Can Jim Messina's And Señor Trumpanzee's Ineptness Help Jeremy Corbyn Win Tomorrow?

Tomorrow is election day in the U.K. And John Nichols thinks you should be as excited as Bernie is about Jeremy Corbyn's anti-austerity campaign. Bernie even went over there to campaign for him, probably hoping Trump would deliver the coup de grâce for the Conservative Party by endorsing Theresa May. Like Bernie, Corbyn "was written off as too far left, and too fiercely opposed to austerity." The same way we have a dominant Republican wing of the Democratic Party here-- the Blue Dogs and New Dems-- muddying up the Democratic brand, over there they have the same garbage, "New Labour," wrecking the Labour Party brand with their Conservative-lite agenda. And they really hate Corbyn, enough so that they're working hard to help Therea May's hapless, floundering campaign. Obama shithead Jim Messina-- a Rahm Emanuel protégé-- has been running the Conservative campaign... all the same corrupt Big Money politics.

But Corbyn and his Labor comrades have mounted a potent challenge to British Prime Minister Theresa May and her Conservative Party. May’s Tories retain a lead in the polls as the campaign races toward Thursday’s vote, but several surveys have Corbyn’s team within striking distance of upsetting expectations.

Corbyn’s stronger than expected run on a “For the Many, Not the Few” manifesto-- which proposes to tax the rich, reverse privatization schemes and invest in health care and education-- has excited the British left. And it has excited Sanders. “I have been very impressed by the work that Corbyn has done and the campaign that he is running and I wish him the very best,” the senator declared in a speech at the Brighton Festival... “I am aware of what Corbyn not only is doing now, but what we has done for the last several years.” That is true; when Corbyn’s left-wing challenge upset the calculus in the 2015 contest for leadership of the Labour Party, Sanders said: “At a time of mass income and wealth inequality throughout the world, I am delighted to see that the British Labour party has elected Jeremy Corbyn as its new leader. We need leadership in every country in the world which tells the billionaire class that they cannot have it all. We need economies that work for working families, not just the people on top... What has impressed me-- and there is a real similarity between what he has done and what I have done-- is he has taken on the establishment of the Labour Party and he has gone to the grassroots and he has tried to transform that party and take on a lot of establishment opposition,” he said of Corbyn. “That is exactly what I am trying to do in the US with the Democratic party.”

“I am also impressed by his willingness to talk about class issues,” added Sanders, who explained that: “Too many people run away from the grotesque levels of income and wealth inequality that exist in the United States, that exist in the UK, and I believe we will never make the kinds of changes that we needs unless we take on this issue of income and wealth inequality and create an economy that works for all of us.”

So another hopeless, utopian dream? Not at all. When Therea May called the election, it looked like she would bury Corbyn. But if there's one thing Jim Messina knows how to do-- with every fiber of his body-- is lose. Messina has run a filthy smear campaign against Corbyn, just like Rahm taught him. It's backfired against his dreadful candidate. When the campaign began, polls were predicting that the Conservatives with em up with over 400 seats with maybe 150-160 for Labour. Today's YouGov poll tells a very different story-- the Conservatives with 42% of the vote (302 seats, not enough to form a government) and Labour with 38% and 269 seats. With the Scottish National Party winning 44 seats, the Liberal Democrats with 12 seats and Northern Ireland with 18 seats, the Theresa May could be looking at a hung Parliament-- or worse, an anti-conservative coalition led by Corbyn.

Today's Independent ran the provocative headline Jeremy Corbyn just ran the campaign of his life, while Theresa May led one of the worst in recent history, and an even more provocative story below it.

So many things, on the final day, illustrate the difference between the two campaigns. In a hermetically sealed community centre in Norwich, Conservative party staff gave lessons to activists on the correct way to wave centrally produced and distributed placards for the TV cameras. "Up. Down. Up. Down," was the advice. "Not side to side."

On a parade of shops in Watford, the two hundred or so, young looking, normal looking people that turned up had made their own. And as they waited, in the time that might otherwise have been spent on placard-waving tutorial, they chanted badly reworked football songs about Jeremy Corbyn.

Jeremy Corbyn, finally arrived, to whoops of great delight, and spelled out how, "The choice facing the country could not clearer,” a nine year old boy bellowed, "VOTE LABOUR!"

"That was, actually the conclusion I was leading to," Corbyn told him. "If you'll just let me take a bit more time to get there."

You don’t get that on the Theresa Tour.

When Corbyn had finished a rousing tricolon on Conservative police cuts, and yet "they act surprised there’s a shortage of police officers!" one young man shouted "Bastards!" while another offered "Wankers!"

You don’t get that in Theresa’s privately booked sports hall. Nor do you get Bangladeshi shopkeepers, leaning out of upstairs windows, filming on their smartphones.

The two realistic options on the ballot paper tomorrow certainly look more different than at any point arguably in living memory. Even Corbyn and May agree on that, the “choice facing the country has never been clearer.” Both of them said the same words.

Corbyn has been drawing bigger crowds than any UK leader since Churchill. That must infuriate his biggest detractor (Tony Blair).

Yesterday's NY Times ran an OpEd by Roger Cohen, A Case For Jeremy Corbyn, referring to May as the "Trump-coddling, self-important, flip-flopping Theresa May, ensconced at 10 Downing Street without ever being elected prime minister." It's clear he wants Corbyn to win so he can blame Trump. After the "two unspeakable terrorist attacks, one in Manchester and one in London... Trump tried to make cheap political capital from the blood on London’s streets. He quoted London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, out of context in a flurry of tweets aimed at buttressing the case for his bigotry. The president of the United States just felt like insulting a prominent Muslim."

Trump bears about the same relationship to dignity as carbon dioxide to clean air. And this is the man May and [crackpot Foreign Secretary Boris] Johnson have coddled, in the name of offsetting the Brexit debacle with increased U.S. trade.

Johnson, by the way, assured the world a couple of months back that British seduction of Trump had been so effective that efforts to convince the president not to quit the Paris climate accord “will succeed.” After all, Trump had been offered a state visit, horse-drawn carriage, the queen; all that British pomp for His Neediness. We know what the word of Johnson, who was for the European Union before he was against it, is worth. It’s worth zilch. No wonder Trump’s finger-to-the-planet Paris decision prompted scarcely a British whimper.

Of all the obscene spectacles one has had to endure over the past several months, the worst has been that of the United States and Britain-- their finest hour but a wan memory-- competing for the favor and lucre of despots. To heck with the European Union, there’s always Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Xi Jinping. So begins the post-American century. How we have fallen.

Disgust, at some level, must find an outlet. Suddenly, we have an election after all. The expected Tory landslide has evaporated. May has led an abysmal, blundering, eat-your-peas campaign.

The prime minister embraced a hard Brexit at a moment when some people are finally experiencing buyers’ remorse. She came up with a “dementia tax,” the essence of which was to punish people for living too long; it did not go down well. She has exuded “this sense of entitlement,” in the words of Parry Mitchell, a member of the House of Lords who quit the Labour Party last year over Corbyn’s radicalism.

Corbyn, by contrast, has made no campaign mistakes. His slogan-- “For the Many not the Few”-- was no less effective for having been borrowed from Tony Blair. The ardor of his followers, particularly the urban under-30s, is remarkable. To them he is a near Messianic figure, the righter of capitalist wrongs; the proud socialist who will nationalize the railroads, make universities free again and inject billions into the National Health Service (while somehow balancing the budget). Like Bernie Sanders, and indeed Trump, he’s the man who will upend the system that brought you the Iraq war, the 2008 financial meltdown, the euro crisis, rampant impunity and ever-more-unequal societies.

Opinion polls now put Corbyn within a few percentage points of May. There is the possibility of a hung parliament.