Will Michigan Workers Put Bernie Back On Track Tuesday?

Bernie and Biden will face off in a one on one debate on Sunday, March 15 in Phoenix (with CNN and Univision hosting-- Jake Tapper, Dana Bash and Jorge Ramos moderating). Before then, though, we have a big day this Tuesday when Michigan, Washington state, Missouri, Mississippi and Idaho hold their primaries, also the day of North Dakota's primary and the last day of Democrats Abroad primary. Michigan is the big prize-- 125 delegates. Before Super Tuesday, Bernie was leading Biden 25-16% with Bloomberg and Elizabeth both at 13%, Mayo Pete at 11% and Klobuchar at 8%. The latest polling indicates that Biden has leap-frogged to the top slot and leads Bernie by almost 7 points.

Washington was also a Bernie state-- pre-Super Tuesday leading Biden by 11 points-- 21-10%. Now? The latest poll shows a tie. The latest poll of Missouri Democrats (post-Super Tuesday) shows Biden slightly ahead.

There are no polls available for Mississippi, Idaho or North Dakota.

Bernie is counting on union workers in Michigan-- who understand the destructive nature of the trade agreements Biden has always backed-- as a boost that will help him regain his footing. Rust Belt autoworkers know-- and Bernie is reminding them of Biden's role in all these disastrous agreements. Writing for Politico yesterday, Megan Cassella reported that Bernie cancelled a rally in Mississippi so he could spend more time in Michigan.

In campaign speeches, press conferences and television ads, Sanders has stepped up his attacks on Biden this week over his past support for trade pacts like NAFTA and permanent normal trade relations with China-- both of which, he argues, “have cost this country millions of good paying jobs and in fact have resulted in a race to the bottom.”

...“They were devastated-- they were devastated by trade agreements like NAFTA” in Michigan, Sanders said this week as he sought to reset his campaign after Super Tuesday. “Joe is going to have to explain to the people and the union workers in the Midwest why he supported disastrous trade agreements.”

...[T]he trade battle is a legacy fight for Sanders, who has spent decades not only opposing trade deals himself but often leading the charge against them. He has voted against every major deal Congress has passed in a generation, although he sat out a 2011 vote on a deal with South Korea.

Some of those battles put him directly at odds with Biden. In 2016, as Biden helped lead the Obama administration’s attempt to gather support for the 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership, Sanders helped collect more than 66,000 signatures on a petition to stop it. Congress never moved on the deal, and President Donald Trump ultimately had the final word, withdrawing the U.S. from the pact on his first week in office.

This year, Sanders was one of just 10 senators to vote against the Trump administration's deal to replace NAFTA, known as the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement. After months of closed-door negotiations between House Democrats and the Trump administration, the pact garnered broad support from a majority of labor unions, most congressional Democrats and even fellow progressive Sen. Elizabeth Warren. Biden backed it as well, saying it was not ideal but that he supported the improvements the labor and progressive movements fought to make.

...For Sanders, the question now is whether his fresh line of attack will work.

In 2016, Sanders’ pitch resonated in Michigan and among workers in the state’s hollowed-out manufacturing sector. But since then, Trump has worked to fashion himself as the champion of the working class and American manufacturing by ripping up what he and Sanders both call disastrous trade deals. Trump has also enacted a series of sweeping tariffs on imports that have devastated farmers and hurt some manufacturers whose equipment and materials are growing more expensive.

The effect has been “tremendously clarifying,” said Doug Irwin, a Dartmouth University economist who has written extensively on the politics and economics of trade. After decades of debate on the merits of multinational agreements, a U.S. president has shifted the country toward a more protectionist agenda and seen what the effects would be, he said.

“What we see is that just as trade creates winners and losers, protectionism creates winners and losers,” Irwin said. “And there are a lot of losers out there.”

A Biden spokesperson sounded a similar tune. "These states have spent years enduring the economic pain that Trump's trade war has forced on them-- and the last thing they have an appetite for is more of that kind of approach," spokesperson Andrew Bates told Politico.

...Biden’s record overall on trade is generally mixed. He voted against a handful of trade deals in his last few years in the Senate, including pacts with Peru, Oman and Chile. But those have garnered far less attention than his votes in favor of NAFTA-- which has long served as a punching bag for critics who blame it for the outsourcing of jobs to Mexico-- and for permanent normal trade relations with China.

Comcast Executives Give Big to Biden

(Click to enlarge)

by Thomas Neuburger

It's easy to make the obvious connection between MSNBC's owner Comcast and the deplorable (yes, that word again) behavior of its hosts and invited guests. It beggars thought not to make it.

Still, details — tangible connections — are sometimes lacking. Yes, there was the financing of the 2016 Democratic Convention in Philadelphia. But what about this cycle?

Here to help inform us is Sludge (yes, a real name and a good site):

MSNBC’s Owners Shower Biden With Campaign Cash

94% of Comcast executives’ and vice presidents’ contributions to Democratic presidential candidates have gone to Joe Biden, a Sludge review of FEC records finds.

The most influential cable news channel among liberals, MSNBC, has a habit of taking cheap shots against one of the leading Democratic presidential contenders.

According to prime time host Chris Matthews, Sen. Bernie Sanders (D-Vt.) is not the type of person who would help you if you were lying on the side of the road injured. A self-proclaimed body language expert who was a guest of weekend host Joy Reid speculated that Sanders lied during the most recent debate because of the 78-year-old candidate’s slouched posture. “He turtles,” the guest said. “His eye level is below his shoulders. This is trying to hide in plain sight.”

The prime-time hosts have done much worse since this piece was written in January. But can we draw a line between the behavior of MSNBC and the behavior of its owner?

Yes, we can:

A Sludge review of Federal Election Commission records shows Biden is the preferred candidate of the station’s owners, the behemoth Comcast Corporation.

Biden has received 17 large campaign contributions from executives and vice presidents at Comcast, including eight for the legal maximum of $2,800. Of all the other candidates still in the race, only South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg has received any Comcast executive contributions—Buttigieg received a single contribution from Comcast Managing Director Amy Banse.

In addition, Comcast’s top lobbyist, David Cohen, co-hosted Biden’s kick-off fundraiser in April and he is listed as a bundler for the campaign, meaning that he has collected at least $25,000 in contributions from others for Biden.

The chart at the top shows the full list of Comcast's executives' financial support of Biden's campaign as of the date of publication, excluding super PAC and dark money support, of course.

The reason for this all-for-Biden teamwork should also be obvious. Aside from the usual corporate animus (actually hatred) for Sanders and his policies, there's an issue dear to Comcast's cold corporate heart that Biden is particularly good on and Sanders is particularly bad on — net neutrality. Read the rest of the Sludge piece for the details.

All in all, Comcast love is a sweet deal for Biden and his campaign. He may have his own network again. All he needs now to do is look viable after the next few races and he's back in business.
 

The Freakout Escalates: DNC, MSDNC & Korporate Democrats Losing Their Minds Over The Appeal Of Bernie Sanders

-by Noah

About 20 years ago, I was looking for something to watch on the telly while I ate my dinner and I happened upon the Chris Matthews Hardball show. It was the first time I had ever seen in it and to this day, I simply turn the sound down or switch the channel whenever his show comes on. Why? Simple. First impressions mean a lot. That night Matthews was interviewing Newt Gingrich and it was anything but hardball. Since that night, I've called the show exactly what it is: Nerfball. Chris Mathews interviewing Newtie was no interview. It was a lovefest of nudge-nudge and wink-wink between two conservative geezers that were old beyond their chronological years; old and in the way. They might as well have been twins rejoicing after being separated for years. The cloying banter on the part of Matthews was a sickening aural plague. Matthews asked the softest questions, all teed up for his buddy Newt to hammer over the fence to the glee of both. MSNBC might as well have been showing us two semi-demented guys talking politics in the lunch room of a nursing home. Neither man had a grip on current day reality, and that was 20 years ago. It was like Hannity and Giuliani are these days, except it was hard to tell which one was Hannity and which one was Giuliani. It was at least that bad. It was, as they say, some really sick shit.

For a long time after that, I saw Matthews rail against progressives on other MSNBC shows, especially whenever election time rolled around. Progressive was a word that he spat out. Even when he feebly tried to hide his contempt, it showed. Even when he tried to cloak himself in his supposed northeastern liberal roots, it showed. He'd long outgrown his so-called "liberalism." Besides, his brand of liberalism was the dated and establishment kind, a co-option kind that was very prevalent in the 1960s when Kennedy Democrats decided to try on the trappings of being more "with it." It was pretty phony then. I saw that first hand. I called it opportunistic liberalism. Anything for a vote. And that was 50+ years ago. Matthews is the embodiment of that. He didn't evolve. He stayed in one place and atrophied while many of us moved on. We progressed. He became a living fossil. Due to his calcification, what Matthews became then, now often appears, in comparison to modern progressives, to be what Barry Goldwater and John Birchers were way back then. The same charge can be directed at politicians like Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Michael Bloomberg and any Republican you care to name. They are all people from another time, another century, and they are not what we need.

Hello! What time is it? We don't need media people or politicians who are so stuck in the past. It doesn't have to do with age but with intellect. Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren didn't stop growing 50 wears ago and they are of the same generation. Yours truly is only a few years behind. Some people have moved into the 21st century. Others feel more comfortable in the past, the reality that they know. They fear the future but, damn, we are now 20 years into a century that we shouldn't even call new anymore. Hillary Clinton didn't get it in 2016. Matthews doesn't get it now.

Matthews has made an effort to fake it. A few years ago he at least tried to hide behind a facade of tolerance for progressives. At MSNBC, he had stuck his finger into the air and detected a gentle breeze flowing left and went with it, at least on face value. As they say, follow the money, and he did, but Bernie Sanders is more than that weak facade of Matthews could bear. On Saturday, as the Nevada Caucus results came in, Matthews snapped for good. He came back out of his Consevervadem closet, bowing the door of the hinges practically screaming, comparing Sanders, a Jewish man, to Hitler's Nazis who stormed into France shortly before he was born:

It looks like Bernie Sanders is hard to beat... I think it's a little late to stop him, and that's the problem... I'm reading about the fall of France in the summer of 1940. And the general calls up Churchill and says 'It's over.' And Churchill says, 'How can it be? You got the greatest army in Europe. How can it be over?' He said, 'It's over.'

Over at CNN, former Obama administration official Van Jones spoke for his fellow bubble dwellers when he said:

Nobody thought six months ago that we would be sitting here with Bernie Sanders on his way to the nomination. He's on his way to the nomination. Something could happen to stop him. Somebody may have some marbles to throw at the stairs or a banana peel. They better find it. Because this guy is off and running.

It's not really over, of course, but to people like Matthews and the equally calcified Democratic National Committee led by Tom Perez (Think of him as this year's Debbie Wasserman Schultz), it is, or at least they fear it is. Bernie isn't one of their proscribed, pre-approved choices. He's not a member of the club. He's only what, in their eyes, too many voters, so far, want. Damn voters! How dare they have opinions! The DNC and their media hacks like Chris Matthews treat Bernie winning as their worst nightmare and, looked at one way, he is. Bernie is such a threat to their gravy train and safe, status quo that they've launched themselves into a state of panic when, in fact, they should be embracing Senator Sanders as a gift. In order to win, you need enthusiastic voters. That's what Trump has and you have to match enthusiasm with enthusiasm or else you don't have a chance. In order to survive as a political party and have a future, you need young people and Latinos coming in your door, and that is what Bernie is rounding up and delivering. He is a gift and the lords of the party gnash their teeth and wail. They are pathetic and they are dangerous, not only to us but the very existence of the party. Their hate for Bernie could deliver not just the nomination to a flaccid Conservadem euphemistically called a "moderate," it could also deliver the election to Trump whether Senator Sanders ends up with the nomination or not. Obviously, that would be fine with korporate America and their shills like Chris Matthews.

The Matthews outburst wasn't just a moment of crankiness and twitching fear, it was also a moment of moral bankruptcy, and, speaking of moral bankruptcy, as I write this on Monday afternoon, MSNBC has not fired Matthews on the spot. They haven't reprimanded him. They haven't even commented. Any silence between the Matthews outburst and the time you read this not shows us the true colors of MSNBC's parent company, COMCAST. Anything they may do now is too little too late.

Matthews isn't exactly alone at MSNBC of course. While the channel is better than the overtly right-leaning Wolf Blitzer led CNN and totally wacko nutjob outlets like FOX "News," and Sinclair, not to mention Drudge, Breitbart, and Trump favorite Alex Jones, there are others at MSNBC who share in Matthews's panic, a panic that has the DNC spinning like the head of that poor little girl in "The Exorcist." Give it another month and they will sound like her too. Since COMCAST took over MSNBC, there has been an obvious move right to the extent that many of us ruefully joke that the channel has become MSDNC, a bland merger of MSNBC and the DNC. Warning #1 to the DNC Establishment Suits and their media minions: You keep saying Bernie isn't a Democrat but you ignore the fact that his voters are and he's more of a real democrat then you've ever been. Warning #2: Bland wallpaper news and commentary doesn't beget any more support or enthusiasm than bland wallpaper politicians. You might as well bring back Mike Dukakis and Walter Mondale.

Among the worst of the bubble dwelling offenders at MSNBC are former Conservadem $enator Claire McCaskill of Missouri who all but clutches her pearls every time Bernie's name comes up. There's the execrable Chuck Todd who has been living in a doorless Republican closet his whole pointless career. There's Katy Tur who doesn't seem too happy at all about the way things are going in the Democratic primaries. There's Nicole Wallace who at least openly admits to being a Republican who doesn't like Trump. However, she was George W. Bush's Communications Director so that bears close attention. Then there's Joy Reid. Reid is the most disappointing of all of them other than Matthews himself. Reid not only has a history of homophobia but she has taken to immaturely openly and loudly sighing when her guests speak up in favor of Sen. Sanders. She reminds me of Al Gore in the first Bush-Gore debate when he sighed, smirked, and made faces at everything Bush had to say. At least Bush deserve and earned the disrespect. And let's not forget the guy who runs the whole thing, the perfectly named Andy Lack who has made a career out of being forced out of one Korporate CEO job only to land in a new one. He's perhaps most infamous for his farcical and clueless tenure at Sony Entertainment.

Meanwhile, Howie has tweeted out a poll where followers can voice their choice of who at MSDNC should walk the plank first. Matthews has a commanding lead but why stop with him?

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."


 

Why It Makes Sense To Refer To Comcast-TV As MSDNC

Bernie wants MSNBC to treat his campaign more fairly. And he's asked the station's top brass to do just that. But maybe that's a mistake. The more unfairly the #NeverTrump Republicans who dominate the MSNBC talking heads team treat Bernie, the higher his polling goes and the more contributions come rolling in. After the New Hampshire primary, Ari Melber-- one of the few MSNBC hosts who is neither a #NeverTrump Republican nor a biased anti-working class bigot-- asked a Democratic voter why she had voted for Bernie and she responded that it was in response to MSNBC's anti-Bernie coverage. "I think that it is completely cynical to say that he's lost 50% of his vote from the last time and there were two candidates," she told Melber. "Now, there are multiple, wonderful candidates who would be great presidents and people that I think we can unify and get behind, but the kind of 'Stop Bernie' cynicism that I've heard from a number of people. I watch MSNBC constantly, so I've heard that from a number of commentators... It made me angry enough, I said, 'Okay, Bernie's got my vote.'"

MSNBC hasn't done an editorial against Bernie per se, but working class supporters find it increasingly hard to watch anti-Bernie hate monsters like Joy Reid. Chris $5 million as year Matthews, or any of the afternoon #NeverTrump Republicans who populate the station's airwaves. On Tuesday, Vanity Fair published a piece by Tom Kludt explaining why Bernie's campaign is sick of MSNBC's coverage.

Faiz Shakir, Bernie's campaign manager went to NBC headquarters to speak with MSNBC president Phil Griffin. Shakir told Kludt that "We watched a ton of terrible coverage occurring and we thought we’d at least try to address it."

For months, the campaign bristled at slights from MSNBC’s stable of hosts and commentators. Jason Johnson, an MSNBC contributor, predicted in January 2019 that Sanders would drop out by August, and network analyst Mimi Rocah said in July that Sanders made her “skin crawl.” On-screen graphics have omitted Sanders and misrepresented his poll numbers, a trend that inspired a sendup from The Onion.

“It’s been a struggle to change the tone and the tenor of the coverage that we receive,” Shakir said in an interview. “They’ve been among the last to acknowledge that Bernie Sanders’ path to the nomination is real, and even when it’s become real, they frequently discount it.” (A study from progressive magazine In These Times buttresses Shakir’s critique). Sanders also attended the off-the-record discussion with Griffin; an MSNBC spokesperson said the network has hosted similar meetings with other Democratic candidates. Shakir said the 30 Rock chat was “open” and “cordial,” but now, months later, he’s “not sure it really changed anything.”

Sanders has long contended that the agenda of “corporate media” doesn’t necessarily reflect the people’s needs, and his 2020 campaign has doubled as a rolling media criticism shop. On Twitter, Sanders’s speechwriter David Sirota, a veteran reporter, has become a one-man rapid-response machine; last week, he chided a New York Times reporter for downplaying Sanders’s victory in the New Hampshire primary. Several key campaign figures hail from the media’s left flank: deputy campaign manager Ari Rabin-Havt (Media Matters), national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray (The Intercept), and Shakir (ThinkProgress). Sanders himself has suggested that the Washington Post “doesn’t write particularly good articles about” him because of his efforts to raise the minimum wage at Amazon, the company founded by the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. He’s also railed against networks taking Big Pharma ads while on the debate stage.

Entering Wednesday’s debate in Las Vegas, which will be cohosted by MSNBC and NBC News, the ongoing tension between the titular liberal cable news network and the current Democratic front-runner has only intensified, and appears symptomatic of generational and ideological rifts within the party. It is at once a test of both MSNBC’s influence over the process and Sanders’s ability to withstand establishment resistance. Shakir said unflattering coverage on MSNBC has been “actively damaging” to the campaign. “The constant diminishment of Bernie Sanders on MSNBC,” he added, “hurts his case for electability.”

Sanders’s legion of very online supporters are quick to share clips and gripes after any perceived slight against Sanders. The anti-Bernie highlight reel grew in recent weeks, with some moments verging on parody. Joy Reid hosted a body-language expert who said Sanders’s posture revealed that he was “lying” about a recent dispute with Elizabeth Warren. Chris Matthews’s appearances, meanwhile, have become appointment viewing for his anguished warnings about Sanders. On the day of the Iowa caucuses, a glum Matthews invoked the ghost of George McGovern in forecasting a wipeout for Sanders in the general election. “Bernie Sanders is not going to be president of the United States, okay?” Matthews declared. Following the most recent debate in New Hampshire, Matthews breathlessly offered another history lesson. “I have my own views of the word socialist and I’d be glad to share them…They go back to the early 1950s. I have an attitude about them. I remember the Cold War,” Matthews said. “I have an attitude towards [Fidel] Castro. 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, okay?”

While Matthews’s rant was mostly met with mockery, there was anger last week when Chuck Todd quoted a story from a conservative publication on-air that described Sanders supporters as a “digital brown-shirt brigade,” prompting a condemnation from the Anti-Defamation League. (Todd will be one of five moderators at Wednesday’s debate.) And despite his newly minted status as the party’s national front-runner, Sanders has continued to face skepticism about his viability. The real story out of New Hampshire, Lawrence O’Donnell said, was “how much ground [Sanders has] lost from four years ago,” when he won the state’s primary in a decidedly smaller field than this year. “I don’t understand how Bernie is considered a front-runner,” Todd said after Sanders’s primary win.

...When we spoke Friday, Shakir was clearly frustrated by what he saw as a mix of dismissiveness and disparagement toward his candidate. He bemoaned a “double standard” in which the campaign faces relentless scrutiny over its most vocal online supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, while MSNBC pundits have impunity to knock the candidate or his base. “You can feel the disdain they have for Bernie Sanders’s supporters,” Shakir said. “It’s a condescending attitude: ‘Oh, they must not be that intelligent. They’re being deluded. They’re being conned. They’re all crazy Twitter bots.’ My view is that there’s a bit of detachment from MSNBC and the people who this campaign gets support from. It feels like they’re covering progressives from an elitist perspective.”

Shakir credited CNN for making “efforts to try and diversify their voices,” citing the network’s hire of Alexandra Rojas, the executive director of the progressive organization Justice Democrats and a veteran of the 2016 Sanders campaign. Even Fox News has been “more fair than MSNBC,” according to Shakir. “That’s saying something,” he said. “Fox is often yelling about Bernie Sanders’s socialism, but they’re still giving our campaign the opportunity to make our case in a fair manner, unlike MSNBC, which has credibility with the left and is constantly undermining the Bernie Sanders campaign.”

Still, Sanders has made his own case several times on MSNBC, sitting down with Rachel Maddow earlier in the race and appearing last week on Chris Hayes’s show. His campaign surrogates get airtime too. On the night before the Iowa caucuses, Sanders campaign cochair Nina Turner accused Michael Bloomberg of being an oligarch trying to buy his way into the election. Johnson, the MSNBC contributor, disputed Turner’s characterization as “dismissive” and “unfair.”

A spokesperson for MSNBC declined to respond to Shakir’s specific critiques, but the network has previously brushed off complaints from Sanders as just another case of a campaign working the refs for more favorable coverage. “A presidential campaign complaining about tough questions and commentary speaks for itself,” a spokesperson for MSNBC told the Daily Beast in July. “Our anchors and analysts are doing their jobs: discussing day-to-day developments that have an impact on the race.”

...MSNBC’s coverage is also a microcosm of the generational split that Sanders faces in the primary. While Sanders cleans up among young Democratic voters, the 78-year-old fares poorly among his own age cohort (which also more closely mirrors the cable news audience). Voters aged 65 and older were shaped by the Cold War, leaving many wary of the ”socialist” label that Sanders embraces, and they were scarred by McGovern’s landslide defeat in 1972. They are more contemporaries and ideological peers of Matthews, and theirs-- not Sanders’s-- is the predominant point of view heard among MSNBC’s center-left pundits.

“There’s a reason the network is mocked as MSDNC: because it’s long been little more than an arm of the party’s establishment apparatus,” said Glenn Greenwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative reporter who had appeared as an MSNBC guest before becoming a staunch critic. MSNBC is “not some news organization with an anti-Sanders bias,” Greenwald said, but rather “a full-scale disinformation machine serving the primary goal of the DNC [Democratic National Committee]: destroying the Sanders campaign at any cost.”

Greenwald pointed to Hayes as an exception to his critique; Shakir also said the prime-time host “has been generally good” in his coverage of the campaign. Anand Giridharadas, a political analyst for MSNBC, has also been one of the few commentators to push back against the network’s criticism of Sanders. But identifying a Sanders sympathizer on MSNBC’s roster is reminiscent of “Where’s Waldo?” MSNBC hasn’t gone the route of CNN, which loaded up on pro-Donald Trump pundits like Jeffrey Lord and Corey Lewandowski during the 2016 race and beyond because its existing stable of conservative analysts were largely critical of the Republican insurgent.

Oh... and by the way... I just couldn't resist.

No Time Like Now For Bernie To Start Planning For What He Can Do For The American People During His First Week In Office

Feeling The Bern by Nancy Ohanian

Bernie's polling has been going up, up, up. And Biden-- the status quo establishment's choice for the 2020 Hillary role-- has been watching his "inevitability" shatter. Biden-- not as corrupt as Trump, but too corrupt to be president-- is looking like a loser in Iowa and New Hampshire. The new Civiqs poll for Iowa State University shows Biden battling it out with Klobuchar, the other conservative with race problems in the Iowa contest, for 4th place.

• Bernie- 24%
• Elizabeth Warren- 19%
• Mayo Pete- 17%
• Status Quo Joe- 15%
• Klobuchar- 11%
• Yang- 5%
• Steyer- 4%
• Tulsi- 2%
• Bloomberg- 1%

The latest NBC News poll by Marist of New Hampshire likely primary voters has Biden in third place behind Bernie and Mayo Pete.

• Bernie- 22%
• Mayo Pete- 17%
• Status Quo Joe- 15%
• lizabeth Warren- 13%
• Klobuchar- 10%
• Tulsi- 6%
• Yang- 5%
• Steyer- 3%

And the newest poll out of Nevada shows Bernie catching up to Biden, who now leads him by less than 2 points.

• Status Quo Joe- 19.4%
• Bernie- 17.6%
• Elizabeth Warren- 10.6%
• Mayo- 8.2%
• Steyer- 7.6%
• Yang- 4.4%
• Klobuchar- 3.6%

The latest polling in California shows Bernie with double the support of Biden, who is in third place after Warren.

• Bernie- 30%
• Elizabeth Warren- 16%

• Status Quo Joe- 15%
• Mayo Pete- 8%
• Yang- 5%
• Bloomberg- 4%
• Tulsi- 4%
• Klobuchar- 3%
• Steyer- 2%

Even in Biden's Southern stronghold, Bernie is catching up. The new Texas Lyceum poll shows Biden ahead of Bernie by 2 points (28-26%) but shows that Bernie comes closer to beating Trump in a general election match-up. Biden's till has one state he's doing well in, South Carolina, but that looks like it could be the only state he wins-- a state where he wouldn't come close to winning in the general election.

As Holly Otterbein pointed out at Politico yesterday, Bernie is starting to be viewed-- and treated-- as the frontrunner, for better and worse. The darkest forces of the Democratic establishment has unleashed their Kraken against him-- barrages of ugly, vicious ads to kill his campaign. "Faced with the dilemma of how to respond in the face of bombs dropped on him," she writes about the Biden SuperPAC, "days away from the Iowa caucuses, the Sanders campaign is mostly sticking to pocketbook issues-- for now. Sanders’ TV ads in the state remain centered on Medicare for All, a major focus of his campaign, as well as women’s rights and his movement... The spots are designed to remind Democratic voters of one of Sanders’ key strengths: Polls show they trust him on health care more than any other 2020 candidate. But they also risk feeding into perceptions among some voters that he is too far left to defeat President Donald Trump, particularly as outside organizations amplify that message with negative ads... Sanders responded in an online video, using the attacks as an opportunity to underscore his populist message: 'It is no secret that our campaign is taking on the political establishment and the big-money interests who are now running negative ads against us in Iowa. The billionaire class is getting nervous, and they should.'"





On Wednesday AP's Will Weissert reported on a speech Bernie gave in Sioux City on Sunday: "You can tell how good I feel by how nervous the establishment is getting. We’re their worst nightmare." The far right of the Democratic establishment, stinking of putrid corruption-- what establishment media inaccurately calls "moderates-- "argue that Sanders’ liberal views, which include universal, government-funded health care under a Medicare for All program and tuition-free public college, are too extreme." But that isn't what voters think, just what the super-rich think, since they are well aware that their taxes will go up.

Donald Shaw broke a story for Sludge about how corrupt MSNBC, a pro-Biden operation, is. "A Sludge review of Federal Election Commission records," wrote Shaw, "shows Biden is the preferred candidate of the station’s owners, the behemoth Comcast Corporation. Biden has received 17 large campaign contributions from executives and vice presidents at Comcast, including eight for the legal maximum of $2,800. Of all the other candidates still in the race, only South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg has received any Comcast executive contributions-- Buttigieg received a single contribution from Comcast Managing Director Amy Banse. In addition, Comcast’s top lobbyist, David Cohen, co-hosted Biden’s kick-off fundraiser in April and he is listed as a bundler for the campaign, meaning that he has collected at least $25,000 in contributions from others for Biden." Does that matter? Well, MSNBC's on-air coverage of Bernie has been worse than Fox's! Bernie has received not only the least total coverage (less than one-third of Biden’s), but the most negative, with the multimillionaire status quo on-air shitheads like Chris Matthews going out of his way to insert snide anti-Bernie remarks and inviting on anti-Bernie self-servers as frequently as possible.

From a policy point of view, Comcast’s support of Biden makes sense. Comcast has been a leading force against neutrality rules, spending millions on lobbying against the issue, and, unlike Sanders and Warren, Biden’s record does not suggest that he would be a strong advocate for restoring net neutrality as president.

In 2006, as a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, Biden said that he did not think net neutrality rules were needed. “[Biden] indicated that no preemptive laws were necessary because if violations do happen, such a public outcry will develop that ‘the chairman will be required to hold this meeting in this largest room in the Capitol, and there will be lines wandering all the way down to the White House,’” CNET reported. The next year, he declined to co-sponsor the Internet Freedom Preservation Act, a bipartisan bill that would amend the Communication Act of 1934 to include net neutrality protections. Sanders was a co-sponsor of the bill. Warren signed on as a co-sponsor of Sen. Ed Markey’s (D-Mass.) net neutrality bill in February 2014 just weeks after becoming a U.S. senator.

Comcast is the nation’s largest broadband provider, operating regional monopolies that give consumers no choice but to subscribe to their services or have no home internet service. About 68 million Americans have access to no broadband or only one internet service provider. For the majority of those with just one ISP option, that option is Comcast. In 2018, Comcast’s revenue from its internet division alone was more than $17 billion.

Sanders has called for Comcast’s regional broadband internet and cable monopolies to be broken up and Warren has called for aggressive antitrust action tech companies. Biden, on the other hand, has not put forth an antitrust platform and has a history of fighting against strong antitrust rules.

In the 1970’s, Biden broke with his Democratic colleagues to oppose legislation that would have blocked corporate mergers based on the total size of the resulting company. Biden voted with Republicans to exempt soft drink companies from antitrust legislation and he voted against a bill from Sen. Ed Kennendy (D-MA) to ensure consumers had authority to sue companies for antitrust violations.

“The Biden-Kennedy split carried symbolic connotations beyond the policy implications of their individual votes,” HuffPost reported. “Where Kennedy wanted to use the Judiciary Committee to continue the old New Deal-era attack on corporate power, Biden became an advocate for corporate interests that had previously been associated with the Republican Party.”

Last year, Comcast spent more than $13 million on lobbying the federal government. In 2014, the company’s PAC  donated to nearly every member of the congressional committees reviewing its bid to take over TimeWarner Cable, according to Politico. Former Sen. Al Franken (D-MN) told Politico that the company had “an army of over 100 lobbyists ready to swarm Capitol Hill.”

Yesterday, writing for the Washington Post, Jeff Stein and Sean Sullivan reported that while Biden and his team are working with the plutocracy to undermine Bernie, he "is considering dozens of executive orders he could unilaterally enact on a wide range of domestic policy issues if elected president, including immigration, the environment and prescription drugs. The document reviewed by The Post shows how the Sanders campaign has already begun extensive planning for how the senator would lead the country in his first days as president if he won the Democratic nomination and defeated Trump in November. Many of the proposals Sanders has floated on the campaign trail do not have support from congressional Republicans and are opposed by some Democrats, so a willingness to move forward without congressional approval could determine whether many of his policies are enacted."

And by the way, yesterday the American Postal Workers Union, whose membership is close to a quarter million, endorsed Bernie. APWU Secretary-Treasurer Liz Powell: "Senator Sanders was a champion of workers’ rights long before he became a candidate for president. Like those who make up the core of the APWU, he is a firm believer in social and economic justice for all. It’s no wonder that he is ranked as the most popular member of the U.S. Senate. Union president Mark Dimondstein emphasized that Bernie's campaign "is boldly uplifting the goals and aspirations of workers. Simply put, we believe it is in the best interests of all postal workers, our job security and our union to support and elect Bernie Sanders for president... [W]when we judge candidates by their long-term and consistent actions, Bernie Sanders stands out as a true champion of postal workers and all workers throughout the country. Bernie Sanders has proven he is a fierce advocate on the side of postal workers. He has opposed the closures of postal facilities and reduced service standards. He has been a leader in the fight for expanded postal financial services and was the lone senator who stopped postal privatizers from appointments to the Postal Board of Governors."

Bernie-- The Most Electable... Despite MSNBC's Anti-Bernie Bias

Late yesterday you may have seen the new Boston Globe poll of New Hampshire Democratic primary voters by Suffolk. Bernie led the pack, followed by Elizabeth Warren, Mayo Pete... and Status Quo Joe bringing up the rear. (Everyone else is in single digits.) Don't look for this news on MSNBC; after all, no one wants to make Mimi Rocha's skin crawl. Or maybe you saw the Latino Decisions poll of Hispanic voters in California, another one released late yesterday. "The path to winning the Democratic Party primary runs through California and its sizable Latino electorate," wrote Adrian Pantoja. "With 495 delegates at stake, the Golden State will be one of the most coveted prizes in this primary election. Among the Democratic Party hopefuls, one candidate, Bernie Sanders, has invested serious time and effort in winning the state and Latino voters. With campaign offices in Latino enclaves like East Los Angeles and a sizable Latino campaign staff, Bernie Sanders is making it clear that he’s serious about winning the Latino vote. Those efforts are paying off according to a recent survey of Latinos in California by The Latino Community Foundation and Latino Decisions. In the survey, Latino voters were asked to state the degree to which they felt favorable or unfavorable toward various candidates, including President Trump. Table 1 shows the percentage of respondents who were 'very' to 'somewhat' favorable toward the candidates. Bernie Sanders is a clear favorite, with two-thirds of Latinos rating the Vermont Senator favorably. A difference of 9-points separates him and Joe Biden."

Did you see that montage of MSNBC anti-Bernie hatred tweeted by John Cusak on Saturday. Remember when Fairness and Accuracy In Reporting found MSNBC to be biased against Sanders-- filling its airwaves with false claims and skewing polls to twist the perception of his standing? For example, Meet the Press’ Chuck Todd showed a graphic that suggested Sanders decreased 5 points in a Quinnipiac poll when the candidate actually gained 5 points. Maybe it's as simple as the corporate network's highly paid actors just not wanting their taxes to go up. But it's something else.

I know one thing, I've come to avoid watching MSNBC-- other than when Chris Hayes does his show. It's not as bad as Fox-- not counting hate-filled Scarsdale multimillionaire Mimi Rocah, who makes my skin crawl-- but that's way too low a bar for me. MSNBC-- Comcast-TV-- seems to be leading the charge when it comes to gaslighting that Bernie is unelectable, even when he well may be the most electable... something that no doubt scares Comcast shitless.

On Sunday, Salon published a piece by Matthew Rozsa, Quit saying that Bernie Sanders can't win-- he may be the most electable Democrat running in 2020, asserting that this conventional wisdom, created by corporate media, may well be turning truth on its head. "A case exists," he wrote, that Sanders is not merely electable, but may be the most electable Democrat running right now [and that] more than mere fairness is at stake here." If Donald Trump, who represents a grave danger to the United States and the world, is to be defeated, Democrats and other voters must look at whether each of the leading candidates-- Bernie, Status Quo Joe, Elizabeth Warren, and slick media creation Mayo Pete-- has a realistic argument for how they could win. Rozsa begins by acknowledging that perhaps it's possible that, as Fox Business Network host Trish Regan told him, Bernie is simply too far left. "Many people make that same argument, from the axiomatic position that a leftist or socialist is inherently unelectable. Yet when I reached out to assorted political experts to get their thoughts on Sanders' electability, I found more complex responses."

I identified five hypothetical arguments suggesting that Sanders is the most electable candidate. He has rebounded a bit in the polls since recovering from his recent heart attack, and is currently at or near the top in both Iowa and New Hampshire. His supporters are enthusiastic and will vote for him no matter what, which could lead to higher turnout for him in both the primary and general elections. Voters may care less about ideology than character, which could give Sanders an edge if he is perceived as compassionate and sincere in contrast to the opportunistic and shallow Trump.

If Trump shifted the Overton Window (that is, the frame of what is considered acceptable in mainstream political debate) in 2016, it's entirely conceivable that Sanders could do it again. For that matter, Sanders' ideas aren't even that radical in the first place; they're basically an updated version of Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal, which got him elected four times.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, Sanders has consistently led Trump in head-to-head polling in battleground states, and thus has a plausible Electoral College strategy. As a resident of one such state, Pennsylvania, I encounter this daily, at least on an anecdotal level.

"Conventional wisdom routinely fails to grasp the simmering anger that’s fueled by extreme income inequality,"  journalist Norman Solomon, co-founder and national coordinator of RootsAction.org and a Sanders delegate to the 2016 Democratic National Convention, told Salon by email. He was making what one could call the "populist wave" argument:

And when the electoral door is closed for progressive populism, the only other door open leads to right-wing demagoguery of the sort that Trump personifies. In the 2020 general election campaign, Democratic presidential nominee Bernie Sanders would fling a progressive populist door wide open.

After dismissing the "mass-media myth" that Democrats need to nominate a moderate like Joe Biden to win (and invoking the example of Hillary Clinton in 2016), Solomon argued that:

yes, there are disaffected Republicans to be had, but not many — compared to the huge potential for increasing turnout among people of color, lower-income voters and young people. More than any other candidate, Sanders has enormous potential to inspire that kind of turnout.

In other words, Solomon posits that Sanders' democratic socialist ideology-- the very thing that lead many to conclude he can't possible win-- is in fact his greatest electoral strength.

By contrast, Kyle Kondik, managing editor of the nonpartisan political science site Sabato's Crystal Ball, offered the more traditional view that Sanders' ideology could just as easily be a liability as a strength.

"There is some evidence that voters punish more ideologically extreme candidates, and remember that for as extreme as Trump was and is on some issues and in his personal behavior, he also altered the GOP’s messaging on issues such as entitlements and free trade in ways that seemed to be electorally useful," Kondik told Salon by email. Sanders could also benefit because "he tends to emphasize economic and class issues over cultural and social ones," Kondick continued, which may be "a better approach for Democrats in a general election setting, because a number of the most important swing voters are probably less economically conservative than they are culturally conservative."

At the same time, Kondik suggested that Sanders' policies could be perceived as overly ambitious "in a time of relative peace and prosperity, where such far-reaching proposals may be out of step with the electorate-- particularly affluent, highly-educated professionals who are new to the Democratic Party and who dislike Trump but may be leery of Sanders’ program."

Kondik was also cautious about predicting that Sanders would inspire higher turnout, arguing that it was an "open question" whether he could do so among "non-white voters, particularly African Americans" and the "small but crucial number of 2016 Trump and/or third party voters."

Finally we come to Allan Lichtman, an American political scientist at American University whose book, The Keys to the White House, defines a formula that has accurately predicted every presidential election since 1984. Unlike Solomon, Lichtman doesn't think Sanders' ideology will help, and unlike Kondik, he doesn't think it is likely to hurt. Instead, he believes ideology is ultimately irrelevant.

"I have said many times that 'electability' is a word that should be abolished from the political lexicon," Lichtman explained by email. "According to my 13 keys to the White House, presidential elections are primarily votes up or down on the strength and performance of the party holding the White House. Only one key pertains to the challenging candidate and it turns against the incumbent party only in the very rare case where the challenger is truly charismatic and inspirational. Otherwise traditional calculations of electability are meaningless." He cited the examples of supposedly electable Democrats like Michael Dukakis in 1988, Al Gore in 2000, John Kerry in 2004 and Hillary Clinton in 2016, all of whom lost.

"My advice to voters is vote for who you believe in and stop trying to decipher 'electability,'" Lichtman advised.

In the Solomon, Kondik and Lichtman schools of thought, we can see a full spectrum of possibilities. Only Kondik holds that Sanders' ideology could hurt him-- largely based on consistent poll results showing that Biden runs strongest against Trump both in the total popular vote and in the Electoral College.

"Bernie Sanders has an impressively solid base of committed supporters, but there's scant evidence that a majority of Americans are ready to embrace his European-style democratic socialism," Will Marshall, founder of the Progressive Policy Institute, told Salon by email. "I think there are lots of suburbanites across the Midwest who have growing doubts about Trump, but might see him as the lesser evil if Democrats nominate someone they view as hostile to the free enterprise system."

Marshall later added, "Mayor Pete [Buttigieg] is rising in part because Democratic primary voters view him as less doctrinaire than Elizabeth Warren, who is being dragged down by her support for Medicare for All. And if she's too far out of the left limb, Bernie's even farther."

Norman Solomon's school of thought-- that a candidate who inspires voters can win by tapping into deep political angers-- has played out successfully in recent history. Before 2016, Americans had never elected a president who lacked any political or military experience, let alone someone who had been divorced twice and was primarily known to the public as a reality TV star. Yet Donald Trump is now president because he defied conventional wisdom at every stage.

The Lichtman school of thought also suggests that Sanders can win, although not because of any special qualities that Sanders possesses. Its logic is much simpler: This election will be a referendum on Trump's presidency. If he passes muster, he will be re-elected; if he doesn't, he won't. Either way, the most logical thing for Democrats to do is choose the candidate they like the most; electability will take care of itself.

I would add two more observations. Bernie Sanders will be 79 years old in January 2021 and has recently survived a heart attack. He would need to pick a strong running mate for his candidacy to work. Secondly, Sanders is Jewish and America is seeing an undeniable spike in anti-Semitism. He would need to be especially cautious on the campaign trail, and the consequences of this particular "first" are unpredictable.

If he never becomes president, history will almost certainly remember Bernie Sanders as an influential figure in American political history. He has fired up a generation of progressives and fundamentally altered the internal dynamics of the Democratic Party to the left. He has inspired an entire generation of young progressives and radicals, with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez only the tip of the iceberg. Thanks to him, formerly fringe policy proposals like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal are core issues in political debate.

Whether you want Bernie Sanders to be president is of course up to you. But the argument that he simply isn't electable doesn't hold water. Those who favor other candidates would do better by arguing for them on their merits, instead of relying on the flawed narrative that Sanders can't possibly win.