MARCH 17, 2019

NEWS AND VIEWS

THE WEARIN’ O’ THE GREEN : OF ALL MY BRITISH COUSINS, I LOVE THE IRISH BEST. I LOVE THEM FOR THEIR PASSION FOR LIFE AND ARTISTIC GENIUS, AND OF COURSE, RIVER DANCE. IF I CAN MANAGE TO WIN THE MILLION ON THE LOTTO, I’LL HOPEFULLY GO OVER THERE TO SEE THEM BEFORE I DIE. BUT FOR NOW, I’M JUST GRATEFUL FOR MY TEN-DAY TRIP TO ENGLAND PROPER, IN 1985. I WENT WITH A FRIEND, BY PLANE TO LONDON, THEN DRIVING A BRITISH CAR WITH THE STEERING WHEEL ON THE RIGHT SIDE OF THE CAR, AND WITH THE TRAFFIC COMING AT ME FROM THE WRONG DIRECTION, TO CANTERBURY AND DOVER FROM THERE AND THEN AROUND THE COAST SOUTH AND WEST TO THE WESSEX AREA TO VISIT STONEHENGE AND BATH – ROMAN AND NORMAN FORTS, SPENDING THE NIGHT IN A WALKING SIZED MEDIEVAL WALLED CITY, NORMAN CATHEDRALS, DEEPLY GREEN FIELDS WITH WOOLY WHITE SHEEP AND THATCHED ROOFS. JUST WHAT I WANTED TO SEE -- MY OWN FAIRY TALE WORLD, AND THE HOME OF MY FOREFATHERS. THANK YOU, GENEROUS DEITY, FOR THAT TRIP.

NOW FROM HAPPY MEMORIES TO NEWS, WHICH IS NOT SO HAPPY.

THE ONSLAUGHT ON BERNIE SANDERS HAS BEGUN, IN THE NEWS AND OPINION WAR, AND POSSIBLY IN THE WORLD OF HUMAN EVIL; FOR INSTANCE, THERE ARE ALREADY RUMORS THAT BERNIE SANDERS’ 7 STITCHES-LONG CUT ON THE SHOWER GLASS WAS IN REALITY SOMETHING WORSE THAN THAT DESCRIPTION, LIKE AN ASSAULT. I WOULD LOVE TO BE ABLE TO DISCOUNT THAT AS A WILD AND RIDICULOUS STORY, BUT UNFORTUNATELY WORLD EVENTS ARE SWIRLING STRONGLY IN THE ATMOSPHERE HERE IN TRUMPWORLD, AND RAW POWER IS THE AIM OF THE GAME, WHICH THE REPUBLICANS CALL “HARDBALL.” I JUST CALL IT INTENSELY DISHONEST.

SIMPLY PUT, COULD THIS INCIDENT IN THE SHOWER ACTUALLY BE AN ATTACK, PERHAPS? IF IT IS, BERNIE IS NOT DISCOURAGED. LIKE HIM OR NOT, YOU HAVE TO SAY ONE THING ABOUT BERNIE. HE ISN’T TIMID, WEAK, SENILE, NOR WILL HE EVER BE CALLED “LIAR IN CHIEF.” SO I TRUST HIM. IN A SOCIETY LIKE OURS TODAY, ONLY STRONG PEOPLE CAN BE HONEST. ONE ARTICLE SAID THAT SOME NEWS SOURCES ARE SAYING THAT THE FAR RIGHTIST GROUPS CLUSTERING AROUND TRUMP MAY BE JOINING FORCES WITH THE SURPRISINGLY UNGENTLE MIDDLE OF THE ROAD DNC GROUP; THE ONES WHO WANT TO SAY ABOUT BERNIE THAT HE IS “LOUD.” HE HAS A STRONG SPEAKING VOICE, AND DOESN’T TRY TO LOOK ANY MORE PASSIVE THAN HE IS. I LIKE THAT. THAT’S THE WAY WORKING CLASS MEN ARE, AND SINCE I GREW UP AROUND THEM, I LIKE THE CHARACTERISTIC. ARE YOU DISCOURAGED YET? I AM, OR SADDENED AT ANY RATE, BUT I’M ALSO ANGRY, SO I’M NOT READY TO GIVE UP. GO, BERNIE, GO!! THERE IS EVIL, YET, TO BE VANQUISHED.

TAKE A MOMENT TO EXAMINE THE FOLLOWING PHOTOGRAPHS FROM TODAY’S NEWS; AND YOU WILL SEE WHY I BELIEVE, 77 YEARS OLD OR NOT, THAT BERNIE SANDERS CAN STILL DO THE JOB AND, BEING THE SORT OF PERSON THAT HE IS, DO IT THE RIGHT WAY. AS MY FAVORITE OLD SAYING GOES, “IT’S NOT THE DOG IN THE FIGHT, BUT THE FIGHT IN THE DOG.” BUT FIRST, LOOK AT THESE THREE GREAT BERNIE PHOTOS -- https://www.apnews.com/bb512b6ff6174474bf7ae3ccfbead19b/gallery/media:34c25b290c1b43f783c40cfed58de5ee.

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FILE - In this March 3, 2019, file photo, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., left, and his wife, Jane Sanders, greet supporters as they leave after his 2020 presidential campaign stop at Navy Pier in Chicago. Bernie Sanders’ revolution is Jane Sanders’ career. And her political and business activities have at times been his headache. His closest adviser, she is perhaps the most influential woman in the 2020 campaign who isn’t a candidate. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)

Bernie Sanders, Jane O'Meara SandersBernie Sanders, Jane Sanders
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FILE - In this March 3, 2019, file photo, Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., right, and his wife Jane Sanders, greet supporters as they arrive arrive [sic] for a campaign event at Navy Pier in Chicago. Bernie Sanders’ revolution is Jane Sanders’ career. And her political and business activities have at times been his headache. His closest adviser, she is perhaps the most influential woman in the 2020 campaign who isn’t a candidate. (AP Photo/Nam Y. Huh, File)

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FILE - In this April 19, 2016, file photo, Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and his wife Jane take a walk in State College, Pa. The Sanders Institute, a think tank founded by Democratic presidential contender Bernie Sanders’ wife and son, has stopped accepting donations and plans to suspend all operations by the end of May. (AP Photo/Mary Altaffer, File)


https://lasvegassun.com/news/2019/mar/16/bernie-sanders-tells-nevada-audience-we-are-going/
Bernie Sanders tells Nevada audience, ‘We are going to bring our people together’
MIRANDA ALAM/SPECIAL TO THE SUN
By Ricardo Torres-Cortez (contact)
Saturday, March 16, 2019 | 6:46 p.m.

PHOTOGRAPH -- Democratic presidential candidate and U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders speaks during a rally in Henderson, Nev. on Saturday, March 16, 2019. Miranda Alam/Special to the Sun

Progressive proposals now popular with Democrats were mostly shun when Bernie Sanders touted them during his 2016 presidential campaign.

The establishment deemed his platform — that included raising the minimum wage, expanding healthcare coverage to all and investing in infrastructure — “too radical,” the Vermont senator said Saturday afternoon in Henderson during an outdoor rally.

“Those ideas that we talked about four years ago that seemed so very radical at that time,” Sanders said. “Today, virtually all of those ideas are supported by a majority of the American people and have overwhelming support from Democrats and independents,” he added, likely taking a shot at the expanding Democratic field of candidates vying for the presidency.

Hundreds of festive Sanders’s supporters showed up Saturday afternoon to Morrell Park in the far southeast valley for an intimate-feeling, but packed “political revolution.”

Before Sanders took to the lectern for his 45-minute speech, supporters made their way to the park, wearing clothes with the candidate’s face, and shading the sun with their blue “Bernie” signs.

A staffer with his campaign jived to music, giving high fives to attendees. Aside from agitators yelling into a bullhorn or purposely revving motorcycle engines to interrupt, attendees were mostly smiles.

Friends Andy Houston and Jill Glass wore matching Sanders red, white and blue shirts with a “Feel the Bern 2020” design. Houston supported Sanders in 2016 when his bid to the White House ended with Hillary Clinton becoming the Democratic presidential nominee.

Houston, 41, said Sanders is a “man of character. I think he’s a man for the people, I think he has a lot of class and he has some great ideas,” the Las Vegas resident said.

Politics and the media have “burned Glass out “a little,” the 39-year-old said, noting she wanted to listen to Sanders to lift up her spirits. “I’m here to support him and applaud him. I’m hoping that he’ll just give us an uplifting message and get us all back excited about politics.”

Alexis Salt, a Clark County School District teacher, took the stage first, and spoke the future of younger Americans.

“There’s so much more that unites us than divides us, but i’m not here to talk about what adults want,” she said.

She said she promised her kids she would talk about them. Their future is more than standardized tests and needing fundraisers to pay for health insurance, she said.

Amy Vilela gave an impassioned speech about her daughter, who she said she lost to the “nation’s barbaric healthcare system” four years ago when she had a curable condition but her “fate was sealed when they asked her if she had health insurance.”

“On issue after issue, Bernie is not just leading, he’s changing the turn of the debate.” said Nina Turner, national co-chair of the political campaign. “Sisters and brothers, if we come together for the political revolution and do the impossible, Bernie Sanders will win the Nevada caucus,” she concluded to an erupting crowd.

Then Sanders, who wore a Vegas Golden Knights cap, took to the stage to speak about his widely reported vision, which includes “aggressively” combating climate change, healthcare for all, a $15 minimum wage, tuition-free higher education, increasing social security benefits, and

criminal justice and immigration reforms.

Under Sanders’s proposals, he said, the 1.8 million immigrants protected by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals would gain legal status. A “humane border policy” would be in place for those seeking asylum, he said.

“No more snatching babies from the arms of their mothers,” he said.

He also attacked President Donald Trump, saying the president “wants to divide us up by the color of our skin, our country of origin, our gender, our religion and our sexual orientation. We are going to do exactly the opposite. We are going to bring our people together.”

His campaign, Sanders said, will be driven by an unprecedented grassroots effort.


https://www.apnews.com/bb512b6ff6174474bf7ae3ccfbead19b
Is Jane Sanders the most powerful woman not running in 2020?
By STEPHEN BRAUN, WILSON RING and STEVE PEOPLES
yesterday – MARCH 18, 2019

WASHINGTON (AP) — Before Bernie Sanders took the stage to formally launch his 2020 presidential campaign this month, the candidate’s most influential adviser took the mic. To cheers, Jane Sanders introduced herself to the Brooklyn crowd as “Bernie’s wife,” then conceded that wasn’t the most politically correct label.

To be sure, identifying Jane Sanders as “the wife” hardly captures the scope of her influence on her husband’s political career. Across 30 years and a dozen campaigns for federal office, she has served variously as her husband’s media consultant, surrogate, fundraiser, chief of staff, campaign spokeswoman and top strategist.

His political revolution has become her career. And her political and business activities have, at times, become his headache. As the Vermont senator undertakes his second presidential run and scrambles his inner circle, Jane Sanders remains his closest adviser, making her perhaps the most influential woman in the 2020 campaign who isn’t a candidate.

“Bernie’s top adviser always has been and will continue to be Jane,” said Jeff Weaver, a Sanders adviser. She has a voice in almost every major political decision her husband makes, travels with him for major events and is deeply involved in formulating policies, issues and campaign infrastructure. “At every level,” Weaver said, “Jane is intimately involved.”

That involvement has drawn questions sometimes about her political judgment, family opportunism and flawed ethics — from political foes, good government advocates and longtime Sanders-watchers in Vermont and in the progressive movement. Most recently, critics questioned the role played by the Sanders Institute, a nonprofit co-founded by Jane Sanders and her son, for blending elements of fundraising, family and campaign policy development.

Her dual roles at the institute and in her husband’s campaign carried echoes of the Clinton Foundation, which Bernie Sanders criticized in 2016 as a possible ethics conflict and back door for foreign donors seeking to influence his then-rival Hillary Clinton.

“Bernie Sanders ran against Hillary Clinton in 2016 criticizing her for the vast sums of money she raised and he seems to be following in some of her footsteps,” said Lawrence R. Jacobs, director of the Center for the Study of Politics and Governance at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey School of Public Affairs. “Now he’s raising vast sums of money and it’s being controlled and shaped by his family.”

Jane Sanders acted this past week to remove the think tank as a possible campaign ethics target, telling The Associated Press that the institute’s operations and fundraising would be suspended for the balance of her husband’s 2020 presidential campaign. Since its creation in 2017, the group raised more than $700,000, but has not disclosed most of its donors. She said the decision to put the Sanders Institute on hiatus was “a forward-looking way to deal with potential concerns.”

Sanders may prove an important surrogate for her husband, particularly in a race crowded with female candidates and potentially hinging on how women vote. She publicly defended her husband when he faced criticism for the way his 2016 campaign handled accusations of sexual harassment.

She’s become an essential liaison to the progressive activists at the heart of the Sanders’ base, using the institute to host meetings of policymakers and activists. An affable, if low-key public speaker, she was the star of the December “Gathering” in Burlington, Vermont, a three-day policy gathering that featured progressive speakers including environmentalist Bill McKibben, actor Danny Glover and her husband.

Steeped in years of involvement in progressive causes, Sanders comfortably slipped into the role as the event’s emcee. Before a crowd of more than 250 progressive activists, she stoked applause lines for favored organizations and lavished compliments on institute fellows.

Similarly, in videos posted on the institute’s website, she has led numerous policy conversations with experts in a Brooklyn accent fainter than her husband’s.

Jane Sanders is not compensated for her role at the institute. Her son, David Driscoll, has been paid $100,000 a year as a co-founder and executive director, she confirmed. Driscoll had been an executive for Nike and the Vermont snowboarding company Burton, but had no previous nonprofit experience, according to his LinkedIn profile.

Like her husband, Jane Sanders “has learned not to trust a lot of people. Family is a lot more dependable than outsiders,” said University of Vermont political science professor Garrison Nelson, an acquaintance and veteran Sanders-watcher.

Jane Sanders expressed frustration about concerns that she and some of her children have at times benefited from their activities affiliated with Sanders’ expanding political apparatus.

“How can we say nepotism here? It just doesn’t fit,” she said. She added that the Sanders Institute has “developed policy and the content that we get completely separate” from her husband’s campaign.

Politics has long been a family project for the couple.

Jane Sanders first worked with her future husband as director of the mayor’s youth Office in Burlington. They were both displaced New Yorkers, Jane noted at the launch rally, stamped by childhood days on Brooklyn’s city streets. “We had very similar experiences,” she said. “We spent a lot of time playing stickball, running races and just hanging out on the streets with the kids in our neighborhoods.”

They wed in 1988 — a second marriage for both — two years before Sanders won his first election to Congress. Jane Sanders went to Capitol Hill as his volunteer deputy — gaining experience in policy, legislation and as chief of staff.

In the early 2000s, she took on a new role along with her daughter, Carina. Two women set up a consulting firm, paid more than $90,000 in consulting fees by Bernie Sanders’ House campaigns.

In 2004, the year before Bernie Sanders’ launched his winning Senate campaign, his wife was named president of Burlington College, a local small liberal arts college. In 2010, she worked out a $10 million deal for the college to buy 32 acres of waterfront land on Lake Champlain and a 77,000-square-foot former orphanage and administrative offices of Vermont’s Roman Catholic Church, which needed the money to settle a series of priest sex abuse cases.

She promised at the time the deal would be paid for with increases in enrollment and about $2.7 million in donations. But her plans never took wing and under fire, she resigned from the college in 2011. The school closed in 2016, citing debt from the land deal as a major reason for its failure. Prompted by complaints filed by a Republican lawyer about her involvement in the land deal, federal investigators looked into Jane Sanders’ stewardship but informed her last November that she would not be charged.

“We’ve learned we’re going to be attacked,” she said during an interview, adding “that’s the fact of today’s politics.”

But she said she was confident that the decision to put the think tank on hiatus was “best for the institute to not have the possibility of misinterpretation.”

The move, she said, will allow her to expand her campaign work freely for the Sanders campaign, including more solo stops on her husband’s behalf.

“I will be more active throughout,” she said.

___

Ring reported from Montpelier, Vermont, and Peoples from New York.


“A LITTLE BLACK EYE IS NOT GOING TO STOP ME,” SAID THE CANDIDATE TO CHEERS.” FUNNY HOW, NO MATTER WHAT BERNIE SAYS, THE AUDIENCE CHEERS, AND HE DIDN’T EVEN HAVE TO PAY PEOPLE TO STAND AROUND IN THE CROWD TO IMPROVE THOSE PHOTOGRAPHS. DONALD TRUMP COULD THINK IT WORTH HIS WHILE TO TRY TO DO MORE TO BERNIE THAN GIVE HIM A BLACK EYE. TAKE CARE, BERNIE.

https://news3lv.com/news/local/bernie-sanders-brings-campaign-to-southern-nevada
Bernie Sanders brings campaign to Southern Nevada
by Jeff Gillan
Sunday, March 17th 2019

PHOTOGRAPH -- Bernie Sanders held spoke at his campaign rally in Henderson March 16. (KSNV)

LAS VEGAS (KSNV) — On a beautiful Saturday afternoon, Bernie Sanders arrived at Henderson’s Morrell Park before a crowd his campaign put at 2,200.

It's Sanders’ first stop in Nevada since he said he's running for president last month.

But first things first: the bandage. The eye. The day before, Sanders collided with a shower door in South Carolina, requiring seven stitches.

“A little black eye is not going to stop me,” said the candidate to cheers.

The guy who made populism cool in 2016, who almost went on to face Donald Trump that November, says this is what his campaign this year means.

“This campaign [sic] is about transforming our country and creating an economy, and a government that works for us, not just the one percent,” Sanders told the crowd.

He's still fired up, now in 2019, for a campaign that he says is fighting for, “economic justice, social justice, racial justice and environmental justice.”

Three years later, Sanders arrives in a very different contest, with now more than a dozen democrats in the race.

This time he’s not the only progressive populist.

RELATED| Sanders holds health care roundtable in South Carolina

In the crowd, I met local Jim Norman.

I asked him about all those Democrats running, and if he’s still “shopping around.”

“Well, the field, it's everybody and their brother is running,” Norman told me. But he says Sanders is the real deal. He's consistent.

“When you watch, Bernie has stayed in line his whole career,” Norman says.

And you saw that Saturday as Sanders stayed on message.

“Democracy is not about billionaires buying elections,” Sanders said, talking about what’s at stake in the upcoming election.

“So we say to the health care industry and the insurance companies, whether you like it or not, we are going to pass a Medicare for all single payer program,” Sanders said, talking about his prescription to get health care to all Americans.

He will fight for free tuition at a public college or university.

“You should not have to go deeply into debt to get a damn education,” Sanders told the crowd, many of whom were younger.

He will fight to fix the environment.

“Today we say to Donald Trump and the fossil fuel industry that climate change is not a hoax, but is a massive threat, an existential threat to our country and the entire planet,” said Sanders.

Republicans today said Sanders’ proposals would bankrupt the country. They say he’s pushing for a “socialist agenda.”

“Bernie Sanders returns to the Silver State as a failed presidential candidate with absurd policies that reach further into the pockets and lives of Nevadans,” said Republican Party spokesperson Renae Eze.

To guys like Stephen Daley, at his first campaign rally, “you can tell he really, he really knows his stuff. He believes his stuff, honestly, he's the best candidate right now,” Daley says.

In 2016, Sanders’ message resonated with many voters, many of whom took part, and took an interest in politics for the first time.

“Turns out that we won 22 states, turns out that we received over 13 million votes that we ended up winning more votes from young people, black and white and Latino, Native American, Asian American than Clinton and Trump combined,” Sanders told the crowd.

Translation: game on, for Bernie 2.0, as Sanders sees how well his message will resonate in a party he helped transform.

MARCH 15, 2019, FRIDAY


NEWS AND VIEWS


THE WRITER OF THIS POLITICO PIECE CLEARLY DOESN’T LIKE BETO O’ROURKE MUCH AT ALL, AS THOUGH HE IS A PIECE OF PUFFY PASTRY RATHER THAN GOOD SOLID MEAT. I DID ENJOY THE CLEVERNESS OF THE WRITING AS HE EVISCERATES BETO VERBALLY, AND I THINK “SEMIGOGUERY” IS A GREAT NEW PHRASE. POLITICO IS A BOLD VOICE IN INTERNET LANGUAGE, AND I BELIEVE, IS AN HONEST NEWS SOURCE. I AM IMPRESSED WITH WHAT I HAVE READ OF THEIRS UP TO THIS POINT, WHICH IS 8 OR 10 ARTICLES OVER THE LAST SIX MONTHS OR SO.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/14/beto-o-rourke-semigoguery-225810
FOURTH ESTATE
The Semigoguery of Beto O’Rourke
With his hollow yet passionate appeals to goodness, light and possibility, the candidate exploits the naiveté of the mob. Will it work in 2020?
By JACK SHAFER March 14, 2019

Charlie Neibergall/AP Photo

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Windmilling his arms as if operated by an amateur puppeteer and drawing on the leftover youth-pastor energy that powered his losing Senate campaign against Ted Cruz, Beto O’Rourke commenced his presidential campaign on Thursday in Keokuk, Iowa. Having cemented in the Cruz contest the political persona of a “better angels” candidate who preaches positivity and uplift, who espouses the right thing rather than the expedient thing, and who hails the other Democratic contenders and flatters his audiences with every breath, O’Rourke slathered the Iowa crowd with his usual campaign honey.

And they loved it.

I’ll admit that a couple of O’Rourke’s Senate campaign speeches and his general charisma flushed me with uncharacteristic feelings of generosity. His “garage band” style of campaign against Cruz, in which he rejected corporate money, avoided negative attacks and refused to employ pollsters or consultants, as my colleague Tim Alberta put it, impressed me as genuine. His willingness to defend the kneeling NFL players counted for something, too. It wasn’t until I read transcripts of his speeches in which he made incessant references to trusting one another, listening to one another and working together that I started to doubt his rhetorical radiance. Like most pop lyrics divorced from the music, O’Rourke’s speeches—given in that weirdly hypnotic poetry-reading voice—die when read on the page. His words inspire best when performed, a similarity he shares with Donald Trump—and with Barack Obama, whose hope and change platitudes filled the 2008 campaign skies with rainbows.

Like your garden-variety demagogue, O’Rourke projects himself as one of the masses who seeks only to do their bidding. Top-heavy with the words “we” and “us,” his speeches make constant common cause with his listeners. But it’s hard to imagine him channeling demagogic rage into the connection he has crafted. Nor could anyone envisage O’Rourke violating societal norms in pursuit of power or accusing his foes of imagined crimes or shouting vulgarities. A deliberate gentleman, he rarely took off the gloves against Cruz. When asked at a debate what he admired about Cruz, O’Rourke cited his opponent’s “sacrifice” and “public service.” Cruz sent dittos back to O’Rourke, but proceeded to compare him to Bernie Sanders, saying O’Rourke believes “in expanding government and higher taxes.” O’Rourke’s meek counter shot was, “True to form.”

On the issues, O’Rourke stands in the shallow end of the Democratic pool, with conventionally centrist Democratic views on gun control, health care, criminal justice, trade and immigration (though he is open to shuttering ICE). As Vox points out, O’Rourke’s voting record was more conservative than the average House Democrat’s, so when audiences cheer him, they’re not cheering his policy choices but the emotive package he delivers them in. When talking about issues, he has a way of sandpapering the Democratic label off them, presenting them as nonideological problem-solving.

Semigoguery worked a near miracle for O’Rourke in the losing Texas contest, where he raised more money—$38 million from July through September—than any other senatorial candidate in history. The strategic upside of semigoguery—and I suspect candidate O’Rourke has calculated this—is that it can taste as sweet to Republican palates on the first chug as it does to Democratic ones. But a candidate who both tastes great and is less filling wouldn’t automatically satisfy the voters’ hunger for something more presidential than what we’ve got. All O’Rourke has demonstrated so far is that his formula raises money, earns flattering notices in the press and fails to deliver enough votes. Semigoguery is a better technique, it seems, for making friends than it is for winning elections.

******

Is exceptional decency a good substitute for experience? We can do this together, reader, and bring all the creativity and genius of our fellow human beings to solve our problems. Email your answer to Shafer.Politico@gmail.com. My email alerts swoon for Beto. My Twitter feed is all in for Buttigieg. My RSS feed has Ted Cruz as his avatar.


YOUNG TURKS ON SANDERS, SHOWING WHY I LIKE BERNIE AND THE YOUNG TURKS.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VFgDA4skZe0
Bernie Sanders Smacks Down Orrin Hatch

THEN: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYFueqv0iIQ
Wal-Mart Welfare

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWPycPQuPvc
Could Bernie Sanders Win In 2020?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cj7nQHIan2k
#BernieSanders #CNN #TYT
Bernie Trolls Wolf Blitzer During CNN Town Hall

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2n9H5YWmsOg
CNN Town Hall With Sen Bernie Sander 2/25/2019 || Sanders Town Hall February 25th

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DbwRW1VWaOs
Bernie Returns to Chicago to Launch 2020 Campaign



NOW THIS IS REALLY INTERESTING. DID BERNIE FIRE THEM? NO WAY. THAT’S JUST NOT BERNIE’S WAY TO WIN ELECTIONS. HE STANDS ON PRINCIPLE, INSTEAD. THAT’S ANOTHER REASON WHY I LIKE BERNIE.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2019/03/15/sen-bernie-sanders-campaign-workers-vote-unionize-2020-election/3179737002/
Bernie Sanders campaign workers unionize, becoming likely first presidential campaign to do so
Christal Hayes, USA TODAY Published 6:01 p.m. ET March 15, 2019

WASHINGTON – Workers on Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign voted to unionize on Friday, becoming what is possibly the first presidential campaign staff in history to organize.

A majority of the Democrat's staff signed on to unionize, meaning all current and future employees would be part of the bargaining process for better pay and benefits. The workers, everyone below the title of deputy director, will be represented by United Food and Commercial Workers Union (UFCW) Local 400, which represents about 35,000 employees in six states and the District of Columbia.

Jonathan Williams, a spokesman for the UFCW, said to his knowledge the Sanders campaign is the first to unionize in history, marking a new path that could be used for campaigns for years to come.

"The best time to join a union is always now," Williams said. "High working standards should be the standard and I would certainly call upon every presidential campaign to look toward the leadership Bernie Sanders' campaign has shown."

MORE: Sanders signs loyalty pledge for 2020 bid

Williams said the next steps are for workers to set up negotiations, something he said would have to happen very soon due to it being a campaign. The UFCW said the agreement could grow to more than 1,000 workers throughout Sanders' 2020 campaign. Employees who transition to the White House, if Sanders were to win, would not be members of the union.

"I hope this breakthrough serves as a model for other presidential campaigns, as well as party committees and candidates for other offices," UFCW Local 400 President Mark Federici said in a statement. "While political campaigns aren’t the easiest work environment, every worker has the right to respect and dignity."

MORE ELECTION NEWS: Who is running for president in 2020?

In January, Sanders apologized after multiple women said allegations of sexual assault within his campaign were not properly addressed during his 2016 bid for president.

The allegations from multiple women who worked on Sanders' campaign surfaced in the New York Times, which criticized Sanders' campaign for not adequately addressing incidents of sexual harassment, sexist mistreatment and pay disparities between men and women.

Sen. Bernie Sanders outlined the government's principles during his first 2020 presidential campaign rally, held in Brooklyn. USA TODAY

On CNN, Sanders apologized to "any woman who feels like she was not treated appropriately." When asked if he had been aware of the complaints, Sanders said, "I was a little bit busy running around the country trying to make the case (to be elected as president)."

The allegations and his perceived failure to rectify the issues, female campaign workers told the Times, bring into question whether he can fight for women's interests if he again seeks the presidency.

"I am not going to sit here and tell you that we did everything right in terms of human resources, in terms of addressing the needs that I'm hearing from now, that women felt they were disrespected, that there was sexual harassment which was not dealt with as effectively as possible," Sanders said on CNN.


Faiz
✔
@fshakir
And we're very proud of it

Amanda Terkel
✔
@aterkel
Bernie campaign announces that it is unionizing - first major party presidential campaign to have a unionized staff

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The UFCW said Sanders' campaign stayed neutral in the unionizing process. Sanders' campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, wrote on Twitter the campaign was "very proud" of the unionizing effort.

"Bernie Sander is the most pro-union candidate in the field, he'll be the most pro-union president in the White House and we're honored that his campaign will be the first to have a unionized workforce," Shakir said.

MARCH 14, 2019

NEWS AND VIEWS

ONE SMALL STEP FOR MAN. ONE GIANT STEP FOR MANKIND. THANK YOU, GREAT DEITY!

Politics Sports Science & Health Economics Culture
Politics Podcast: Beto O’Rourke’s Path To The Democratic Nomination
MAR. 5, 2019, AT 10:55 AM

The Movement To Skip The Electoral College Is About To Pass A Major Milestone
With Colorado expected to join, the National Popular Vote compact is about to snag its first purple state.
By Nathaniel Rakich

Graphics by Rachael Dottle
Filed under Electoral College

When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, it was the fourth time in American history — and the second time this century — that a candidate won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. Now a group of voting-rights activists is working to prevent any future presidents from taking office the same way.

[How popular is President Donald Trump?]

The National Popular Vote initiative seeks to set up an interstate compact that would effectively do an end run around the Electoral College without actually abolishing it, which would require the lengthy, laborious process of building broad, bipartisan support to pass a constitutional amendment. The logic behind the compact is that the Constitution already gives states the power to award their electoral votes how they see fit, so each state that signs on to the compact agrees to award its electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote — not necessarily the candidate who wins that state. There’s just one catch: The agreement only goes into effect when the states who’ve joined are worth a total of 270 electoral votes — enough to deliver an automatic victory to the popular vote winner.

Currently, 11 states (plus the District of Columbia) representing 172 electoral votes have signed on to the compact, but Colorado and its nine electoral votes are primed to join in the next few weeks. (The state House and Senate recently passed the bill, and Gov. Jared Polis has said he will sign it.) That would bring the total number of signatories to 13 and the electoral-vote count up to 181 — two-thirds of the way to 270. Now the compact just needs to bring on enough new states to get 89 additional electoral votes and it would radically change how the U.S. picks its president. The million dollar question is, could it really happen?

For the last few years, it has looked impossible. The compact had passed in 12 places, yes, but all of them were solidly blue — before the 2018 midterms, all of them were at least 11 points more Democratic-leaning than the country as a whole.1 What’s more, supporters had almost run out of low-hanging fruit to target; only one other state that blue (Delaware) has yet to sign on, and it is worth only three electoral votes. It seemed like the National Popular Vote campaign had hit a ceiling. Red states were (and still are) unlikely to join, given that both times the popular vote and electoral vote split in living memory — in 2000 and 2016 — the outcome favored the Republican candidate.2 And purple states theoretically have little incentive to sign on; every four years, presidential candidates shower them with a disproportionate share of their attention (campaign visits, media buys) in an effort to snag some of those precious few swingable electoral votes. That would all go away if the only thing that mattered was the nationwide popular vote.

But Colorado represents an important breakthrough. With a partisan lean of D+1, it’s the first swing state to sign on to the compact. But like 10 of the other 12 jurisdictions to pass the compact, Colorado is doing so when Democrats have full control of state government, meaning the party is in power in both branches of the legislature and holds the governorship. And even in the other two instances, it was still possible for the compact to pass with only Democratic support.3 That suggests that a state’s willingness to pass a National Popular Vote bill may rely not just on its blueness in presidential elections but also on whether its legislature and governor are Democratic. And in Colorado, most Democratic legislators voted for the legislation even as opponents argued it would eliminate Colorado’s clout as a swing state. (Not a single Republican voted to support it.)

Related: POLITICS PODCAST
Politics Podcast: Should We Cancel The Electoral College?

So if we assume that these bills will only pass in states where Democrats can push them through without GOP support, what other states might join the compact in the next few years, and would those states be enough to reach 270? New Mexico, where the compact has already passed the state House, looks like the most likely next signatory, which would add five electoral votes. After that, there will be four remaining states that have not yet signed on and where Democrats have full control of state government: Delaware, Maine, Nevada and Oregon, which would contribute a total of 20 more electoral votes. (All four states are considering bills that would have them join the agreement.) In addition, Democrats have a good chance to take full control of Virginia’s state government after this fall’s legislative elections, which could add another 13 electoral votes. But even if all these states pass a National Popular Vote bill, the compact would still sit at 219 electoral votes — 51 shy of the number needed for it to take effect. Democrats would then need to take full control of several more states for the compact to become a reality.

And even if the party accomplishes that difficult task, it’s not safe to assume that those states will automatically join the agreement; Delaware and Oregon have had Democratic-controlled governments for years and still have not joined (the campaign to ratify the compact kicked off in 2006). Opposition to the effort will likely ramp up, too, if the compact begins to look like a serious possibility. Right now, if the compact has any chance of being realized, it likely won’t be for many years.

Ultimately, the biggest challenge to the National Popular Vote agreement may be a legal one. Election-law expert Rick Hasen at the University of California, Irvine School of Law told FiveThirtyEight he expected there would be serious legal challenges to the compact if it crosses the 270-elector threshold. Opponents may brandish the part of the Constitution that says that interstate compacts require the consent of Congress, or they may argue that it runs afoul of the Voting Rights Act because it may diminish the clout of minority voters. And, of course, there is the fact that it circumvents what the founders intended — the Electoral College was designed to be an indirect method of electing the president. So even if organizers somehow get states worth 270 electoral votes to join the compact, expect it to face a long fight in the courts challenging whether it can actually take effect.

CORRECTION (March 5, 2019, 1:07 p.m.): A previous version of the cartogram in this article mistakenly failed to identify Connecticut as part of the National Popular Vote initiative.

Nathaniel Rakich is FiveThirtyEight’s elections analyst. @baseballot



MORE FROM 538

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bernie-sanders-2020-democratic-nomination-kickoff/?cid=referral_taboola_feed
FEB. 19, 2019, AT 6:49 AM
How Bernie Sanders Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination
By Clare Malone
Filed under 2020 Election

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY FIVETHIRTYEIGHT / GETTY IMAGES

Bernie Sanders is a famous, successful loser.

When he announced his run for the Democratic nomination in April 2015, Sanders trailed Hillary Clinton in the polls by nearly 57 percentage points. By spring of 2016, some polls showed him within single digits. Sanders was no longer an obscure senatorial frump from Vermont — he was a bona fide political phenomenon whose primary success embodied the Democratic Party’s leftward drift.

But 2020 is not 2016. Sanders kicked off his 2020 run early on Tuesday, and as he navigates his second presidential primary, he’ll need to prove he can build on his past success, not coast on his 2016 coalition.

Sanders enters the 2020 race not as an underdog but as a Democratic Socialist leader of the pack; an early Iowa poll showed him commanding 19 percent of the vote of likely caucusgoers, second only to former Vice President Joe Biden. Sanders comes to the race with the high name recognition that many candidates in the crowded field lack, and with a glossy pelt hanging off his political belt: the grassroots movement that propelled him to unexpected heights in 2016.

While many 2020 contenders will spend the early days of their campaigns conveying just what sort of candidate they would be and delicately trying to signal what kinds of voters they think they appeal to, Sanders is already a known quantity. In a recent YouGov poll, only 16 percent of respondents said they didn’t know what they thought of him, compared with 38 percent who said the same of Kamala Harris and 29 percent who didn’t know what to think of Elizabeth Warren. Engaged Democratic voters will know that Sanders’s brand is populist — free college, $15 minimum wage, “Medicare for all” — and polemical. The senator’s early charm in 2016 seemed to lie in his harangues against an unmitigated free-market system and the need for political revolution. In the age of President Trump, many Democrats might be looking for a pure-of-heart angry warrior figure in their candidate — someone with a distinct brand of politics that hasn’t been formed solely in reaction to the president. Sanders certainly is that.

We know who was attracted to that kind of candidate in the last Democratic primary. In 2016, Sanders outperformed Clinton with young voters and voters who live in more rural places. He won primaries in states with sizable white populations like Michigan and Wisconsin — states that Clinton went on to lose in the general election to Trump. In the months and years following Clinton’s loss to Trump, Democrats have debated ways to win back this disillusioned group. Sanders could hold some appeal to those Obama-Trump voters given his primary performance in upper Midwest states and the fact that he did well with independents.

While Clinton won the 2016 primary by a substantial number of votes — more than 3 million — it’s safe to say the Democratic Party has gone through a bout of soul searching over the past couple of years. Voters who might have dismissed Sanders during the 2016 primary could well have come around to him in the interim. A Gallup survey found that 2016 was the first year in which Democrats felt more positively about socialism than they did about capitalism — Sanders’s message might well have seeped in. Another potential strength is his proven track record of attracting small-dollar donations. Sanders raised more than $100 million from donors giving less than $200 during the 2016 run, and in the 2020 campaign era, in which candidates are eschewing PAC money, that donor base is powerful.

Small donors gave big to Sanders

The five 2018 U.S. Senate candidates who raised the largest share of their donations from small donors as of Nov. 1, 2018

CANDIDATE PARTY STATE SHARE OF CONTRIBUTIONS FROM SMALL DONORS
Bernie Sanders I Vermont 77%
–
Elizabeth Warren D Massachusetts 56
–
Corey Stewart R Virginia 50
–
Beto O’Rourke D Texas 46
–
Geoff Diehl R Massachusetts 45
–
SOURCE: FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION VIA CENTER FOR RESPONSIVE POLITICS

Sanders also may have a leg up in early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire, where all-important local activists play an outsized role in building candidate momentum. Sanders knows them, and he won’t have to do as much as others to build up grassroots support.

But Sanders’s 2016 success could also be the makings of his greatest 2020 challenge. When he entered the race in 2015, it was in large part to push his progressive left ideas. Other politicians picked up on the fact that Democratic voters liked the big ideas that Sanders was selling, and now the 2020 field is packed with contenders who are campaigning on platforms similar to his 2016 campaign. Sanders’s 2017 “Medicare for all” bill became something of a litmus test for those senators considering a 2020 run — Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren all signed on as co-sponsors. Even Clinton acknowledged the appeal in her campaign memoir, “What Happened”: “I have a new appreciation for the galvanizing power of big, simple ideas. I still think my health care and college plans were more achievable than Bernie’s and that his were fraught with problems, but they were easier to explain and understand, and that counts for a lot.”

This means the progressive-left lane in 2020 is quite a bit more crowded than it was in 2016, which is a problem for Sanders, albeit a problem that stems from his own success. Warren is perhaps his most direct ideological competition — she’s been a critic of American capitalism for decades, though unlike Sanders, she still calls herself a capitalist and a Democrat. She also hired his 2016 Iowa caucus director — inside baseball to be sure, but it’s worth paying attention to the campaigns Democratic operatives choose to work for this early on.

Another potential complexifier for Sanders is that many Democrats appear to be prioritizing “electability” over ideology in 2020. A Monmouth University poll found that 56 percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents wanted a candidate who will perform well against Trump, even if they disagree with that person on most issues. What electability actually means in this context is quite vague, but if it becomes a proxy for a centrist candidate palatable to swing voters, Sanders might be out of luck. Or, even if voters decide that “electable” means more left, Sanders could lose out to new faces trying to sell their pragmatic progressivism — Harris, Warren or potential candidate Beto O’Rourke. We might be wise not to discount voters’ affinity for these new, shiny candidates: 59 percent of respondents in a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll said they would be interested in “someone entirely new” as their nominee. Forty-one percent of those polled said Sanders shouldn’t even run again.

Sanders also would need to work to improve his performance with black voters, a crucial demographic in the Democratic primary.

In 2016, Clinton and Sanders split the white vote, but she did better among black voters overall, though young black voters trended toward Sanders. 2020 will likely be a whole different ballgame when it comes to courting the black vote. The field has two top-tier contenders who are black — Harris and Booker — and Joe Biden could hold some appeal given that he served as vice president under Barack Obama.

And then there is the matter of allegations of sexual harassment and gendered pay inequity that have been leveled against the Sanders campaign itself. Women who worked for the candidate in 2016 said there was a lack of accountability on the campaign when it came to the harassment, and Sanders’s initial response to the reporting was that he had been unaware of the allegations. “I was little bit busy running around the country trying to make the case,” he said. “If I run, we will do better next time.” Sanders issued a more full-throated apology via Twitter days later, but the allegations have served to compound the impression that there were whiffs of sexism swirling around the Sanders campaign and its supporters. “Bernie bros,” as some male supporters of Sanders came to be called, were sometimes blamed for sexist online attacks on Clinton.

From ABC News:
Clare Malone is a senior political writer for FiveThirtyEight. @claremalone

MARCH 14, 2019

NEWS AND VIEWS

Politics Sports Science & Health Economics Culture
Politics Podcast: Beto O’Rourke’s Path To The Democratic Nomination
MAR. 5, 2019, AT 10:55 AM

The Movement To Skip The Electoral College Is About To Pass A Major Milestone
With Colorado expected to join, the National Popular Vote compact is about to snag its first purple state.
By Nathaniel Rakich

Graphics by Rachael Dottle
Filed under Electoral College

When Donald Trump won the presidency in 2016, it was the fourth time in American history — and the second time this century — that a candidate won the Electoral College but lost the popular vote. Now a group of voting-rights activists is working to prevent any future presidents from taking office the same way.

[How popular is President Donald Trump?]

The National Popular Vote initiative seeks to set up an interstate compact that would effectively do an end run around the Electoral College without actually abolishing it, which would require the lengthy, laborious process of building broad, bipartisan support to pass a constitutional amendment. The logic behind the compact is that the Constitution already gives states the power to award their electoral votes how they see fit, so each state that signs on to the compact agrees to award its electoral votes to whoever wins the national popular vote — not necessarily the candidate who wins that state. There’s just one catch: The agreement only goes into effect when the states who’ve joined are worth a total of 270 electoral votes — enough to deliver an automatic victory to the popular vote winner.

Currently, 11 states (plus the District of Columbia) representing 172 electoral votes have signed on to the compact, but Colorado and its nine electoral votes are primed to join in the next few weeks. (The state House and Senate recently passed the bill, and Gov. Jared Polis has said he will sign it.) That would bring the total number of signatories to 13 and the electoral-vote count up to 181 — two-thirds of the way to 270. Now the compact just needs to bring on enough new states to get 89 additional electoral votes and it would radically change how the U.S. picks its president. The million dollar question is, could it really happen?


For the last few years, it has looked impossible. The compact had passed in 12 places, yes, but all of them were solidly blue — before the 2018 midterms, all of them were at least 11 points more Democratic-leaning than the country as a whole.1 What’s more, supporters had almost run out of low-hanging fruit to target; only one other state that blue (Delaware) has yet to sign on, and it is worth only three electoral votes. It seemed like the National Popular Vote campaign had hit a ceiling. Red states were (and still are) unlikely to join, given that both times the popular vote and electoral vote split in living memory — in 2000 and 2016 — the outcome favored the Republican candidate.2 And purple states theoretically have little incentive to sign on; every four years, presidential candidates shower them with a disproportionate share of their attention (campaign visits, media buys) in an effort to snag some of those precious few swingable electoral votes. That would all go away if the only thing that mattered was the nationwide popular vote.

But Colorado represents an important breakthrough. With a partisan lean of D+1, it’s the first swing state to sign on to the compact. But like 10 of the other 12 jurisdictions to pass the compact, Colorado is doing so when Democrats have full control of state government, meaning the party is in power in both branches of the legislature and holds the governorship. And even in the other two instances, it was still possible for the compact to pass with only Democratic support.3 That suggests that a state’s willingness to pass a National Popular Vote bill may rely not just on its blueness in presidential elections but also on whether its legislature and governor are Democratic. And in Colorado, most Democratic legislators voted for the legislation even as opponents argued it would eliminate Colorado’s clout as a swing state. (Not a single Republican voted to support it.)

Related: POLITICS PODCAST
Politics Podcast: Should We Cancel The Electoral College?

So if we assume that these bills will only pass in states where Democrats can push them through without GOP support, what other states might join the compact in the next few years, and would those states be enough to reach 270? New Mexico, where the compact has already passed the state House, looks like the most likely next signatory, which would add five electoral votes. After that, there will be four remaining states that have not yet signed on and where Democrats have full control of state government: Delaware, Maine, Nevada and Oregon, which would contribute a total of 20 more electoral votes. (All four states are considering bills that would have them join the agreement.) In addition, Democrats have a good chance to take full control of Virginia’s state government after this fall’s legislative elections, which could add another 13 electoral votes. But even if all these states pass a National Popular Vote bill, the compact would still sit at 219 electoral votes — 51 shy of the number needed for it to take effect. Democrats would then need to take full control of several more states for the compact to become a reality.

And even if the party accomplishes that difficult task, it’s not safe to assume that those states will automatically join the agreement; Delaware and Oregon have had Democratic-controlled governments for years and still have not joined (the campaign to ratify the compact kicked off in 2006). Opposition to the effort will likely ramp up, too, if the compact begins to look like a serious possibility. Right now, if the compact has any chance of being realized, it likely won’t be for many years.

Ultimately, the biggest challenge to the National Popular Vote agreement may be a legal one. Election-law expert Rick Hasen at the University of California, Irvine School of Law told FiveThirtyEight he expected there would be serious legal challenges to the compact if it crosses the 270-elector threshold. Opponents may brandish the part of the Constitution that says that interstate compacts require the consent of Congress, or they may argue that it runs afoul of the Voting Rights Act because it may diminish the clout of minority voters. And, of course, there is the fact that it circumvents what the founders intended — the Electoral College was designed to be an indirect method of electing the president. So even if organizers somehow get states worth 270 electoral votes to join the compact, expect it to face a long fight in the courts challenging whether it can actually take effect.

CORRECTION (March 5, 2019, 1:07 p.m.): A previous version of the cartogram in this article mistakenly failed to identify Connecticut as part of the National Popular Vote initiative.

Nathaniel Rakich is FiveThirtyEight’s elections analyst. @baseballot


MORE FROM 538

https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/bernie-sanders-2020-democratic-nomination-kickoff/?cid=referral_taboola_feed
FEB. 19, 2019, AT 6:49 AM
How Bernie Sanders Could Win The 2020 Democratic Nomination
By Clare Malone
Filed under 2020 Election

PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY FIVETHIRTYEIGHT / GETTY IMAGES

Bernie Sanders is a famous, successful loser.

When he announced his run for the Democratic nomination in April 2015, Sanders trailed Hillary Clinton in the polls by nearly 57 percentage points. By spring of 2016, some polls showed him within single digits. Sanders was no longer an obscure senatorial frump from Vermont — he was a bona fide political phenomenon whose primary success embodied the Democratic Party’s leftward drift.

But 2020 is not 2016. Sanders kicked off his 2020 run early on Tuesday, and as he navigates his second presidential primary, he’ll need to prove he can build on his past success, not coast on his 2016 coalition.

Sanders enters the 2020 race not as an underdog but as a Democratic Socialist leader of the pack; an early Iowa poll showed him commanding 19 percent of the vote of likely caucusgoers, second only to former Vice President Joe Biden. Sanders comes to the race with the high name recognition that many candidates in the crowded field lack, and with a glossy pelt hanging off his political belt: the grassroots movement that propelled him to unexpected heights in 2016.

While many 2020 contenders will spend the early days of their campaigns conveying just what sort of candidate they would be and delicately trying to signal what kinds of voters they think they appeal to, Sanders is already a known quantity. In a recent YouGov poll, only 16 percent of respondents said they didn’t know what they thought of him, compared with 38 percent who said the same of Kamala Harris and 29 percent who didn’t know what to think of Elizabeth Warren. Engaged Democratic voters will know that Sanders’s brand is populist — free college, $15 minimum wage, “Medicare for all” — and polemical. The senator’s early charm in 2016 seemed to lie in his harangues against an unmitigated free-market system and the need for political revolution. In the age of President Trump, many Democrats might be looking for a pure-of-heart angry warrior figure in their candidate — someone with a distinct brand of politics that hasn’t been formed solely in reaction to the president. Sanders certainly is that.

We know who was attracted to that kind of candidate in the last Democratic primary. In 2016, Sanders outperformed Clinton with young voters and voters who live in more rural places. He won primaries in states with sizable white populations like Michigan and Wisconsin — states that Clinton went on to lose in the general election to Trump. In the months and years following Clinton’s loss to Trump, Democrats have debated ways to win back this disillusioned group. Sanders could hold some appeal to those Obama-Trump voters given his primary performance in upper Midwest states and the fact that he did well with independents.

While Clinton won the 2016 primary by a substantial number of votes — more than 3 million — it’s safe to say the Democratic Party has gone through a bout of soul searching over the past couple of years. Voters who might have dismissed Sanders during the 2016 primary could well have come around to him in the interim. A Gallup survey found that 2016 was the first year in which Democrats felt more positively about socialism than they did about capitalism — Sanders’s message might well have seeped in. Another potential strength is his proven track record of attracting small-dollar donations. Sanders raised more than $100 million from donors giving less than $200 during the 2016 run, and in the 2020 campaign era, in which candidates are eschewing PAC money, that donor base is powerful.

Small donors gave big to Sanders

The five 2018 U.S. Senate candidates who raised the largest share of their donations from small donors as of Nov. 1, 2018

CANDIDATE PARTY STATE SHARE OF CONTRIBUTIONS FROM SMALL DONORS
Bernie Sanders I Vermont 77%
–
Elizabeth Warren D Massachusetts 56
–
Corey Stewart R Virginia 50
–
Beto O’Rourke D Texas 46
–
Geoff Diehl R Massachusetts 45
–
SOURCE: FEDERAL ELECTION COMMISSION VIA CENTER FOR RESPONSIVE POLITICS

Sanders also may have a leg up in early primary states like Iowa and New Hampshire, where all-important local activists play an outsized role in building candidate momentum. Sanders knows them, and he won’t have to do as much as others to build up grassroots support.

But Sanders’s 2016 success could also be the makings of his greatest 2020 challenge. When he entered the race in 2015, it was in large part to push his progressive left ideas. Other politicians picked up on the fact that Democratic voters liked the big ideas that Sanders was selling, and now the 2020 field is packed with contenders who are campaigning on platforms similar to his 2016 campaign. Sanders’s 2017 “Medicare for all” bill became something of a litmus test for those senators considering a 2020 run — Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren all signed on as co-sponsors. Even Clinton acknowledged the appeal in her campaign memoir, “What Happened”: “I have a new appreciation for the galvanizing power of big, simple ideas. I still think my health care and college plans were more achievable than Bernie’s and that his were fraught with problems, but they were easier to explain and understand, and that counts for a lot.”

This means the progressive-left lane in 2020 is quite a bit more crowded than it was in 2016, which is a problem for Sanders, albeit a problem that stems from his own success. Warren is perhaps his most direct ideological competition — she’s been a critic of American capitalism for decades, though unlike Sanders, she still calls herself a capitalist and a Democrat. She also hired his 2016 Iowa caucus director — inside baseball to be sure, but it’s worth paying attention to the campaigns Democratic operatives choose to work for this early on.

Another potential complexifier for Sanders is that many Democrats appear to be prioritizing “electability” over ideology in 2020. A Monmouth University poll found that 56 percent of Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents wanted a candidate who will perform well against Trump, even if they disagree with that person on most issues. What electability actually means in this context is quite vague, but if it becomes a proxy for a centrist candidate palatable to swing voters, Sanders might be out of luck. Or, even if voters decide that “electable” means more left, Sanders could lose out to new faces trying to sell their pragmatic progressivism — Harris, Warren or potential candidate Beto O’Rourke. We might be wise not to discount voters’ affinity for these new, shiny candidates: 59 percent of respondents in a recent USA Today/Suffolk University poll said they would be interested in “someone entirely new” as their nominee. Forty-one percent of those polled said Sanders shouldn’t even run again.

Sanders also would need to work to improve his performance with black voters, a crucial demographic in the Democratic primary.

In 2016, Clinton and Sanders split the white vote, but she did better among black voters overall, though young black voters trended toward Sanders. 2020 will likely be a whole different ballgame when it comes to courting the black vote. The field has two top-tier contenders who are black — Harris and Booker — and Joe Biden could hold some appeal given that he served as vice president under Barack Obama.

And then there is the matter of allegations of sexual harassment and gendered pay inequity that have been leveled against the Sanders campaign itself. Women who worked for the candidate in 2016 said there was a lack of accountability on the campaign when it came to the harassment, and Sanders’s initial response to the reporting was that he had been unaware of the allegations. “I was little bit busy running around the country trying to make the case,” he said. “If I run, we will do better next time.” Sanders issued a more full-throated apology via Twitter days later, but the allegations have served to compound the impression that there were whiffs of sexism swirling around the Sanders campaign and its supporters. “Bernie bros,” as some male supporters of Sanders came to be called, were sometimes blamed for sexist online attacks on Clinton.

From ABC News:

Clare Malone is a senior political writer for FiveThirtyEight. @claremalone

MARCH 10 THRU 12, 2019

NEWS AND VIEWS

BERNIE’S ATTEMPTS TO IMPROVE HIS RELATIONSHIP WITH MINORITIES IS PERHAPS WORKING. I’VE SEEN NO SIGN THAT HE DISLIKES MINORITY GROUPS, OR WOULD WORK AGAINST THEIR INTERESTS. HE’S REALLY A KIND PERSON AND CARES ABOUT PEOPLE.

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bernie-sanders-campaign-touts-support-from-minority-members/
BY RICHARD ESCOBEDO
MARCH 11, 2019 / 7:32 PM / CBS NEWS

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/bernie-sanders-campaign-touts-support-from-minority...
3 hours ago - By Richard Escobedo. March 11, 2019 / 7:32 ... First published on March 11, 2019 / 7:32 PM. © 2019 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Advisers to Sen. Bernie Sanders' presidential campaign team say that the Vermont independent is polling well among minority groups that backed his rival Hillary Clinton in 2016. According to campaign pollster Ben Tulchi, nearly half of Sanders support currently comes from Latinos, African Americans and women—a departure from the early days of his 2016 campaign.

"We're starting the campaign with a base of African Americans and Latinos," Tulchi said in a conference call with reporters on Monday.

Sanders' campaign is investing early in a national operation and has nearly 70 staffers on the payroll, said campaign manager Faiz Shakir. And it is zeroing in on states with significant minority populations.

In South Carolina, the campaign is staffing up early and hoping to avoid a repeat of the 2016 Democratic primary. Three years ago, African American turnout propelled Hillary Clinton to a landslide victory in South Carolina, where she bested Sanders 76 percent to 26 percent.

Overall, 77 percent of black Democratic primary voters preferred Clinton over Sanders in 2016, according to CBS News polling.

The campaign is also turning an eye to early voting states such as Nevada, where Clinton edged out Sanders 52 percent to 47 percent. Staffers said Texas, where Clinton also won in a landslide by more than 30 points, is also a priority for Sanders, as is Arizona, California and Colorado.

In the week following Sanders' announcement, the campaign raised $10 million—a number his team likes to tout. But beyond Sanders' financial war chest, his staff points to another currency: name identification.

"He begins this race nearly universally well known," said Tulchi, who notes that Sanders spent considerable time and effort introducing himself to voters in the early days of his first bid for president. "He emerged out of the 2016 race as one of the country's most popular elected officials."

First published on March 11, 2019 / 7:32 PM

© 2019 CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.


https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/10/bernie-sanders-2020-senate-1213220
2020 ELECTIONS
'A major player': Sanders gets props from the Democratic establishment
Democratic senators are surprisingly open to the Vermont independent as the nominee if he manages to emerge from the crowded primary.
By BURGESS EVERETT and MARIANNE LEVINE 03/10/2019 06:55 AM EDT Updated 03/10/2019 08:40 AM EDT

PHOTOGRAPH – It’s clear there’s been a sea change over the past three years in how Democratic senators view their independent colleague from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. | Drew Angerer/Getty Images

PHOTOGRAPH -- 2020 ELECTIONS – THIS IS AN EXCELLENT PICTURE OF BERNIE, SHOWING HIS LONG LEGS, SQUARE SHOULDERS AND A DETERMINED FACE. SOME CRITICS HAVE SAID OR IMPLIED THAT HE IS OVERLY ASSERTIVE OR IS GUILTY OF “SHOUTING.” HE DOES, WHEN ADDRESSING AN AUDIENCE, SPEAK WITH CLARITY AND POWER. SINCE MY EARS ARE A LITTLE WEAK, I’M GRATEFUL FOR THAT. I THINK IN A POLITICIAN, BEING ON THE PASSIVE SIDE IS NOT A GOOD CHARACTERISTIC, AND TOO MANY DEMOCRATS ARE NOT “STRONG” ENOUGH. BERNIE HAS A HUMOROUS SIDE WHEN HE IS NOT BEING “GRUFF,” AND HAS A NICE-LOOKING FACE, WHEN HE SMILES, ESPECIALLY, TO BE ALMOST 80 YEARS OLD. THOSE WHO DON’T CARE FOR HIM, SPEAK OF HIS ADVANCED AGE, BUT HE’S STRONG AND HAS CONSIDERABLE ENDURANCE AND INTELLIGENCE. THERE IS NOTHING ABOUT HIM THAT IMPLIES SENILITY OR WEAKNESS, THOUGH, SO JUST DON’T READ THOSE STORIES. THEIR ONLY PURPOSE IS TO SUPPRESS THE SANDERS VOTE. THE EDITOR HAS THEM PURPOSELY TO BE, NOT ONLY SPECIFYING WHAT TO WRITE, BUT HOW TO PITCH IT AT THE READERS AND HOW HARD-HITTING IT MUST BE. THERE HAS BEEN A LOT OF TALK ABOUT FREEDOM OF THE PRESS, BUT IT HAS BEEN IN DECLINING HEALTH AS A CONCEPT FOR THE LAST TWENTY YEARS OR MORE.


THE MORE OF THE POLITICO.COM STORIES THAT I READ, THE MORE I LIKE THEM. THE DEPTH AND ORIGINALITY ALWAYS INTERESTS ME, AND THEY TEACH ME SOMETHING IMPORTANT.

https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/03/09/bernie-sanders-race-black-voters-2020-225611
‘This Is Not 2016’: What People Don’t Get About Bernie Sanders and Race
The Vermont senator did better with black voters in 2016 than many people realize. But 2020 is a different story.
By SAM SANDERS March 09, 2019

PHOTOGRAPH – SANDERS SPEAKS WITH A BLACK LADY DURING A MARCH

Sam Sanders is the host of NPR’s “It’s Been a Minute with Sam Sanders,” a talk show about the news of the week, featuring interviews with people in the culture who deserve your attention. He is also a recovering campaign reporter.

When I first started covering Senator Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign in 2015, I thought it would be a relatively short assignment. He jumped into the Democratic primary with low name recognition, a campaign infrastructure dwarfed by Hillary Clinton’s, and a message many observers deemed too radical to ever succeed nationally.

I was wrong.

My “short assignment” turned into several months on the road with Sanders and his team. By the time he dropped out of the race at the Democratic National Convention in July 2016—after winning 43 percent of the primary vote nationally and outraising Clinton on the strength of his small-dollar donations—he’d become one of the most popular politicians in America.

The Bernie Sanders who announced last month that he is again running for president is in a very different position than the one I reported on four years ago. The party he was trying to pull to the left seems to have caught up with him, with proposals like “Medicare for All” fast turning into litmus tests for 2020 candidates. He’s still a democratic socialist and still running on the same message, but he is no longer an underdog; he’s a front-runner.

And yet, while much has changed for Sanders, some of the same questions that dogged him in the 2016 race will again be asked by Democratic primary voters over the next few months. Perhaps the biggest of those is whether he can convince enough of them that he isn’t a single-issue candidate—and whether he realizes that even as the Democratic Party has moved closer to him on economic issues, it has grown increasingly vocal on race and identity, issues that even some of Sanders’ supporters concede is a blind spot for the candidate.

“Bernie’s central concern has always been with the condition of what he calls working-class families. He is consumed by the need for economic justice,” Huck Gutman, a University of Vermont professor and Sanders’ former chief of staff, said in an interview with NPR early on in the senator’s 2016 campaign. “[Sanders’] central concerns have never been war or civil rights or gay rights or women’s rights.”

That’s a potential problem for Sanders in the 2020 campaign. His defining issue—economic inequality—has now been co-opted by just about every other serious candidate for the nomination. And that in turn means that the likely areas of contrast between Sanders and his primary opponents will come elsewhere—potentially on issues that touch on race and identity, which have never been the senator’s strong suit.

That said, the conventional narrative around Sanders and race paints his 2016 efforts as a failure, but that’s not accurate.

From the start of his campaign, Sanders and his aides tried to respond to criticisms on race. They were quick to note his history in the civil rights movement at the University of Chicago in the 1960s, framing it as the formative event in his political awakening: “His activism and when it occurred, as a young college student, set in motion the direction of his life,” Sanders adviser Tad Devine told the Chicago Tribune. After Black Lives Matter activists targeted Sanders early on for being tone-deaf about policing, he appointed Symone Sanders, an African-American woman who had been an activist on issues of race and criminal justice, as his national press secretary—ostensibly his most visible messenger on TV. And he made it a point to visit parts of the country where racial disparity is on full display, like West Baltimore, the home of Freddie Gray, a young black man who died in the back of a police vehicle in 2015 and whose name became a rallying cry for the Black Lives Matter movement.

Though Sanders lost a majority of the black vote in the 2016 Democratic primaries, he did win a majority of black (and Latino) voters under age 35 in several states. All over the country, when I talked with black voters, they revealed the same generational differences you’d expect to hear from, well, white voters. Like any other group, the way black voters think about issues like the economy or policing is directly influenced by the times in which they came of age. Living through the war on drugs or the economic boom of the ’90s might mean you see the world a bit differently than younger voters who grew up during the Great Recession and birth of the Black Lives Matter movement. (Any candidate who wants to win, say, the 2020 South Carolina primary, needs to understand the nuance that can exist within a voting bloc that many outside observers deem monolithic.)

Even so, the questions about Sanders and race never faded. And already, issues of race are again dogging him as he mounts a 2020 effort.

In a recent interview with Vermont Public Radio, Sanders said of his place in the 2020 race as a 77-year-old straight white man, “We have got to look at candidates, not by the color of their skin, not by their sexual orientation or their gender and not by their age.” It was a statement that would have seemed innocuous in years past, but in a primary with one of the most diverse candidate rosters in recent memory—and at a time when Democratic politics are wrapped up in issues of race and identity—many Democrats saw this as a misstep and a sign that Sanders’ rhetoric on race and identity needs more workshopping.

These aren’t topics that will fade away anytime soon. Already, the 2020 Democratic contenders are being forced to grapple with the way race affects economic inequality, and how the two issues intersect—as in the simmering debate over economic reparations for the descendants of slaves. In 2008 and 2016, it was a proposal too hot for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton or Sanders to support. But at this point in the 2020 cycle, Kamala Harris, Elizabeth Warren and Julián Castro have already voiced their support, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has announced she’ll take up a bill to study the issue further, which will likely only increase its salience on the campaign trail. Asked about reparations earlier this week on an episode of “The Breakfast Club” radio show, Sanders said he was opposed to such cash payouts, but instead wanted to “change the banking system so that we end racism”—again, a pivot to his comfort zone of economic inequality. And on ABC‘s “The View” this month, Sanders said of reparations, “I think there are better ways to do that than just writing out a check.”

To be fair, Sanders’ messaging on race has shifted. In the past few weeks, he’s called President Donald Trump a racist, talked about voter suppression and discussed the need for policing reform. But to broaden his appeal to black voters, he’ll have to work harder on racial issues than he did four years ago. Then, his only real opponent was Clinton, whom young black voter after young black voter on the trail called out for her “superpredators” comment from 1996, which many interpreted as a slur against young black people. For many primary voters—especially young ones—it wasn’t too hard for Sanders to be better than that on race.

The 2020 primary will be different. Sanders is running against the likes of Cory Booker, Harris and Castro and many other candidates who lack Clinton‘s baggage with voters of color (though some, such as Harris, with her long record as a prosecutor, may have their own).

Even younger black voters who backed Sanders in 2016 aren’t yet fully on board with his 2020 campaign.

Dallas Fowler, a political consultant and strategist in Southern California, was a Sanders delegate at the 2016 Democratic National Convention—one of a relatively small number of black women at the event who were pledged to support Sanders. I interviewed her several times over the course of the 2016 election cycle, and we spoke again after Sanders’ announcement.

Fowler told me that Sanders’ “revolution never ended,” and that she’s happy to see him run again, even though she’s not guaranteeing him her vote just yet. “The race is different,” Fowler told me. “This is not 2016.”

Fowler says of the former Sanders delegates she talks to—they all stay in touch, she says—maybe a third still are undecided who they’ll support, while the majority say they’ll back Sanders again.

She says she still likes Sanders, but she’s waiting to see what he and all the other Democratic contenders have to say. He hasn’t won her over yet. Especially when it comes to race, Fowler said, “I need to hear a few different things from the last time.”

MARCH 8 AND 9, 2019

NEWS AND VIEWS

PARDON ME FOR MAKING A LESSER EFFORT THAN USUAL TO THINK OF USEFUL COMMENTS ON THESE ARTICLES, BECAUSE THERE ARE TOO MANY STORIES, AND IT’S LATE HERE IN FLORIDA. MOST OF THE ARTICLES HAVE A GOOD DEAL OF INFORMATION AND WELL-STATED OPINION IN THEM ALREADY, SO I WILL JUST FOCUS A LITTLE ON THE ANTI-SANDERS “CAMPAIGN” THAT VOX SAYS IS “BEING PUSHED BY FORMER CLINTON STAFFERS.” I WILL STATE MY PRO-SANDERS VIEW: THE “SELF-RIGHTEOUS” AND THE “LOUD AND ANGRY” PERSONAL DESCRIPTION OF HIS STRAIGHT-SHOOTER WAY OF DEALING WITH CORPORATE AND POLITICAL CORRUPTION. THAT CLAIM IS ONE THAT MORE THAN A HANDFUL OF THE DEMS HAVE CHOSEN TO CRITICIZE HIM ON, AND VERY HARSHLY. HE DEALS STRONGLY, YES, WITH UNACCEPTABLE POLITICAL BEHAVIOR. I TRUST HIM SO MUCH MORE BECAUSE OF THAT, AND I, TOO, AM ANGRY AT THE LEVEL OF CORRUPTION THAT EXISTS TODAY. SHOUT ON, BERNIE! IF YOU SAY IT STRONGLY ENOUGH, MAYBE THE “WELL-BRED” PEOPLE IN THIS COUNTRY WILL STOP TAKING MONEY UNDER THE TABLE AND LISTEN TO WHAT HE ACTUALLY SAYS.

THEY’RE CALLING HIM A PRUDE, IT SEEMS TO ME. DID HE REFUSE TO EAT OF THE FORBIDDEN FRUIT, PERHAPS? THEY ALSO DO NOT MENTION, WITH “APPROPRIATE” DERISION, THE FACT THAT HE IS A JEW, AND I’M SURE THAT MORE THAN ONE HAS SAID IT BEHIND HIS BACK. THAT MAY BE EXACTLY WHY HE DOESN’T CHOOSE TO CRITICIZE PEOPLE BASED ON THEIR “IDENTITY” CHARACTERISTICS. HE KNOWS HOW IT FEELS TO BE THE RECIPIENT OF THAT SORT OF UNKINDNESS. THAT, TO ME, JUST PROVES THAT HE IS WELL-BRED ENOUGH NOT TO DO IT, AND HIS RECENT AND WELL-SPOKEN STATEMENT THAT PERSONAL CHARACTERISTICS OF THAT SORT SHOULD NOT BE THE SUBJECT OF POLITICAL COMMENT IN THE HOUSE OR THE SENATE SHOULD GO TO HIS CREDIT RATHER THAN BE USED TO CUT HIM DOWN. THAT SORT OF THING DEGRADES OUR POLITICAL VIRTUES CONSIDERABLY.

IT SEEMS TO ME THAT COMPLAINING ABOUT THE RAMPANT “CORPORATE GREED” IS A VALID ISSUE, AND THAT THE NUMBER OF HIGH-LEVEL POLITICIANS ON BOTH SIDES OF OUR GOVERNMENT WHO ARE ACTUALLY WEDDED TO WALL STREET AND HUGE BUSINESSES OF ALL KINDS, IS THE CENTRAL PROBLEM OF OUR TIME AND OUR NATION. THE UBERWEALTHY DON’T CONSIDER IT A PROBLEM, BUT THAT JUST MEANS THAT THEY SHOULD BE MORE “SELF-RIGHTEOUS,” LIKE BERNIE. WE ARE IN THE GREATEST DANGER AS A SOCIETY WHEN GOOD PEOPLE AREN’T COMPLAINING ABOUT IT, AND THOSE WHO DO ARE CALLED EXTREME AND “LOUD.” TO ME, THAT IS THE MOST RIDICULOUS CRITICISM OF SANDERS THAT I’VE HEARD, BUT I KEEP HEARING IT FIRST FROM ONE DEMOCRATIC SOURCE AFTER ANOTHER, SO I’M ABSOLUTELY SURE THAT TARA GOLSHAN FROM VOX IS ACCURATE AND FAIR IN HER DEFENSE OF BERNIE.

AS FOR “THE CLINTON TREATMENT,” IT WAS UNFAIR, BUT IT WAS NOT PROMOTED BY BERNIE SANDERS, I AM CERTAIN. THAT ISN’T “HIS WAY.” IT WAS CLEARLY DONE BY THE TRUMP CAMP INSTEAD. THE CLINTONITES ARE JUST INFURIATED AT HIM THEMSELVES BECAUSE HE CAME FRIGHTFULLY CLOSE TO BEATING THE PANTS SUIT OFF HER, AND IN AN EMBARRASSINGLY PUBLIC WAY. I WONDER HOW HILLARY FELT ABOUT THE IMMENSE AND SPONTANEOUS OVATION THAT THE WHOLE AUDIENCE AT THE 2016 DNC MEETING GAVE HIM WHEN HE WALKED ONTO THE STAGE. SO, I ALSO HAVE ILL WILL LEFT OVER FROM THE UNFAIRNESS THAT OCCURRED AMONG THE DEMS, AND ABSOLUTELY ON THE PART OF THE TRUMP CAMP. BUT I JUST WANT TO MOVE ON, AND STRENGTHEN THE PROGRESSIVE GROUPS IMMENSELY. IT’S ALMOST TIME FOR A NEW ELECTION – MY, HOW TIME DOES FLY. LET’S GET UP OFF OUR NETHER REGIONS AND DO SOMETHING USEFUL, LIKE GETTING RID OF THE DANGEROUS PERSON WHO NOW OCCUPIES THE WHITE HOUSE.

https://www.vox.com/2019/3/8/18253459/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-2020-relitigate-primary
The anti-Bernie Sanders campaign being pushed by former Clinton staffers, explained
Former Hillary Clinton aides really want Bernie Sanders to get the Clinton treatment.
By Tara Golshan Mar 8, 2019, 2:30pm EST

PHOTOGRAPH -- In 2016, then Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton, left, and US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) went on the campaign trail together. Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

Former Hillary Clinton aides want the American public to know that they’re still mad about Bernie Sanders.

In the past week, a number of Clinton staffers have gone to the press, both publicly and anonymously, to air their frustrations about the Vermont senator, who launched his 2020 presidential bid late last month.

Politico reported former aides slamming Sanders for demanding a private jet to stump for Clinton in the general election. Talking Points Memo said top Clinton staffers called to say they think Sanders allowed the “Bernie Bros” — the trope used to describe a young, white, male, extremely online Sanders supporter — to sow division within the Democratic party. Top Clinton aides want the media to hit his past record on gun control and same-sex marriage. A lot of former aides really just want to complain about the loud, angry tone Sanders uses when he rants about corporate greed.

At the core of their frustrations is a belief that Clinton beat Sanders fair and square and that Sanders was a sore loser. These attacks are their way of warning the American public it could happen again, leaving a divided Democratic party in the general election against Trump.

“I think we are all just scarred by 2016 at large and would like to prevent that again,” one former Clinton staffer said of the attacks against Sanders.

These former Clinton aides aren’t tearing apart Sanders’s current policy agenda (probably because most major Democratic candidates have essentially adopted it). They’re just saying, here’s a bunch of dirt we had and we would like Sanders to have to deal with if he’s going to run again.

“I’m not necessarily an anti-Bernie guy, especially not when it comes to his policies,” another ex-Clinton staffer, who worked on her campaign’s research team, said. “But he has this self-righteous attitude to himself. If you are not with him you are against him, and I think we are seeing that kind of behavior in the White House, to be honest. And that style is not what we need.”

But in the machinations of the Sanders-Clinton rivalry, in which both camps purport each others’ teams engaged in nefarious tactics to ultimately deny Democrats the White House, one statistic is often forgotten: as best as we can tell, more Sanders primary supporters voted for Clinton in the general election than Clinton supporters voted for Barack Obama in 2008.

And while Clinton’s aides say they are trying to even the playing field in 2020, this relitigation of 2016 is doing more to reopen past wounds than heal them.

Why the relitigation of 2016 will never end
The 2016 primary was bitter.

Clinton had been preparing for her moment for eight years through Barack Obama’s presidency. Then Sanders came close to winning in Iowa and handily won the New Hampshire primary, throwing Clinton’s presumptive nomination into question. He mounted a long and serious challenge, staying in the race through every single primary — even after it was mathematically impossible for him to clinch the nomination.

In the end, Sanders lost because Clinton won 34 primary contests, whereas Sanders only won 23, giving Clinton a 3 million popular vote lead and the Democratic nomination.

But throughout it all, a frustration grew over the fairness of the 2016 election. It’s understandable: Democrats were dealt a devastating blow in 2016, and everyone involved feels slighted. Clinton even wrote an entire book about it, where Sanders landed among the factors she has come to blame for her loss.

The bitterness hasn’t gone away.

Sanders’s supporters maintain the 2016 primary was rigged; Clinton was the establishment candidate, lifted by the entirety of the Democratic Party apparatus, from the way the Democratic National Committee scheduled debates to fundraising — and besides, she had the support of the Party’s superdelegates before the primaries even began.

This all came to a head in July 2016, when the DNC’s then-chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz was forced to abruptly resign just as the party’s nominating convention began. The central issue was leaked emails (now believed to be hacked by Russians) showed Democratic leaders disliked Sanders. After the election, Donna Brazile, who was appointed to replace Schultz, revealed that the DNC, deeply in debt at the start of the 2016 cycle, had struck a deal with Clinton in 2015, essentially trading some of its autonomy for Clinton’s fundraising help. To Sanders supporters, this was all evidence that the primary was rigged from the beginning.

But Clinton’s team says Sanders was just a sore loser. Sanders didn’t concede the primaries even when there was no path to the nomination, saying he wanted to see his “political revolution” to the end. His campaign manager told Bloomberg Politics at the time that their campaign “would like to get to a place where we could very actively support the nominee,” hinting that Clinton would first have to adopt a more progressive vision.

Sanders endorsed Clinton in July of 2016. But tensions remained. Recently asked whether he would seek advice from Clinton’s team, Sanders said “I think not,” giving Clinton surrogates more fodder to say Sanders was never on their side.

“The one difference between Clinton people and Bernie people is we would vote for Bernie if he got the nomination,” the former Clinton research staffer said. Exit polling tells a different story; there wasn’t a massive Bernie Bro defection in 2016.

“This is a little anecdotal — I just heard from the Bernie side,” the Clinton staffer clarified.

Clinton’s aides want Sanders to be put through the media wringer

Ahead of Sanders’s 2020 announcement, Democratic strategist Zac Petkanas, a former senior aide to Hillary Clinton, penned an op-ed for NBC News warning Sanders of a deluge of negative media coverage to come. He gave Sanders a taste of what they should expect, blasting his voting record on gun control, immigration, and same-sex marriage.

Petkanas writes:

While in 2016 he cultivated a reputation around popular left-wing positions like Medicare-for-All and free college, the broader embrace of those issues in the Democratic party means that his opponents in a second presidential campaign will inevitably address his lesser-known and decidedly less progressive record on the issues that cut directly against his liberal brand.

Petkanas gets at the core of these Clinton attacks against Sanders — a widespread belief that Clinton was unfairly targeted in the press, torn to pieces on every vote, posture, and position, whereas Sanders got a pass.

“We just want every candidate to be treated the same. And we don’t want some people to be media darlings,” one of the former Clinton campaign aides told Vox, citing Sanders’s record with immigration and dismissal of identity politics.

“He’s coming into this new race with the same messaging, the same team,” another Clinton aide said. “He hasn’t adapted the messaging to the post-loss world that we live in. Democratic socialism is more popular than ever, but the broader message around institutional racism, he’s still in this ‘identity politics doesn’t matter’ ... saying things that don’t resonate with a lot of people who don’t share his privilege as a cis white man in politics.”

The generous reading of the Clintonite argument is that media coverage did seem like it was unfair. A post-2016 election study from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center found, “Clinton’s alleged scandals accounted for 16 percent of her coverage — four times the amount of press attention paid to Trump’s treatment of women and sixteen times the amount of news coverage given to Clinton’s most heavily covered policy position.”

But Sanders and his supporters have their own media critique to make. They pointed out the media also wasn’t focusing on the senator’s movement, calling it a “Bernie Blackout*.” A June 2016 study from Harvard’s Shorenstein Center found that Sanders’s media coverage did indeed lag:

By summer, Sanders had emerged as Clinton’s leading competitor but, even then, his coverage lagged. Not until the pre-primary debates did his coverage begin to pick up, though not at a rate close to what he needed to compensate for the early part of the year. Five Republican contenders — Trump, Bush, Cruz, Rubio, and Carson — each had more news coverage than Sanders during the invisible primary*. Clinton got three times more coverage than he did.

It’s important to note that Sanders, like these Clinton aides, has already said he will support whoever wins the Democratic nomination.

But for now, it seems, the Clinton world’s bitterness will continue to fuel the news cycle.


*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_primary

Invisible primary
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

In the United States, the money primary, also known as the invisible primary, is the period between (1) the first well-known presidential candidates with strong political support networks showing interest in running for president and (2) demonstration of substantial public support by voters for them in primaries and caucuses. During the money primary candidates raise funds for the upcoming primary elections and attempt to garner support of political leaders and donors, as well as the party establishment. Fund raising numbers and opinion polls are used by the media to predict who the front runners for the nomination are. This is a crucial stage of a campaign for the presidency, as the initial frontrunners who raise the most money appear the strongest and will be able to raise even more money. On the other hand, members of the party establishment who find themselves losing the invisible primary, such as Mitt Romney in the 2016 race, may abandon hope of successfully running.[1]

During the invisible primary appeals are made and meetings held with the political elite: party leaders, major donors, fundraisers, and political action committees. In contrast to the smoke-filled room where a small group of party-leaders might at the last minute, in a small meeting room at a political convention, determine the candidate,[2][3][4] the invisible primary refers to the period of jockeying which precedes the first primaries and caucuses and even campaign announcements. The winners of the invisible primary, such as Hillary Clinton and, possibly, Jeb Bush[5] in 2016, come into the first primaries and caucuses with a full war chest of money, support from office holders, and an aura of inevitability. Winners of the invisible primary have the support of the leaders of their political party and, in turn, support the political positions of their party; they are insiders, part of the party establishment. They do not always win, as Hillary Clinton did not in 2008[1] or 2016. There is little or no campaign advertising using TV, particularly by the candidate, during this period, although online advertising may be used to build mailing lists of grassroots supporters and small contributors.[6]


NEXT UP IN EXPLAINERS
Captain Marvel’s 2 end-credits scenes, explained
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8 things everybody should know about measles
The extraordinary https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2019/3/8/18251707/medicare-for-all-bill-senate-filibuster-budget-reconciliation-byrd-rule

MARCH 7, 2019

NEWS AND VIEWS

DNC CHAIR TOM PEREZ IS AGAIN BEHAVING ASSERTIVELY. THANK YOU, MR. PEREZ. YOU AREN’T ONE OF THOSE WEAK-KNEED DEMOCRATS. I’VE BEEN WATCHING YOU, AND I LIKE YOUR STYLE.

https://www.npr.org/2019/03/06/700807729/dnc-bars-fox-news-from-hosting-2020-primary-debates
DNC Bars Fox News From Hosting 2020 Primary Debates
March 6, 20192:05 PM ET
Jessica Taylor at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., July 25, 2018. (photo by Allison Shelley) (Square)
JESSICA TAYLOR
Twitter

PHOTOGRAPH -- Following a report about the close relationship between Fox News and the Trump White House, Democratic National Committee Chairman Tom Perez said the Democratic Party will not allow the network to host any of its primary debates in 2020.
Charles Dharapak/AP

Updated at 7:27 p.m. ET

The Democratic National Committee will not allow Fox News to broadcast any of its 2020 presidential primary debates, citing a recent report about the close relationship between the Trump administration and the conservative cable network.

"I believe that a key pathway to victory is to continue to expand our electorate and reach all voters. That is why I have made it a priority to talk to a broad array of potential media partners, including FOX News," DNC Chairman Tom Perez said in a statement Wednesday.

"Recent reporting in the New Yorker on the inappropriate relationship between President Trump, his administration and FOX News has led me to conclude that the network is not in a position to host a fair and neutral debate for our candidates. Therefore, FOX News will not serve as a media partner for the 2020 Democratic primary debates," the statement adds.

POLITICS
Initial Democratic Primary Debates Will Accommodate Up To 20 Candidates

The decision comes after a lengthy article by Jane Mayer in the New Yorker detailed the increasing coziness between Trump and the network, which has long had a conservative tilt but which one source in the piece calls simply "propaganda" and effectively Trump's "own press organization."

The president responded on Twitter on Wednesday evening to the DNC's announcement, suggesting that he might block media outlets that he disfavors from holding debates during the general election phase of the 2020 campaign. "Democrats just blocked @FoxNews from holding a debate," Trump wrote. "Good, then I think I'll do the same thing with the Fake News Networks and the Radical Left Democrats in the General Election debates!"


Donald J. Trump
✔
@realDonaldTrump
Democrats just blocked @FoxNews from holding a debate. Good, then I think I’ll do the same thing with the Fake News Networks and the Radical Left Democrats in the General Election debates!

141K
7:05 PM - Mar 6, 2019
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Former Fox News President Bill Shine is now the White House communications director, and Trump has given dozens of exclusive interviews to Fox while eschewing other networks, often deriding them as "fake news." Host Sean Hannity has appeared as a special guest at Trump rallies, and in the New Yorker story, he is referred to as essentially "a West Wing adviser."

Among many other details in the New Yorker article, Mayer also writes that former Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes, who died in 2017, had tipped Trump off to some debate questions during the 2016 cycle. This includes a now-infamous clash with then Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly over his past comments about women, though Kelly has said she does not believe Trump received the question in advance. Another source had allegedly alerted Trump that there would be a question about whether he would eventually support the Republican nominee.

In a statement, Fox News Senior Vice President Bill Sammon pointed to the network's intent to have a debate hosted by its news anchors, as opposed to its prime-time opinion hosts, as evidence of why Democratic Party leadership should rethink the decision. Fox News was set to host one Democratic primary debate in 2016, but it was late in the primary campaign and never happened.

"We hope the DNC will reconsider its decision to bar Chris Wallace, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, all of whom embody the ultimate journalistic integrity and professionalism, from moderating a Democratic presidential debate," Sammon said. "They're the best debate team in the business, and they offer candidates an important opportunity to make their case to the largest TV news audience in America, which includes many persuadable voters."

Wallace, who also hosts Fox News Sunday, has often pushed back on the Trump administration, including a recent inaccurate talking point over how many terrorists were coming through the Southern border.

Party committees expressing their frustration over news coverage by denying networks debates is nothing new. In 2015, the Republican National Committee announced it was suspending NBC News from hosting any future debates, citing "inaccurate or downright offensive" questions during a CNBC primary debate.

Correction
March 6, 2019
A previous version of this story misspelled Jane Mayer's last name as Meyer.


BERNIE SANDERS SIGNS THE PLEDGE.

POLITICS
Bernie Sanders Signs Democratic Party Loyalty Pledge For 2020 Run
March 5, 2019 5:18 PM ET
Jessica Taylor at NPR headquarters in Washington, D.C., July 25, 2018. (photo by Allison Shelley) (Square)
JESSICA TAYLOR

PHOTOGRAPH -- Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., has signed a pledge that he will govern as a Democrat if he is elected president in 2020.
Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders has signed a loyalty pledge, promising to run and govern as a Democrat if he wins the presidency in 2020, a new requirement for candidates that largely grew out of his own 2016 campaign.

The pledge Sanders signed was given to all active Democratic presidential campaigns last week. It affirms to the DNC chairman that they "are a Democrat ... are a member of the Democratic Party; will accept the Democratic nomination; and will run and serve as a member of the Democratic Party."

It's an issue that arose during Sanders' first presidential run, with concerns among some Democrats that the longtime independent and self-described democratic socialist, might run as a third-party candidate after losing the nomination to Hillary Clinton.

At the same time that the party adopted the loyalty pledge for presidential candidates, it also made changes to the nominating process that were sought by Sanders and his supporters, like minimizing the role of superdelegates.

POLITICS
Bernie Sanders Files To Run As A Democrat — And An Independent

ANALYSIS
Are Democrats Ready To 'Feel The Bern' Or Is Sanders The 'MySpace' Of 2020?

The party rules state that a candidate must "be a bona fide Democrat whose record of public service, accomplishment, public writings, and/or public statements affirmatively demonstrates that the candidate is faithful to the interests, welfare, and success of the Democratic Party of the United States who subscribes to the substance, intent, and principles of the Charter and the Bylaws of the Democratic Party of the United States, and who will participate in the Convention in good faith."

In the Senate, Sanders caucuses with Democrats. But after his first run for the White House, Sanders seemed to suggest going forward that he would run as a Democrat instead of an independent, saying in 2015 when he filed for the New Hampshire primary that he would be on the ballot as a Democrat in future elections.

POLITICS
Which Democrats Are Running In 2020 — And Which Still Might

Sanders ran for and won re-election in Vermont in 2018 as an independent. He even declined the Democratic nomination after he was offered it, as he has in the past, but Sanders was backed by the Vermont Democratic Party in his independent effort. Sanders has already filed papers for his 2024 Senate re-election bid — as an independent, even as he once again seeks the Democratic nomination for president.

The ambiguity in Sanders' party ID highlights the lingering tensions between Sanders and the DNC after his bruising primary fight with Clinton almost four years ago. Clinton alleged in her book What Happened that Sanders only ran to "disrupt the Democratic Party," not to "make sure a Democrat won the White House," and that his bid did "lasting damage" to her campaign.

POLITICS
Former New York Mayor Bloomberg Decides Against 2020 Presidential Bid


HERE IS ANOTHER REALLY GOOD ARTICLE ON POLITICS FROM THE ATLANTIC. WE DEMOCRATS ARE IN A MUCH BETTER POSITION NOW, I THINK, THAN LAST YEAR; THE IDEA THAT HE’LL “FADE” DUE TO HIS ADVANCED AGE IS JUST WISHFUL THINKING ON THEIR PART, I BELIEVE. HE’S STRONG, AND VERY INTELLIGENT. I DO HOPE I WILL GET TO GO TO ONE OF HIS EVENTS AND ACTUALLY MEET HIM THIS YEAR. I’LL BUY ONE OF HIS BOOKS AND GET IT AUTOGRAPHED.

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2019/02/bernie-sanders-democratic-frontrunner-president/583066/
POLITICS
Bernie Sanders Is the Democratic Front-Runner
Even though many Democrats blame him for Donald Trump’s election—and his rivals think he’ll fade
EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
FEB 19, 2019

PHOTOGRAPH – SANDERS SPEAKING, YURI GRIPAS / REUTERS

He’s a 77-year-old socialist who’s abrasive when he’s in a good mood, and who’s still blamed by many Democrats for Hillary Clinton losing to Donald Trump. But go ahead, try to argue that Bernie Sanders isn’t the front-runner in the 2020 Democratic race right now.

After making his second presidential run official on Tuesday, Sanders blew past every other announced candidate’s early fundraising numbers—$3.3 million in the first few hours, more than double the huge $1.5 million Kamala Harris raised in the whole first day—and he’s expecting to easily hit the 1 million website sign-ups he asked for as a first show of support for his campaign.

Then there’s where he stands in early polls, behind only Joe Biden. Or the argument Sanders’s own pollster has been making: that he will have surprising strength in parts of the country where he connects with many of the same disaffected voters who backed Trump, or who were too turned off by what’s become of politics to vote at all in 2016.

“Short of Joe Biden entering the race, Sanders on paper starts off with more advantages than anybody else. He’s got the largest list; he’s got the most intense following that has stayed with him since 2016; he has a proven ability to fundraise from his small-dollar base,” said Brian Fallon, a Democratic strategist who was the spokesman for Clinton, leading the public charge against Sanders last time around. “He’s in the exact opposite position that he started off the 2016 campaign in.”

The Democrats running against him assume that this won’t last. But he’ll raise millions, get 20,000 people at his rallies, and make them all look junior varsity in comparison. Still, they’re confident that he won’t be able to maintain that over the next year.

Peter Beinart: Bernie Sanders offers a foreign policy for the common man

Sanders running when he’s part of a big field of enticing candidates is a whole lot different from Sanders running as the single fresh alternative to a candidate who never inspired much passion throughout her entire career. He could burn out He could burn out, get eclipsed by some of the newer forces in the party, and have to answer for all the parts of his record and background that didn’t get full scrutiny when he was a novelty nowhere near winning in 2016.

If nothing else, there could certainly come a point late in the game, much like what happened with Howard Dean in 2004, when Democratic voters look at him and say they just can’t take seriously the idea of Sanders actually beating Trump, or actually being the commander in chief and sitting behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office as the 46th president of the United States.

At least that’s what his rivals are telling themselves. Because that’s how races have always gone up to this point. Except, that is, for 2016, when Sanders became a bizarre breakout sensation and the country put Trump behind that desk as the 45th president.

No matter what, his candidacy seems set to reshape the dynamics of the race.

Sanders has moved quickly in an attempt to show that he’s a more serious candidate than four years ago, when he announced his campaign during a break from the Senate floor, gave a few harried answers to the questions from the few reporters who had showed up, and then said he had to get back to vote.

This time, he started with a carefully constructed rollout, with a slick announcement video, a sit-down interview on CBS This Morning, and a media tour. “Sisters and brothers,” he wrote to his huge email list Tuesday morning, “together, you and I and our 2016 campaign began the political revolution. Now, it is time to complete that revolution and implement the vision that we fought for.”

A full operation is being put together, with the assumption that he will have well over $200 million in online fundraising to draw from. That includes top leadership of the campaign meant to illustrate the diversity of his support, demographically and geographically. Faiz Shakir, a former aide to Harry Reid, is leaving his job as the political director of the American Civil Liberties Union to be the campaign manager. In addition to his deep political experience, he will be the first Muslim presidential-campaign manager in history. Analilia Mejia, an organizer of Colombian and Dominican descent who most recently directed the Fight for $15 and Earned Sick Days campaigns in New Jersey and previously worked for the New Jersey Working Families Party, will be the political director. The deputy political director will be Sarah Badawi, who was most recently the government-affairs director for the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, a liberal group that led the effort to draft Elizabeth Warren into the 2012 Senate race, and later worked on her campaign.

Their organization will send out an array of emails, videos, and Twitter-friendly GIFs, which Sanders and his team hope to use to capture the sensation of his 2016 campaign and turn it into an overwhelming movement.

All this will build to a big kickoff rally.

“Bernie Sanders is always an underdog because he is fighting against large special interests who don’t want to see his agenda succeed. He’ll be the underdog until the day he wins,” said Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat enthusiastic about Sanders’s announcement. “He’s the front-runner in terms of grassroots energy and a small-dollar army—we’ve seen how decisive that is.”

The darkness settled in at Warren’s headquarters weeks ago, and by Tuesday morning, Warren advisers were thinking that the upside of Sanders’s candidacy is that at least there will be two strong voices for real structural reform in the economy and political system. While her goal remains winning the White House, she and her aides have had to rethink how she’s going to get there. Sanders will massively out-raise and outperform her for months, Warren advisers think. But over time, if she is able to build up the staying power, there might be a chance for her to have a late second wind, particularly if Sanders collapses under either his own weight or late skepticism about him becoming the nominee, people around her believe. In that scenario, she’s like John McCain in the 2008 Republican primary, able to surge as an acceptable alternative once people try out Sanders and other candidates and realize they don’t like any of them. Sanders could serve as a buffer for anyone who thinks that Warren is too left, or too old, or doesn’t have enough of a claim on the women’s vote given the other female candidates in the race.

Khanna argued that the two won’t split votes.

“Running for president is something deeper. I don’t think you have just a cut-and-paste Let’s see who has what percent of the base and how they overlap. I think it’s about do you meet the moment, and does your vision inspire people?” he said.

A Warren spokeswoman declined to comment on what impact Sanders’s presence in the race would have on her campaign.

In the meantime, several other candidates are salivating over how they expect the two to destroy each other. Among those potentially positioned to do best over a scramble on the left flank are Cory Booker and Kamala Harris, who both have progressive credentials but are campaigning to build strong and more diverse foundations of support.

Or as Harris greeted the news of Sanders’s entry on Tuesday morning while at a campaign stop in New Hampshire, “The more the merrier. I think it’s great.”

That will likely leave little room for some of the more left-leaning potential candidates who have been considering jumping in, most prominently Senator Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon. Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard of Hawaii will likely face the same problem distinguishing herself now that Sanders is in the race.

But the moderates will rejoice, hoping that voters take notice of how the Trump campaign quickly responded to the Sanders launch: “Bernie Sanders has already won the debate in the Democrat primary, because every candidate is embracing his brand of socialism. But the American people will reject an agenda of sky-high tax rates, government-run health care and coddling dictators like those in Venezuela. Only President Trump will keep America free, prosperous and safe.”

If beating Trump is the priority, the moderates want primary voters to think that nominating Sanders would be playing right into Trump’s clear plans to spend the next 20 months pumping up his modern-day Red Scare. That’s the theoretical space for Senator Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who is pitching herself as a pragmatist. She said at a CNN town hall on Monday night that she won’t support Medicare for all and that she would only support free college tuition “if I was a magic genie.”

But the person most closely watching Sanders’s announcement is probably Biden, who’s been going over polling data and election results he believes show that votes are not as far left as the media attention to things such as Medicare for all and the Green New Deal would suggest.

The former vice president is deep in final deliberations about whether to run again, but he feels sure that Sanders’s agenda will be both the wrong policy for the country and the wrong politics to defeat Trump.

“To be sure, there’s anxiety about what the future holds, and caution about what our rapidly changing world means to families who are being left behind,” Biden said on Saturday at the Munich Security Conference, in a speech full of lines that could have been from an announcement. “This fourth industrial revolution is causing great anxiety, and I think is part of the reason for so much of our uncertainty.”

The Biden spokesman Bill Russo declined to comment on how Sanders’s announcement shapes his thinking.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.

EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE is a staff writer at The Atlantic.


https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2019/03/what-does-mueller-want-paul-manafort/584389/
IDEAS
Five Unanswered Questions About Paul Manafort
His time at the helm of the Trump campaign remains mysterious.
3:28 PM ET
Franklin Foer
Staff writer for The Atlantic

What did Robert Mueller want from Paul Manafort? Last September, the special counsel cut a deal with the former chair of Donald Trump’s campaign: If Manafort truthfully provided guidance to prosecutors, they would suggest a less onerous sentence for his crimes. There was a clear assumption in the trade, that Mueller believed Manafort had information valuable to his broader investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. In the months that followed the deal, Manafort became a regular visitor to Mueller’s office, often sitting for six hours at a time.

Get the latest issue now.

But Manafort proved to be the archetype of the unreliable witness. Last month, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, who had initially approved Manafort’s plea agreement, accused him of a pattern of “withholding facts if he can get away with it.” With his lies, Manfort scuppered* his plea deal and apparently doomed himself to spend the remainder of his days in the slammer.

Read: Paul Manafort, American hustler

On Thursday, a judge will sentence him for bank and tax fraud—and next week, another sentencing hearing awaits him for his failure to register his Ukrainian lobbying and what the government calls “conspiracy against the United States.” A prison uniform represents the long-delayed and fitting epilogue to Paul Manafort’s life story. It would be misleading, however, to declare this a moment of closure.


SCUPPER* -- https://notoneoffbritishisms.com/2016/12/20/scuppered/
https://www.google.com/search?q=scuppered+define&oq=scuppered&aqs=chrome.4.69i57j0l5.8062j0j8&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8

scup·per2Dictionary result for scupper
/ˈskəpər/Submit
verbBRITISH
past tense: scuppered; past participle: scuppered
sink (a ship or its crew) deliberately.
synonyms: sink, scuttle, submerge, send to the bottom, open the seacocks in
"the captain decided to scupper the ship"

INFORMAL
prevent from working or succeeding; thwart.
"plans for a casino were scuppered by a public inquiry"
synonyms: ruin, wreck, destroy, devastate, wreak havoc on, damage, spoil, mar, injure, blast, blight, smash, shatter, dash, torpedo, scotch, mess up; More



THIS SECOND FRANKLIN FOER STORY LOOKS VERY INTERESTING TO ME, ALSO. MORE BY FRANKLIN FOER:
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The collected documents from the Manafort trials make it obvious that prosecutors believe that Manafort attempted, on many occasions, to leverage his leadership of the Trump campaign to salvage his disastrous personal finances. What they have described is a state of desperation, but they haven’t fully articulated where, precisely, this desperation led him. While they have ended his life as a free man, they have let linger a long set of important questions about his time at the helm of the Trump campaign.

Who Is Konstantin Kilimnik?

For nearly a decade, Manafort was trailed by a diminutive aide de camp, a Ukrainian named Konstantin Kilimnik. In Manafort’s world, foreign names were often truncated to more easily spelled initials, so Kilimnik went by the moniker KK. According to colleagues, Manafort described KK as his “Russian brains.”

Prosecutors have routinely asserted that KK was an “asset” of Russian intelligence—although it’s not exactly clear what they mean by this, or what evidence supports that conclusion. Over time, however, prosecutors have slowly revealed details about KK. They have shown that KK remained in contact with Manafort during the campaign. One meeting appears to have especially fascinated Mueller: On August 2, 2016, Manafort, Rick Gates (his other longtime deputy), and KK met at the Grand Havana Room, a cigar bar in Manhattan. Manafort supplied Kilimnik with a sheaf of the Trump campaign’s internal polling data. (The blogger Marcy Wheeler has pointed to a footnote in a Mueller filing indicating that Manafort and Gates passed KK 75 pages of polling.) Apparently, the polling was intended for Manafort’s old financial benefactors in Ukraine, the two oligarchs who funded the political party that Manafort represented. Did they actually receive it? (They have denied ever getting the data.) And did KK give anyone else the closely guarded information?

Manafort, Gates, and KK certainly behaved as if they were engaged in nefarious activity. According to Mueller’s team, the troika left the Havana Room separately, through different exits. Andrew Weissmann, one of Mueller’s lawyers, told Berman Jackson that this meeting at the cigar club goes “very much to the heart of what the special counsel’s office is investigating.”

Read: The loud silence of Mueller’s Manafort memo

Getting “Whole” With Oleg Deripaska?

One of Manafort’s most important consulting clients was the Russian aluminum magnate Oleg Deripaska. Earlier in his career, Deripaska was commonly referred to in the media as “Putin’s oligarch.” Manafort advised Deripaska on political matters, but he also became an investment partner with him. In 2007, Deripaska gave Manafort approximately $20 million to manage in a private-equity fund, intended for investment in properties across Ukraine and Russia. According to court documents, Manafort failed to account for what happened to these funds. Deripaska has accused Manafort of stealing them—and has said that Manafort stopped responding to his requests to reach him.

Soon after Manafort joined the Trump campaign, he asked KK to send Deripaska media clips about his new role. In emails obtained by The Atlantic, Manafort asked KK if there was a way to use his position to get “whole” with the oligarch. He even offered to provide Deripaska with private briefings. What became of these entreaties? There’s no evidence that Deripaska ever received them.

The Russian dissident Alexey Nalavny has stoked suspicions that information traded hands. He produced a long video that began as a so-called shaggy-dog story, but then took a pointed turn. The video culminated in footage of Deripaska on a yacht in Norwegian waters discussing U.S. sanctions against Russia with a Kremlin foreign-policy hand. The video came from a Belarusian escort who was on the yacht and stealthily captured the scene. In an absurdist plot twist, Thai authorities arrested the escort for hosting sex-instruction clinics. From her Thai cell, the escort claimed that she could provide more information about Manafort’s relationship to Deripaska. That might prove to be a story fabricated story in desperation, but the evidence of Manafort’s desire to reach Deripaska is unambiguous.

The Ukraine Peace Plan

When Michael Cohen testified before a House committee last week, he wasn’t asked any questions about his efforts on behalf of a Ukrainian legislator’s peace plan—a document he delivered to the White House in the administration’s earliest days. Securing American support for a version of this plan was a longtime desire of Paul Manafort’s old clients. War in eastern Ukraine meant that the electoral base of their political party was living in a war zone, unable to participate in national elections. This significantly damaged their prospects for ever reclaiming their country’s presidency.

Did Manafort play any role in promoting this agenda? Manafort’s own lawyers have conceded that he discussed a peace plan with KK at the Grand Havana Room meeting.

Read: The mysterious return of Manafort’s “Russian brain”

A Banker Named Calk

In August 2016, an obscure Chicago banker named Stephen Calk appeared on a list of Donald Trump’s economic advisers. Soon after Paul Manafort left the Trump campaign—when Trump quipped, “I’ve got a crook running my campaign”—Calk’s bank began loaning Manafort money. What’s strange is that the bank loaned Manafort $16 million, which amounted to 22 percent of the bank’s total equity capital. As prosecutors proved in court, these loans were procured on the basis of fraudulent information that Manfort provided. But were they also procured on the basis of a promise? During Manafort’s trial, Robert Mueller introduced an email in which Manafort tried to get Calk a job as secretary of the Army.

Soon after Manafort left the campaign, he received another set of loans from a group called Spruce Capital. One co-founder of Spruce had been a partner in the development of Trump Tower Waikiki. (Spruce says that it received the loan request through a broker.) Why would these Trump connected entities continue to lend to Manafort after he had been fired?

The Godfather and the Super PAC

When Manafort arrived in the Trump campaign, he famously promised that he would work for free. This seemed strange given his persistent efforts to monetize every aspect of his existence, not to mention all the money he owed banks and Oleg Deripaska. We now know Mueller doesn’t believe that Manafort received nothing for his efforts. He has accused Manafort of lying about money he received from a Trump super PAC called Rebuilding America. Trump created the group to entice elite donors, who had initially shunned his campaign. Manafort dispatched his daughter’s godfather to organize the effort. The godfather received at least $830,000 for running the operation. Even after Manafort left the campaign in disgrace, the super PAC arranged to pay $125,000 of Manafort’s debts. According to The New York Times, prosecutors are interested in foreign donations that flowed through the super PAC.

Finally, why did Paul Manafort put himself in this position? He could have cooperated truthfully with Mueller and lightened his sentence. But he attempted to keep vital chapters of his story shrouded in lies. He wanted them to remain a mystery. Perhaps Mueller has already filled in those gap and has gleaned a complete narrative. But there’s another possibility. Without Manafort’s cooperation, we might never gain clarity about some of the most disturbing questions that still hover around him.

We want to hear what you think about this article. Submit a letter to the editor or write to letters@theatlantic.com.


FRANKLIN FOER is a staff writer for The Atlantic. He is the author of World Without Mind and How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization.