South Carolina Voters Need To Ask Themselves If Mayo Pete Respects African Americans?

I had dinner with civil rights icon Fergie Reid last night and we were discussing how both Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders had backed the 90for90 voter registration initiative but how Mayo Pete's team had refused. I noted that Mayo's racism was hardly something new or unknown. Oddly, after having tried to get him to embrace the initiative, he finally did-- just hours after our dinner and hours before South Carolina primary day! A creation of intelligence agency spooks, did the Mayo campaign have our table bugged? I doubt it but it does seem like an act of desperation or, at least, one that lacks a certain comprehension. His outsider imagine has been carefully constructed by spin-masters to obscure his deep establishment roots, such as the fact that his foreign policy adviser is a powerful Pentagon insider , Doug Wilson, who started mentoring him right out of college, the same man who encouraged once-peacenik Buttigieg to join the military, an important factor in his political climb. Russ Baker:

In a February 25 pre–South Carolina primary debate during which Sanders took fire from all five candidates, Buttigieg called attention to himself by the intensity of his attacks on the frontrunner.

At one point, an argument broke out between the two after Sanders took aim at US foreign policy for being responsible for overthrowing “governments all over the world in Chile, in Guatemala, in Iran,” and supporting pro-business dictatorships. Buttigieg responded that Sanders represents the “revolutionary politics of the 1960s”-- and hammers a recurring theme, that the Vermont senator is as divisive and dangerous as Trump.

Buttigieg was able to put his military service front and center at the debate. Responding to a question framing him as the only veteran on the stage, he brought up his first trip to the state, when he attended Fort Jackson for three weeks of special training before being deployed to Afghanistan in 2015. He recalled looking down at his uniform sleeve and feeling pride that “the flag on [his] shoulder represented a country known to keep its word.”

Since 400,000 vets live in South Carolina, and it has eight bases, representing Army, Navy, the Marines, and Airforce, military service carries special weight there.

How was the little-known mayor of a small American city (ranked 308th largest) transformed into a candidate deemed most qualified to handle some of the most complex decisions facing this country and the world, at a time perhaps more challenging than any in history?

The answer, research suggests, is that Buttigieg has benefited — like many politicians — from a career-long shaping, punctuated by repositionings and makeovers, until he had the right set of credentials and backers to make it to the top. But the particulars of the makeover are like no other.

The Buttigieg we think we know today came into focus over the course of about 16 years, as he was bundled into a package of appealing but vague impressions-- energetic, reformer, articulate, thoughtful, youthful, reasonable.

During his presidential campaign, his handlers have pivoted from difficult-to-prove and politically profitless assertions about his tenure in South Bend, IN, to equally vague but far more savvy branding as a healing national figure, a hardheaded realist, and seasoned man of the world: global businessman and traveler, and, not least, military veteran.

Perhaps paradoxically, he turns out to be backed by a mighty retinue from the very national security elite he says he hopes to “upend.”

Henry Davis, Jr., currently serving his third term on the South Bend City Council, and Jordan Giger, a school teacher and leader of the South Bend chapter of Black Lives Matter, are clearly not on Team Buttigieg. Yesterday the two had an OpEd published by one of South Carolina's biggest newspapers, The State: If black voters in SC support Pete Buttigieg, they will only re-elect President Trump. "Before South Carolina votes in Saturday’s Democratic Party primary," they wrote, "we feel a duty-- as black leaders who know former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg very well-- to issue a political warning to anyone who cares about defeating President Donald Trump in 2020." And did they ever!

Simply put, if Buttigieg becomes the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, his candidacy will be damaged by at least three ticking legal time bombs that are set to go off during the 2020 election-- all of which will serve to help Trump depress black voter turnout and win re-election.

Voters deserve to know that there is a pending special prosecutor investigation into the June 2019 death of Eric Logan, an unarmed black man shot by a white South Bend police officer while walking to his mother’s home from a family event. Buttigieg was still mayor when the shooting occurred, and he was forced to leave the presidential campaign trail to face the anger and anguish of our community. The Indiana attorney general’s office says that the special prosecutor’s report on Logan’s death will likely be released soon.

There is also a wide-ranging federal civil rights lawsuit into systematic racism in the South Bend Police Department while Buttigieg was the city’s mayor. Civil rights law gives plaintiffs broad discovery power to unearth the racist behavior that plagued our community during Buttigieg’s two terms leading South Bend-- and our former mayor may be among those subpoenaed to give a deposition.

That represents the second ticking legal time bomb hovering over Buttigieg’s campaign.

And here is the third one that voters deserve to know about: the South Bend City Council brought a pending lawsuit against Buttigieg to demand the release of secret tapes revealing racist and criminal acts, including white police officers plotting against the city’s first black police chief in an attempt to get him fired.

This controversy has drawn national coverage: the New York Times, for example, published an April 2019 bearing the headline “Pete Buttigieg Fired South Bend’s Black Police Chief. It Still Stings.”

During the 2020 election President Trump will try to suppress the black vote, possibly with help from the Russians. Now just imagine the field day they will have as these Buttigieg-related lawsuits, depositions, subpoenas, reports and other revelations become public throughout the 2020 campaign.

It could resemble the 2016 election furor over Hillary Clinton’s emails, only on steroids. And the furor over the Buttigieg material will be far more warranted, because the systemic racism Buttigieg appeared to tolerate is real.

Before they vote, South Carolinians deserve to know that Buttigieg’s problems with black voters will not go away anytime soon, and that these problems exist for good reason.

Thanks for listening to our voices.

Hard to understand how a completely fabricated empty suit like Mayo could be polling even 4th-- and at almost double what Elizabeth Warren is polling-- in South Carolina. The Real Clear Politics average for the state looks like this going into primary day today:

• Status Quo Joe- 39.7%
• Bernie- 24.3%
• Steyer- 11.7%
• Mayo Pete- 11.3%
• Elizabeth- 6.0%
• Klobuchar- 5.7%
• Tulsi- 2.3%

We'll see how accurate that turns out to be in a few hours but now consider this. Did Mayo Pete just expose South Carolina Blacks to whatever contagion prevented him from meeting Florida Whites? In South Carolina on Thursday afternoon, Buttigieg shook hands and greeted each of nine African American health care leaders. But in Florida Mayo canceled plans for two rich people-only fundraisers scheduled for Wednesday evening at private residences in Palm Beach and Wellington as well as two appearances scheduled for earlier Wednesday in Miami, citing an unspecified illness.

Who Can Win The Conservative Lane To Take On Bernie? None Of These Clowns?

The fight for the conservative lane is in full swing, and yesterday, Bloomberg's campaign manager dismissed Biden's strategy for beating out Bloomberg, Klobuchar and Mayo Pete. Biden's plan is to win big in South Carolina and get the corporate media to market him as the "come back kid." Yesterday, Kevin Sheekey, the Bloomers campaign manager, claimed "South Carolina is not going to matter" and that "Super Tuesday is going to be really definitional for this race."

The Real Clear Politics polling average for South Carolina has Biden way ahead again because of a just-released poll from Monmouth. The polling average has Biden at 34.3%, Bernie at 20.0%, Steyer at 14.0% and no one else in double-digits. Here's the Monmouth poll released yesterday (including changes since their October survey):

• Status Quo Joe- 36% (+3)
• Bernie- 16% (+4)
• Steyer- 15% (+11)
• Elizabeth- 8% (-8)
• Mayo- 6 (+3)
• Klobuchar- 1% (flat)
• undecided- 15% (flat)

Biden is going on Chris Wallace's Sunday show on Fox to declare that he's the comeback kid after the (expected) big win among elderly rural voters who think he's the second coming of Obama and are largely unaware that his political foundations are completely steeped in racism. (Trump will make sure they know if Biden makes it to November.) So will these folks change the Super Tuesday dynamic across the country? I doubt it. Bloomberg's folks agree with me that it won't and Bernie is doing his own thing and largely ignoring the increasingly vicious and desperate squabbling in the conservative lane. He knows he'll have to fight one of them in the end-- probably at a brokered convention-- and is just trying to pile up as many delegates as he can while they work at undercutting each other.

Mayo Pete (Twerp) is also keeping his nose to the grindstone, with a strategy of forgetting about winning any Super Tuesday states and instead targeting a few congressional districts where he thinks he can eke out a few delegates, like he did in Nevada.

Buttigieg’s campaign said in a memo that its objective on March 3 is to “minimize” Sanders’ margins and maximize “delegate accumulation by [congressional] district, not states.” Anticipating a drawn-out primary process, Buttigieg is looking to survive deeper into the calendar, making it to mid-March contests in the Midwest that might provide more opportunities for him.

Buttigieg is focusing on selected districts in smaller media markets throughout the country to rack up delegates, from Austin, Texas and its suburbs to San Diego, northern Maine, and other locales where Democrats flipped House seats in 2018. But it’s a risky strategy to maintain momentum, and that risk is born out of necessity.

...“Pick a place and try for a win. Otherwise, if you’re playing just to pick off delegates, then that’s what you say if you’re in trouble,” the strategist said, granted anonymity to discuss the issue candidly. “If it’s a math game, then you’re just doing it to be at the convention, and you’re not playing to win.”

In its memo, Buttigieg’s campaign pledged to “limit Sanders’ delegate lead to no more than 350 pledged delegates.” States on Super Tuesday account for about a third of the total delegates handed out in the Democratic presidential race.

“How many districts are each candidate hitting threshold and by what margin? To me, that’s the most important question on Super Tuesday,” said Michael Halle, an adviser to the Buttigieg campaign. “You gain the most efficiency by becoming viable.”

But even among his supporters, there’s a fear that Buttigieg’s best days in the presidential race already happened.

“We’re definitely worried about him not making it to Maryland,” which votes in late April, said Raina Chambers, a 49-year-old from Beltsville, Maryland, who saw Buttigieg speak in Arlington, Va., on Sunday.

Her husband, Michael Chambers, added, “but if Pete doesn’t make it, I’d be fine with Michael Bloomberg, too.”

No doubt. Most Mayo Pete supporters would be just fine with any status quo piece of shit, if not Bloomberg, then Biden or Klobuchar or Mark Warner of Chris Coons... anyone who doesn't champion the working class. Hey, what about John Delaney or Michael Bennett? Why is no one talking about digging up Frackenlooper?

As for that convention... the NY Times went into fantasyland yesterday. Don Beyer (New Dem-VA) is a multimillionaire, a status quo politician who would never feel comfortable around a President Bernie. "At some point you could imagine saying, 'Let’s go get Mark Warner, Chris Coons, Nancy Pelosi,' he said, while preparing to introduce the former Mayor Pete Buttigieg of South Bend., Ind., at a campaign event near his home on Sunday. 'Somebody that could win and we could all get behind and celebrate.'" Drunk? Insane? Fatally conservative? All of the above?

Dozens of interviews with Democratic establishment leaders this week show that they are not just worried about Mr. Sanders’s candidacy, but are also willing to risk intraparty damage to stop his nomination at the national convention in July if they get the chance. Since Mr. Sanders’s victory in Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, The Times has interviewed 93 party officials-- all of them superdelegates, who could have a say on the nominee at the convention-- and found overwhelming opposition to handing the Vermont senator the nomination if he arrived with the most delegates but fell short of a majority.

Jay Jacobs, the New York State Democratic Party chairman and a superdelegate, echoing many others interviewed, said that superdelegates should choose a nominee they believed had the best chance of defeating Mr. Trump if no candidate wins a majority of delegates during the primaries. Mr. Sanders argued that he should become the nominee at the convention with a plurality of delegates, to reflect the will of voters, and that denying him the nomination would enrage his supporters and split the party for years to come.

“Bernie wants to redefine the rules and just say he just needs a plurality,” Mr. Jacobs said. “I don’t think we buy that. I don’t think the mainstream of the Democratic Party buys that. If he doesn’t have a majority, it stands to reason that he may not become the nominee.”

While there is no widespread public effort underway to undercut Mr. Sanders, arresting his rise has emerged as the dominant topic in many Democratic circles. Some are trying to act well before the convention: Since Mr. Sanders won Nevada’s caucuses on Saturday, four donors have approached former Representative Steve Israel of New York to ask if he can suggest someone to run a super PAC aimed at blocking Mr. Sanders. He declined their offer.

Others are urging former President Barack Obama to get involved to broker a truce-- either among the four moderate candidates or between the Sanders and establishment wings, according to three people familiar with those conversations.

William Owen, a D.N.C. member from Tennessee, suggested that if Mr. Obama was unwilling, his wife, Michelle, could be nominated as vice president, giving the party a figure they could rally behind.

People close to Mr. Obama say he has no intention of getting involved in the primary contest, seeing his role as less of a kingmaker than as a unifying figure to help heal party divisions once Democrats settle on a nominee. He also believed that the Democratic Party shouldn’t engage in smoke-filled-room politics, arguing that those kinds of deals would have prevented him from capturing the nomination when he ran against Hillary Clinton in 2008.

“If Bernie gets a plurality and nobody else is even close and the superdelegates weigh in and say, ‘We know better than the voters,’ I think that will be a big problem,” said Representative Pramila Jayapal of Washington state, a Sanders supporter who is co-chairwoman of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Others in the party view Mr. Sanders as such an existential threat that they see stopping him from winning the nomination as less risky than a public convention fight. Many feared that putting Mr. Sanders on the top of the ticket could cost Democrats the political gains of the Trump era, a period when the party won control of the House, took governor’s mansions in deep red states and flipped statehouses across the country.

Aside from Mark Warner, one of the richest politicians in America and a conservative, Chris Coons, the Delaware conservaDem who is a Bidenesque character but not senile, and Pelosi, the second most hated politician in America after Mitch McConnell, other fantasies brought forward by The Times include Sherrod Brown and Kamala Harris.

Jack Holmes, politics editor at Esquire on that Times rubbish: "For all the worried talk of Sanders as another George McGovern, a chaotic convention where the delegate leader is jettisoned for someone chosen by The Folks Behind the Curtain could shake the public's faith in the Democratic ticket nearly as much as McGovern's display of catastrophic judgment in the Eagleton Affair. More to the point, these Wise Men of the Democratic Party are not, at least as they appear in The Times, particularly wise. A number of them seem to think they can randomly choose a person who is not running to be the nominee... There seems to be an overwhelming sense among delegates to the Democratic National Convention that the election can only be won by sticking to the old ways, by returning to the Before Times. What no one seems willing to contemplate is that we are never going back. There is no normal to go back to. Just as NeverTrump Republicans have mostly convinced themselves he's an aberration within their party, it seems the Democratic Establishment has convinced itself he is not the symptom of any deeper, structural problems in how we run our shop. There was something so fundamentally broken in this country that we elected a racist game-show host over a former Secretary of State the last time, and now a man who calls himself a democratic socialist-- whose actual policies are more New Deal Democrat-- is winning the primary race. Maybe it's because he's promising to transform the way we do things in a country where the actual voting public doesn't seem to like how things are done."

Remember a few paragraphs up you read "William Owen, a D.N.C. member from Tennessee, suggested that if Mr. Obama was unwilling, his wife, Michelle, could be nominated as vice president, giving the party a figure they could rally behind?" Maybe The Times should have introduced him by explaining that Owens is a Republican donor and healthcare lobbyist. You know... just for a little context. The Intercept's Lee Fang reported that Owen runs a lobbying firm-- Asset & Equity Corporations-- which helped finance right-wing Republican senators Mike Rounds (SD), Dan Sullivan (AK) and Mitch McConnell (KY) last year. Confronted by Fang, Owen said "I am a committed Democrat but as a lobbyist, there are times when I need to have access to both sides and the way to get access quite often is to make campaign contributions. I’m a registered lobbyist and I represent clients and they have interest in front of Congress and I attend the Senator’s Classic, which is a Republican event, each year." Why should Owen be a DNC member, a super-delegate or someone with any power whatsoever in determining who the nominee is?

Sunday: Bernie appears at the L.A. Convention Center with Public Enemy, Sarah Silverman and Dick Van Dyke. 5pm, although doors open at 3pm. I bet they'll be registering voters.

THE TWERP

Pete 5 by Nancy Ohanian

The RealClearPolitics national polling average shows Mayo Pete in 5th place with negative momentum. He's also in 5th place with negative momentum in South Carolina, in 5th place in California, 5th place in Texas and 5th place in North Carolina. The newest poll from The Economist by YouGov shows only 24% of Democrats are even considering voting for him and that he's the first choice of just 8% of Democrats (and second choice of just 5%). 60% of registered voters say he would lose to Trump. Only 4% of Democratic primary voters thought he won the last debate.

But unless Bloomberg pays him off, Mayo Pete, who appears to be coming down with coronavirus and is already cancelling live appearances, will never drop out. He'll always harbor some hope that he could somehow be part of a compromise at a brokered convention. And besides, what better does he have do? He has nothing going for him, the way, say Amy Klobuchar does, who will go back to the Senate when this is over. The security establishment that's behind Mayo, can't exactly give him any gainful employment while Trump is in charge and I doubt McKinsey would take him back now.

On Monday, Norman Solomon discussed how a generally innocuous Mayo Pete turned into the nasty twerp who has become a vile anti-Bernie attack machine. Desperate after his terrible performance in the Nevada caucuses, Mayo, with his record of ugly racism as a mayor, accused Bernie of being "narrow" and "not inclusive." Solomon wrote that "Buttigieg has gone from pseudo-progressive to anti-progressive in the last year, and much of his current mission involves denouncing Bernie Sanders with attack lines that are corporate-media favorites ('ideological purity. . . call people names online. . . a narrow and hardcore base'). Buttigieg’s chances of winning the 2020 presidential nomination are now tiny, but he might have a bright future as a rising leader of corporate Democrats. Weirdly, Buttigieg’s claim that Sanders has 'a narrow and hardcore base' came from someone who appears to be almost incapable of getting votes from black people. In Nevada, columnist E.J. Dionne noted, Buttigieg 'received virtually no African American votes.' And Buttigieg made his claim in the midst of a Nevada vote count showing that Sanders received more than three times as many votes as he did. The Washington Post reported that Sanders 'even narrowly prevailed among those who identified as moderate or conservative.' ...[The Twerp's] mission is being steadily repurposed. After increasingly aligning himself with the dominant corporate sectors of the party-- vacuuming up millions of dollars in bundled checks along the way-- Buttigieg is hurling an array of bogus accusations at Sanders."

Solomon had noted previously that Twerpy is a corporate whore gobbling up massive contributions from the health insurance, pharmaceutical and hospital industries for his stand against government-provided healthcare for the working class. Solomon noted that he is nothing but "a glib ally of corporate America posing as an advocate for working people and their families."

Since then, continuing his rightward swerve, Buttigieg has become even more glib, refining his campaign’s creation myth and fine-tuning his capacity to combine corporate policy positions with wispy intimations of technocratic populism. Buttigieg is highly articulate, very shrewd-- and now, in attack mode, more valuable than ever to corporate patrons who are feverishly trying to figure out how to prevent Sanders from winning the nomination. During last week’s Nevada debate, Buttigieg warned that Sanders “wants to burn this party down.”

Over the weekend, the Buttigieg campaign sent out email that tried to obscure its major support from extremely wealthy backers. “At the last debate,” Buttigieg’s deputy campaign manager Hari Sevugan wrote indignantly, “Senator Bernie Sanders condemned us for taking contributions from billionaires. That’s interesting. Because what that tells us is in the eyes of Bernie Sanders, the donations of 45 folks (that’s .0054% of our total donor base) are more important than the donations of nearly 1,000,000 grassroots supporters.”

But Sevugan left out the pivotal roles that very rich contributors have played in launching and sustaining the Buttigieg campaign, with lobbyists and corporate executives serving as high-dollar collectors of bundled donations that add up to untold millions. Buttigieg’s corresponding shifts in policy prescriptions make some sense if we follow the money.

In a detailed article that appeared last week, “Buttigieg Is a Wall Street Democrat Beholden to Corporate Interests,” former Communications Workers of America chief economist Kenneth Peres summed up: “Buttigieg and his supporters like to portray him as a ‘change agent.’ However, he has proven to be a change agent that will not in any significant way challenge the current distribution of power, wealth and income in this country. Given his history, it is no surprise that Wall Street, Big Tech, Big Pharma, Health Insurers, Real Estate Developers and Private Equity have decided to invest millions of dollars into Buttigieg’s campaign.”

In the aftermath of the Nevada caucuses, Buttigieg is escalating his attacks on Sanders (who I actively support), in sync with “news” coverage that is especially virulent from some major corporate outlets. Consider, for example, the de facto smear article that the New York Times printed on Sunday. Or the venomous hostility toward Sanders that’s routine on Comcast-owned MSNBC, which has stepped up its routine trashing of Sanders by journalists and invited guests.

More than ever, corporate Democrats and their media allies are freaking out about the grassroots momentum of the Bernie 2020 campaign. No one has figured out how to stop him. But Buttigieg is determined to do as much damage as he can.

The Mayo Pete Twerp Team has been working in high gear trying to get a Hootie and the Blowfish reunion for his big March 2nd blowout rally. How'd that happen. Jon Reremy's GishGallop post may hold the key.

With the election season heating up, Democratic presidential nominee Bernie Sanders has just been greeted with another round of good news. The pioneering heavy metal band Megadeth has offered to play at Sanders’ upcoming rally before the next primary on Saturday, March 2nd in San Jose, California, and the Sanders campaign has enthusiastically accepted.

“This is a great opportunity for us to demonstrate the diversity of people who believe in a Sanders presidency,” said campaign manager Faiz Shakir, awkwardly forming a set of horns with his fingers for the cameras.

Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine was open about the profound role Sanders has played in his stormy life.

“For years, I held on to such intense anger. I could feel it eating my insides. So I drank to getaway. It took me decades to hit rock bottom, and then I bounced to fundamentalist Christianity and went completely off the deep end, even announcing at a show that Obama staged a mass shooting to take away guns,” he explained, sighing. “After that, I knew my meds were wrong. I went to my doctor, and we played with combinations and dosages until I stabilized.”

Mustaine shook visibly as he continued.

“My whole life I’ve been tossed around, too weak to stand without a crutch-- first alcohol, then religion. The things I see Bernie doing, though, it’s unbelievable. It’s inspirational. I want to be part of the team that helps people instead of hiding behind my couch with a gun, muttering to an invisible man and hoping things magically get better. This is a crutch I can really stand behind.”

Sanders took a moment to comment on Mustaine’s journey, saying, “the young man has had it rough. He’s fought his demons, but he’s a better man. I believe in him, and I am proud to have him by my side. Peace sells, and the American people are buying!”

Guest Post By Mayo Pete

Everyone I know has come to absolutely hate Mayo Pete, mostly due to the fact that he's a plastic phony careerist running for president because of himself, not because of the American people. Was he always such a creep? When he was a senior in high school closeted young Pete won the John F Kennedy Presidential Library's annual Profiles in Courage Essay Contest. This was Mayo Pete in 2000. Please read it and then hink about how far backwards he's fallen in 20 years!

In this century, there are a daunting number of important issues which are to be confronted if we are to progress as a nation. Each must be addressed thoroughly and energetically. But in order to accomplish the collective goals of our society, we must first address how we deal with issues. We must reexamine the psychological and political climate of American politics. As it stands, our future is at risk due to a troubling tendency toward cynicism among voters and elected officials. The successful resolution of every issue before us depends on the fundamental question of public integrity.

A new attitude has swept American politics. Candidates have discovered that it is easier to be elected by not offending anyone rather than by impressing the voters. Politicians are rushing for the center, careful not to stick their necks out on issues. Most Democrats shy away from the word “liberal” like a horrid accusation. Republican presidential hopeful George W. Bush uses the centrist rhetoric of “compassionate conservatism” while Pat Buchanan, once considered a mainstream Republican, has been driven off the ideological edge of the GOP. Just as film producers shoot different endings and let test audiences select the most pleasing, some candidates run “test platforms” through sample groups to see which is most likely to win before they speak out on a major issue. This disturbing trend reveals cynicism, a double-sided problem, which is perhaps the greatest threat to the continued success of the American political system.

Cynical candidates have developed an ability to outgrow their convictions in order to win power. Cynical citizens have given up on the election process, going to the polls at one of the lowest rates in the democratic world. Such an atmosphere inevitably distances our society from its leadership and is thus a fundamental threat to the principles of democracy. It also calls into question what motivates a run for office-- in many cases, apparently, only the desire to occupy it. Fortunately for the political process, there remain a number of committed individuals who are steadfast enough in their beliefs to run for office to benefit their fellow Americans. Such people are willing to eschew political and personal comfort and convenience because they believe they can make a difference. One outstanding and inspiring example of such integrity is the country’s only independent congressman, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders.

Sanders’s courage is evident in the first word he uses to describe himself: “socialist.” In a country where “communism” is still the dirtiest of ideological dirty words, in a climate where even liberalism is considered radical, and socialism is immediately and perhaps willfully confused with communism, a politician dares to call himself a socialist? He does indeed. Here is someone who has “looked into his own soul” and expressed an ideology, the endorsement of which, in today’s political atmosphere, is analogous to a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Even though he has lived through a time in which an admitted socialist could not act in a film, let alone hold a congressional seat, Sanders is not afraid to be candid about his political persuasion.

After numerous political defeats in his traditionally Republican state, Sanders won the office of mayor of Burlington by ten votes. A successful and popular mayor, he went on to win Vermont’s one congressional seat in 1990. Since then, he has taken many courageous and politically risky stands on issues facing the nation. He has come under fire from various conservative religious groups because of his support for same-sex marriages. His stance on gun control led to NRA-organized media campaigns against him. Sanders has also shown creativity in organizing drug-shopping trips to Canada for senior citizens to call attention to inflated drug prices in the United States.

While impressive, Sanders’s candor does not itself represent political courage. The nation is teeming with outspoken radicals in one form or another. Most are sooner called crazy than courageous. It is the second half of Sanders’s political role that puts the first half into perspective: he is a powerful force for conciliation and bipartisanship on Capitol Hill. In Profiles in Courage, John F. Kennedy wrote that “we should not be too hasty in condemning all compromise as bad morals. For politics and legislation are not matters for inflexible principles or unattainable ideals.” It may seem strange that someone so steadfast in his principles has a reputation as a peacemaker between divided forces in Washington, but this is what makes Sanders truly remarkable. He represents President Kennedy’s ideal of “compromises of issues, not of principles.”

Sanders has used his unique position as the lone independent congressman to help Democrats and Republicans force hearings on the internal structure of the International Monetary Fund, which he sees as excessively powerful and unaccountable. He also succeeded in quietly persuading reluctant Republicans and President Clinton to ban the import of products made by underage workers. Sanders drew some criticism from the far left when he chose to grudgingly endorse President Clinton’s bids for election and reelection as president. Sanders explained that while he disagreed with many of Clinton’s centrist policies, he felt that he was the best option for America’s working class.

Sanders’s positions on many difficult issues are commendable, but his real impact has been as a reaction to the cynical climate which threatens the effectiveness of the democratic system. His energy, candor, conviction, and ability to bring people together stand against the current of opportunism, moral compromise, and partisanship which runs rampant on the American political scene. He and a few others like him have the power to restore principle and leadership in Congress and to win back the faith of a voting public weary and wary of political opportunism. Above all, I commend Bernie Sanders for giving me an answer to those who say American young people see politics as a cesspool of corruption, beyond redemption. I have heard that no sensible young person today would want to give his or her life to public service. I can personally assure you this is untrue.

Let me switch gears for a moment. Blue America vets congressional candidates and one of the screens we apply is a tough one on us to get it right. We want to know how courageous candidates will be when they confront the swamp that is Congress. Sure, we expect all of our candidates to be good on issues-- like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, for example-- but political courage is essential. We made a grievous error at one time-- until recently in fact-- by assuming that someone has been in the military and had shown courage there, they would do the same in Congress. The vets among the Class of 2018 are among the most cowardly, in a political sense, we have ever observed. Most of them are more prone to do what they're told by the House leadership and to calculate political career advantage than ever take any kind of a principled stand. I have seen the polar opposite of freshmen veterans like Max Rose, Elaine Luria, Gil Cisneros, Chrissy Houlahan, Jason Crow and Jared Golden-- the biggest disappointment since we endorsed him based on what we thought was courageousness. We've revamped the screening process and I doubt a Jared Golden would ever slip through again. Meanwhile, apropo of nothing, I wanted to pass along that among a super-courageous bunch of candidates, the one that has amazed me consistently and the most often in terms of courageousness is Eva Putzova. I also noticed that Blue America members are probably seeing something like that too, since she had gotten the most in contributions through our members. She deserves the help. If you haven't chipped in yet-- or if you want to give more... that's what the thermometer is for. Oh-- and look who else noticed this week:

Mayo Pete Has Come Out Of The Closet Again!

Mayo Pete didn't come out of the closet until he was 33-- in 2015, when he was in electoral politics and there was no doubt he would be outed if he didn't do it himself. Last year, when he wasn't a top candidate, the New York Times' Jeremy Peters wrote the LGBTQ story on Pete. He doesn't talk about the inherent mental illness of hiding in the closet for years and how it turns someone into a compulsive liar. "The closet that Pete Buttigieg built for himself in the late 1990s and 2000s," wrote Peters (who is openly gay himself), "was a lot like the ones that other gay men of his age and ambition hid inside. He dated women, deepened his voice and furtively looked at MySpace and Friendster profiles of guys who had come out-- all while wondering when it might be safe for him to do so too."

By the late 1960s, the stigma attached to being gay-- earlier than that a admission to being an outlaw if not a misfit-- had largely dissipated in many circles and was already starting to break down. When I told my mother-- a blue collar woman who may or may not have graduated from high school-- in the early '70s that I was gay, she asked me if that meant I would be borrowing her wig. Peters claims it was still professionally "unsafe" to admit being gay decades later. There have always been many more cowards-- like Mayo Pete-- than people with courage.

Peters writes that Pete "struggled for a decade after leaving Harvard to overcome the fear that being gay was 'a career death sentence,' as he put it in his memoir." When I ran first Sire and then Reprise Records, I helped many men and women struggling with coming out. Coming out, in my experience, never ruined any of my artists' careers. I know Mayo's type-- untrustworthy, sneaky, self-deceptive... completely unfit to lead. His coming out came almost 40 years after it was "safe" for anyone with a spine.

Many in his generation and in his college class decided to come out as young adults, whether they were confident they would be accepted or not, and had their 20s to navigate being open about their identity-- a process that helped make Americans more aware and accepting of their gay friends, family members and co-workers. Instead, Mr. Buttigieg spent those years trying to reconcile his private life with his aspirations for a high-profile career in public service.

Attitudes toward gay rights changed immensely during that period, though he acknowledges that he was not always able or willing to see what broader social and legal shifts meant for him personally.

...He took a longer journey than his peers did, he has said, because of the inner turmoil he experienced over whether in fact he wanted to be known as the “gay” politician.

...One thing no one seemed to peg him for was someone wrestling with being gay. He was so discreet that many of his friends and classmates said in interviews that they never would have guessed he was hiding anything until he told them. He left the testosterone-fueled campus sex banter to others. Hegel and de Tocqueville were more to his conversational tastes.

“His sexuality didn’t present as a really big thing in his life,” said Joe Flood, a classmate. “I think he always thought about himself politically,” he added, noting that Mr. Buttigieg would become active in the university’s Institute of Politics, an organization at the Kennedy School of Government that hosted big-name politicians like Senator Edward M. Kennedy and Howard Dean during their time in school. “You don’t end up there accidentally,” Mr. Flood said.

When he first ran for mayor in 2011 and won, he was closeted. A local gay rights group did not initially endorse him in that race, opting instead for a candidate with a more established track record on the issues. Mr. Buttigieg endured some awkward moments, like signing a city law banning discrimination based on sexual orientation in 2012. To not think about how the law directly affected him, he acknowledged, “took a little compartmentalization.”

Over the weekend, though, Mayo came out of a different closet-- the Austerity closet of conservatism which many Democrats have seen him oozing out of in the last few months as he tried deciding if he was progressive or reactionary, ultimately connecting the dots between the billionaires and multimillionaires who have been willing to fund him and leaving all pretenses of progressivism behind. He's now a full-on contender, along with Status Quo Joe, Klobuchar and Bloomberg, for the conservative lane in the primary.

NBC News' Sahil Kapur noted over the weekend that Mayo is calling on Democrats "to get more serious about lowering the national debt, portraying himself as the biggest fiscal hawk in the presidential field and taking a shot at chief New Hampshire rival Bernie Sanders for being too spendthrift." Phony Austerity is a hallmark of conservative politics and Mayo is embracing it as fully as he eventually embraced his long-hidden homosexuality.

Asked at a town hall here how important the deficit is to him, Buttigieg said it's "important" and vowed to focus on limiting the debt even though it's "not fashionable in progressive circles."

"I think the time has come for my party to get a lot more comfortable owning this issue, because I see what's happening under this president-- a $1 trillion deficit-- and his allies in Congress do not care. So we have to do something about it," Buttigieg, the former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, said in a packed middle school gym, drawing cheers.

...Buttigieg's remarks are out of step with plenty of progressives who believe Democrats are easily duped by conservatives into focusing on deficit reduction at the expense of their priorities when they control the presidency.

The deficit has risen sharply under President Donald Trump, as it did under his GOP predecessors George W. Bush and Ronald Reagan, all of whom enacted tax cuts and boosted defense spending. It fell under Democrats Barack Obama and Bill Clinton.

But cutting the deficit has not been a focus of the 2020 Democratic field, leaving an opening for Buttigieg to claim that mantle. He echoed fiscal hawks Sunday in arguing that higher deficits strain prospects for investment.

"It's not fashionable in progressive circles to talk too much about the debt, largely because of the irritation to the way it's been used as an excuse against investment. But if we're spending more and more on debt service now, it makes it harder to invest in infrastructure and health and safety net that we need right now," he said. "And also this expansion, which I think of as, by the way, just the 13th inning of the Obama economic expansion. It isn't going to go on forever."

Buttigieg hasn't laid out a plan to significantly lower the national debt, which could require steep tax hikes or cuts in cherished programs like Social Security.

Asked to back up Buttigieg's claim to fiscal responsibility, a campaign aide pointed to a recent study by the Progressive Policy Institute that says the tax revenues Buttigieg has proposed to raise would narrowly exceed his new spending.

Stephanie Kelton, an economics professor at Stony Brook University in New York who is a senior economic adviser to Sanders, fired back at Buttigieg.

The Sanders campaign responded by suggesting Buttigieg was in the pocket of big donors.

“In a blatant effort to appease his billionaire donors, Pete Buttigieg is now parroting the same corporate talking points to justify cuts to Social Security and Medicare that have been used for decades-- cuts that Bernie Sanders has fought to block,” Sanders communications director Mike Casca told NBC News. “This is part of a pattern: Buttigieg used to support Medicare for All, then he raked in huge donations from top pharmaceutical executives, and now suddenly he's against Medicare for All.”

Predictably, scumbag billionaire Steve Rattner, who will do anything and everything he can to derail Bernie, purred that "Finally, a Democratic presidential candidate acknowledges that the deficit/debt is a huge problem that will need to be dealt with."

Is it any wonder that Russian oligarch Leonid Blavatnik-- a big-time Trump financial supporter-- is now helping fund Mayo?

Oops! Wrong oligarch

Bernie-- The Electability Candidate... As Well As The Candidate With The Best Agenda

He Can Do It (detail] by Nancy Ohanian

Tomorrow's the first-in-the-nation primary: New Hampshire. Bernie is looking like a winner there again, something that will be hard for the Establishment to write off as "he's just a neighbor" because of how poorly Elizabeth Warren and Deval Patrick, also neighbors, seem to be faring. The polling pretty much all shows Bernie polling in first place. Yesterday, CBS News released their last New Hampshire primary poll, which reflects Mayo Pete's bounce from Iowa. They report that Bernie is first at 29% support among likely voters (up two points from January) while Mayo Pete is at 25%-- having gained 12 points since then. Mayo's recent gains come at the expense of Status Quo Joe's collapsing campaign; he is now at just 12% and is more likely to come in fifth than third.

• Bernie- 29% (up 2)
• Mayo- 25% (up 12)
• Elizabeth- 17% (down 1)
• Status Quo Joe- 12% (down 13)
• Klobuchar- 10% (up 3)
• Tulsi- 2% (up 1)
• Yang- 1% (down 1)
• Steyer- 1% (down 2)
• Deval Patrick- 1% (flat)
• Michael Bennet- 0% (flat)

The poll shows that Bernie's voters are far more enthusiastic than Mayo's (68% to 47%), which could lead to a blow-out for Bernie, his voters showing up at the polls, while the Pete voters not bothering, especially after the barrage of attacks Mayo has suffered all week.

NPR reports that Mayo is getting beaten like a dusty rug-- and from every direction. Biden and Klobuchar, who are competing with Mayo for the conservative lane, have gone after him with the greatest vehemence, even though the 3 of them all basically stand for the same Republican-light, pro-Austerity agenda. NPR reported that Status Quo Joe "launched the most pointed attacks." This vicious ad-- in which Biden's ad-makers lie about Biden's own record and tell the truth about Mayo's could be devastating-- if Biden had the money to run it on TV; he doesn't.





"[D]uring a rare gaggle with reporters, Biden emphasized the point. 'I do not believe we're a party at risk if they nominate me, and I do believe we're a party at risk if we nominate someone who's never held a higher office than mayor of South Bend, Indiana,' he said. When asked whether it was fair to compare his spat with Buttigieg with Hillary Clinton's similar criticism of Barack Obama in 2008, Biden said, 'Oh come on, man, this guy's not Barack Obama.'"

Mayo had a good comeback on Jake Tapper's show yesterday: "Neither is he." That might be the truest thing Mayo said all campaign. Meanwhile one of his press flacks added that "The Vice President's decision to run this ad speaks more to where he currently stands in this race than it does about Pete's perspective as a mayor and a veteran." No one mentioned "veteran," even though it's becoming more and more obvious to more and more people that Mayo's stint as a Naval Reserve intelligence officer was all about creating a résumé point and not much about serving the country.

Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who's eager to gain support from the kind of moderate voters who back Buttigieg, also piled on with criticisms of Buttigieg's experience.

"We have a newcomer in the White House and look where it got us," she said on the debate stage Friday night. "I think having some experience is a good thing."

Jason Sattler (@LOLGOP) had a very different take take than most in the mainstream media and he shared it with USA Today readers on Sunday morning: Moderate Democrats have a duty to consider Sanders. He has a clear path to beating Trump. He wrote that Bernie isn't his favorite senator running for the 2020 nomination but that he sees his potential to unite the Democratic Party and oust Trump. Bernie is the most electable and moderates-- if not actual conservatives who get called moderates-- should come out of their self- and media-inflicted delusions. Addressing moderates, Sattler wrote, "If you believe in saving democracy, the courts and the planet, and reversing the unrepentant cruelty, corruption and carelessness that define the current administration, you have a duty to at least consider the candidacy of the most popular senator in America, the top fundraiser in the Democratic primaries, and the man who has generally beaten Trump in head-to-head polls for five years now.

Establishment Democrats seem to live in terror of reliving the 1972 presidential election, when a triangulating Richard Nixon crushed lefty George McGovern. But two much more recent nightmares-- 2000 and 2016-- are far more instructive. When Democrats fail to bring their left-most flank into the fold, Republicans are able to swipe elections.

Beyond his ability to woo the party’s most reluctant supporters, the best case for the strength of Sanders' candidacy is that pretty much every argument against him ends up pointing to why he may be uniquely electable.

Claims that “Nobody likes him” in Washington, or that he can’t overcome his socialist branding, ignore what sets him apart from others. Brian Fallon, former spokesperson for the Hillary Clinton, calls it an “authenticity factor.”

Nobody likes politicians; this is why they play the foil in ad after ad, even in ads for career politicians. Bernie may be a lot of things, but he’s no one’s idea of a Capitol Hill slick.

Yes, Sanders is not a Democrat. Neither are most voters. Independent is the most popular party affiliation in America by far.

Last year Pete Buttigieg himself made a solid yet obvious point. “If we embrace a conservative agenda, you know what they're going to do?” he said. Republicans will say "we’re a bunch of crazy socialists. So let’s stand up for the right policy, go up there and defend it.”

If every Democrat is going to be called a socialist, maybe the one who has spent decades dealing with this charge is our best choice. And given that four in 10 Americans can’t afford a $400 emergency, you can argue that the best candidate to run against Trump-- a walking monument to the dangers of inherited wealth-- is a candidate who has spent decades warning against the evils of an economy where the top 0.1% own as much as the bottom 90%.

Perhaps the most ridiculous claim is that Bernie hasn’t accomplished enough.

This ignores the more than 200 bills he’s co-sponsored that became law-- including the 2014 Veterans Access, Choice and Accountability Act he negotiated with conservative lawmakers John McCain and Jeff Miller to reform the Veterans Administration. (Trump loves that law so much that he often takes credit for it himself.)

2020 Democrats:In New Hampshire primary, could Pete Buttigieg end Joe Biden’s 50-year political career?

And it's practically libelous to disregard Sanders' transformative impact on American politics. He has helped lead the Democratic Party into a renaissance of fighting for big things for working-class Americans. He’s one of the greatest champions of the $15 minimum wage, a movement that has swept many states and helped drive income gains among the poorest workers.

Claims that he promises too much “free stuff” ignore that Democrats have failed when they’ve promised too little.

Supposed big ticket items like free college and universal pre-K may seem overly generous, but they’re just rounding errors compared to the recent increases in the defense budget combined with the massive tax cuts for corporations passed by Trump’s GOP. And while Medicare for All’s popularity rises and falls in polls, it would be a strong selling point if the entire Democratic Party got behind it and made the case that it would lead to higher wages.

None of this is meant to endorse any sort of hostage-taking “Bernie or bust” mentality.

His followers’ occasional threats to withhold support for their non-preferred nominee are as unconscionable as they’d be from anyone who should oppose Trump, given the purposeful damage this president gleefully does to the most vulnerable. This spite-- along with a sometimes creepy hostility toward “normie” Democrats and a willingness to traffic in conspiratorial thinking that invests mystical sway in a sometimes comically inept Democratic National Committee-- offers some evidence that this movement may lack the coalition-building potential necessary to defeat Trump.

From now on, anything goes: Senate acquittals of President Donald Trump leave a damaging legacy.

But this divisiveness does not often appear in Sanders himself, who has a proven distaste for distractions like Hillary Clinton's “damn emails.”

Like the vast majority of Sanders supporters in the 2016 election, I’d gladly vote for any Democratic nominee over Trump. This senator isn’t even my favorite senator running for the nomination. Yet one reason I have to seriously consider Sanders is that he has the clearest path to uniting the Democratic Party and ousting the evil clown in the Oval Office.

And if you only care about winning, you can’t ignore that.

I Wouldn't Trust A Word That Comes Out Of Mayo Pete's Mouth, Would You?

Biden brags about his illusory accomplishments nearly as much as Amy Klobuchar brags about hers. (Most of what Biden says is patently false or exaggerated beyond credibility. In the ad above he did not lead the passage of the Affordable Care Act; he didn't have anything substantive to do with the Iran deal; he did not have anything to do with saving the auto industry; he did not lead the passage and the implementation of the Recovery Act or save us from a Depression; he passed neither the Assault Weapons Ban nor the Violence Against Women Act.) So, yeah, he's doing it again in the ad above. But that isn't why we're looking at this ad tonight. I embedded it because of how hilariously Biden's ad-maker handled slick Indiana sad sack Mayo Pete.

Biden and Mayo are fighting for the conservative lane in the primary which will probably belong to Republican oligarch Michael "Mini-Me" Bloomberg in the end anyway. Biden never won an election outside of Delaware, a state with less than a million people, and the most votes he ever got was in 2008 when he took 257,484 votes in the midst of the presidential election. Other than that anomaly, the most votes he won on his own was in 1996 when he took 165,465 votes. How did he become Vice president? Obama won the election and Biden was put in the ticket because of his conservatism and whiteness. Mayo never even won an election to anything (other than to head a glorified neighborhood council). The most votes he ever got was in 2010 when he lost a race-- 633,243 (37.5%) to 1,053,527 (62.5%)-- for Treasurer to GOP sociopath Richard Mourdock. His biggest win was the 2011 South Bend mayoralty (10,991 votes; notably he didn't draw as many votes for his 2015 reelection-- just 8,515 ). He lost both serious elections he tried to win. Biden's ad captures the essence of Mayo's bullshit campaign.

Meet Mr. Austerity-- the focus group responses must have changed

Tuesday is primary day in New Hampshire, the last of the nearly all-white states Mayo think he can win. Yesterday's CNN poll shows him winning in the conservative lane, but losing overall.

• Bernie- 28% (up 3)
• Mayo- 21% (up 6)
• Status Quo Joe- 11% (down 5)
• Elizabeth- 9% (down 3)
• Tulsi- 6% (up 1)
• Klobuchar- 5% (down 1)
• Yang- 3% (down 2)
• Steyer- 3% (up 1)
• Bloomberg- 2% (up 1)

Interesting factoid from the poll: when voters were asked to name a candidate they would not vote for under any circumstance, the people selecting Biden had grown significantly, from 11% in January to 17% (first place) today. Elizabeth is right behind him with 16% (up from 12% in January.). Of the top candidates, the only one whose numbers have gone down-- a good thing in this case-- is Bernie, who went from 13% in January to 11% now. Mayo went up from 1% to 3%.

Back to Mayo. Ipsos polled before and after the New Hampshire debate Friday. Bernie had the highest pre-debate favorability (67.7%) and the highest favorability after the debate (69.4%) and was viewed as having had theist debate performance (the winner).

Of the 5 top candidates, Biden had the worst night. He came in 5th for performance and his favorability dropped from 66.6% to 64.3%. What about Mayo? He was tied for second place with Klobuchar for debate performance and his favorability rose from 51.7% to a much more robust 56.9%, which is still way below Bernie, Biden and Elizabeth.

And who do voters feel is best equipped to beat Señor Trumpanzee? Before the debate it was Biden (63.5%) but after watching him in action, voters moved him way down to 58.7%. So, for the first time, Bernie is now viewed as the most electable against Trump. He went from 59.4% to 60.0%. Mayo also moved up, but from 47.4% to 49.9%.

So what about Mayo? Fortunately, people are beginning to catch on to the manufactured, plastic candidate-- and sharing the revelations with their circles: