where this is going. Anyone my age or Ansara's age or Bernie's age could tell you the next soundly sad line:

The only way Donald Trump does not become president of the United States is if Hillary Clinton does.

Some supporters of Bernie Sanders seem intent on making the same mistakes we did in that fateful year of 1968. Some of the pioneering, innovative protesters who have created Black Lives Matter seem to share our 1968 disdain for electoral politics, as if elections and who is in power could be ignored in the struggle for profound social change.

Others, the perpetual Hillary haters of the left, once again suffer from a profound failure of imagination. Unable to imagine how bad it could become, they preach about refusing to be forced again to "settle for the lesser of two evils."

Young people may play a pivotal role in this election. For the very first time, "millennials" now are as large a group of potential voters as my tired generation, the baby boomers. The pool of younger voters is also far to the left of the older voters. The young once again have a moral passion that could produce real change.

Some Sanders supporters still say they will stay home. What is currently altering the dynamics of the race and whittling down Clinton’s lead is the attraction of younger voters to the third-party candidates, Libertarian Gary Johnson and Green Jill Stein. Where Obama in 2012 received 60 percent of voters under 30, when Johnson and Stein are included in the polls, Clinton is receiving only 31 percent of those voters. A significant group of Sanders supporters cannot bring themselves to support Clinton, the candidate of the establishment, no matter what the threat from Trump and no matter how hard Bernie campaigns for her.

A recent YouGov poll shows only 60 percent of Sanders supporters choosing Clinton, with Jill Stein getting 11 percent and Johnson getting 6 percent and many still undecided. If Clinton could get 80 percent of the Bernie voters to support her, she would be back at her comfortable lead of early August. As pollsters turn to quizzing the smaller pool of "likely voters," many of the groups that most oppose Trump diminish, as so many of those people do not actually make it to the polls.

The one irreducible fact of this bizarre election is this: The only way Donald Trump does not become president of the United States is if Hillary Clinton does. In any closely contested state, staying home or voting for a third-party candidate is, in its impact, a vote for Trump. It does not take a great leap of moral or political imagination to envision the damage a Trump presidency will bring to our nation and to the world.

I left the U.S. soon after Nixon was elected and stayed away until he resigned rather than go through impeachment. I have no doubt-- none whatsoever-- that Trump is worse to an unimaginable magnitude.

Sanders Surge Continues in Iowa & NH; Taking the Fight to Clinton

The Sanders surge is about Sanders, not Clinton. Click to enlarge.

by Gaius Publius

We know that Sanders is gaining in many polls, and that some are attributing his rise to a growing "anyone but Clinton" mood among Democrats. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight.com disagrees.

Data first, via Silver:

In Iowa, Sanders’s favorability rating has grown from about 35 percent at the start of the year to 60 percent now. And in New Hampshire, it has improved from around 45 percent to 65 percent. Some of that is from improved name recognition, but Sanders’s unfavorable ratings haven’t increased even as he’s become better known, remaining at about 10 percent in each state.

From 35% to 60% in Iowa, from 45% to 65% in New Hampshire, both since February. These are excellent numbers. Now the cause, as Silver sees it. The article begins with the idea he wants to debunk:

“The recent rise of Bernie Sanders,” wrote Vox’s Jonathan Allen last week, “points as much to [Hillary] Clinton’s vulnerability as Sanders’s strength.” Allen went on to argue that Joe Biden should run for president. “The Sanders surge shows that Democratic activists want an alternative to Clinton,” he explained.

We’ve seen this idea before. For at least a year, journalists have been urging, sometimes almost begging, Biden to enter the race. The more elaborate versions of the idea liken the 2016 campaign to 1968, a year in which the incumbent president, Lyndon B. Johnson, withdrew after the liberal, anti-war candidate Eugene McCarthy finished a close second in the New Hampshire primary. The nomination was eventually won by Johnson’s vice president, Hubert Humphrey, after Robert F. Kennedy (who had entered the race after New Hampshire) was assassinated. In the 2016 narrative, Clinton is Johnson, Sanders is McCarthy and Biden is some composite of Kennedy and Humphrey.

But these comparisons suffer from a fatal flaw. Unlike LBJ, who (mostly because of the Vietnam War) had approval ratings only in the mid-50s or low 60s among Democrats during the 1968 campaign, Hillary Clinton is beloved by voters in her party. In national polls, her favorability ratings among Democrats usually exceed 80 percent.

Thus:

The Bernie Sanders surge, in other words, has a lot more to do with Bernie Sanders than with Hillary Clinton. More specifically, it has to do with his left-populist politics. We’re going to break some news here: It turns out that some Democrats are really liberal, and they like a really liberal candidate like Sanders. Right now, Sanders is winning about half the support of white liberal Democrats, but little support from other groups within the party. That works out to around 25 or 30 percent of the vote in Iowa and New Hampshire but more like 15 percent among Democrats nationally.

But Silver's news for Sanders is not all good.

The Dark Side of Silver's Silver Lining

Silver is concerned (on Sanders' behalf) that this result — potential wins in Iowa and New Hampshire, each with a rich lode of white liberal Democrats — may be as good as it gets for him. In other words, that Sanders may win in Iowa and New Hampshire and lose everywhere else.

Here's what that "white liberal Democrat" population looks like, state by state:

Click to enlarge.

From a different FiveThirtyEight piece (the one containing the graphic above), Silver writes this:

Sanders, who has sometimes described himself as a socialist, isn’t likely to do so well with moderate Democrats, of course. That’s a problem for him, since a thin majority of Democrats still identify as moderate or conservative rather than liberal. But Sanders has a few things working in his favor. The share of liberal Democrats is increasing — pretty rapidly, in fact — and those Democrats who turn out to vote in the primaries tend to be more liberal than Democrats overall.

What’s received less attention is that Sanders has so far made very little traction with non-white Democrats. The most recent CNN poll found his support at just 9 percent among non-white Democrats, while the latest Fox News poll had him at only 5 percent among African-American Democrats. (Fox News did not provide crosstabs for Hispanics or other minority groups.)

So Sanders (and Warren) seem to be creating new "liberals" — meaning the Warren kind, not the Obama kind —pretty rapidly. That's good news. But without minority support, he's going to have some trouble. And that's fixable. I've heard from a number of sources that the Sanders camp is aware of this. More as it develops.

In the meantime...

Sanders Takes It to Clinton

This is one way to use the advantage you have — draw clear lines. Two reports, each from The Hill, around the same event, an impromptu Sanders press conference. First (my emphasis):

Sanders uses Clinton visit to draw contrast

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) on Tuesday tried to highlight the differences between himself and fellow presidential candidate Hillary Clinton after she spoke with Senate Democrats during a weekly party lunch.

Sanders, who, like Clinton, is seeking the 2016 Democratic nomination, spoke with reporters at a stakeout normally reserved for leadership from both parties. He used the impromptu press conference to underscore differences the two have on a wide range of issues, including trade, the war on Iraq, climate change and national security.

Pointing to his vote against the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), Sanders said that he believes the trade deal has "been disastrous for American workers. ...Secretary of State Clinton I believe has a different view on that issue."

He also cited his vote against authorizing the war against Iraq. Clinton, who was a senator at the time, has faced criticism for her vote supporting the war, and she told reporters earlier this year that she "made a mistake."

On climate change, he touted his opposition to the Keystone pipeline adding that "I think Secretary Clinton has not been clear on her views on that issue."

The Hill used that last remark — on Keystone and climate change — for a second piece about that press conference:

Sanders challenges Clinton on Keystone

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders challenged his rival Hillary Clinton Tuesday to take a stand against the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Speaking with reporters in the Capitol, Sanders he took a leadership role in Democrats’ fight against the proposed Canada-to-Texas pipeline, while Clinton has been silent on the project.

“I have helped lead the opposition against the Keystone pipeline,” the Vermont senator said. “I think Secretary Clinton has not been clear on her views on that issue.”

In a later statement, Sanders added that he opposes Keystone “because of concerns about climate change.”...

Clinton’s silence on Keystone has been one of the top sticking points for environmentalists, who have mostly avoided endorsing her.

As secretary of state from 2009 to 2013, Clinton was one of the most senior Obama administration officials responsible for its review of TransCanada Corp.’s application to build the pipeline, a process that has stretched on for more than six years.

In 2010, she said the administration was “inclined” to approve the project. But she has been silent since then.

Sanders, meanwhile, has been actively courting environmentalists, and was ranked by the super PAC Climate Hawks Vote as the best senator on climate in the 2013-2014 session of Congress.

Climate Hawks Vote ranks members of Congress relative to climates issues (visit the page to find out how your senator ranks). More information here.

Bottom Line — There's Plenty of Time

If the Sanders surge lasts through February, when the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary are held, he's viable through the start of next year at least. That's a full six months to present the Sanders case to the rest of the Democratic base. So far, so good, though I would think it would be good to start making that case soon.

GP

Echoes of 1968?

As many of you know, Ken and I grew up together in Brooklyn. Schumer went to our high school, James Madison and Norm Coleman was co-secretary of our class at PS 197 with me. But Ken and I had a third musketeer as well, Dan, who I first got to know because he was the sergeant of the corner where I was a crossing guard. Today Dan is a successful producer and director. He's never written for DWT but was moved, perhaps after seeing reports like this one, to action last night:

As some waver in their support of Obama and consider throwing their vote to McCain as a sort of "protest" of Hillary's not winning or not being considered for the VP nom, consider this...history has a tendency to repeat itself. How many of you waverers out there remember 1968, when similarly outraged purists stayed home and didn't vote for Hubert Humphrey essentially because he was Johnson's Vice President?  Well, those waverers out to make a point helped elect Richard Nixon!  They might as well have voted for him!  And let's not forget all the dedicated Naderites who, on principle, denied Gore Florida. (That really paid off, didn't it?)
 
Remember, this is about a lot more than gender politics. How many folks will a President McCain appoint to the Supreme Court...for life.  How many more years will we be in Iraq?  There is a millimeter of distance between Hilary's views and Obama's. I would have gladly voted for either one becasuse of what they represent, not who they are. We are too tied to personality cults here as opposed to policy. If this were a parliamentary democracy along the lines of the British model (which it never will be) the temdency would be to vote for party, not personality (or gender). I'm as worried about those who will sit this one out as I am about those who, as a protest, will actually vote for McCain. My plea is simple.   Don't do it.  Please.

-Dan Chaykin

Can the culture clash between Obama and Clinton supporters be bridged by November? Remembering the disasters of 1968, Harold Meyerson hopes so

June 5, 1968: The assassination of Sen. Robert F. Kennedy didn't end the culture clash between his supporters and those of his antiwar presidential rival, Sen. Eugene McCarthy.

"[W]hen two distinct political groups, each convinced that it brings something new and historic to its party and its nation, campaign against each other, bringing them together is no easy task, even when no policy matters divide them."

--Harold Meyerson, in his Washington Post column today,
"Patching Up the Democrats"

Mrs. Clinton has already blundered into the subject of the ill-fated 1968 Democratic presidential race, which went through a famous series of convulsions of which she seemed blissfully unaware: the decision by little-known Minnesota Sen. Eugene McCarthy to challenge President Lyndon Johnson's reelection bid on the issue of the Vietnam War; the president's abrupt decision not to run for reelection, leaving the field -- he thought -- to Vice President Hubert Humphrey; New York Sen. Robert Kennedy's long-delayed decision to enter the race; and then, in June, Senator Kennedy's assassination the night he won the California primary.

Harold Meyerson remembers that night with personal vividness:

Forty years ago tonight, I was one of a number of very young staffers on Eugene McCarthy's presidential campaign crammed into a Los Angeles hotel room, where we watched on television as Robert Kennedy, a few miles down Wilshire Boulevard at the Ambassador Hotel, claimed victory in the California primary. A few minutes later, the networks reported that Kennedy had been shot. The rest of the evening was a mix of anxiety, nausea, tears, misgivings and despair.

What Meyerson also recalls vividly is how different, and all but incompatible, the ranks of McCarthy and Kennedy supporters were while both candidates were in the race, even though "on matters of policy, there were really no significant differences" between the candidates.

We'll never know how that split would have played out. Meyerson notes, "McCarthy himself had planned to stand down and back Kennedy if Kennedy won California and began racking up establishment endorsements." But of course circumstances prevented that from happening.

Then Kennedy was killed. And there was no one to go over to, no one who could lead the antiwar forces to victory in Chicago or the general election. McCarthy did not drop out, and those in the Kennedy column who couldn't stand him persuaded George McGovern to be a last-minute candidate simply to show the flag in Chicago. Four years later, the McCarthy people and the Kennedy people of '68 came together to be the core of McGovern's successful campaign for the nomination. By then, though, Richard Nixon was president, the Vietnam War still raged, and the onetime Gene and Bobby loyalists had to think for a moment to recall what it was that had once so divided them.

I tell this tale, of course, not merely to remind us that the better world of which Robert Kennedy so movingly spoke died aborning 40 years ago in Los Angeles. I also tell it because I see a dynamic similar to that between the Kennedy and McCarthy campaigns in the relationship between Barack Obama's and Hillary Clinton's equally historic campaigns, and because today's Democrats have been given a chance -- as they were not in 1968 -- to come together and make the kinds of changes they have only dreamed of over the past four decades. You would think -- well, hope -- that after 40 years, this time they'd get it right.

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