The "Existential Battle" Is for Control of the Democratic Party

Steve Kornacki, MSNBC's so-called "numbers guy," visually misrepresents Sanders' strength against Trump, then lies about the erroneous graphic: "Elizabeth Warren, she’s been running second place, she is running second place on the Democratic side. She leads Trump by 5 points." The graphic shows that Kornacki is obviously wrong. Warren is in third place, and Sanders' margin against Trump is greater than Warren's.

by Thomas Neuburger

Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector. That’s what a vote for “change” would mean in 2020.
     –Matt Taibbi

We've been hearing quite a bit about how the 2020 election is an "existential battle" for control of the nation's future, and that Trump's re-election poses an "existential threat." For example:

Jennifer Rubin, Washington Post: "we are in a fight for our democracy and our decency; we are engaged in an existential battle to defend objective reality".

Chauncey DeVega, Salon: "Trump is promising an authoritarian "national renewal" to his white supporters through a fake populism that nurtures feelings of grievance and victimhood -- feelings that can only be remedied through loyalty to the Great Leader and Dear Father. Political violence will be necessary -- and is already taking place across the country -- because TrumpWorld and its members believe that they are in an existential battle for survival."

Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, reporting from Iowa: "In a mid-June appearance in Iowa, Biden tipped off reporters that he’d be making remarks about Trump. Dressed in dark-wash dad jeans and blue shirt, he became the 10,000th Democrat this year to call the president an 'existential threat.'"

That 2020 existential battle, of course, is always cast as between the Democrats and the Republicans.

But there's another existential battle going on, one that will occur before the main event — the battle for control of the Democratic Party. In the long run, that battle may turn out to be more important than the one that immediately follows it.

Matt Taibbi, from the same article:

[T]he undeniable truth is that the Democratic race is about Sanders. Most of the candidates either support Medicare for All or try to sound like they do. They also tend to support a $15 minimum wage and call for wealth taxes, a Green New Deal, antitrust actions, and some rejection of corporate donors. Even Joe Biden, he of the lengthy career deep-throating credit-card-industry bucks, has parroted Sanders’ anti-corporate themes, noting that the Constitution reads “ ‘We the People,’ not ‘We the Donors.’ ”

There is an irony in the fact that Sanders has become the bête noire of Clintonian politics, given that Sanders represents the culmination of Bill’s 1992 electoral formula: “Change versus more of the same.”

Decades later, this is no longer just a marketing formulation. About 20 of the candidates exist somewhere on the spectrum of traditional Democratic politics, with Klobuchar, Mayor Pete, and Biden on one side, and Warren on the more progressive end. Sanders is the revolutionary. His election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector. That’s what a vote for “change” would mean in 2020.

Before mainstream Democrats can begin the "existential battle" with the forces of Trump and Republicanism, they have to win the existential battle against the force that wants to force change on their own party.

They're engaged in that battle today, and it seems almost all of the "liberal media," sensing the existential nature of the threat, is helping them win it. Katie Halper, in a second perceptive piece on the media's obvious anti-Sanders bias, "MSNBC’s Anti-Sanders Bias Is Getting Truly Ridiculous," writes: "When MSNBC legal analyst Mimi Rocah (7/21/19) said that Bernie Sanders 'made [her] skin crawl,' though she 'can’t even identify for you what exactly it is,' she was just expressing more overtly the anti-Sanders bias that pervades the network."

Halper then documents instance after instance of this bias, from graphics that show Sanders in fourth place in a poll in which he placed second...

.@MSNBC just posted this poll.
Why is Bernie listed below Warren? pic.twitter.com/GD8nO0xMJO

— Geoff Campbell (MiamiGator) One of the Squad (@GeoffMiami) July 7, 2019

to Steve Kornacki presenting a different misleading graphic from a different poll, then reinforcing the visual error with a verbal lie (see above), to political analyst Zerlina Maxwell (and former Clinton staffer, though this was never mentioned) blaming Sanders on-air for not mentioning race until 23 minutes into a speech, when in fact he mentioned it at the five-minute mark.

Maxwell corrected her misrepresentation later when challenged about it...

.@ZerlinaMaxwell, I appreciate your work but you said Bernie didn't talk about race / gender until 23 min in.

At 3min: he thanked @shaunking for his work on criminal justice reform.

At 6min: he discussed fighting Trump's sexism + racism.

13min: he discussed mass incarceration. pic.twitter.com/x7B2F2PNhM

— Waleed Shahid (@_waleedshahid) March 2, 2019

...but only on Twitter, and only while reinforcing her scorn for Sanders.

MSNBC is clearly acting as a messaging arm of the Democratic Party mainstream in its battle with progressives in general and Sanders in particular, and Zerlina Maxwell, who's been variously employed by that mainstream, from her work with Clinton to her work on MSNBC, is an agent in that effort.

Let me repeat what Matt Taibbi wrote: "[Sanders'] election would mean a complete overhaul of the Democratic Party, forcing everyone who ever worked for a Clinton to look toward the private sector."

Before this election becomes a referendum on Trump, it will be a referendum on the Democratic Party, on whether voters in the Democratic primary, as many of them as are permitted to participate in it, will choose to continue the Party as currently constituted, or force on it sudden, radical and transformational change.

If the nation wishes true deliverance, not just from Trump and Republicans, but from the painful state that got Trump elected in the first place, it will first have to believe in a savior. 

Will it choose as its savior a radically overhauled Democratic Party? Or will it trust its salvation to a Party that, in the words of the Onion's fictional, but accurate Nancy Pelosi, offers as "our core 2020 argument" that "we are infinitesimally less objectionable than our opposition."

Welcome to the Democratic primary. In the long run, if mainstream Democrats win the first existential battle of 2020 and enter the second unreformed, how much of the nation will truly rally to their side and help them defeat the current Trump, or the next one, or the next one after that?

Will the nation still seek delivery from their pain, even after Trump is defeated, if indeed he is? And if they do, will they find it in an unreconstructed, money-driven Democratic Party, or go looking elsewhere again, perhaps to an elsewhere worse than the elsewhere the current Trump emerged from?
  

More Magic From Bernie Sanders-- An Economic Agenda

This morning, just before Bernie Sanders' official declaration of candidacy, John Harwood got to ask him 10 questions for CNBC. Here are a few of the most relevant to American voters looking for a better opportunity for the future:

HARWOOD: After the revolution, what does it look like? What do you see happening to the 1 percent?

SANDERS: What is my dream? My dream is, do we live in a country where 70 percent, 80 percent, 90 percent of the people vote? Where we have serious discourse on media rather than political gossip, by the way? Where we're debating trade policy, we're debating foreign policy, we're debating economic policy, where the American people actually know what's going on in Congress? Ninety-nine percent of all new income generated today goes to the top 1 percent. Top one-tenth of 1 percent owns as much as wealth as the bottom 90 percent. Does anybody think that that is the kind of economy this country should have? Do we think it's moral? So to my mind, if you have seen a massive transfer of wealth from the middle class to the top one-tenth of 1 percent, you know what, we've got to transfer that back if we're going to have a vibrant middle class. And you do that in a lot of ways. Certainly one way is tax policy.

HARWOOD: Have you seen some of the quotations from people on Wall Street, people in business? Some have even likened the progressive Democratic crusade to Hitler's Germany hunting down the Jews.

SANDERS: It's sick. And I think these people are so greedy, they're so out of touch with reality, that they can come up and say that. They think they own the world.

What a disgusting remark. I'm sorry to have to tell them, they live in the United States, they benefit from the United States, we have kids who are hungry in this country. We have people who are working two, three, four jobs, who can't send their kids to college. You know what? Sorry, you're all going to have to pay your fair share of taxes. If my memory is correct, when radical socialist Dwight D. Eisenhower was president, the highest marginal tax rate was something like 90 percent.

HARWOOD: When you think about 90 percent, you don't think that's obviously too high?

SANDERS: No. That's not 90 percent of your income, you know? That's the marginal. I'm sure you have some really right-wing nut types, but I'm not sure that every very wealthy person feels that it's the worst thing in the world for them to pay more in taxes, to be honest with you. I think you've got a lot of millionaires saying, "You know what? I've made a whole lot of money. I don't want to see kids go hungry in America. Yeah, I'll pay my fair share."

HARWOOD: If the changes that you envision in tax policy, in finance, breaking up the banks, were to result in a more equitable distribution of income, but less economic growth, is that trade-off worth making?

SANDERS: Yes. If 99 percent of all the new income goes to the top 1 percent, you could triple it, it wouldn't matter much to the average middle class person. The whole size of the economy and the GDP doesn't matter if people continue to work longer hours for low wages and you have 45 million people living in poverty. You can't just continue growth for the sake of growth in a world in which we are struggling with climate change and all kinds of environmental problems. All right? You don't necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country. I don't think the media appreciates the kind of stress that ordinary Americans are working on. People scared to death about what happens tomorrow. Half the people in America have less than $10,000 in savings. How do you like that? That means you have an automobile accident, you have an illness, you're broke. How do you retire if you have less than $10,000, and you don't have much in the way of Social Security?

Also this morning, as the clock ticked down to Bernie's 5pm rally in Burlington, MSNBC's Steve Kornacki made the case for his candidacy on the network's website, acknowledging that the challenge against Hillary-- "the most overwhelming non-incumbent front-runner either party has seen since the dawn of the modern nominating process"-- is Herculean. "[W]hile the odds that he’ll actually defeat her are vanishingly slim, he may nonetheless be better-positioned than any other Clinton challenger to at least make her break a sweat."

It’s easy to dismiss Sanders as nothing more than a niche candidate, an avowed “democratic socialist” with a diehard following on the far-left. Raising money will be a challenge and Sanders will rely heavily on modest contributions from grassroots donors. His outsider posture and distance from the Democratic establishment also means he won’t be reeling in many high-profile endorsements. (Just last week, Vermont’s Democratic governor, Peter Shumlin, snubbed Sanders and threw his support to Clinton.) Nor does Sanders have much of a campaign infrastructure in place right now.

But write him off completely at your own peril, because Sanders actually has a few things working in his favor. There’s his message, for one thing, a frontal assault on the political system and a pledge to directly combat the “billionaire class.” This is hardly new talk from Sanders, who has been on Capitol Hill for 24 years now, but the climate has shifted since the 2008 economic meltdown and income inequality, wealth concentration and corporate power are unusually prominent in the national debate. And with economic anxiety still high and rampant frustration with Washington’s paralysis, there’s a potentially wide opening for a damn-the-system crusade like Sanders is leading.

It’s more than that, though. There’s also his personality and his image – grumpy demeanor, disheveled appearance, disinterest in discussing anything not related to policy, contempt for personal questions. He is the antithesis of a packaged political candidate and his authenticity is a powerful tool. Look at it this way: Former Maryland Gov. Martin O’Malley, who is poised to join Sanders in the Democratic race later this week, is planning to stress many of the same economic themes as Sanders. But which one of them sounds like he means it more? Sanders’ team can’t afford polling yet, but they are quick to point to his strong favorable/unfavorable scores in public surveys as proof of his potential appeal.

In this sense, Clinton’s seeming invincibility makes her the ideal opponent for Sanders. All of the attributes that contribute to her strength-- her bottomless bankroll, her legion of high-powered endorsers, her extensive connections to the country’s financial elite, her marriage to a former president-- mark her as the embodiment of the political establishment against which Sanders defines himself. Plus, her strength has kept the Democratic Party’s brightest non-Hillary White House prospects-- like, say, Elizabeth Warren-- on the sidelines, making it easier for Sanders and his message to stand out.

His appeal is broader-- or potentially broader-- than most assume. In Vermont, Sanders has built a formidable coalition not only of Democrats and liberals but also of economically downscale conservative white voters. Here it’s worth noting that Sanders routinely votes against gun control measures and ventures into culture war politics rarely and grudgingly.

The good news for Sanders is that he’s gained more early polling traction than any of the other Clinton challengers-- O’Malley, former Virginia Senator James Webb, and former Rhode Island Governor Lincoln Chafee. He’s also shown himself to be a star on social media, where his policy ruminations regularly go viral, and his team bragged of bringing in $1.5 million in the 24 hours after his announcement of candidacy last month. His team hopes to raise $50 million this year-- not nearly enough to rival Clinton, of course, but plenty to build out full-fledged operations in all of the early primary and caucus states.

At a minimum, the Sanders team believes he’ll be able to emerge as the de facto non-Clinton candidate. Already, there are encouraging signs for them on this front. A recent Iowa poll put Sanders at 14%, more than O’Malley, Webb and Chafee combined; and a New Hampshire poll gave him 18%, more than doubling up the other three. (That said, he still trails Clinton by around 50 points.)

The venues for the lead-off contests are favorable for Sanders: Iowa and New Hampshire, two states with small, rural populations that aren’t too different from Vermont, where Sanders has now won ten statewide elections. The leftward, activist-oriented bent of Iowa’s Democratic caucus electorate is well established; it’s the state where Clinton finished in third place in 2008 the beginning of the end of her first presidential campaign. And right on Iowa’s heels will come New Hampshire, where Democrats already know Sanders as their next-door neighbor.

Realistically, Sanders could fare surprisingly well in these two states, knock the other non-Hillary candidates out of the race, then gobble up 20-to-30% in primaries and caucuses throughout the spring and arrive at the convention with hundreds of delegates-- enough to command attention and shape the platform.

Earlier today, we sort of asked if you believe in magic. Music and magic could help, but contributions from ordinary working people are what's going to give Bernie a chance to compete. Can you help?

Giuliani, A Serial Draft Dodger Who Was Raised By A Career Criminal, Claims Obama Isn't Like Him

Scott Walker surrogate Rudy Giuliani

Louisiana's clownish governor, Bobby Jindal-- does he still perform exorcisms?-- immediately chimed in how much he agrees with Rudy Guiliani that President Obama doesn't love America. No one asked and no one cared but he did get his name in the papers, albeit disparagingly. The Guiliani meltdown took place at a fundraiser for Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, the union-busting thug who's afraid to say-- at least publicly-- whether he agrees with Guiliani (and Jindal) or not. Over the weekend, Walker said he doesn't know if Obama is a Christian. It's been an embarrassing little sidebar to the staging of the ugly Republican Party nomination battle gearing up now. Since few people under 35 remember who Giuliani is or why anyone cares what he says, the NY Daily News's Wayne Barrett, a Giuliani biographer, put Giuliani and his comments into context last week.

First of all, Giuliani's critique that Obama wasn't raised like him-- as though that were somehow damning in itself-- is something the whole nation should be rejoicing in. Giuliani was raised by a father who-- when he wasn't serving time in Sing-Sing for robbery-- worked as a bat-wielding enforcer for a loan-sharking operation run by Rudy's uncle. Giuliani has often held his father up as a role model without ever admitting that Harold Giuliani was a career criminal, although a far cruder, less slick one than his son turned out to be.

Rudy Giuliani knows a lot about love.

Ask Regina Peruggi, the second cousin he grew up with and married, who was "offended" when Rudy later engineered an annulment from the priest who was his best man on the grounds, strangely enough, that she was his cousin. Or ask Donna Hanover, the mother of his two children, who found out he wanted a separation when he left Gracie Mansion one morning and announced it at a televised press conference.

Or ask Judi Nathan, his third wife, whom he started dating while still married to Hanover and New York mayor. In two SUVs, he and an entourage of six or seven cops traveled 11 times to Judi's Hamptons getaway at a taxpayer cost of $3,000 a trip. That's love.

Rudy knows so much about love that he declared the other day that President Obama "doesn't love you" and "doesn't love me" at a private party of GOP fat cats.

The onetime presidential candidate also revealed at the party that Obama "doesn't love America," an echo of a speech he'd delivered to delirious cheers in Arizona a week earlier when he declared: "I would go anywhere, any place, anytime, and I wouldn't give a damn what the President of the United States said, to defend my country. That's a patriot. That's a man who loves his people. That's a man who fights for his people. Unlike our President."

Rudy may have forgotten the half-dozen deferments he won ducking the Vietnam War, even getting the federal judge he was clerking for to write a letter creating a special exemption for him. And remember Bernie Kerik? He's the Giulaini police commissioner, business partner and sidekick whose nomination as homeland security secretary narrowly preceded indictments. He then did his national service in prison.

Giuliani went so far as to rebuke the President for not being "brought up the way you were and the way I was brought up through love of this country," a bow no doubt to the parenting prowess of Harold Giuliani, who did time in Sing Sing for holding up a Harlem milkman and was the bat-wielding enforcer for the loan-sharking operation run out of a Brooklyn bar owned by Rudy's uncle.

Though Rudy cited Harold throughout his public life as his model (without revealing any of his history), he and five Rudy uncles found ways to avoid service in World War II. Harold, whose robbery conviction was in the name of an alias, made sure the draft board knew he was a felon. On the other hand, Obama's grandfather and uncle served. His uncle helped liberate Buchenwald, which apparently affected him so deeply he stayed in the family attic for six months when he returned home.

Rudy also said Obama is "more of a critic than he is a supporter of America," an odd admonition coming from a security salesman who told a Tijuana audience of consulting clients in October: "America needs to stop lecturing other countries and start working on how to stop drug use in its citizens," shifting the onus for the Mexican drug trade onto us. He's a consultant in Mexico, El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the very countries where right-wing governments, traffickers and/or gangs are driving children and teenagers across the U.S. border.

He was a consultant for the government of Qatar, the country his friend and FBI director Louis Freeh accused of hiding 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohammed before the attack. That's the ultimate triumph of money over memory, since he's still talking, as recently as a week ago, about the 10 friends and 343 firefighters he lost on 9/11.

While Giuliani finds Obama's rhetoric insufficiently pro-American, his 2012 RNC speech was filled with catchphrases like Obama's "a complete and absolute failure," and he just branded the President "a moron" in his Arizona invocation of Neville Chamberlain at Munich, all of it presumably a new form of nationalist celebration. In 2012, Rudy even blasted Obama, without a glance in the mirror, for "attempting to exploit" the killing of Osama Bin Laden, calling it "disgusting."

Rudy contends that his not-like-us Obama insights have nothing to do with race, adding in day-after doubling down that the President "was taught to be a critic of America," while pointing out that his mother and grandparents were white. There are few in New York now, after 12 years of Mike Bloomberg and a year of Bill de Blasio, who doubt that Rudy was a conscious, almost energetic, polarizer. He never acknowledged his dark side then and he's not about to now.

Maybe Rudy is just frustrated that Obama never took to the whole cross-dressing theme the way Rudy did.

What Do Politicians Eat-- Aside From Bribes From Food Conglomerates?

On his MSNBC show Friday, Chris Hayes, talked with socially conscious celebrity chef Tom Colicchio about the new food guidelines from the U.S.D.A. (above). Does anyone care what the U.S.D.A. suggests? Or, is there a way to implement their guidelines as part of social policy? As a society, for example, we eat way too much sugar. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died every year because over sugar over-consumption. Diabetes and cancer are rampant. As many as two-thirds of Americans are obese now. Social policy is based on bribes to corrupt politicians-- both parties, like Florida Republican Senator Marco Rubio and DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz-- who make sure the multibillion dollar sugar empire of their benefactors are subsidized with taxpayer funds and protected from competition from cheap foreign-grown sugar. It seems like poor social policy that we spend $180 billion annually in healthcare costs related to bad diet. But the lobbyists are working this full-time and the politicians are lined up to line their pockets and fill their campaign war chests with their bribes.

Some local governments are trying soda taxes, the idea being to make the worst carrier of sugary death, more expensive. Not easy to do. Over 5 million people have watched this sugar documentary by Dr. Robert Lustig, Sugar: The Bitter Truth. How much impact will it have in changing public policy?



Yesterday, Steve Kornacki, also on MSNBC, interviewed another celebrity chef, Rocco DiSpirito, to talk about how some of our politicians eat. They focuses on two especially obese GOP fatties-- Jeb Bush and Chris Christie-- who decided they had to lose some serious poundage in order to run for president. DiSpirito: "I think you can draw an inference from how the candidates conduct themselves in their diet to how they lead. I don't think it's unfair to say that a candidate who's thinking and actually conscious about what he consumes is more likely to be conscious about other things... How well you preserve yourself is an indication of how well you might try to preserve our nation."