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Re: F6 post# 248765

Monday, 05/30/2016 4:34:53 AM

Monday, May 30, 2016 4:34:53 AM

Bernie Sanders LIVE from Carson, CA - A Future to Believe in Election Night Rally

Published on May 17, 2016 by KTNV Channel 13 Las Vegas [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDqchFCm3HNLAob6OpsLWLw , http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCDqchFCm3HNLAob6OpsLWLw/videos ]

State Democratic Party chairwoman talks about what happened at the Nevada Democratic Convention and the threats afterward.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EajubDinf6s [with comments]

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What happened at the Dem Nevada Convention

Hardball with Chris Matthews
5/17/16

MSNBC's Andrea Mitchell, Joy Reid and The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson discuss how and why things got heated between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton supporters at the Democratic Nevada Convention Saturday. Duration: 5:36

Sanders Statement on Nevada

Press Release
May 17, 2016

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Tuesday issued the following statement:

“It is imperative that the Democratic leadership, both nationally and in the states, understand that the political world is changing and that millions of Americans are outraged at establishment politics and establishment economics. The people of this country want a government which represents all of us, not just the 1 percent, super PACs and wealthy campaign contributors.

“The Democratic Party has a choice. It can open its doors and welcome into the party people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change – people who are willing to take on Wall Street, corporate greed and a fossil fuel industry which is destroying this planet. Or the party can choose to maintain its status quo structure, remain dependent on big-money campaign contributions and be a party with limited participation and limited energy.

“Within the last few days there have been a number of criticisms made against my campaign organization. Party leaders in Nevada, for example, claim that the Sanders campaign has a ‘penchant for violence.’ That is nonsense. Our campaign has held giant rallies all across this country, including in high-crime areas, and there have been zero reports of violence. Our campaign of course believes in non-violent change and it goes without saying that I condemn any and all forms of violence, including the personal harassment of individuals. But, when we speak of violence, I should add here that months ago, during the Nevada campaign, shots were fired into my campaign office in Nevada and apartment housing complex my campaign staff lived in was broken into and ransacked.

“If the Democratic Party is to be successful in November, it is imperative that all state parties treat our campaign supporters with fairness and the respect that they have earned. I am happy to say that has been the case at state conventions in Maine, Alaska, Colorado and Hawaii where good discussions were held and democratic decisions were reached. Unfortunately, that was not the case at the Nevada convention. At that convention the Democratic leadership used its power to prevent a fair and transparent process from taking place. Among other things:

- The chair of the convention announced that the convention rules passed on voice vote, when the vote was a clear no-vote. At the very least, the Chair should have allowed for a headcount.

- The chair allowed its Credentials Committee to en mass rule that 64 delegates were ineligible without offering an opportunity for 58 of them to be heard. That decision enabled the Clinton campaign to end up with a 30-vote majority.

- The chair refused to acknowledge any motions made from the floor or allow votes on them. The chair refused to accept any petitions for amendments to the rules that were properly submitted.

“These are on top of failures at the precinct and county conventions including trying to depose and then threaten with arrest the Clark County convention credentials chair because she was operating too fairly.”

© Bernie 2016

https://berniesanders.com/press-release/statement-nevada/ [also, annotated, at "This Bernie Sanders statement on the Nevada convention reads like an open threat to the Democratic establishment", https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/17/bernie-sanders-is-mad-as-hell-and-hes-not-going-to-take-it-anymore-at-least-in-nevada/ (with embedded video report, and comments)]

©2016 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/what-happened-at-the-dem-nevada-convention-687544899509 [with comments] [the above YouTube of the segment for the moment at least at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtdXxjn2xMw (with comments)]

*

NV Dem Chair speaks out about threats, violence

Hardball with Chris Matthews
5/17/16

Nevada Democratic Party Chair Roberta Lange talks to Chris Matthews and Joy Reid about Saturday's convention that escalated into chaos. Duration: 10:22

©2016 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/nv-dem-chair-speaks-out-about-threats-violence-687561795738 [with comments] [the above YouTube of the segment for the moment at least at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4SkYRPC3nlU (with comments)]

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Does Bernie Sanders want to be the Ralph Nader of 2016?

Democratic U.S. presidential candidate Bernie Sanders speaks at a campaign rally at the convention center in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, US, May 12, 2016.
(Christopher Reistroffer/Reuters)

By Dana Milbank
May 17, 2016

Let’s examine what Bernie Sanders supporters did in his name over the weekend.

As the Nevada Democratic convention [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/security-concerns-end-nevada-democrats-convention/2016/05/15/43f5606a-1b08-11e6-82c2-a7dcb313287d_story.html ] voted to award a majority of delegates to Hillary Clinton — an accurate reflection of her victory in the state’s February caucuses — Sanders backers charged the stage, threw chairs [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/us/politics/bernie-sanders-supporters-nevada.html ] and shouted vulgar epithets at speakers. Security agents had to protect the dais and ultimately clear the room.

Sanders supporters publicized the cellphone number of the party chairwoman, Roberta Lange [ http://m.lasvegassun.com/news/2016/may/16/post-convention-death-threats-democratic-official/ ], resulting in thousands of abusive text messages and threats:

“Praying to God someone shoots you in the FACE and blows your democracy-stealing head off!”

“Hey bitch.?.?. We know where you live. Where you work. Where you eat. Where your kids go to school/grandkids.?.?. Prepare for hell.”

Veteran Nevada reporter Jon Ralston [ https://www.ralstonreports.com/blog/sample-voicemails-left-state-democratic-chairwoman-roberta-lange ] transcribed some of the choice voicemail messages for the chairwoman, some with vulgar labels for women and their anatomy:

“I think people like you should be hung in a public execution. .?.?. You are a sick, twisted piece of s--- and I hope you burn for this!”

“You f---ing stupid bitch! What the hell are you doing? You’re a f---ing corrupt bitch!”

The day after the convention, Sanders supporters vandalized party headquarters with messages saying, among other things, “you are scum [ https://lasvegassun.com/news/2016/may/16/post-convention-death-threats-democratic-official/ ].”

And the candidate’s response to the violent and misogynistic behavior of his backers? Mostly defiance. Asked by reporters Tuesday about the convention chaos — in which operatives from his national campaign participated — Sanders walked away in the middle of the question [ http://www.mediaite.com/online/bernie-sanders-abruptly-ends-interview-after-reporter-asks-about-nevada-chaos/ ].

Finally, mid-afternoon Tuesday, Sanders released a statement [ https://berniesanders.com/press-release/statement-nevada/ (in full above)] saying, “I condemn any and all forms of violence, including the personal harassment of individuals.” But he blamed the Nevada party for preventing a “fair and transparent process,” and he threatened Democrats: “If the Democratic Party is to be successful in November, it is imperative that all state parties treat our campaign supporters with fairness and the respect that they have earned.”

It is no longer accurate to say Sanders is campaigning against Clinton, who has essentially locked up the nomination. The Vermont socialist is now running against the Democratic Party. And that’s excellent news for one Donald J. Trump.

“The Sanders Campaign spent its time either ignoring or profiting from the chaos it did much to create,” the Nevada Democratic Party wrote [ https://www.ralstonreports.com/blog/nv-democrats-file-complaint-against-sanders-campaign-dnc ] in a formal complaint to the Democratic National Committee. The state party wrote, “Part of the approach by the Sanders campaign was to employ these easily-incensed delegates as shock troops.” The Sanders representatives “at the times of most intense crisis offered little more than shrugs and smirks.”

The Nevada Democrats [ http://www.rollcall.com/news/politics/reids-nevada-democrats-warn-dnc-violence-sanders-supporters ], warning of similar disruptions at the national convention in July, accused the Sanders campaign of [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/17/nevada-democratic-party-accuses-bernie-sanders-campaign-of-inciting-violence/ ] “inciting disruption — and, yes, violence,” and said, “the goal of many of these individuals, sanctioned or encouraged by the Sanders campaign, is not party-building but something more sinister.”

A few weeks ago, I wrote [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/bernie-sanders-is-no-fool-hell-back-clinton-when-he-quits-the-race/2016/04/26/ca67cfb4-0bf1-11e6-a6b6-2e6de3695b0e_story.html ] that I wasn’t concerned about Sanders remaining in the race until the very end, because he doesn’t wish to see a President Trump and will ultimately throw his full support to Clinton. Sanders has, indeed, lightened up on Clinton and is instead trying to shape the Democrats’ platform and direction. But his attacks on the party have released something just as damaging to the causes he professes to represent. Coupled with his refusal to raise money for the party, his increasingly harsh rhetoric could hurt Democrats up and down the ballot in November and beyond.

“We are taking on virtually the entire Democratic establishment,” Sanders proclaims [ http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/278322-sanders-the-convention-will-be-a-contested-contest ].

“The Democratic Party has to reach a fundamental conclusion: Are we on the side of working people or big-money interests?” he asks.

“The Democratic Party up to now has not been clear about which side they are on on the major issues facing this country,” he announces.

This was Ralph Nader’s argument in 2000: There isn’t much difference between the two parties. It produced President George W. Bush. Sanders said at the start of his campaign that he wouldn’t do what Nader did, because there is a difference between the parties.

Yet now his supporters, the Nevada Democratic Party says, are behind “physical threats and intimidation,” “scuffles, screams from bullhorns, and profane insults” and “numerous medical emergencies among delegates pressed up against the dais.”

This, even though they were wrong on the merits. Ralston writes that “the Sanders folks disregarded rules, then when shown the truth, attacked organizers and party officials as tools of a conspiracy to defraud the senator of what was never rightfully his in the first place.”

And this, despite only two additional delegates being at stake, as The Post’s Philip Bump [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/15/heres-what-happened-at-saturdays-dramatic-nevada-democratic-convention/ ] points out — not enough to make a difference in the race.

More to the point, no grievance justifies what happened in Nevada. Yet Sanders, recklessly, is fueling the fire.

Read more:

Jonathan Capehart: Obama’s civics lesson for Trump and Sanders supporters
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2016/05/16/obamas-civics-lesson-for-trump-and-sanders-supporters/

The Daily 202: Liberal allies turning on Bernie Sanders after Nevada donnybrook
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/05/18/daily-202-liberal-allies-turning-on-bernie-sanders-after-nevada-donnybrook/573b56ed981b92a22d86b9d2/

© 2016 The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/does-bernie-sanders-want-to-be-the-ralph-nader-of-2016/2016/05/17/b091d75a-1c5f-11e6-b6e0-c53b7ef63b45_story.html [with embedded video report, and comments]

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Allegations of fraud and misconduct at Nevada Democratic convention unfounded
Nevada Democratic Party leaders "hijacked the process on the floor" of the state convention "ignoring the regular procedure and ramming through what they wanted to do."
— Jeff Weaver on Tuesday, May 17th, 2016 in a television interview on CNN
FALSE

May 18th, 2016
http://www.politifact.com/nevada/statements/2016/may/18/jeff-weaver/allegations-fraud-and-misconduct-nevada-democratic/ [with embedded video report "Roberta Lange responds to threats after convention"]

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It Comes From the Very Top

AP Photo

By Josh Marshall
Published May 18, 2016, 12:10 AM EDT

For months I'd thought and written that Sanders's campaign manager Jeff Weaver was the key driver of toxicity in the the Democratic primary race. Weaver has been highly visible on television, far more than campaign managers tend to be. He's also been the one constantly upping the tension, pressing the acrimony and unrealism of the campaign as Sanders actual chances of winning dwindled.

But now I realize I had that wrong.

Actually, I didn't realize it. People who know told me.

Over the last several weeks I've had a series of conversations with multiple highly knowledgable, highly placed people. Perhaps it's coming from Weaver too. The two guys have been together for decades. But the 'burn it down' attitude, the upping the ante, everything we saw in that statement released today by the campaign seems to be coming from Sanders himself. Right from the top.

This should have been obvious to me. The tone and tenor of a campaign always come from the top. It wasn't obvious to me until now.

This might be because he's temperamentally like that. There's some evidence for that. It may also be that, like many other presidential contenders, once you get close it is simply impossible to let go. I don't know which it is. That would only be my speculation. But this is coming from Bernie Sanders. It's not Weaver. It's not driven by people around him. It's right from him. And what I understand from knowledgable sources is that in the last few weeks anyone who was trying to rein it in has basically stopped trying and just decided to let Bernie be Bernie.

Sanders's speech tonight was right in line with his statement out this afternoon. He identified the Democratic party as an essentially corrupt, moribund institution which is now on notice that it must let 'the people' in. What about the coalitions Barack Obama built in 2008 and 2012, the biggest and most diverse presidential coalitions ever constructed?

Sanders's narrative today has essentially been that he is political legitimacy. The Democratic party needs to realize that. This, as I said earlier, is the problem with lying to your supporters. Sanders is telling his supporters that he can still win, which he can't. He's suggesting that the win is being stolen by a corrupt establishment, an impression which will be validated when his phony prediction turns out not to be true. Lying like this sets you up for stuff like happened over the weekend in Nevada.

As I said, it all comes from the very top.

© 2016 TPM Media LLC (emphasis in original)

http://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/it-comes-from-the-very-top

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The Sad Decline and Fall of Bernie Sanders

Kevin Drum
May 18, 2016 1:15 AM

So tonight's Democratic primaries basically ended in a tie. There's really nothing of interest left anymore: Hillary Clinton will win the nomination, as we've all known she would for at least the past month.

The one thing I do keep wondering about is what happened to Bernie Sanders. Before this campaign, he was a gadfly, he was a critic of the system, and he was a man of strong principles. He still is, but he's also obviously very, very bitter. I wonder if all this was worth it for him? By all objective measures he did way better than anyone expected and had far more influence than anyone thought he would, and he should feel good about that. Instead, he seems more angry and resentful with every passing day.

I know this happens all the time in presidential primaries. Everyone starts out promising to run high-minded campaigns, but the attacks always come sooner or later—and the targets inevitably believe the attacks are unfair and slanderous. As a result, the losers develop a deep personal disdain for their opponents.

That's what's happened this time, and I suppose there's nothing unusual about it. I don't even blame anyone in particular. Maybe Hillary's team played too rough. Maybe Bernie's team is too thin-skinned. I just don't know. But it's sort of painful to see a good person like Bernie turned into such a sullen and resentful man. And doubly painful to see him take his followers down that path too.

Usually these things fade with a bit of time. Politics is politics, after all. But for Bernie, it's always been more than politics. I wonder if he's ever going to get over this?

Copyright ©2016 Mother Jones and the Foundation for National Progress

http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2016/05/decline-fall-bernie-sanders [with (approaching 4,000) comments]

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NV Dem Chair on threats: This is Sanders’ responsibility

MSNBC Live with Tamron Hall
5/18/16

Nevada State Democratic Party Chair, Roberta Lange, comments on the report that there was a shooting at a Bernie Sanders’ campaign headquarters in Nevada. She also comments on the threats she has received from anonymous Bernie Sanders’ supporters. Duration: 3:52

Bernie Sanders Supporters Unleash Sexist, Nasty Attacks On Nevada’s Dem Chair

Just listen to the voicemails Roberta Lange has received.
05/17/2016 Updated May 18, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-nevada-dem-chair_us_573b4b8de4b0aee7b8e7dfa2 [with embedded videos including some of the voicemails, and comments]

Pro-Bernie Trolls on Why They Harassed Nevada's Democratic Chair

Here's what several men had to say for themselves after threatening Roberta Lange and calling her a "b-tch"
May 18, 2016
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/pro-bernie-trolls-on-why-they-harassed-nevadas-democratic-chair-20160518 [with comments]

©2016 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/tamron-hall/watch/nv-dem-chair-on-threats-this-is-sanders-responsibility-688019011901 [with comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wO_n_2pxiTc [with comments]

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Our Dangerous Politics of Resentment

By Rev. Dr. Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite
Professor of Theology, Chicago Theological Seminary
05/19/2016 06:03 pm ET | Updated May 19, 2016

If you squint your eyes just right, the news can look like a procession of angry faces grimacing with furious indignation. This is the streaming video of our politics of resentment, the playing out of carefully cultivated and nurtured feelings of being wronged or treated unfairly.

Yes, many of these feelings of being “wronged” or “treated unfairly” are deliberately and cynically created. They are not just the normal human response to being genuinely wronged. Instead, they are manufactured, constructed on lies and distortions to generate political power.

The kind of lies that can stoke this type of resentment are that white people have been wronged when other races are treated equally, that straight men are wronged when gender inclusivity is the law (and practice) of the land, that certain Christians are somehow diminished in their freedom to practice their faith when others have the same religious freedom, that a nation of immigrants is ironically weakened by immigrants, and that government or vague “elites” are to blame for my troubles.

This politically cultivated resentment is different and infinitely more dangerous than a genuine response to being wronged precisely because it is based on untruths and it can be much more resistant to the religious and psychological practices that can help reduce resentment at actual wrong and transform it toward healing.

This type of manufactured resentment is, frankly, the basis of the “Trumpism” that has been given enormous power through the presidential campaign of Donald Trump. Trump’s supporters are encouraged to feel resentful when others get equal rights, and they are made to feel this equality for others somehow weakens them. The dangers of this position have been made clear by a wide range of religious leaders, including Christian leaders who, in a theologically substantive statement that can be found at calledtoresist.org [ http://www.calledtoresist.org/ ], passionately condemned Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump, calling his campaign message “contrary to our Christian values” and condemning his bombastic rhetoric as “racist, bigoted, and hateful.” The statement is specific about Trump’s words and policy advocacy that demean immigrants, Muslims, women, people of color and the disabled.

But to see how far this kind of politics of resentment has penetrated into our politics, there is some worrisome evidence on the left as well. The Sanders campaign, in addition to drawing attention to the gross economic injustices of the US, has been accused of trading on the idea of “unfairness” and accusations of a rigged political system when things don’t go the way some supporters want, targeting ‘party elites’. At the recent Nevada state convention when Democratic Chairwoman Roberta Lange declined to make a rule change that would have benefitted Bernie Sanders, Sanders supporters yelled, threw things and then flooded Lange with death threats and personalized insults [ http://gawker.com/nevada-democrats-report-personalized-death-threats-from-1777079119 ].

Instead of roundly condemning the violence and threats, Sen. Bernie Sanders instead struck [ http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/sanders-nevada-convention-nonsense-issues-ultimatum ] back Tuesday with a statement that dismissed complaints from Nevada Democrats as “nonsense” and asserted that his backers were not being treated with “fairness and respect.”

No. That’s not the only issue here, Sen. Sanders. I will disclose that I have been a Sanders supporter and caucused for him in my state. I have had great hopes of the movement-building language of the Sanders campaign as a way to engage in long-term change in our social and political life. But death threats and personalized harassment are never okay and it is no way to build a transformational movement.

It is the same old, same old.

The politics of resentment will never transform this society toward greater justice and peace. Unresolved resentment harms and can even destroy people and societies.

In the original work on Just Peace [ https://books.google.com/books/about/Just_Peacemaking.html?id=p5IKAQAAMAAJ ] first articulated by a group of 23 Christian religious leaders and scholars changed how we approach peacemaking because it focused on actual practices that have been historically proven to reduce conflict and to achieve more peace with justice. I was part of that original group of 23 and yet I opposed the practice “Acknowledge Responsibility for Conflict and Injustice and Seek Repentance and Forgiveness.”

I opposed that practice on forgiveness precisely because in my work with battered women I knew they get told over and over to ‘forgive and forget’ and go back to their abusers without a call for the abuser to confess their wrongdoing and stop the battering.

But those who articulated this practice dove deeply into what forgiveness really means and how resentment can be overcome. It involves the “cultivation of empathy,” the “forbearance from revenge,” and the capacity to at least admit the possibility that there could be “future reconciliation.” Thirty Jewish, Christian and Muslim scholars and religious leaders [ https://books.google.com/books/about/Interfaith_Just_Peacemaking.html?id=R8AiMAEACAAJ ] have also attested to how this work of acknowledgement of responsibility for conflict and injustice and the pursuit of repentance and forgiveness is present in each of their traditions.

But what about “manufactured resentment”? I have said it is resistant to these historic practices, but I have not said it is impossible to transform them.

Speaking for myself, I know if I nurture my own anger and resentment in response to the anger and resentment of those with whom I vehemently disagree, I only add to the general mess of the politics of resentment. I personally try to engage the Just Peace practice of compassionate connection.

But, I want to raise a strong caution here. Each one of us stands in a different relationship to the construct of power and privilege in this society, and therefore each one of us has to decide when and even if to engage, and how. As Alice Walker notes in her definition of Womanist [ http://noteasybeingred.tumblr.com/post/206038114/alice-walkers-definition-of-a-womanist-from-in ] that sometimes “periodically” it is necessary to be a separatist “for health.” Do not mistake engaging our times for liberal “choice,” the ability to come and go in the struggle as you see fit.

Those who are on the receiving end of this manufactured resentment have no options on “being in the struggle” as it comes to their doors (and sometimes even breaks down their doors without warrants). White liberals say they ‘don’t see race,’ but as I wrote in a previous Huffington Post piece, it doesn’t matter. “Race sees you.” Homophobia sees you. Classism sees you. Nativism sees you. And so forth. It is more a matter of strategic postures that people adopt that can and must vary, even vary for the same person at different times even as a matter of sheer survival.

My strategic posture relative to compassionate connection is to try to use my own race, gender, class and faith privilege to try to get through the barriers being thrown up by manufactured resentment and get some face time, some voice time, some faith time with those on the other side of this wall being thrown up in our society.

I think a very good example of this kind of work is demonstrated by Anna Merlan in her article for Jezebel "We Called Up Bernie Fans to Who Threatened Nevada Dem State Chair and Asked Them to Explain Themselves [ http://theslot.jezebel.com/we-called-up-bernie-fans-who-threatened-nevada-dem-stat-1777177985 ]". The few she was able to reach had varied responses, from embarrassment to being glad they had “drawn attention” to what they perceived as unfairness to frustration, disaffection and loneliness. I was impressed with this article, because the author tried to get to the feelings and not the ideology of those who made the threats.

What did those feel who had been contacted? Did some personal contact inspire empathy? Perhaps.

There were thousands of replies to this article that were “approved” some of which I read. Some were profane, angry or merely defensive, though some also approving. By implication others were “not approved.” Even so, the comments section begins “Warning: These may contain graphic material.”

This is a microcosm of the bitter fact that trying to listen and learn and reach out can be met with anger and rejection. But not always. Not always.

We say in the peace movement, “When you mirror your enemy, you become your enemy.”

That I will not do.

Copyright © 2016 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rev-dr-susan-brooks-thistlethwaite/our-dangerous-politics-of_b_10055136.html [with comments]

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Bernie Sanders Is Hurting Himself by Playing the Victim

Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders.
(AP Photo / John Minchillo)

The Vermont senator could turn from movement leader into the messiah of an angry white male cult with his claims of a “rigged” nomination process.

By Joan Walsh
May 19, 2016

It’s been five days since the conflagration at the Nevada State Democratic Convention, and the embers are still burning. Much of it has singed Senator Bernie Sanders. The intimidation of speakers and the misogynist death threats against party chair Roberta Lange have led to a wave of critical pieces by Bernie supporters—some of them now former Bernie supporters. Sanders’s loyal CNN backer Sally Kohn wrote in Time [ http://time.com/4339865/bernie-sanders-supporters-violence/ ]: “I Felt the Bern But the Bros Are Extinguishing the Flames.” Esquire’s Charles Pierce, who voted for Sanders, weighed in Tuesday [ http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a44904/nevada-democratic-convention/ (included in full in the post to which this is a reply)]: “It’s Time for Bernie’s People to Calm Down.” Sanders supporter Harold Meyerson now insists, “The Bros Are Undermining Bernie [ http://prospect.org/article/how-bros-are-undermining-bernie ].”

In the pages of the Sanders fanzine Salon (for which I used to work), at least two Bernie supporters have written that it’s over: For them, the mayhem in Las Vegas has doused the burn. Even on Sanders-friendly Reddit, former Berners were leaving the fold [ https://www.reddit.com/r/hillaryclinton/comments/4jv8z6/as_a_sanders_supporter_im_with_her/ ]. Much of the media has reacted with shock to the Nevada chaos, and Sanders surrogates have faced tougher grilling on cable news than they have for the entire campaign.

But the Sanders camp is defiant, with the senator himself condemning the threats and reports of violence, but—and you never add “but” to a sentence that’s condemning threatening behavior—insisting party leaders had it coming, because convention rules were less than fair or “transparent.” Sanders has continued to rip the Democratic Party for unfairness, and his supporters are now telling reporters there will be trouble at the convention in Philadelphia over the “rigged” primary process.

“When you lose a fair fight, then you’re sad and disappointed. When you lose a rigged fight, then you’re angry and you hit the streets,” Charles Chamberlain, the executive director of the liberal group Democracy for America, told CNBC [ http://www.cnbc.com/2016/05/19/bernie-sanders-marriage-of-convenience-with-democrats-fraying.html ]. He predicted “disruption” in Philadelphia, and then he went off a cliff: “I think a little bit of disruption is exciting. That’s democracy,” Chamberlain said. “The reality is without that, all you have is boring parliamentary procedure and everyone falls asleep. So I think it’s exciting and it’s actually healthy.” “Disrupting” a party convention because parliamentary procedure is “boring” seems the height of entitlement.

Let me stipulate that the “Democratic establishment” isn’t blameless in this mess. I understand the anger and even fear of Nevada Democrats, but the local party’s letter to the DNC charging that there’s “a penchant for violence” in the Sanders campaign was histrionic and only escalated the conflict. I get it: After Clinton supporters were forced to walk a gauntlet of shame in East Los Angeles, screamed at by angry Sandernistas with bullhorns who even bullied children; after protesters crowded Clinton’s car on the way to a fundraiser; and now, after Nevada, there is growing concern about an apparent mob mentality that can cross the line into physical harassment, if not violence. But describing “a penchant for violence” is unfair to the many millions of peaceful, respectful Sanders supporters.

With hindsight, I wish chair Roberta Lange had used her discretion to call for roll-call votes on the contested issues—although it’s common in meetings like that for a chair to use her judgment in evaluating a voice vote, when one side clearly has the edge in numbers, but is out-shouted by the smaller contingent. And once again, Democratic National Committee chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz escalated a conflict that she should have worked to defuse. Repeatedly accused of unfairness by the Sanders campaign—not always with clear evidence—she has time and again replied harshly and defensively to her critics. When the Sanders campaign sued the DNC in December for briefly locking it out of a party voter file—because Sanders staffers, who were quickly fired, tried to steal private Clinton voter data during a security breach—Wasserman Schultz took the lead in defending herself. Even Governor Howard Dean, a former DNC chair who normally defends his successor in public, suggested she should have left the defense to surrogates and waited for the results of the DNC’s own investigation.

The Nevada conflict is even more incendiary, and frankly dangerous to her party. Wasserman Schultz is not helping her friend Hillary Clinton with her attacks on Sanders. Just the appearance of fairness can go a long way in assuaging worries about fairness. Wasserman Schultz’s defiant rebuke to the Sanders camp has made it worse.

We’ve also seen some real injustice along the way to the nomination: more than 100,000 voters wrongly purged in Brooklyn; polling places shut down in Phoenix, Arizona. But both were the work of local election officials—and in Phoenix, a Republican—not the national party. Other Sanders complaints are specious: You don’t have to like closed primaries, but they were established long before Sanders came along, and acting like they “disenfranchise” his independent or non-aligned voters is an insult to the mostly African-American and poor people who are truly disenfranchised in this country. Still, several states, including New York, make it ridiculously hard to change your registration and become a Democrat. There’s plenty of room for reform to make the party more inclusive.

All of that said: The Sanders campaign has less than a leg to stand on in its Nevada protests. Politifact “fact-checked” campaign manager Jeff Weaver’s claim [ http://www.politifact.com/nevada/statements/2016/may/18/jeff-weaver/allegations-fraud-and-misconduct-nevada-democratic/ ] that the state party “hijacked the process on the floor” of the convention “ignoring the regular procedure and ramming through what they wanted to do.” After an exhaustive examination of the long day of skirmishes, it found Weaver’s claim to be “false.”

The defections of some supporters, the increased skepticism of even once-friendly cable hosts, and a rebuke by Politifact isn’t fatal to Sanders’s campaign, of course. What will be fatal to Sanders’s future as a mass-movement leader—as opposed to the messiah of an angry, heavily white, and male cult—is his continued insistence that his enemy now is not so much the corporate overlords, or income inequality, or the big banks, but a corrupt Democratic Party, epitomized by Wall Street flunkie Hillary Clinton, that has “rigged” the election to thwart him—as he raged in a tone-deaf speech Tuesday night, as cable news was showing the texted death threats to Roberta Lange in the background (which Sanders did not even mention).

“The Democratic Party is going to have to make a very, very profound and important decision. It can do the right thing and open its doors and welcome into the party people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change,” he said, as the crowd roared, “Bernie or bust!” The alternative, he said, is “to choose to retain its status quo structure, remain dependent on big money campaign contributions and be a party with limited participation and limited energy.” His attacks on the Democratic Party got even louder cheers even than his hits at Clinton—the kind of applause that once rang out for breaking up the big banks or ending the scourge of student debt.

And in Thursday’s New York Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/us/politics/bernie-sanderss-campaign-accuses-head-of-dnc-of-favoritism.html (below)], Sanders campaign leaders and their supporters said they plan to escalate their attacks on Clinton and the party. Top strategist Tad Devine insisted he’s “not thinking about” whether the attacks will hurt Clinton in her battle against Trump; they will do what they can to run up his delegate count, especially in California.

Though Sanders supporter Charlie Pierce wondered why the campaign would make such a ruckus over only a few delegates in Nevada, I’m starting to believe that the point wasn’t the actual delegates—he trails her by about 280 at this point—but creating the appearance of a rigged system. Sanders himself entered the land of either fantasy or prevarication Thursday when he thanked supporters Thursday for a “victory” in Kentucky [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/pb/news/post-politics/wp/2016/05/19/sanders-after-coming-up-short-in-kentucky-thanks-the-state-for-great-victory/ ]—even though he lost narrowly there to Clinton. The campaign said it was pondering a recount and would decide on Wednesday, but there’s still no word on that. Some of his backers have been alleging “fraud” in Kentucky [ http://bradblog.com/?p=11691 ], with absolute no evidence.

This is starting to get delusional, and dangerous to the American movement for social justice.

First of all, I don’t accept the presumption of moral and ideological superiority from a coalition that is dominated by white men, trying to overturn the will of black, brown, and female voters or somehow deem it fraudulent. There’s a growing element of male entitlement in the Sanders “movement” that supporter Sally Kohn articulates well:

It’s also too easy to suggest that Sanders’ supporters are a different kind of angry than Trump’s. Are we entirely sure about that? The populist right may be more inclined toward misogyny and xenophobia, but the populist left is not immune from these afflictions. And as I’ve written before [ http://time.com/4239152/white-voters/ ], when you see progressive white men—many of whom enthusiastically supported Barack Obama’s candidacy—hate Clinton with every fiber of their being despite the fact that she’s a carbon copy of Obama’s ideology (or in fact now running slightly to his left), it’s hard to find any other explanation than sexism. Either way, the brutish, boorish behavior of Bernie Bros (and their female compatriots, too) was a huge reason I was reluctant to seemingly side with them in endorsing Sanders—and has been the only reason I have ever questioned my decision to do so since.

I understand Sanders’s desire to amass the largest number of delegates at the convention, in order to be able to push the party left. There may well be worthy platform fights and political reforms to advance there. He’d like a major prime-time speaking role, which I always thought was a no-brainer (though his anti-party broadsides over the last few days have made me wonder if he’s putting that obvious sign of respect in jeopardy).

If you’d told me a year ago that we’d go into Philadelphia with 45 percent of the delegates committed to a socialist, as a firm flank on the left, backed by the many millions of Clinton supporters like myself who also identify with the left, I’d have said we were on the verge of transforming the party into a vehicle for racial and economic justice. Now I’m afraid of what’s coming. If Sanders wants to destroy the party instead of change it, if he wants to demonize progressives like Barney Frank and Connecticut Governor Dannel Malloy (Devine has suggested he wants them removed from leadership roles because they endorsed Clinton), if he wants to turn the first female presidential nominee into a corrupt caricature of herself, a cross between Carly Fiorina and Marie Antoinette, then Philadelphia will be a disaster. For the party, and for Sanders too. He thinks he’s the only one who can defeat Donald Trump. But in fact, he’s the only one who can elect him, by tearing the party apart.

Copyright (c) 2016 The Nation Company LLC

http://www.thenation.com/article/bernie-sanders-is-hurting-himself-by-playing-the-victim/ [with comments]

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NV Dem Chairwoman: 'I fear for my safety'

MSNBC
5/20/16

Nevada Democratic Party Chairwoman Roberta Lange tells MSNBC's Alex Seitz-Wald that she continues to receive threats from Bernie Sanders supporters, and that the Sanders campaign is remaining silent on the issue. Duration: 3:56

©2016 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-quick-cuts/watch/nv-dem-chairwoman-i-fear-for-my-safety-689945155708 [with comments] [the above YouTube of the segment for the moment at least at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8e_CurAVarc (with comments)]

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A fractured Democratic Party threatens Clinton’s chances against Trump

By David Weigel
May 18, 2016

When Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont took the stage this week after falling short in the Kentucky primary, supporters of Hillary Clinton wondered whether he would finally soften his tone and let her move on to a general election against Donald Trump.

They didn’t have to wonder for long.

Sanders credited Clinton’s victory to “a closed primary, something I am not all that enthusiastic about, where independents are not allowed to vote.” He commanded the Democratic Party to “do the right thing and open its doors and let into the party people who are prepared to fight for economic and social change.” And then he promised that he’s staying in the race until the convention. “Let me be as clear as I can be: We are in ’til the last ballot is cast!”

The performance prompted cheers across a crowd of about 8,000 in Carson, Calif., highlighting the mistrust and alienation that Sanders’s most ardent fans feel about Clinton, the Democrats and their “rigged” system. Yet the whole spectacle also sent shudders through those supporting Clinton, who are growing increasingly irritated by Sanders’s ever-presence in the race — and nervous that he is damaging Clinton.

All of it seems to have come to a head in recent days, as bitterness on both sides has boiled over and prompted new worries that a fractured party could lead to chaos at the national convention and harm Clinton’s chances against Trump in November. Two realities seem to be fueling it all: The nomination is, for all intents and purposes, out of Sanders’s reach yet his supporters are showing no signs of wanting to rally behind Clinton.

“If you lose a game that you put your heart and soul into, and you lose squarely, you can walk off the court and shake someone’s hand and say, ‘Well done,’?” said Rep. Diane Russell, a Maine legislator and Sanders supporter. “If you don’t feel like the game was working fairly, it’s hard to do that.”

On the other side is this view: It’s also hard to win a general election with a protracted, divisive primary battle that won’t go away. “The way he’s been acting now is a demonstration of why he’s had no support from his colleagues,” said former Massachusetts congressman Barney Frank.

Sanders supporters are crying “fraud” over delegate selection and threatening to sit out the election. They have promised to press their case to the convention floor. It happened in 2008, in the final throes of Clinton’s failed bid against Barack Obama. What remains unclear is whether this year’s divisions will go deeper or longer.

An explosive weekend convention in Nevada, where Sanders supporters turned on the state party chairwoman for overruling their challenges and seating Clinton delegates, exposed the depth of the acrimony. In his statements since then, Sanders has made no attempt to heal it.

Sanders is also keeping his supporters riled up by making what many Democrats view as an unrealistic, and even dishonest, view of his candidacy, given Clinton’s large lead in delegates.

“There are a lot of people out there, many pundits and politicians, they say Bernie Sanders should drop out, the people of California should not have the right to determine who the next president will be,” he said at Tuesday’s rally, insisting that the state had enough pledged delegates to put him over the top.

Increasingly, Sanders’s most passionate supporters claim that the primary has been rigged. A Reddit user’s chart comparing the first wave of exit polls with Clinton’s stronger-than-expected performances has been circulated — most famously by Sanders surrogate and actor Tim Robbins — as evidence of election fraud.

Clinton’s 16-point victory in New York is explained by the state’s onerous registration rules and by the still-unexplained purge of Brooklyn voter rolls. Anyone questioning her lead of three million votes can find solace in a CounterPunch article titled “Clinton Does Best Where Voting Machines Flunk Hacking Tests.”

“Do these people read newspapers?” said Bob Mulholland, a California superdelegate and Clinton supporter who has accused Sanders supporters of harassing his peers. “Are they reading some chain email with bogus numbers? I hold Sanders somewhat responsible for this, because he comes across on TV as a very angry old man, riling people up.”

As Kentucky slid away from Sanders on Tuesday, some of his supporters saw a culprit in Alison Lundergan Grimes. The secretary of state and 2014 candidate for U.S. Senate, a longtime supporter of Clinton, even went on CNN to declare Clinton the winner.

“Hillary doesn’t even care anymore,” wrote one Sanders supporter, tweeting a link to a story about alleged fraud in Kentucky.

“Yet another state we would’ve won if everyone could vote,” another supporter wrote on Reddit.

“Better watch out for illegal conduct by Grimes since she said electing Clinton is more important than doing her job,” tweeted another.

The evidence for the last claim was a video clip from a rally with Clinton and Grimes, where the secretary of state said she was “not only here to do my job” but also to back her candidate. It was cut and distributed by America Rising, a conservative opposition research firm adept at finding wedges between Clinton and the left.

As Sanders has fallen behind Clinton, more conservatives have looked for ways to exploit the angst. On Tuesday morning, Fox News sent a morning-show host to the streets of New York to ask voters if the primary had been rigged for Clinton. Dan Backer, the conservative attorney and treasurer of the pro-Trump Great America PAC, has egged on Sanders supporters on Facebook with pep talks like “Bernie will win the most primaries and can still take the most pledged [elected] delegates while narrowing the total vote gap.” Trump has also announced a kind of snarky solidarity with Sanders, telling voters and Twitter followers that the senator should bolt the party over his foul treatment.

“Bernie Sanders is being treated very badly by the Democrats — the system is rigged against him,” Trump tweeted Wednesday morning. “Many of his disenfranchised fans are for me!”

The Sanders campaign has endorsed none of this — but it hasn’t tamped it down. Sanders’s sympathetic response to the Nevada convention fracas angered the state and national party, with DNC Chairwoman Debbie Wasserman Schultz comparing the worst scenes there to the violence at Trump rallies. Asked if there had been any actual fraud in the primaries, Michael Briggs, Sanders’s spokesman, suggested that the Democratic Party’s infrastructure had been sabotaged in a way that hurt one candidate.

“Most state parties tried to do a good job,” he said, “but often they are short on resources and there are institutional impediments to a fair process, like super-early registration, party-switch deadlines, closed primaries, complicated party registration rules, bad voter lists.”

Sanders himself has made harder-to-argue cases against the Democratic primaries. The truncated debate schedule struck supporters of both candidates as unfair, something the party seemed to acknowledge by tacking on more of them in March and April. Although Clinton is on track to win a majority of pledged delegates, Sanders has suggested that early support for Clinton among superdelegates, the party leaders and elected officials who get an automatic convention vote but are not bound by their state’s popular vote created a barrier no candidate could scale.

“It is absurd that you had 400 establishment Democrats on board Hillary Clinton’s campaign before anybody was in the race,” Sanders told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow in an interview last week. “That stacks the deck in a very, very, unfair way for any establishment candidate, and against the wishes of the people.”

At the same time, Sanders and his supporters argue that superdelegates should consider bolting Clinton and backing him, based on polls that show him leading Trump as her favorables sink. That irritates Clinton supporters on two levels: by suggesting that the voters got it wrong and by dismissing the judgment of the sort of elected leaders whom any president would need to pass an agenda.

“If you believe you represent the people, and the people are uncooperative with your goal of winning, you have to find some explanation,” said Frank, whose appointment to the DNC rules committee sparked anger from Sanders’s supporters. “Look — I understand you have some disagreements, but does the overwhelming view of the black leadership, LGBT leadership, women’s leadership — does that count for nothing?”

As they contemplate Sanders’s “contested contest” at the Philadelphia convention, Clinton supporters think warmly back to 2008. By the time those primaries concluded, as many as 40 percent of Clinton voters said they could not support Barack Obama. The most dedicated PUMAs (Party Unity My A--) became TV stars; the vast majority of Clinton holdouts eventually went for the ticket. While Clinton’s favorable rating with Sanders supporters has been falling, many of his endorsers think that can be reversed.

“I want people to see this as a fair process, because I’m not in the ‘Bernie or Bust’ camp,” said Russell, the Sanders supporter from Maine. “I love this campaign, but I love my country more. And I tell the ‘Bernie or Bust’ people, if you’re angry at the end of this, you’re not going to take it out on the DNC. You’re going to take it out on the most vulnerable people — the ones we are fighting for.”

© 2016 The Washington Post

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-fractured-democratic-party-threatens-clintons-chances-against-trump/2016/05/18/91e53d12-1c6c-11e6-b6e0-c53b7ef63b45_story.html [with embedded video reports, and (over 4,000) comments]

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Bernie Sanders, Eyeing Convention, Willing to Harm Hillary Clinton in the Homestretch

Senator Bernie Sanders spoke at a campaign rally on the campus of California State University, Dominguez Hills, in Carson, Calif., on Tuesday.
Credit Monica Almeida/The New York Times

By PATRICK HEALY, YAMICHE ALCINDOR and JEREMY W. PETERS
MAY 18, 2016

Defiant and determined to transform the Democratic Party [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/democratic_party/index.html ], Senator Bernie Sanders [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/bernie-sanders-on-the-issues.html ] is opening a two-month phase of his presidential campaign aimed at inflicting a heavy blow on Hillary Clinton [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/hillary-clinton-on-the-issues.html ] in California and amassing enough leverage to advance his agenda at the convention in July — or even wrest the nomination from her.

Advisers to Mr. Sanders said on Wednesday that he was newly resolved to remain in the race, seeing an aggressive campaign as his only chance to pressure Democrats into making fundamental changes to how presidential primaries and debates are held in the future. They said he also held out hope of capitalizing on any late stumbles by Mrs. Clinton or any damage to her candidacy, whether by scandal or by the presumptive Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump.

After sounding subdued if not downbeat about the race for weeks, Mr. Sanders resumed a combative posture against Mrs. Clinton, demanding on Wednesday that she debate him before the June 7 primary in California and highlighting anew what he asserted were her weaknesses against Mr. Trump.

Mr. Sanders, his advisers said, has been buoyed by a stream of polls showing him beating Mr. Trump by larger margins than Mrs. Clinton in some battleground states, and by his belief that an upset victory in California could have a psychological impact on convention delegates who already have doubts about Mrs. Clinton.

But his newly resolute attitude is also the cumulative result of months of anger at the national Democratic Party over a debate schedule that his campaign said favored Mrs. Clinton; a fund-raising arrangement between the party and the Clinton campaign; the appointment of fierce Clinton partisans as leaders of important convention committees; and the party’s rebuke of Mr. Sanders on Tuesday for not clearly condemning a melee at the Nevada Democratic convention on Saturday.

While Mr. Sanders says he does not want Mr. Trump to win in November, his advisers and allies say he is willing to do some harm to Mrs. Clinton in the shorter term if it means he can capture a majority of the 475 pledged delegates at stake in California and arrive at the Philadelphia convention with maximum political power.

Tad Devine, a senior adviser to Mr. Sanders, said the campaign did not think its attacks would help Mr. Trump in the long run, but added that the senator’s team was “not thinking about” the possibility that they could help derail Mrs. Clinton from becoming the first woman elected president.

“The only thing that matters is what happens between now and June 14,” Mr. Devine said, referring to the final Democratic primary, in the District of Columbia. “We have to put the blinders on and focus on the best case to make in the upcoming states. If we do that, we can be in a strong position to make the best closing argument before the convention. If not, everyone will know in mid-June, and we’ll have to take a hard look at where things stand.”

The prospect of a drawn-out Democratic fight is deeply troubling to party leaders who are eager for Mrs. Clinton and House and Senate candidates to turn to attacking Mr. Trump without being diverted by Democratic strife. Mr. Sanders has won nearly 10 million votes, compared to Mrs. Clinton’s 13 million, and Democratic leaders say she needs time to begin courting the young voters, liberals and other Sanders supporters who view her as an ally of corporate and big-money interests.

But Mr. Sanders has sharpened his language of late, saying Tuesday night that the party faced a choice to remain “dependent on big-money campaign contributions and be a party with limited participation and limited energy” or “welcome into the party people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change.”

Mr. Sanders’s street-fighting instincts have been encouraged by his like-minded campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, who has been blistering against the Clinton camp and the party establishment. On Wednesday, he took to CNN to accuse Representative Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Florida, the Democratic national chairwoman, of “throwing shade on the Sanders campaign from the very beginning.”

For weeks, some current and former Sanders campaign workers have privately acknowledged feeling disheartened about Mr. Weaver’s determination to go after the Democratic National Committee, fearing a pitched battle with the party they hope to support in the general election. The intraparty fighting has affected morale, they say, and raised concerns that Mr. Weaver, a longtime Sanders aide who more recently ran a comic book store, was not devoted to achieving Democratic unity. Several described the campaign’s message as having devolved into a near-obsession with perceived conspiracies on the part of Mrs. Clinton’s allies.

Democratic leaders said they wanted to do everything possible to avoid having Clinton-Sanders tensions send the Philadelphia convention into the sort of chaos they had expected to mar the Republican convention. So far, though, Mr. Sanders has not indicated that he would ask his delegates to support Mrs. Clinton, as she did in 2008 for Barack Obama.

“I’m hopeful that the two candidates will come together, and soon, which could blunt the possibility of real trouble at our convention,” said Edward G. Rendell, the former governor of Pennsylvania and a Clinton supporter who is chairman of the Philadelphia host committee for the convention. “But you look at what happened in Nevada, and you worry.”

The melee there, at which Sanders supporters revolted and threatened the state Democratic chairwoman in a fight over delegates, intensified concerns among Clinton allies. Senator Barbara Boxer of California, who attended the convention, said she spoke with Mr. Sanders late Tuesday and said he was “distressed” by the Nevada episode.

“He will be judged as whether or not he has leadership qualities by the way he handles this,” she said.

Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, who is close to Mr. Sanders, spoke with Mr. Sanders on Friday about not letting the state convention devolve into a messy fight. They spoke again on Tuesday afternoon, and Mr. Reid complained that a staff member who had attended feared for her safety. But Mr. Sanders’s subsequent statement condemning the violence, which mostly dwelled on how dismissively he felt the party was treating him, did little to soothe Mr. Reid’s unease.

“Bernie and I have known each other for a long time, and I believe he is better than this,” Mr. Reid said Wednesday.

But some Sanders supporters said that Democrats were ignoring an undercurrent of anger among those who fear that Mrs. Clinton, if elected, would lack the courage to challenge her friends and political contributors.

“We want to have progressive values and socialism on the convention’s agenda, rather than slip back into centrist Democratic thinking if she gets elected,” said Tick Segerblom, a state senator in Nevada and a Sanders supporter. “I think there could be some chaos at the convention – at least outside, with a lot of anarchists, socialists, young people.”

Mrs. Clinton’s campaign has largely taken Mr. Sanders’s latest broadsides in stride. In soliciting donations Wednesday, it said that the two-front battle against Mr. Sanders and Mr. Trump was “one of the toughest parts of our campaign so far.” A Clinton campaign spokesman declined to comment about Mr. Sanders’s debate proposal in California.

Privately, Mrs. Clinton’s advisers said Mr. Sanders could win California but emphasized their confidence that Mrs. Clinton would still win the nomination. She now has a total of 2,293 pledged delegates and superdelegates; she needs 90 more to win the nomination, although superdelegates can shift their support up to the convention. Mr. Sanders has 1,533 pledged delegates and superdelegates.

Mr. Sanders is now running slightly behind Mrs. Clinton in California in public polls. Ben Tulchin, Mr. Sanders’s pollster, pointed to signs of rising voter registration in California among young people and independents — two core Sanders constituencies — as evidence that he could win the state. But Hispanic registration is also rising, which could benefit Mrs. Clinton. With Mr. Sanders expected to campaign aggressively over the next three weeks, his supporters in the state said they were focused on winning the primary, not on November.

“If you want to talk about historic, let’s talk about the record turnout numbers at his rallies,” said Mayor Bao Nguyen of Garden Grove, Calif., a Sanders supporter. “Senator Sanders isn’t obliged to help Secretary Clinton if she wins. That’s a decision his team can make if they face that choice.”

Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, Mr. Sanders’s lone endorser in the Senate, said that the party’s divisions would only deepen if Mr. Sanders was driven from the race now.

“You can’t say to them, ‘Hey we don’t want to hear your views,’ and shut the door on them,” Mr. Merkley said, “and then a month later open the door and say, ‘Hey, can you come in and help us out?’

Related Coverage

Clinton and Sanders Amass Appearances Before California Fight
MAY 23, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/us/politics/clinton-sanders-california.html

Hillary Clinton Declines Invitation to Debate Bernie Sanders
MAY 23, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/us/politics/hillary-clinton-donald-trump-campaign.html

Bernie Sanders Facing Pressure Over Supporters’ Actions in Nevada
MAY 17, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/18/us/politics/bernie-sanders-supporters-nevada.html

From Bernie Sanders Supporters, Death Threats Over Delegates
MAY 16, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/us/politics/bernie-sanders-supporters-nevada.html

A Single-Payer Plan From Bernie Sanders Would Probably Still Be Expensive
MAY 16, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/17/upshot/why-single-payer-health-care-would-probably-still-be-expensive.html

© 2016 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/19/us/politics/bernie-sanderss-campaign-accuses-head-of-dnc-of-favoritism.html [with comments]

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Sanders camp: NYT headline was unfair

All In with Chris Hayes
5/19/16

Bernie Sanders campaign manager Jeff Weaver objects to characterization of willingness to 'harm' Hillary Clinton. Duration: 7:27

©2016 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/all-in/watch/sanders-camp-nyt-headline-was-unfair-689318979789 [with comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MBfjBck8m6Y [with comments]

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Who the Super Delegates Are and Why They Will Not Switch to Sanders

By Andy Ostroy
05/19/2016 10:40 am ET | Updated May 19, 2016

Math. Path. Wrath. This has been the process through which Bernie Sanders’ supporters travel. They don’t get the math, so they continue to see his path, and if you disagree and speak to the realities of the campaign, you’ll reap their wrath. And what’s their main fuel? The super delegates. Hillary Clinton has about 500 more of them than Sanders. But according to Sanders’ ferociously loyal legion of millennials, Bernie can still win the nomination because the super delegates could dump Hillary for him at the convention. And herein lies the massive delusion.

To be sure, Sanders’ supporters hate the concept of super delegates, and are in denial over their allegiance to Hillary. “They don’t count” is the common refrain. But all this bluster only serves to demonstrate a lack of understanding of who the super delegates are and why the chance of them switching from Clinton to Sanders is less likely than Knicks president Phil Jackson abandoning the triangle offense.

So let’s analyze for a moment just who these mysterious folks are. Super delegates consist of members of the Democratic National Committee, party leaders, Senators, Congressmen/women and state Governors. Stalwarts of the Democratic establishment. Prominent people such as Andrew Cuomo, Cory Booker, Sherrod Brown, Jim Clyburn, Joaquin Castro, Dick Durbin, Kirsten Gillibrand, Terry McAuliffe, Claire McCaskill, Nancy Pelosi, Maxine Waters and Charlie Rangel. At best it’s misleading for Sanders and his surrogates to repeatedly drum into supporters’ heads that these super delegates can be co-opted. They can’t. And won’t.

One needs to understand why the super delegate process was created in the first place. It was part of a set of rules created by the Party following the 1968 nomination of Hubert Humphrey, who hadn’t run in a single primary and who eventually lost in a landslide to Richard M. Nixon. It was a failsafe strategy designed to ensure the nomination of electable candidates; to prevent a candidate precisely like Bernie Sanders—an independent, socialist outsider who’s not part of the Democratic machine—from winning the nomination. So to understand this super delegate system is to understand why there’s no chance these Washington “insiders,” the establishment, would not only not abandon the candidate who currently has the most votes and pledged delegates but, more so, would suddenly throw their support to someone who is not one of them.

The real rub here is that Sanders himself knows all this. Yet he continues to fan the flames of anger and resentment, amping up his rhetoric of a “rigged system” where super delegates either don’t count and/or will magically propel him into the Oval Office despite there being absolutely no logical or historic basis for them to switch allegiance. It’s time that he share this reality with his supporters.

Copyright © 2016 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc. (emphasis in original)

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andy-ostroy/who-the-super-delegates-are-and-why-they-will-not-switch-to-sanders_b_10044970.html [with comments]

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Hillary Clinton full CNN interview

Published on May 19, 2016 by CNN [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCupvZG-5ko_eiXAupbDfxWw / http://www.youtube.com/user/CNN , http://www.youtube.com/user/CNN/videos ]

Hillary Clinton discusses EgyptAir, the war on terror, and Donald Trump, and her relationship with Bernie Sanders' campaign and Donald Trump's criticisms of Bill Clinton, with CNN's Chris Cuomo.

Hillary Clinton: Donald Trump not qualified to be president
May 19, 2016
[...]
Sanders' campaign responded to Clinton in a statement later Thursday afternoon.
"In the past three weeks, voters in Indiana, West Virginia and Oregon respectfully disagreed with Secretary Clinton," the campaign said. "We expect voters in the remaining eight contests also will disagree. And with almost every national and state poll showing Sen. Sanders doing much, much better than Secretary Clinton against Donald Trump, it is clear that millions of Americans have growing doubts about the Clinton campaign."
http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/19/politics/hillary-clinton-on-egyptair-shines-a-very-bright-light-on-threat-of-terror/index.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFQG0Bfqaoo [with comments],
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SAzzINxXlcw [with comments]

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Hillary Clinton sends a very clear message to Bernie Sanders: Enough is enough

Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. Some Democrats feel their prolonged nomination fight is hurting the party.
(Seth Wenig/AP)

By Chris Cillizza
May 19, 2016

Hillary Clinton has been waiting (relatively) patiently for Bernie Sanders to recognize the mathematical and political realities of his current situation and either end his candidacy for the Democratic presidential nomination or heavily scale back the rhetoric he has been using against her.

He has done neither. And in an interview Thursday with CNN [ http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/19/politics/hillary-clinton-on-egyptair-shines-a-very-bright-light-on-threat-of-terror/index.html (just above)], Clinton made clear that she's had enough.

Here's the key piece of what she said to CNN’s Chris Cuomo:

I went all the way to the end against then-Senator Obama. I won nine out of the last 12 contests back in ’08. I won Indiana, Kentucky, West Virginia. So I know the intense feelings that arise, particularly among your supporters as you go toward the end. But we both were following the same rules, just as both Senator Sanders and I are following the same rules, and I’m 3 million votes ahead of him and I have an insurmountable lead in pledged delegates, and I’m confident that just as I did with Senator Obama, where I said, you know what? It was really close. Much closer. Much closer than it is between me and Senator Sanders right now.

The not-so-subtle message? Look, man, I’ve walked in your shoes. It sucks. But I did the right thing for the party. Time for you to do the same.

On the merits, Clinton is absolutely right. Her delegate lead over Sanders is both considerable and considerably larger than Obama’s was over Clinton eight years ago.

(Philip Bump / The Washington Post)

And no matter how you count it, she has a 2.9 million raw-vote lead over Sanders [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/19/yes-hillary-clinton-is-winning-the-popular-vote-by-a-wide-margin/ ].

These numbers — in terms of delegates and popular vote — haven’t changed all that much in the past few months. (Sanders’s inability to beat Clinton in New York or Pennsylvania effectively ended any realistic chance he had to win.) What has changed is that the Republican race is now over, meaning that Donald Trump is now free to go after Clinton day in and day out while she remains at least somewhat distracted by Sanders’s ongoing challenge.

It's not just that. Sanders, after a brief rhetorical respite from direct frontal attacks on Clinton, appears to have been re-emboldened by his recent series of victories. (Sanders has won three of the four states that have voted this month.) Those wins, coupled with a high-profile confrontation between Sanders and Clinton supporters during the Nevada Democratic Convention last weekend, seem to have convinced the senator from Vermont that the fight is still very much worthwhile.

The best evidence of his recommitment to it came earlier this week with a VERY strongly worded rebuke of the Nevada Democratic Party [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/17/bernie-sanders-is-mad-as-hell-and-hes-not-going-to-take-it-anymore-at-least-in-nevada/ (the Sanders statement in full above)] over allegations of shenanigans at the convention. He wrote, in part:

The Democratic Party has a choice. It can open its doors and welcome into the party people who are prepared to fight for real economic and social change — people who are willing to take on Wall Street, corporate greed and a fossil fuel industry which is destroying this planet. Or the party can choose to maintain its status quo structure, remain dependent on big-money campaign contributions and be a party with limited participation and limited energy.

Tough language, bordering on a threat that he and his people will either continue to create problems for Clinton or abandon her entirely if she is the nominee.

Clinton, judging from what she told CNN’s Cuomo, doesn’t like to be threatened. She told Cuomo that while she was committed to doing her part to reunify the party, “Senator Sanders has to do his part,” too. She added: “That’s why the lesson of 2008, which was a hard-fought primary, as you remember, is so pertinent here. Because I did my part.”

Later in the interview, Clinton reiterated that Sanders “has to do his part to unify. He said the other day that he’ll do everything possible to defeat Donald Trump. He said he’d work seven days a day week. I take him at his word.”

Message sent. Now we wait to see how Sanders and his loyal supporters react. My guess? Not well.

© 2016 The Washington Post (emphasis in original)

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/19/hillary-clinton-sent-a-very-clear-message-to-bernie-sanders-today-enough-is-enough/ [with embedded video report, and (over 6,000) comments]

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The problem isn't Bernie Sanders' supporters. It's Bernie Sanders himself

Not the problem.
Getty Images

By kos
Friday May 20, 2016 7:45 AM CDT

Shit got all crazy in Nevada. Some people threw chairs (or maybe they just waved them in the air), others sent threatening misogynistic and terroristic voicemails and texts to the head of the Nevada Democratic Party.

Here’s the thing. Even though these were supporters of Bernie Sanders, I don’t consider them in any way representative of Bernie Sanders’ supporters. Politics is full of cranks. I used to do a Sunday feature of all the hate email I got until Twitter made that obsolete. Now I get them on Twitter. All sorts of hateful messages. The Secret Service is tasked in large part with following up with people making threats against the president. This is politics and people get mad and do really stupid shit.

I don’t think that has anything to do with “Bernie Sanders’ supporters.” They are a problem, but they aren’t the problem. Make sense?

The problem is Bernie Sanders himself, who as a leader refuses to forcefully and unambiguously reject that violence, instead rationalizing and explaining it away [ http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/5/17/1527598/-Amazing-Bernie-Sanders-still-can-t-tell-his-most-crazed-supporters-to-stop-acting-like-Trump-goons ] with a mix of grievances and outright conspiracy theory. The same guy who once said, “Mr. Trump should take responsibility for addressing his supporters’ violent actions,” now can’t be bothered to do the same when it’s a few rotten apples in his crowd acting insane.

To say this is stunning is an understatement. All movements are infused with a little bit of crazy, it’s the leadership’s job to marginalize it. Otherwise, you get the Tea Party—you indulge the crazy fringe, bad things happen. You indulge people who can’t keep passions in check, you damage your broader efforts and your own personal image. Armando [ http://www.dailykos.com/blogs/armando/ ] may be one of my favorite people online, and a genuine and true friend, but several years ago when he … ahem…. hit a rough patch and kinda lost it, I banned him. (Lucky for me, and hopefully for you, he’s now back and better than ever!) Several other front page writers have suffered the ban hammer as well.

My point is, none of those decisions were easy, or agreeable. They were gut-wrenching for me. I lost sleep over them. But my own personal friendships and feelings of solidarity were trumped by disruptive and destructive behavior that threatened to undermine what I was building.

Yet here is Bernie Sanders doubling down [ https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/5/19/1528489/-Sanders-campaign-admits-it-wants-to-hurt-Clinton-even-if-that-means-helping-Trump ] on his destructive approach, still refusing to call out the few bad apples, and vowing a scorched-earth campaign to the convention. Because maybe then the superdelegates will see the wisdom of overturning the democratic will of the voters in favor of the toddler stomping his feet and throwing a tantrum? What the hell?

Oh, I saw the responses; Sanders never said he wanted to hurt Clinton, that’s just a dishonest paraphrase of a New York Times reporter! And yes, that happens often in the world of journalism. A very plausible possibility! If only there was a way for Sanders to set the record straight if that reporter mischaracterized his campaign’s intent. You know, some kind of instantaneous mass medium that would immediately inform millions of his true feelings …

So I checked Twitter [ https://twitter.com/berniesanders?lang=en ], and of course, nothing.

And why would he correct something he so clearly believes? He’s been talking “revolution” for so long that it’s clear he actually believes in it … in the literal sense of the word. He didn’t forcefully condemn the violence in Nevada because revolutions are violent. He doesn’t care about the will of the Democratic electorate because revolutions aren’t democratic elections.

At this point, his entire message is “Nice party you got there, sure would be a shame if something happened to it!” So hey superdelegates, toss aside the will of the electorate because otherwise he’ll burn the place down. Viva la revolución! So screw your math [ https://medium.com/@KailiJoy/bernie-sanders-campaign-manager-calls-math-media-narrative-5e9665166d2a ] and your numbers!

AUDIE CORNISH: But if he has to win 68 percent of all the delegates going forward, in all the races, and he falls short of that?—?you know, do you have an obligation to be honest about what his path is?

JEFF WEAVER: Well, no, but see, but that’s a media narrative from people who think that politics is just standing at a board, doing mathematics. But it’s much more than that.

(Insert stupefied silence, eyes wide in disbelief, a couple of blinks ...)

In actuality, the primary system has been rigged in Sanders’ favor—giving him far more delegates than his share of the popular vote would suggest—so perhaps that might explain their confusion about math. Heck, his entire early boost came from two of the most unrepresentative states in the country, in a party that is the most diverse.

And when even those advantages aren’t enough, they outright lie about their chances. Sanders’ campaign manager literally says he doesn’t have to be honest to his supporters. “Do you have an obligation to be honest about what his path is?” Answer: “Well, no.”

So here you have this amazing group of passionate activists, having fought for Bernie for so long, suddenly being lumped in with violent dead-enders and math ignoramuses. It’s not Bernie Sanders’ name being besmirched, it’s that of so many good people I know who are now forced to apologize for their candidate (or worse, try to rationalize it).

I already hear the response: “Thanks for your concern, Kos!” But yes, I am concerned. Because I actually believe in much of what Sanders supported, even if he was never a good vehicle to deliver that message. He proved that there is a hunger for strong liberalism and has given a future generation of Democrats an opening to continue the fight. That’s amazing shit, and something that every Sanders supporter should be proud of because this is about issues, right?

I sure hope it wasn’t a cult of personality focused on Bernie Sanders. He was never going to win, and sure as hell he never connected with key party demographics. But if this is a true movement, then keep fighting for candidates that pick up the mantle! THAT I want to see and encourage. And it makes it very hard to do so if all of Bernie’s supporters are painted with a broad brush of “violent cranks.”

To reiterate, yes, those violent cranks existed. They exist everywhere. Some Sanders supporters are assholes. Guess what? Some Clinton supporters are violent assholes too!

When Donald Trump applauded the violent thugs at his rallies, he became a violent thug himself. Sanders is now no different, and that’s distressing.

Our primary was once a substantive, welcome contrast to the shitfest on the Right. Now, Sanders is doing everything he can to be the sore loser Trump once promised to be.

© Kos Media, LLC (emphasis in original)

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/5/20/1528657/-The-problem-isn-t-Bernie-Sanders-supporters-It-s-Bernie-Sanders-himself [with comments]

*

Berning Sanders: the backlash begins

Bernie Giving Stink Eye, a currently popular meme. Check your Facebook, it's everywhere.

By MBNYC
Tuesday Jan 19, 2016 4:04 PM CST

A lot of us have said, and for a long time, that Senator Sanders of Vermont has been given essentially a free ride by major media in his pursuit of the Democratic nomination for President. When he was mentioned, it was either as an irrelevant gadfly or, at best, an amusing sideshow to Hillary Clinton’s presumably unstoppable march to the nomination and hence to the Presidency.

To supporters of the good Senator the phenomenon manifested rather differently, as a media blackout that kept the voting public in ignorance of the qualities and agenda of a long-time Progressive leader, stifling the voice of a disaffected left and a public both angry and hungry for change.

As they say, be careful what you wish for. After the last debate [video and transcript included at/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=120074878 and preceding and following], the media is paying attention.

- - -

He is not my choice in the Democratic primary, nonetheless Bernie Sanders strikes me as a decent human being, certainly a solid Progressive and a man of character and worth. If he’s the nominee of the party, I will vote for him. If he’s not, I look forward to working with the men and women who support him not just in electing the next Democratic President, but in building a fairer, stronger and more just America.

He’s awoken something in the nation, a spirit and anger that slept for too long, and we should all be grateful to him for that alone.

I am however altogether pleased that his agenda and proposals are finally getting the critical scrutiny any aspiring nominee should expect, but that has been sorely lacking in the media and altogether absent in the effusions of praise heaped on him by his supporters here and elsewhere.

I am not one of them, but allow me to suggest that enthusiasm will not remedy deficiencies nor render them immaterial. That is not how politics works or for us Progressives should work.

- - -

Matt Yglesias at Vox is first at bat, with It’s time to start taking Bernie Sanders seriously [ http://www.vox.com/2016/1/18/10784774/bernie-sanders-serious ].

He starts with a critique of the newly-released Sanders healthcare plan, which is here [ http://www.scribd.com/doc/295825734/Bernie-Sanders-Medicare-for-All-plan ]. I’d encourage people to read it, it won’t take all too long.

Yglesias is not impressed, and neither am I. Three pages aren’t a healthcare plan, what they are is a press release. And the plan is not equivalent to, as titled, Medicare for All. That designation is marketing, pure and simple, or less charitably described, misleading.

Yglesias: BernieCare isn't really a plan

[...] In the debate [Sanders] thundered rhetorically: "Tell me why we are spending over three times more than the British, who guarantee health care to all of their people?"

As it happens, there is an answer to this question: In the United Kingdom, the central government acts to comprehensively set wages and salaries for doctors and other health care providers. They set them at levels far lower than what we see in the United States. And a government board with the friendly acronym NICE [ https://www.nice.org.uk/ ] serves as a centralized authority empowered to decide what treatments will and won't be paid for (death panels, in short).

Sanders's "plan" doesn't cover any of this ground. Worse, his worldview doesn't seem to accommodate the questions. Instead, he says the only relevant issue is "whether we have the guts to stand up to the private insurance companies and all of their money."

This is a serious issue: no policy is perfect, seasoned politicians and the voters who support them know that. Nothing is incapable of improvement. If Bernie Sanders lacks the flexibility to critically examine his ideas – quite a few of his supporters notably seem to – that should give voters some pause. As should the idea that one man is so shiningly and inevitably right that he and his ideas are above criticism or betterment.

- - -

Also on healthcare, Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine, The Case Against Bernie Sanders [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/01/case-against-bernie-sanders.html ].

Sanders has promised to replace Obamacare with a single-payer plan, without having any remotely plausible prospects for doing so. Many advocates of single-payer imagine that only the power of insurance companies stands in their way, but the more imposing obstacles would be reassuring suspicious voters that the change in their insurance (from private to public) would not harm them and — more difficult still — raising the taxes to pay for it.

As Sarah Kliff [ http://www.vox.com/2014/12/22/7427117/single-payer-vermont-shumlin ] details, Vermont had to abandon hopes of creating its own single-payer plan. If Vermont, one of the most liberal states in America, can’t summon the political willpower for single-payer, it is impossible to imagine the country as a whole doing it. Not surprisingly, Sanders's health-care plan uses the kind of magical-realism approach to fiscal policy usually found in Republican budgets, conjuring trillions of dollars in savings without defining [ http://www.vox.com/2016/1/17/10784528/bernie-sanders-single-payer-health-care ] their source.

What’s a trillion or two, whatever, but pretty soon you’re talking real money.

- - -

Chait again on Sanders’ plans for the economy, Wall Street regulation and dismissal of the Obama administration’s achievements:

Sanders’s core argument is that the problems of the American economy require far more drastic remedies than anything the Obama administration has done, or that Clinton proposes to build on. Clinton has put little pressure on Sanders’s fatalistic assessment, but the evidence for it is far weaker than he assumes.

Sanders has grudgingly credited what he calls [ https://berniesanders.com/bernies-announcement/ ] “the modest gains of the Affordable Care Act,” which seems like an exceedingly stingy assessment of a law that has already [ http://www.businessinsurance.com/article/20150127/NEWS03/150129861/1287 ] reduced the number of uninsured Americans by 20 million.

The Dodd-Frank reforms of the financial industry may not have broken up the big banks, but they have, at the very least, deeply reduced [ http://www.salon.com/2015/11/10/wall_street_is_finally_getting_its_comeuppance_why_new_global_regulations_are_a_vital_step_in_the_right_direction/ ] systemic risk. The penalties for being too big to fail exceed the benefits, and, as a result, banks are actually breaking themselves up [ http://www.wsj.com/articles/has-the-government-made-it-too-expensive-to-be-a-big-bank-1452731317 ] to avoid being large enough to be regulated as systemic risks.

- - -

Chait touches as well on the question of the grassroots army that – or so we’re told – will overwhelm the feeble ramparts of Washington’s status quo to impose a President Sanders’ agenda on establishment special interests.

Sanders’s version involves the mobilization of a mass grassroots volunteer army that can depose the special interests. “The major political, strategic difference I have with Obama is it’s too late to do anything inside the Beltway,” he told Andrew Prokop [ http://www.vox.com/2014/10/14/6839305/bernie-sanders-running-for-president-2016 ]. “You gotta take your case to the American people, mobilize them, and organize them at the grassroots level in a way that we have never done before.” But Obama did organize passionate volunteers on a massive scale — far broader than anything Sanders has done — and tried to keep his volunteers engaged throughout his presidency. Why would Sanders’s grassroots campaign succeed where Obama’s far larger one failed?

Chait is a little too cynical here, I think. But the question of how Bernie Sanders would succeed where Barack Obama did not is relevant, and I haven’t seen all that many convincing answers to it. Or rather, I haven’t seen the question asked.

- - -

Moving on, foreign policy. How about the Middle East and ISIS/Da’esh?

You might recall the Democratic debate in the immediate aftermath of the Paris terror attacks [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQFjTJW7NCM (next below; with comments)],

a debate focused on foreign policy, security and terrorism; Sanders spent a sentence or two on those horrific events in the heart of a European capital and major world city, then moved seamlessly to his standard stump speech – without regard to the rather obvious fact that it was of little bearing on the topic of debate.

Tim Mak on The Daily Beast titles his piece simply Bernie’s ISIS Strategy Is A Disaster [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/01/17/bernie-s-isis-strategy-is-a-disaster.html ].

Sen. Bernie Sanders wants Iran and Saudi Arabia to send ground troops into Syria as part of a coalition of Muslim nations to fight ISIS, an idea he’s pressed multiple times as a strategy to fight Islamic extremism in the region. [...]

“These comments indicate Sanders lack of serious engagement with foreign policy issues. While I appreciate his opposition to the Iraq War, perhaps if he was a little more engaged with that issue he would understand the problematic elements [of his proposal],” said Evan Barrett, a political adviser to the Coalition for a Democratic Syria, a Syrian-American opposition umbrella group.

Sanders has preferred to stick to economic issues, an environment that he is deeply familiar with. But he has been apparently unprepared [ http://www.politico.com/story/2015/11/bernie-sanders-foreign-policy-paris-215937 ] to address national security topics, a primary responsibility of the commander-in-chief position he is seeking. His puzzling comments on how to fight ISIS are just the latest manifestation of his lack of foreign policy fundamentals.

Iran and Saudi Arabia are both Muslim nations, but adhere to diverging and oppositional forms of the Islamic faith, Sunni and Shi’ite, a division that goes back to the earliest days of Islam. Iran is mostly Shi’ite, Saudi Arabia mostly Sunni, with a large Shi’ite population concentrated in areas nearest Iran and the Persian Gulf, areas that also contain the bulk of Saudi oil production.

The Saudi embassy in Tehran was recently sacked by a mob angry over Saudi Arabia’s execution of a Shi’ite cleric [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/saudi-arabia-executes-47-people-including-prominent-shiite-cleric/2016/01/02/01bfee06-198e-4eb6-ab5e-a5bcc8fb85c6_story.html ]. The kingdom broke off diplomatic relations [ http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2016/01/saudi-arabia-severs-diplomatic-relations-iran-160103202137679.html ] a day later. Saudi Arabia and Iran are bitter rivals in the region [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/13/world/middleeast/persian-gulf-arabian-gulf-iran-saudi-arabia.html ], to expect them to work together to achieve a U.S. foreign policy objective is naive at best, dangerous incomprehension of regional dynamics in a key area of world instability at worst.

But that wasn’t just an off the cuff gaffe. It’s a point the Vermont senator has repeated in press releases [ http://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/sanders-calls-for-arab-nations-to-step-up-fight-against-islamic-state ] for the past year: the war against ISIS, he said, “must be won primarily by nations in the region—Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Qatar, Kuwait, Jordan and Iran— which must be prepared to send ground troops into action to defeat Islamic extremists.”

You could argue that details of conflict in the Middle East and elsewhere can easily be acquired from briefings or delegated to competent aides, and you’d be right. It’s been done before. I wouldn’t consider that approach optimal, but it’s clear that Senator Sanders is no George W. Bush in temperament, intelligence or any other characteristic you might see fit to name.

That is however not the end of the story or even the most troubling aspect of this curious intransigence. Knowledge can be attained, but understanding requires a willingness to do so.

- - -

Sanders’ lack of curiosity and apparent unwillingness to revisit a subject even faced with a live, nationally televised debate on it (as noted above) speaks to a character trait his colleagues are familiar with: his near-exclusive focus on matters he considers relevant, regardless of context.

The New York Times [ http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/15/us/politics/bernie-sanders-an-outlier-the-senator-begs-to-differ.html ]:

Mr. Sanders’s disdain for the things he views as unimportant is matched by his single-minded focus on the things he says are of real consequence, like the future of Social Security.

At the Democratic caucus lunches, at which he is a fixture, “all he ever talks about is Social Security [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/s/social_security_us/index.html ],” one congressional aide said. “He doesn’t even try to relate it to the topic at hand.”

That focus was on display a few weeks ago when, on an especially slow day in the Senate with only a minor vote on the schedule, caucus members piled onto buses for a White House meeting with President Obama. Looking around the room, Mr. Obama was surprised to see Mr. Sanders.

“Bernie?” he said. “Shouldn’t you be out in New Hampshire?” There was a chuckle, and then the president asked Mr. Sanders what was on his mind.

“Social Security,” Mr. Sanders said.

Whether that’s a strength or a weakness, I’m not qualified to say. That is for the voters to decide. But I would hazard a guess that the media spotlight on Bernie Sanders will not fade soon [where, of course and unfortunately, no such media spotlight on the sheer vapidity and impudence of Bernie's sputterings has ever, then or since, shone nearly as brightly as it should have].

© Kos Media, LLC (emphasis in original)

http://www.dailykos.com/stories/2016/1/19/1471810/-Berning-Sanders-the-backlash-begins [with comments]

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Bernie and Hillary: Apocalypse Now

ROBYN BECK via Getty Images

By Richard Brodsky
05/20/2016 09:48 am ET | Updated May 20, 2016

Get it straight.

Bernie has every right to run in California and through the convention. The Democratic political establishment has tilted to Hillary from the beginning. Hillary has appropriately heard the message, especially about income inequality, and moved to the left. Hillary has more votes and more delegates than Bernie.

There’s no need to paper over the disputes. Bernie is leading a movement, not just a campaign. He has taken a corrupted election system and used it honestly to move a progressive agenda, and more power to him. His people feel the outcomes deeply. But there is so much at stake, and a history of lasting splits after Democratic primaries, that it’s time for both campaigns to focus on what matters.

When these things go wrong, the consequences are, well, Apocalyptic. In 1968 I was part of the McCarthy anti-war effort. After tumultuous and horrific events, Humphrey won the nomination. The movement never quite accepted the significance of the general election and we ended up, by a whisker, with Nixon. Nixon. America would have been vastly better off with Humphrey.

In 2000, Gore was the nominee. Nader siphoned off enough progressive votes in enough states to throw the election to Bush. Bush. Iraq, Afghanistan and the Supreme Court. American would have been vastly better off with Gore.

We face the same fearsome outcome now. A percentage of Bernie-ites have announced they will never support Hillary. Hillary, at her worst, is competent, decent and reasonably progressive. No need to ignore the character and policy concerns. But there is no reasonable argument about the choice. Trump? Really?

Bernie understands and will, eventually, do the right thing. It would be smart for the Democratic leadership to bend over backwards to make it easier for him. But in the end this will be in the hands of a lot of decent, progressive people who have correctly fought for an end to income inequality, racial, gender and sexual orientation bias and more. There is no reasonable argument about the choice. In November, if Hillary is the nominee, with all her limitations and strengths, support for her is a moral imperative. The consequences of President Trump will make the Nixon and Bush years seem like a paradigm of stability and progress.

There is no reasonable argument for progressives to do anything but vote for Hillary.

Copyright © 2016 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/richard-brodsky/bernie-and-hillary-apocal_b_10058986.html [with comments]

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Bernie Sanders’ Campaign Is Feeling The Money Burn

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) had $5.8 million left in his campaign account at the beginning of May.
JOSH EDELSON via Getty Images

Sanders’ campaign entered May with a cash balance that was dwarfed by Hillary Clinton’s.

By Paul Blumenthal
05/20/2016 06:06 pm ET | Updated May 21, 2016

WASHINGTON — Bernie Sanders is burning through his campaign account.

The Sanders presidential campaign began May with just $5.8 million cash on hand [ http://docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/forms/C00577130/1073715/ ], according to reports filed Friday with the Federal Election Commission. That was significantly less than the $30 million available [ http://docquery.fec.gov/cgi-bin/forms/C00575795/1073673/ ] to Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton.

Sanders’ cash-on-hand deficiency followed heavy spending by his campaign in the previous three months. The independent Vermont senator’s insurgent campaign spent $160 million from January through April, bringing its total spending to $202 million.

In April, the Sanders campaign fired hundreds of staffers [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/us/politics/bernie-sanders-campaign.html ] as it pivoted toward the final primaries and caucuses of the long election season.

The Sanders camp raised $27 million in April, with $11 million coming from donors who each gave less than $200. Much of his other donations came from repeat donors who had given a total of more than $200. Clinton’s campaign raised $25 million — $26.4 million including allocation from the Hillary Victory Fund. Her campaign spent $24 million in April.

The two Democratic presidential candidates’ campaigns have raised almost identical sums, according to FEC reports — $212 million for Sanders, compared with Clinton’s $211 million. The Clinton campaign said in a press release that its total fundraising was slightly above $213 million.

Sanders created a microsite [ https://berniesanders.com/revolution/ ] to tout his campaign’s historic fundraising. It says the senator raised money from 2.4 million donors, a record at this stage in the race. The campaign said it had received 7.6 million donations — about 13 per minute. The average age of donors was a remarkable 27.

The Clinton campaign said that it has raised money from 1.2 million donors.

Copyright © 2016 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-cash-on-hand_us_573f7be5e4b0613b512a5fad [with comments]

===

Chris W. Cox, Wayne LaPierre & Donald Trump: 2016 NRA-ILA Leadership Forum

Published on May 20, 2016 by NRA [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCZr49eSL2aHQ_41476IrkbA / http://www.youtube.com/user/NRAVideos , http://www.youtube.com/user/NRAVideos/videos ]

NRA leaders Chris W. Cox and Wayne LaPierre, along with Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, address the crowd and discuss the importance of this year’s election.

NRA-ILA Executive Director Chris W. Cox declares this year’s presidential election a do-or-die fight for the soul of our country. If we don’t show up at the polls in force this November, we’ll witness the end of individual freedom in America. Cox says if Hillary wants to turn this election into a do-or-die fight over the Second Amendment, to bring it on — the National Rifle Association was born to stand and fight!

NRA Executive Vice President and Chief Executive Officer Wayne LaPierre warns that a Clinton White House would be a dangerous extension of the Obama White House … and ground zero for a massive attack on our freedom. LaPierre tells the crowd that they are America’s best hope and this is their moment, and he urges patriots to rise up and take our country back this November.

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump talks about his strong support for gun rights. He says the Second Amendment is on the ballot this November and the only way to save it is to vote for him.

Originally aired 5/20/16.

Citing Family, Hillary Clinton Affirms Gun-Control Stance

Hillary Clinton speaking in Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., on Saturday at an event benefiting the Trayvon Martin Foundation’s Circle of Mothers.
MAY 21, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/22/us/politics/hillary-clinton-campaign.html

NRA Endorses Trump; Armed Man Immediately Shot Outside White House
05/20/2016 Updated May 20, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2016/05/20/huffpost-hill_n_10070990.html [with comment]

NRA’s Wayne LaPierre Freaks Out About Ex-Felons Voting, Is Fine With Them Carrying Guns

In a speech Friday, NRA CEO Wayne LaPierre railed against giving voting rights back to ex-offenders. His organization feels differently about restoring their gun ownership rights.
Something about this seems hypocritical ...
05/20/2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/nra-felon-voting-rights_us_573f5bd2e4b0613b512a3ead [with comments]

NRA Convention: Dwindling Membership, Desperate Rhetoric

05/23/2016 Updated May 23, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-greenwald/nra-convention-dwindling_b_10107208.html [with comments]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VXpBJBSOhTU [with comments] [additional text re the three performers adapted respectively from http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jiXOEGGaQkw (with comment), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhu7oTxICjE (with comments), and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1iST5oUPNAA (with comments)]

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Bernie Sanders: American People See Hillary Clinton as 'Lesser of Two Evils'

By MaryAlice Parks
May 21, 2016, 5:41 PM ET

Presidential hopeful and underdog for the Democratic nomination Bernie Sanders [ http://abcnews.go.com/topics/news/us/bernie-sanders.htm ] said one of the reasons he is staying in the race is because he does not want Americans "voting for the lesser of two evils."

Sanders added that he will use Hillary Clinton [ http://abcnews.go.com/topics/news/whitehouse/hillary-clinton.htm ]'s low favorability ratings as part of his case to Democratic party [ http://abcnews.go.com/topics/news/us/democratic-party.htm ] super delegates [ http://abcnews.go.com/topics/news/elections/superdelegates.htm ] that they should back him over her.

"We need a campaign, an election, coming up which does not have two candidates who are really very, very strongly disliked. I don't want to see the American people voting for the lesser of two evils," the senator told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos during an interview that will air on "This Week" Sunday. "I want the American people to be voting for a vision of economic justice, of social justice [ http://abcnews.go.com/topics/news/social-justice.htm ], of environmental justice, of racial justice."

Asked by Stephanopoulos whether he would describe Clinton as the lesser of two evils against Donald Trump [ http://abcnews.go.com/topics/news/donald-trump.htm ], Sanders responded, "No, I wouldn't describe it, but that's what the American people are saying."

"If you look at the favorability ratings of Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, both of them have very, very high unfavorables," Sanders added.

A NY Times/CBS poll [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/us/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-poll.html ] this week found that nationwide voters have a more negative than positive opinion of both Donald Trump and Clinton. (Trump had a 55 percent unfavorable rating, and Clinton had a 52 percent unfavorable rating, according to the poll). By comparison, only 34 percent of participants in the poll had an unfavorable view of Sanders and more, 41 percent, had a favorable view of him. However, a higher percentage, 26 percent, said they were undecided about the senator, too.

Sanders has long argued that although he is losing the primary fight to Clinton, party elites should consider how well he does with independents as one of the reasons he is better equipped to take on Trump in November.

Copyright © 2016 ABC News Internet Ventures. Yahoo! - ABC News Network

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bernie-sanders-american-people-hillary-clinton-lesser-evils/story?id=39280278 [with embedded non-YouTube video clip included in the ABC News YouTube above, and comments], http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSXR1468WLM [with comments]

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Sen. Bernie Sanders on State of the Union - Full Interview

Published on May 22, 2016 by CNN

Today on CNN's State of the Union Senator Bernie Sanders joined Jake Tapper to discuss super delegates, Wasserman Schultz and more.

excerpts:

Sanders open to super delegates overturning pledged delegates
Sanders makes his claim that although he is behind in pledged delegates that the super delegates should decide who the nominee is.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=li4WxDEk_f0 [with comments]

Sanders says super delegate system 'undemocratic'
Sen. Bernie Sanders criticizes the super delegates and how they were already on Clinton's side before the primary season even began.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J_4ldxz17OA [with comments]

Sanders rejects notion he is damaging Clinton against Trump
Sen. Bernie Sanders refutes the idea that he is hurting Hillary Clinton's chances in a general election because of his continued criticism of the election process.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6Js95widqk [with comments]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KfEUO3ApstM [with comments]

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05/22/16: Bernie Sanders Discusses Current Standing in Presidential Election

This Week with George Stephanopoulos
46:40 | 05/22/16 | NR | CC

Guests: Bernie Sanders, Ed Royce, Adam Schiff, Anthony Fauci, Donna Brazile, Matt Dowd, Bill Kristol, Cokie Roberts

Copyright 2016 ABC News

http://abc.go.com/shows/this-week-with-george-stephanopoulos/episode-guide/2016-05/22-052216-bernie-sanders-discusses-current-standing-in-presidential-election [full episode original video] [the above YouTube of the included Sanders interview itself for the moment at least at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfwZGySTOJo (no comments yet), others for the moment at least at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JUP1Rx5c4Oo (with comments), and, with following panel discussion, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_IqFISaExM (with comments)]

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Bernie Sanders keeps fighting as if Hillary Clinton’s big lead is a huge lie

original print title:
Bernie refuses to see that he lacks votes to win

In the world of Bernie Sanders, he is the people's choice.
(© Stephen Lam / Reuters/REUTERS)

Sanders keeps acting as if he's pounding Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary elections.
(Mary Altaffer/AP)

In His Own Words: Bernie Sanders Talks About His Chances, Thoughts About Sen. Clinton

Published on May 22, 2016 by CBS Los Angeles [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCkH1uDkyuO9sVjSqdqBygOg / http://www.youtube.com/user/1cbsla , http://www.youtube.com/user/1cbsla/videos ]
In a continuation of his one-on-one interview with CBS2/KCAL9's Dave Bryan [the initial portion at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaVzSwjwZpw (with comments)], Bernie Sanders says he or Hillary Clinton we be our next president. "Donald Trump will not."
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60nWzJmcoOo [non-YouTube version embedded; with comments]

Mike Lupica
Sunday, May 22, 2016, 8:52 PM

The longer Bernie Sanders stays in the race against Hillary Clinton, and the more he is carried along by the roar of his crowds, we’re clearly supposed to buy certain items wholesale from him, starting with the big one: He’s apparently the only honest politician left in America.

So only Bernie can save the Democratic Party from itself, right before he saves the country from Donald Trump. So Bernie fights on even as he complains this particular fight was fixed a long time ago, because so many superdelegates were throwing down with Clinton before Bernie ever threw his own hat into the ring.

Day after day and rally after rally, he tells us that if it weren’t for these lousy superdelegates rigging the system against him this way — and if they’d only give him more debates — he would eventually be taking his rightful place in the general election, and being the one to run against Trump.

Only none of these things happen to be true, no matter how many times, and how earnestly, Sanders says them. By the way? Did Sanders not know the rules of engagement before he got into the thing? He acts now as if they changed the rules on him in the middle of the game, or as soon as he started to draw crowds that have rivaled Trump’s, and win some primaries and caucuses. He acts as if he’s beating Clinton like a drum even though she’s gotten 2.9 million more votes than he has, at least according to the Washington Post.

No matter. He, Bernie, is the only one the voters love, truly. Only his vision of America counts.

“We need a campaign, an election coming up,” he tells George Stephanopoulos on “This Week,” “which does not have two candidates who are really, very, very strongly disliked.”

But when Stephanopoulos comes back at him and asks if he is describing Clinton vs. Trump as the lesser of two evils, giving Sanders the chance to say that is exactly what he meant, he says this instead: “I wouldn’t describe it, but that’s what the American people are saying.” This from the guy who fancies himself the heavyweight championship standup guy of the world.

So he will stay in this race until the middle of June, sticking to his story that he’s not hurting Clinton or hurting her chances against Trump by doing that, which happens to be thinking made out of moonbeams. Is he kidding? It has already reached the point where Trump quoting Bernie on Hillary Clinton or talking about how Bernie says she lacks judgment is just one more part of the campaign that should be a drinking game.

Sanders stays in the race because his own rhetoric has become a narcotic for him; because he really has convinced himself he is the face and voice of a revolution. And if you’re running a revolution, it’s a little difficult to head back to the Green Mountains.

To the end, Sanders really does act as if the scoreboard is some great big lie, even when the numbers are up there for everybody to see. And when somebody points out how many more votes Clinton has gotten, as Stephanopolous did on Sunday, Sanders immediately begins talking about the caucuses he’s won, if they alter the math in some dramatic way. In the world according to Bernie, he is the people’s choice. Well, yeah, if he wins the California primary by about 3 million votes.

Has Sanders’ campaign roused the young, and the disaffected? It has. And still doesn’t give him the right to decide which demographic matters the most in the presidential race of 2016, which one is the most noble, or honorable, or righteous. Bernie Sanders has earned a significant market share, you bet. It doesn’t mean his votes count more than everybody else’s votes, as he stubbornly refuses to get out of the way, mostly because his ego won’t get out of the way.

He has been a better candidate than Hillary Clinton the way Donald Trump has been a far better candidate than she has. Face it, just about everybody is. Sanders started out a thousand percentage points behind her, and began to make his run, and his noise. One of the huge surprises of this campaign — though not one as huge as the rise of Trump — really is how the young have come to a candidate who will turn 75 years old before the next presidential election, as the amazing, small-donation money just kept rolling in.

He has made all that noise, from coast to coast. He has thrown a scare into Hillary Clinton, won a lot of states. He has just not won enough, gotten enough votes, or delegates of all shapes and sizes, even as he keeps yelling about superdelegates the way Trump yells about Crooked Hillary. That’s when Trump isn’t yelling — or tweeting — that Sanders should become a third-party candidate.

The truth is, Bernie already is.

© Copyright 2016 NYDailyNews.com

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/lupica-bernie-refuses-lacks-votes-win-article-1.2646026

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Sanders: 'Democracy is messy'

Hardball with Chris Matthews
5/24/16

Bernie Sanders is charging full speed ahead on challenging Hillary Clinton until the bitter end. Duration: 6:49

©2016 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/hardball/watch/sanders-democracy-is-messy-692192323610 [the above YouTube of the segment for the moment at least at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I076btezVJU (with comments)]

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Berning Down the House

Mike Blake / Reuters

By Steven Conn
05/23/2016 07:47 am ET | Updated May 23, 2016

When the election of 2016 is finally, mercifully over, perhaps we’ll look back on the middle of May as the moment when politics began to revert to form. For months, candidates behaved in ways we’ve never seen before, voters became increasingly unpredictable (and un-pollable) and party establishments trembled that they no longer had the controls of their runaway trains.

But by the second week of May, things started to settle back into the old familiar patterns, and that should send a chill down our spines. Tired though the cliché may be, it still applies: Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line.

To be sure, the Republican establishment failed entirely to run their own nominating process and it is unprecedented that a major party has been hijacked entirely by a demagogue who essentially parachuted in from left field. But after wiping the egg off their faces, more and more of those GOP insiders are warming to Trump. Some of us giggled at the way Chris Christie publicly humiliated himself sucking up to Trump way back in February. Turns out he simply wanted to get to the front of the line of kneeling GOP supplicants.

More importantly, mid-May brings news that according to a recent survey Republican voters are warming to Trump too. And more to the point, last week Sheldon Adelson made it clear that he will be throwing big money at the Trump campaign.

Even as the GOP was getting its house in order and falling in line, the love affair between Sanders and his supporters appears headed to a nasty custody fight with the rest of the Democratic Party. Reports from the Sanders campaign hint that he will campaign to the bitter end, and that his campaign will be more and more bitter. He is preparing to damage Hilary Clinton personally, using tactics he previewed in the run-up to the New York primary. “Bernie Sanders, Eyeing Convention, Willing to Harm Hilary Clinton in Homestretch [above],” read the headline in the Times.

To understand Bernie’s “strategy” here you need to review his political resume. There is an unwavering (some might say frozen) set of ideological commitments behind everything he has done — or mostly said — since he retreated from New York City to bucolic Vermont. To be clear: I’m largely sympathetic to the rhetoric but ideology isn’t the point.

What has also remained steadfast has been Sanders’s commitment not to engage in the messy, disappointing, and ultimately compromising world of party politics. As a member of Vermont’s Liberty Union Party and then as a self-identified Socialist, Sanders has repeatedly preferred ideological purity to political pragmatism. He has never wanted to get his hands dirty with the business of how party politics actually works. After all, the first time even identified himself as a Democrat was in 2015 when he decided to run for president.

So it’s a bit cheeky, isn’t it, for Sanders to claim now that his campaign is about re-making the Democratic Party. He’s had almost 40 years in elective office to do just that, but he has either found the Democratic Party beneath his contempt or he’s been astonishingly ineffective at having any impact inside it.

In this sense, Sanders is a child of 1968. That generation has always preferred the theater of politics rather than the exercise of power, and it has grown more comfortable with symbolic gestures rather than those which might have real consequences. Remember all the people you know who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 as a “symbolic” act? Those of us still suffering from Nader 2000 PTSD remember how none of his voters wanted to own up to the consequences of that bit of symbolism.

Like so many on the left, the children of 1968 are addicted to lost causes. Unwilling — or scared — to do the things necessary to achieve partial victories, they pick up their marbles and retreat to their moral high ground. For the children of 1968 the good is always the enemy of the best. Nothing makes the self-righteous feel better about themselves than the martyrdom of lost causes. Now that Bernie’s run for the nomination is a lost cause, he’s in his comfort zone.

The kids came to Chicago in 1968 to destroy the Democratic Party, and they did a fair bit of damage. And in so doing, they helped put Richard Nixon in the White House. I don’t expect a full-blown police riot in the streets of Philadelphia this summer, but as an Associated Press story reports, Sanders supporters are already gearing up for convention fights and acts of civil disobedience. Purity, not unity, is the primary goal for the Sanders backers interviewed by the AP.

Sanders — and perhaps some of his supporters — may well believe that it is necessary to destroy the village in order to save it. That, after all, is how revolutions start, and Bernie has been promising revolution — not reform, not incrementalism, not two steps forward and one step back, but Revolution! - since the 1970s. Taking down Hilary Clinton might well make the Sandernistas feel good about themselves. The rest of us may well be living with President Trump.

Steven Conn is the W. E. Smith Professor of history at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio.

Copyright © 2016 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-conn/berning-down-the-house_b_10103918.html [with comments]

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Sanders manager: Dem. race has been 'civil'

Andrea Mitchell Reports
5/23/16

Bernie Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver discusses the extended Democratic primary race between Sanders and rival Hillary Clinton. Duration: 6:57

©2016 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/andrea-mitchell-reports/watch/sanders-manager-dem-race-has-been-civil-691080771813 , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZP03fbUD_U [with comments]

*

Hillary & Bernie Cold Open - SNL

Published on May 22, 2016 by Saturday Night Live [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCqFzWxSCi39LnW1JKFR3efg / http://www.youtube.com/user/SaturdayNightLive , http://www.youtube.com/user/SaturdayNightLive/videos ]

Hillary Clinton (Kate McKinnon) and Bernie Sanders (Larry David) reminisce about their time running against each other in the Democratic primary.

[originally aired May 21, 2016]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HRqZhJcae3M [with (over 4,000) comments]

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Sen. Boxer: ‘It is time for us to unite’

Andrea Mitchell Reports
5/24/16

California Senator and Hillary Clinton supporter, Barbara Boxer, discusses the campaign finance allegations against Governor Terry McAuliffe and also comments on Donald Trump’s recent attacks against Bill and Hillary Clinton. She also responds to Clinton’s battle against Bernie Sanders. Duration: 5:10

©2016 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/andrea-mitchell-reports/watch/sen-boxer-it-is-time-for-us-to-unite-691846723799 , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ny_06WGo7Vc [with comments]

===

Donald Trump is Willing to Debate Bernie Sanders

Published on May 26, 2016 by Jimmy Kimmel Live [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCa6vGFO9ty8v5KZJXQxdhaw / http://www.youtube.com/user/JimmyKimmelLive , http://www.youtube.com/user/JimmyKimmelLive/videos ]

Donald Trump shares his opinion on the race between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton and agrees to debate Sanders under one condition.

[originally aired (evening of) May 25, 2016]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vzO-JYjEcHE [with (over 8,000) comments]

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Bernie Sanders
@BernieSanders
Game on. I look forward to debating Donald Trump in California before the June 7 primary.
11:30 PM - 25 May 2016
https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/735689625407131648 [with comments]

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Sanders’ campaign: Trump, Sanders debate would benefit voters

Andrea Mitchell Reports
5/26/16

Bernie Sanders campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, joins NBC’s Andrea Mitchell to discuss the possibility Bernie Sanders debating Donald Trump, the State Department’s report on Hillary Clinton’s private email server, the report that DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz is fighting to keep her job and Democratic party unity. Duration: 7:02

©2016 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/andrea-mitchell-reports/watch/sanders-campaign-trump-sanders-debate-would-benefit-voters-693462083727 , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sf1uWWgSg_I [with comments]

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"I Would LOVE To Debate Bernie! He's A Dream!" - Donald Trump FULL Press Conference

Published on May 26, 2016 by kids game [ https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUGdHsPc6PQTEemG3pMU3eQ , https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCUGdHsPc6PQTEemG3pMU3eQ/videos ]

Thursday, May 26, 2016: Donald Trump spoke to members of the media in Bismarck, ND after reaching 1,237 delegates and clinching the GOP nomination for President.

Donald Trump’s Top Adviser: ‘This Is Not A Hard Race’

Paul Manafort explains why his boss is “gonna win,” no prob.
05/25/2016 Updated May 26, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-paul-manafort-general-election_us_574619eee4b0dacf7ad3e201 [with comments]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60Cax02EcLg [no comments yet] [also at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D7M5WrD5nNc (no comments yet), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMegcjv46JE (text taken from; with comments), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTk3fsNBPh8 (with comments), and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q13u8OLFkiU (title taken from; with comments)] [complete event, also including the speech next below, at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7se8WBRSmxI (no comments yet), and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I8soRz1cAA (with comments)]

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Trump Bismarck, ND Speech (Williston Basin Petroleum Conference) - Thu. 5/26/16

Published on May 27, 2016 by Live Streaming News [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY9SWT1EQ-OSJJu_rd78TNQ , http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCY9SWT1EQ-OSJJu_rd78TNQ/videos ]

Donald Trump’s remarks at The Williston Basin Petroleum Conference in Bismarck, ND at the Bismarck Event Center.

Donald J. Trump Formal Policy Address on Energy
May 26, 2016
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-formal-policy-address-on-energy

An America First Energy Plan
May 26, 2016
https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/an-america-first-energy-plan

Donald Trump Said Some Things About Energy
“Imagine a world” where America has complete energy independence. Imagine — it’s easy if you try.
05/26/2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-energy_us_57475807e4b055bb1171a811 [with embedded video clip, and comments]

Donald Trump’s Energy Plan: More Fossil Fuels and Fewer Rules
MAY 26, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/politics/donald-trump-global-warming-energy-policy.html [with embedded video clip, and comments]

Pretty Much Everything Donald Trump Said About Energy and Climate Was Wrong, Ignorant, or Gibberish

05/27/2016 Updated May 27, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-h-gleick/pretty-much-everything-do_b_10168986.html [with comments]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoST314iIyU [no comments yet] [also at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=74MIwmvDuFc (with comments), and, with intros, at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEUmIFTZsbo (title and text taken from; no comments yet), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YYsl_e6we0U (with comments), and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SV-m2txA0E (no comments yet)] [complete event, also including the press conference just above, at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7se8WBRSmxI (no comments yet), and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9I8soRz1cAA (with comments)]

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Sanders ‘Can’t Wait’ to Debate Trump on Jobs, Taxes, Climate Change

Press Release
May 26, 2016

VENTURA, Calif. – Saying he was “very excited” and “can’t wait” to debate Donald Trump, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders on Thursday told a Ventura College rally he looked forward to debating jobs, low wages, tax breaks for the rich, climate change and other issues.

Sanders first proposed a debate with Trump after Hillary Clinton reneged on a commitment to debate Sanders in California in May before the June 7 primary election. Trump agreed.

“I am very excited about it,” Sanders told the crowd of more than 9,800 supporters.

Sanders said he looked forward to asking Trump why he favors more tax breaks for the wealthy and profitable corporations, why he thinks wages for American workers are too high and why he opposes raising the $7.25 an hour minimum wage

“We’re going to ask him why he thinks climate change is a hoax when the scientific community is almost unanimous that climate change is causing devastating problems,” Sanders added.

He also said he looked forward to asking the presumptive Republican presidential candidate “why he thinks that in a nation where our diversity is our strength he thinks it is appropriate to be insulting Mexicans and Latinos” and Muslims and women and veterans.

In the closing weeks of the contest with Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Party presidential nomination, Sanders maintained a heavy schedule of big rallies designed to put him before 200,000 Californians by Election Day.

“We are holding rallies just like this up and down this state,” Sanders said. “By the end of this campaign here in California I am confident we will have personally met and spoken to over 200,000 Californians. This is a grassroots campaign of the people, by the people and for the people.”

The Southern California rally was the first after a new poll published on Wednesday showed Sanders surging to within two points of Hillary Clinton. The Public Policy Institute of California [ http://www.ppic.org/content/pubs/survey/S_516MBS.pdf ] poll not only showed Clinton and Sanders in a dead heat – 46 percent for Clinton to 44 percent for Sanders – it also showed Sanders with a much broader lead than Clinton in a general election matchup. Clinton led Trump by 10 percentage points. Sanders led him by 17 points.

© Bernie 2016

https://berniesanders.com/press-release/sanders-cant-wait-to-debate-trump/

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Trump/Sanders debate talk awkward for Clinton

The Rachel Maddow Show
5/26/16

Rachel Maddow reports on the newly discussed possibility of a debate between Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders and what that would mean for each candidate's profile in the race, particularly Hillary Clinton's. Duration: 20:31

Donald Trump’s Top Adviser: ‘This Is Not A Hard Race’

Paul Manafort explains why his boss is “gonna win,” no prob.
05/25/2016 Updated May 26, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/donald-trump-paul-manafort-general-election_us_574619eee4b0dacf7ad3e201 [with comments]

First on CNN: Clinton to air TV ads in California
May 25, 2016
http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/25/politics/democratic-primary-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-california-ads/index.html

©2016 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/trump-sanders-debate-talk-awkward-for-clinton-693901891555 , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ahd5HIcfCJk [with comments] [show links at http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/citations-the-may-26-2016-trms (no comments yet)]

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Sanders backers will seek emergency injunction from federal court on Friday in Calif. Primary

“San Francisco’s Department of Elections and its employees have been doing an exemplary job,” Herrera said. “I’m equally confident that our co-defendants are also meeting or exceeding their legal duties.”

Defending San Francisco, Herrera calls it unfortunate that plaintiffs would ‘inject confusion and uncertainty into an election that has been underway for weeks’

May 26, 2016

SAN FRANCISCO (May 26, 2016)—Attorneys for supporters of Sen. Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign notified City Attorney Dennis Herrera this evening that they will file an emergency request with U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup in San Francisco tomorrow, May 27, for a preliminary injunction in California’s June 7 Presidential Primary.

San Francisco, Alameda County, and state elections officials were sued last week by an unincorporated association of Sanders backers called the “Voting Rights Defense Project,” who together with the American Independence Party [as is clear in the case documents linked below and from e.g. "Bernie Sanders supporters sue to have California's voter registration extended until election day", http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-pol-ca-bernie-sanders-supporters-lawsuit-california-voter-confusion-20160522-snap-story.html (with comments), the same American Independent Party ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Independent_Party , http://www.aipca.org/ ) referenced in/see (linked in) http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=122303260 and preceding and following] and two San Francisco voters leveled an array of allegations in their May 20 civil complaint that Herrera calls wholly baseless. The activists are seeking sweeping injunctive relief in their suit, including provisions to force 58 counties to segregate ballots already cast by unaffiliated voters; to allow “re-votes” by those voters for presidential primary candidates; and to extend the state’s voter registration deadline—which passed on May 23 for eligibility to vote in the June 7 primary—until election day itself.

Voting in the nation’s most populous state has been underway since May 9.

“I think it’s unfortunate—and selfish, frankly—that these plaintiffs would inject confusion and uncertainty into an election that has been underway for weeks,” Herrera said. “San Francisco’s Department of Elections and its employees have been doing an exemplary job, and I’m equally confident that our co-defendants are also meeting or exceeding their legal duties. This lawsuit is without merit, and there is no basis for an emergency injunction. I intend to fight it aggressively.”

Herrera noted that the emergency relief plaintiffs may seek for California’s Presidential Primary in federal court tomorrow may differ from that enumerated in their original civil complaint. Plaintiffs’ counsel represented to Herrera’s office late today that they expected to file their motion for a preliminary injunction with Judge Alsup by noon on Friday.

In a May 24 San Francisco Chronicle report, Orange County Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley—who is president of the California Association of Clerks and Election Officials—said election-day registration would be impossible this year. California has plans to implement such a same-day voter registration system in 2018, after state officials certify its new voter database.

Plaintiffs’ Counsel Contact Information

Contact information for the attorneys of record for the plaintiffs is:

• William M. Simpich, (415) 542-6809 or bsimpich@gmail.com, and

• Stephen R. Jaffe, (415) 618-0100 or stephen.r.jaffe@jaffetriallaw.com.

Case Information

The case is: Voting Rights Defense Project et al. v. Tim Depuis et al., U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, Case No. 3:16-CV-02739, filed May 20, 2016.

Download the Voting Rights Defense Project’s lawsuit against San Francisco, Alameda County and California’s Secretary of State (filed May 20, 2016).
http://www.sfcityattorney.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/VRDP-v.-San-Francisco-Alameda-Padilla.pdf

Download email correspondence between legal counsel (May 16–26, 2016).
http://www.sfcityattorney.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/05/VRDP-SF-Email-Correspondence.pdf

Related:

Hearing set in Bernie Sanders backers’ injunction bid for Calif. Primary: June 1, at 11:00 a.m.
May 27, 2016
http://www.sfcityattorney.org/2016/05/27/hearing-set-bernie-sanders-backers-injunction-bid-calif-primary-june-1-1100-m/

Copyright © 2016 City Attorney of San Francisco

http://www.sfcityattorney.org/2016/05/26/sanders-backers-will-seek-emergency-injunction-federal-court-friday-calif-primary/

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Jimmy Kimmel Live

On the Road
May 27, 2016

It was Bernie Sanders’ turn to go on Jimmy Kimmel Thursday [(the evening of) May 26, 2016] one night after Donald Trump sat down with the late-night talk show host. Passing along a question from Sanders, Kimmel had asked the Republican presidential candidate if he would debate Sanders. Trump said yes. “Game on,” Sanders tweeted.

Bernie Sanders
@BernieSanders
Game on. I look forward to debating Donald Trump in California before the June 7 primary.
11:30 PM - 25 May 2016
[ https://twitter.com/BernieSanders/status/735689625407131648 (with comments)]

Sanders had hoped to debate Hillary Clinton in California, but she backed out of her agreement to a debate before the Golden State’s June 7 primary election. Sanders called that “kind of an insult to the people of the largest state.”

During his stop at the Los Angeles studio, Sanders also talked about Clinton’s lead among so-called superdelegates — elected officials and party leaders. More than 400 superdelegates endorsed Clinton even before the White House campaign began. Sanders called that “pretty absurd and undemocratic.”

© Bernie 2016

https://berniesanders.com/jimmy-kimmel-live/ , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7KAXrZqGZ0I [as embedded; with comments]

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Sanders' campaign comments on debate rumors

MSNBC Live
5/27/16

Jeff Weaver, Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager, expresses strong support for the idea of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders having a debate. He also is confident for a win in the California primary. Duration: 4:46

©2016 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/sanders-campaign-comments-on-debate-rumors-694331971677 , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=795AtrNOYKQ [with comments]

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Donald Trump Talks CA Drought at Rally in Fresno, CA on May 27, 2016 - FULL SPEECH

Published on May 27, 2016 by FOX 10 Phoenix [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJg9wBPyKMNA5sRDnvzmkdg , http://www.youtube.com/channel/UCJg9wBPyKMNA5sRDnvzmkdg/videos ]

Donald Trump held a rally at Selland Arena in Fresno, CA on Friday May 27, 2016. He spoke about the drought, Arizona and more.

Donald Trump Tells Drought-Plagued Californians: ‘There Is No Drought’
“If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water.”
05/28/2016 Updated May 28, 2016
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/trump-water-california_us_574910e0e4b03ede4414f435 [with this YouTube embedded, and comments]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KPe-WY2eghY [Trump's performance begins at c. the 7:15 mark; with comments] [also at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I1Z39P_axO4 (with comments)]

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Sanders Prepared to Accept Network Debate Proposal

Press Release
May 27, 2016

BURLINGTON, Vt. – Bernie Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, issued the following statement Friday on television network proposals to host a debate with Donald Trump:

“Our campaign and the Trump campaign have received two offers by broadcast television networks to host the Sanders-Trump debate that we suggested. Both offers include a major contribution to charity.

“We are prepared to accept one of those offers and look forward to working with the Trump campaign to develop a time, place and format that is mutually agreeable. Given that the California primary is on June 7, it is imperative that this all comes together as soon as possible. We look forward to a substantive debate that will contrast the very different visions that Sen. Sanders and Mr. Trump have for the future of our country.

© Bernie 2016

https://berniesanders.com/press-release/sanders-prepared-accept-network-debate-proposal/

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Donald J. Trump Statement on Debating Bernie Sanders

May 27, 2016

Based on the fact that the Democratic nominating process is totally rigged and Crooked Hillary Clinton and Deborah Wasserman Schultz will not allow Bernie Sanders to win, and now that I am the presumptive Republican nominee, it seems inappropriate that I would debate the second place finisher. Likewise, the networks want to make a killing on these events and are not proving to be too generous to charitable causes, in this case, women’s health issues. Therefore, as much as I want to debate Bernie Sanders - and it would be an easy payday - I will wait to debate the first place finisher in the Democratic Party, probably Crooked Hillary Clinton, or whoever it may be.

https://www.donaldjtrump.com/press-releases/donald-j.-trump-statement-on-debating-bernie-sanders

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Sanders Statement on Debate

Press Release
May 27, 2016

LOS ANGELES – U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders issued the following statement Friday on Donald Trump’s on-again, off-again position on a debate:

“In recent days, Donald Trump has said he wants to debate, he doesn’t want to debate, he wants to debate and, now, he doesn’t want to debate.

“Given that there are several television networks prepared to carry this debate and donate funds to charity, I hope that he changes his mind once again and comes on board.

“There is a reason why in virtually every national and statewide poll I am defeating Donald Trump, sometimes by very large margins and almost always by far larger margins than Secretary Clinton. There is a reason for that reality and the American people should be able to see it up front in a good debate and a clash of ideas.”

© Bernie 2016

https://berniesanders.com/press-release/sanders-statement-debate/ , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B9Mls-NjqZI [as embedded; with comments]

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Bernie Sanders | The 2nd Young Turks Interview (FULL)

Published on May 27, 2016 by The Young Turks [ http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC1yBKRuGpC1tSM73A0ZjYjQ / http://www.youtube.com/user/TheYoungTurks , http://www.youtube.com/user/TheYoungTurks/videos ]

Cenk Uygur interviews Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders for the second time during the 2016 campaign.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qipncSCMMrc [with comments] [the first TYT interview of Sanders included in the post to which this is a reply]

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Sanders lawyers threaten to disrupt DNC over committee members

The Rachel Maddow Show
5/27/16

Rachel Maddow shares the details of a letter from Bernie Sanders campaign lawyers to the DNC threatening to disrupt the national convention unless two co-chairs of the Standing Platform and Rules Committees are removed. Duration: 8:48

the full letter from the Sanders campaign to the DNC:

http://www.msnbc.com/sites/msnbc/files/sandersletter_160527.jpg

Sanders Camp Moves To Kick Friends Of Clinton Off Convention Committees

May 28, 2016
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/sanders-campaign-moves-to-remove-clinton-allies-from-dnc-committees [with comments]

Sanders fails to oust Clinton backers from convention roles
May. 28, 2016 1:41 PM EDT
WASHINGTON (AP) — Democratic officials have rejected Bernie Sanders' request to remove two high-profile Hillary Clinton supporters from leadership positions at the party's summer convention.
Sanders' presidential campaign said in a letter Friday to the Democratic National Committee that Dannel Malloy, Connecticut's governor, and Barney Frank, a former Massachusetts congressman, couldn't be relied upon to perform their roles "fairly and capably while laboring under such deeply held bias."
Malloy is Platform Committee co-chairman. Frank is co-chairman of the Rules Committee.
Democratic officials responded to Sanders' request on Saturday, saying in a letter that Malloy and Frank were elected under party rules and that Sanders wasn't alleging any violations of that process.
The DNC says it reviewed the challenge, found it failed to meet the criteria and "we are compelled to dismiss it."
© 2016 Associated Press
http://bigstory.ap.org/article/a9a368ce98164309aa0a3f4cd74ad6c8/sanders-fails-oust-clinton-backers-convention-roles [with comments]

Sanders wants Democratic rules committee co-chairs removed. The DNC says, ‘no.’
May 28, 2016
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/2016/05/28/dnc-rejects-sanderss-challenge-of-rules-committee-co-chairs/ [with embedded video clip, the text of the letter (image above), and comments]

©2016 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/sanders-lawyers-threaten-to-disrupt-dnc-694626371717 [show links at http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/citations-the-may-27-2016-trms (with comments)] [the above YouTube of the segment for the moment at least at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQFheZYawMc (with comment)]

*

Internal rift worries Democrats as GOP falls in line behind Trump

The Rachel Maddow Show
5/27/16

Rachel Maddow reports on concerns within the Democratic Party about tensions between the Clinton and Sanders camps for upcoming state conventions as Republicans fall in behind Donald Trump without any of the strife originally expected. Duration: 7:02

Democrats sweat next convention blowup

Sen. Bernie Sanders laughs during a campaign stop in Laramie, Wyoming.
Wyoming could be the next flash point for a Sanders revolt.
05/27/16
http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/democrats-wyoming-bernie-sanders-revolt-223668

©2016 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/rift-worries-democrats-as-gop-falls-in-line-694629443615 [show links at http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow-show/citations-the-may-27-2016-trms (with comments)] [the above YouTube of the segment for the moment at least at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZC-PiRcfw-o (no comments yet)]

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Sanders continues push for debate with Trump

MSNBC Live
5/28/16

Democratic Strategist, David Goodfriend, and NYC Professor Jeanna Zaino, join MSNBC’s Frances Rivera to discuss the back and forth of the Donald Trump/Bernie Sanders potential debate. Duration: 6:15

©2016 NBCNews.com

http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc-news/watch/sanders-continues-push-for-debate-with-trump-694847043752 [the above YouTube of the segment for the moment at least at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5i9tiJga71I (no comments yet)]

===

Dismantling Bernie’s Moral Monopoly

Sean Rayford/Getty Images

By Maximillian Ashwill
05/26/2016 10:31 am ET | Updated May 26, 2016

Last week, Democratic primary voters in Portland, Oregon preferred Bernie Sanders to Hillary Clinton by 12 percentage points [ http://www.nytimes.com/elections/results/oregon ]. Portland perfectly embodies a pro-Sanders area. It is liberal and the whitest major city in the United States [ http://priceonomics.com/how-diverse-is-your-city/ ]. In these Sanders strongholds, white Sanders supporters talk among themselves about how the Sanders “revolution” is inclusive, progressive, and represents the “99 percent.” They nod in agreement about the dishonesty of “Shrillary,” the corrupt nature of the “establishment,” and the blackout of Sanders by the “mainstream media.” More importantly, they claim superdelegates, closed primaries, and archaic voting processes have “fixed” the election for Clinton.

It seems that Sanders and his supporters have monopolized the moral high ground and cornered the market on outrage. At the same time, their moral purity is unencumbered by a morally reprehensible election strategy. This strategy, when stripped down to its basic elements, entails replacing a qualified female nominee with a white male candidate. Moreover, it requires overturning the swing votes of women and minorities largely in favor of votes by white males.

Sanders’ strategy

In last week’s primary contests, Sanders soundly defeated Clinton in Oregon and narrowly lost Kentucky. In his victory speech from Carson, California [ http://www.c-span.org/video/?409687-1/bernie-sanders-addresses-supporters-carson-california (that rally the first item this post)] he reiterated his plan to take his nomination challenge to the convention floor in Philadelphia, “we’re going to continue to fight for every last vote until June 14th, and then we’re gonna take our fight into the convention.”

This has been the Sanders campaign’s strategy since he lost New York on April 19. At the time, Sanders’ campaign manager, Jeff Weaver, articulated their strategy more precisely [ http://www.msnbc.com/rachel-maddow/watch/sanders-campaign-undaunted-by-ny-loss-669591619932 (at/see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=122106081 and preceding and following)], “We’re going to go to the convention. It is extremely unlikely either candidate will have the requisite number of pledged delegates to (win the nomination). So it’s going to be an election determined by the superdelegates.”

Sanders currently trails Clinton in the popular vote and pledged delegates. This will almost certainly be the case on June 14 when the final primary in DC is wrapped up. When Weaver was asked if, after DC, he would use the six weeks before the convention to try to flip superdelegates to Sanders, Weaver said, “Yes, absolutely.”

Sanders’ message

Of course, the Sanders campaign does not acknowledge the voter suppression that would occur if their superdelegate strategy were successful. The Sanders campaign’s pitch to superdelegates at the convention will be much more innocuous. They will argue that Sanders has the momentum, Clinton’s negatives make her a flawed candidate, and Sanders is a stronger candidate against Donald Trump, the presumed Republican nominee.

These arguments have some merit.

If you look at polling from a year ago, it certainly looks like the Sanders campaign has gained momentum. In Carson last week, Sanders reinforced this narrative [ http://www.c-span.org/video/?409687-1/bernie-sanders-addresses-supporters-carson-california ], “When we began this campaign a little over a year ago we were sixty points behind Secretary Clinton in the polls, we had no political organization, no money, very little name recognition... Well, a lot has changed in the last year.”

Whether this is genuine momentum or spurred more by greater name recognition and better funding is up for debate. What is clear now, is that Sanders and Clinton are neck-and-neck in the polls [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/elections/ ].

Sanders also claims to have more excitement behind his campaign. He has been packing venues almost to the extent that Obama did in 2008. His rallies are more festive than traditional campaign events. Much of this excitement is garnered from his overwhelming support among the youth. Last Tuesday in California, he said to ruckus cheers [ http://www.c-span.org/video/?409687-1/bernie-sanders-addresses-supporters-carson-california ], “I am especially proud that in nearly every primary and caucus... we have received a significant majority of the votes of young people.”

Exit polling [ http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls ] supports this: Sanders has won 71 percent of the youth vote; Clinton has won 28 percent. By contrast, if excitement is correlated to youth, then is boringness correlated to old age? By that measure, Clinton is much more “boring” than Sanders; she is dominating the elderly vote, with 70 percent of voters older than 65 supporting her, compared to only 28 percent for Sanders.

The Sanders campaign’s most persuasive argument to superdelegates is that they have a better shot at beating Trump in the general election. Recent polling supports this [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/latest_polls/elections/ ]. The latest PPP poll from May 10 has Sanders leading Trump by 11 points and Clinton leading Trump by only 6 points. The CNN/ORC poll from May 4 shows Sanders leading Trump by 16 points and Clinton leading Trump by 13 points. Other state polls show Sanders outpacing Clinton as well. A Quinnipiac poll in the swing state of Ohio shows Clinton trailing Trump by 4 points, and Sanders leading Trump by 2 points.

Sanders is losing

The argument the Sanders campaign would ideally like to make to the superdelegates is that Sanders is winning the primary. But, he is not. Make no mistake about it, Bernie Sanders is losing to Hillary Clinton and it isn’t particularly close. Excluding caucus states, Clinton has received nearly 13 million votes [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/democratic_vote_count.html ] compared to Sanders’ nearly 10 million votes. Even if caucus votes could be counted, it is unlikely that Sanders would reduce her 3 million-vote lead by much. By contrast in 2008, Clinton was leading Barack Obama in the popular vote, but still dropped out of the race and pledged her support to the next president well before the convention.

More importantly, Sanders is losing the pledged delegate race. Currently, Sanders trails Clinton [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/democratic_delegate_count.html ] by 271 pledged delegates. These delegates are awarded proportionally to state election and caucus results, and represent the will of the voters.

In 2008, then-Senator Obama only led Clinton by 127 pledged delegates [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2008/president/democratic_delegate_count.html ] after all primaries were completed — less than half of Sanders’ current deficit. Despite this, she still suspended her campaign well before the Democratic convention and threw her campaign’s full weight behind Obama (after he agreed to forgive her campaign debt, of course).

Sanders supporters often complain about the role of superdelegates. They argue that these party insiders should vote in line with their state’s election results. Some Sanders supporters have gone so far as to threaten these superdelegates after posting their private addresses and phone numbers online. While it is hard to find anyone who supports the role of superdelegates, it is true that Clinton has a nearly 500 superdelegate [ http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/2016/president/democratic_delegate_count.html ] lead over Sanders. What Sanders supporters fail to realize is that if superdelegates were forced to vote in line with their state’s election result, Clinton would have all but clinched the nomination already. New York times reporter, Nate Cohn, crunched the numbers and recently tweeted [ https://mobile.twitter.com/Nate_Cohn/status/726850969435148288 ], “Hillary has already won enough states to win a majority of Super Delegates under (proportional assignment), even if she loses all remaining contests.”

But, it is not the fact that Clinton is winning that is dooming Sanders’ convention strategy, it is how she is winning. Clinton is dominating Sanders with female voters and voters of color.

Clinton is winning the female and non-white vote

There was some confusion early in the primary schedule about if Clinton would actually outperforming Sanders with women. It turns out she is crushing him. In the primary states where exit polls [ http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls ] were taken, the average number of women voters supporting Clinton is 60 percent versus only 38 percent for Sanders. By contrast, the two are virtually tied in the male vote (49 percent apiece with a half percentage advantage for Sanders).

Clinton is also dominating the “non-white” vote. This includes Americans of Asian, Latino, or African origins. On average, Clinton is supported by 69 percent of non-whites compared to 30 percent for Sanders. In the five primaries where exit polls were taken and where Hispanics represent a reasonably large population, Clinton is supported by 59 percent of Latino voters, on average. Sanders is supported by 40 percent. But, Clinton’s biggest supporters appear to be African-Americans. In the 22 states where blacks represent a significant voting block and where exit polls [id.] were taken, Clinton has received, on average, the votes of 78 percent of black voters. Sanders has received 21 percent.

Contrary to the Sanders campaign’s claim that they are gaining momentum, these voting trends have remained relatively static. Women and minorities have consistently supported Clinton. The chart below shows the average percentage of voters [id.] that supported Clinton throughout the primary season. The dip after April 2nd is because the only state with exit poll data during that period was Wisconsin, a state solidly in the corner of Sanders, and 88 percent white.

These trends are important because they contradict the narrative about Sanders’ victory in Oregon and his narrow loss in Kentucky. Election coverage leading up to these primaries suggested that Sanders had the edge in Oregon and Clinton had the edge in Kentucky. A narrow win by Clinton in Kentucky was widely viewed as a victory for Sanders. But, when we look at the numbers this probably isn’t the case. The average percentage of white people in the 18 states won by Sanders is 88.5 percent and the average percentage of white people [ http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/united-states/quick-facts/all-states/white-population-percentage ] in the 24 states won by Clinton is only 76 percent (this excludes Alaska, Hawaii, and US territories, of which Clinton won three and Sanders won two). Both Oregon and Kentucky have white populations of 88 percent (88.1 percent for Oregon and 88.5 percent for Kentucky). These are perfectly consistent with other states Sanders has won. In Kentucky, when considering these demographics and Clinton’s incendiary comment [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksIXqxpQNt0 (next below; with comments)],

“we’re gonna put a lot of coal companies and coal miners out of business” — for a state with about 11,000 coal miners — a narrow victory in Kentucky should be considered a major victory for her campaign. Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight blog agrees [ http://projects.fivethirtyeight.com/election-2016/delegate-targets/ ], saying Clinton actually outperformed her projected delegate haul in the bluegrass state.

Why women and minorities support Clinton

Clinton’s support among women should not be surprising. Clinton has fought for women’s rights for decades. In 1995, she represented the U.S. at the United Nation’s World Conference on Women in China, famously stating, “Women’s rights are human rights” — a mantra that has been carried by women’s rights activists all over the world. She has also been a source of pride for women who understand the challenges faced by women in establishing a foothold in the upper echelons of power. Clinton is a lawyer with a degree from Yale, a first lady, a senator, a Secretary of State, and the first viable female major party candidate for the President of the United States. More importantly, in terms of policy, like Sanders, she supports issues that are important to women like equal pay and abortion rights.

In terms of the black vote, the Sanders campaign has made great efforts to gain support among black communities, but with little success. This has been a source of constant frustration among Sanders supporters who see Sanders as a champion of black issues. They point out that economic inequality disproportionately impacts black communities, they highlight Sanders’ activism during the civil rights movement, and point to Clinton’s support of President Bill Clinton’s crime bill and welfare reforms in the 1990s, initiatives that had negative impacts on African-Americans.

But, black Americans have very reasonable motivations for supporting Clinton. First, Clinton is largely seen as an ally and protector of Obama’s legacy. Obama’s term as president is largely considered [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/21/dont-look-now-but-barack-obama-is-suddenly-popular/ ] a success among African-Americans and Clinton is seen as the best steward of the president’s policies. Second, Sanders is a senator from the whitest state in the union (over 95 percent white [ http://www.indexmundi.com/facts/united-states/quick-facts/all-states/white-population-percentage ]) and has little-to-no experience in representing blacks or minorities. Third, blacks emerge from a history of being lied to by politicians who promise the world. In January 1865, former slaves were famously promised 40 acres and a mule on order from Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, approved by President Lincoln, and overturned several months later by Lincoln’s successor, President Andrew Johnson. In 1964, Malcolm X described [ http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/malcolm_x_ballot.html ] this deep distrust among the black community for populist politicians, he said, in an election year, “all of the white political crooks will be right back in your and my community ... with their false promises which they don’t intend to keep.”

Sanders seems to fit this mold with his promises of free education and free health care and a very questionable plan to pay for it (assumes a sustained economic growth rate that hasn’t happened in modern American history).

Disenfranchisement of Clinton supporters

If Clinton’s lead in votes and delegates is largely because of support from Blacks, women, and Hispanics, then who is supporting Sanders? White men. In the 12 states with exit polling [ http://www.cnn.com/election/primaries/polls ] that disaggregates data into one category of “race and gender,” Sanders is leading Clinton in the average percentage of white male supporters — 55 percent to 44 percent.

Given this demographic truth, if superdelegates were to disregard Clinton’s lead and give the nomination to Sanders, they would essentially be taking away the nomination from a qualified woman and giving it to a white man. Sadly, such an outcome would not be new to America. Women still earn only 79 cents to the man’s dollar [ http://www.iwpr.org/initiatives/pay-equity-and-discrimination ] and are underrepresented in leadership positions. Moreover, overturning Clinton’s lead would inevitably require overturning the votes of women and minorities in favor of the votes of white men.

In 1870, nearly a hundred years after America’s democracy was established, the 15th amendment to the US Constitution was adopted. This amendment ostensibly gave black Americans the right to vote. But, it wasn’t until the 24th amendment in 1964 (eliminating poll taxes) and the Voting Rights act in 1965, that blacks — and other Americans of color — truly began to enjoy universal suffrage. For women, it wasn’t until 1920, when the 19th amendment was adopted, that they too were given the right to vote. In 2016, disenfranchisement continues to be an important political issue as Republican-led voter ID laws are largely seen as efforts to disenfranchise blacks and other groups who generally support Democrats.

Disenfranchisement is the dark, unspoken side to Sanders’ convention strategy. When immeasurable concepts like momentum, excitement, and electability are stripped away, this is what’s left: a white male candidate, supported largely by white males, attempting to overturn the primary victory of a female candidate favored by the swing vote of women and minorities.

In his 1964 speech entitled “Bullets and Ballots,” Malcolm X explained the swing vote [ http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/speeches/malcolm_x_ballot.html ], “What does this mean? It means that when white people are evenly divided, and black people have a bloc of votes of their own, it is left up to them to determine who’s going to sit in the White House and who’s going to be in the dog house.”

Of course, nobody believes that Sanders’ intention is to eliminate the swing vote of women and minorities. On the contrary, most believe he is simply trying to win because he believes he is better for the country and better for marginalized communities. In his victory speech last Tuesday [ http://www.c-span.org/video/?409687-1/bernie-sanders-addresses-supporters-carson-california ], Sanders said, “Racial justice... is the future of this country.” But, unfortunately for Sanders, his continued pursuit of a convention strategy based on superdelegates overturning a Clinton primary victory represents a serious blow to the racial (and gender) justice for which he is purportedly fighting.

Copyright © 2016 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maximillian-ashwill/dismantling-bernies-moral_b_10130470.html [with comments]

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This Is How a Revolution Ends

Lucy Nicholson / Reuters

The Democratic insurgent’s campaign is losing steam—but his supporters are not ready to give up.

Molly Ball
May 26, 2016

SANTA MONICA, Calif.—This is how a revolution ends: its idealism tested, its optimism drained, its hope turned to bitterness.

But if Bernie Sanders’s revolution has run aground in California, which will be one of the last states to vote in the Democratic primary on June 7, he was not about to admit it here, where thousands gathered on a sun-drenched high-school football field of bright green turf.

“We are going to win here in California!” Sanders said, to defiant cheers. In the audience, a man waved a sign that said, “Oh HILL no!”

This is Sanders’s last stand, according to the official narrative of the corrupt corporate media, and if there is anything we have learned in the past year, it is the awesome power of the official narrative—the self-reinforcing drumbeat that dictates everything.

Sanders continued: “I believe that if we win here in California, and if we win the other five states that are voting on June 7, we’re going to go marching to the Democratic convention with a hell of a lot of momentum. I believe that if we do well here in California, we’ll march in with momentum and we’ll march out with the Democratic nomination!”

But then again, according to the official narrative, the primary is already over. Also according to the delegate count, which has Sanders’s opponent, Hillary Clinton, just 78 short of the 2,383 it takes to win the nomination. Also according to the Democratic voters, some 3 million more of whom have supported Clinton than Sanders over the past four months of voting. And also according to Clinton, who told CNN the other day, “I will be the nominee.”

But in the world Sanders’s supporters inhabit, this is all so much media manipulation. “Do you trust the media?” asked one of his introducers, the television host Cenk Uygur. “No!” yelled the crowd. “Do you believe they’ve treated Bernie Sanders fairly?” “Fuck the media!” yelled someone standing near the press riser. (Sanders was also introduced by two actors, Dick Van Dyke and Rosario Dawson.)

Sanders and his people have their own sets of rules. All you have to do is unskew the delegate counts, they explain, take out the superdelegates, imagine they all vote for Sanders, imagine certain primaries had been conducted according to different rules. Angry memes about missing votes and stolen precincts ricochet around social media. Did you see what happened in Nevada, when the party, Sanders’s supporters claim, changed the rules to keep them from getting more delegates at the state convention? The game is rigged!

The Sanders movement has become impervious to reality. Some have even called into question the nature of reality itself: “Bernie Sanders’ ‘political revolution’ is political only inasmuch as thought is political,” a self-described “metamodernist creative writer” named Seth Abramson wrote [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/on-bernie-sanders-and-exp_b_10077684.html ] in the Huffington Post a few days ago. “By the very nature of things—we might call it perceptual entropy—the impossible, once perceived, enters a chain of causation whose natural conclusion is realization.” By this logic, Abramson reasons, Sanders is actually winning. It’s, like, the Matrix, man, or something.

A sign in the crowd to the left of the stage said, “Smash the patriarchy!”

A sign on the other side of the stage said, “Eliminate the 1%!”

A 25-year-old art model named Vanna Mae Caldwell told me, “Here is what they don’t tell you: None of the superdelegates have actually voted yet!” California, she believes, is going to go for Sanders in a landslide, and then the Democratic convention—which she plans to attend, as a protester—“is going to be very interesting.” If Sanders does not get the nomination, Caldwell will not be able to bring herself to vote for either Clinton or Donald Trump, whom she sees as two sides of the same corporate coin; she’ll vote instead for the Green Party’s candidate, Jill Stein. “I’m Bernie or Bust,” she said proudly.

Caldwell discovered Sanders last year through Tumblr and YouTube videos. She is an active member of three different Sanders-boosting Facebook groups and livestreams once a week “to motivate people to vote for Bernie.” It has changed their lives, being a part of this movement. Something like that doesn’t just end. Does it?

“The delegate system is corrupt,” said Prasad Paul Duffy, a 58-year-old spiritual activist and filmmaker with shoulder-length blond curls. He was sitting cross-legged and barefoot on the field before the speeches started. “It’s a tool of the 1 percent, the powers that be. It should be abolished.” Clinton, he believes, is “owned by the billionaires,” and he could never vote for her.

“I would vote for Trump,” Duffy said. “At least he’s challenging the status quo. He sees we’ve been sold down the river and we’ve got to get it back. I prefer Bernie’s means to Trump’s! But Trump is being demonized in the press for similar reasons as Bernie is being ignored. They’re both challenging the system. We are people who don’t believe in the system! We want to make a new system where people take care of each other.”

Among the dozens of Sanders supporters I met over the course of two days, this was not a universal view. Perhaps half said they will reluctantly vote for Clinton in November. (A recent poll [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/us/politics/donald-trump-hillary-clinton-poll.html ] found that 72 percent of Sanders backers nationally would support Clinton; the Sanderistas who go to rallies are a more dedicated bunch.) The Bernie-or-Bust-ers tended to be young, male, and white; few described themselves as Democrats, and many were new to voting. Women, people of color, and Democrats seemed more open to Clinton.

More than once, I met couples debating the question. “I will not vote for Hillary Clinton,” vowed Eric Thiercof, a 20-year-old pool-maintenance worker. “No, no! Anyone but Trump!” interjected his girlfriend, Florencia Pina, a student.

As Sanders gave his usual 75-minute consciousness-raising diatribe in Santa Monica, the temperature dropped about 15 degrees, and people began to stream off the field. By the time he got to the climactic line—“In fact, we need a political revolution!”—the whole back half was empty, and the crowd was practically too sparse to give the requisite answering roar.

Maybe they know it’s over after all.

- - -

This—Clinton and her challenger still duking it out for the Golden State, while Republicans rally around their presumptive nominee, Trump—is not what most people expected. But most people didn’t know Bernie Sanders.

When Republicans, a few weeks ago, contemplated the choice between a messy convention and a nominee many disliked, they decided, en masse, to suck it up and get on the winner’s bandwagon. Democrats, on the other hand, may get both; they show no inclination to rally behind the almost certain winner. What does that say about Sanders, and about Clinton?

Sanders has repeatedly said he will not play the spoiler—by running as an independent or backing a third-party candidate such as Stein. He says he will do everything in his power to defeat Trump. But many Democrats worry that by dragging out a contest he cannot win—and continuing to attack Clinton’s character, and the nomination process, in sharp terms—he is deepening the party’s divisions. The Washington Post’s Eugene Robinson called [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/sanderss-scorched-earth-campaign-is-a-gift-to-trump/2016/05/19/b2f582b4-1ded-11e6-9c81-4be1c14fb8c8_story.html ] Sanders’s antics “reckless in the extreme,” in one of a litany [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/powerpost/paloma/daily-202/2016/05/18/daily-202-liberal-allies-turning-on-bernie-sanders-after-nevada-donnybrook/573b56ed981b92a22d86b9d2/ ] of recent [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/05/bernie_sanders_scorched_earth_run_against_hillary_clinton_is_a_mistake.html ] liberal [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/does-bernie-sanders-want-to-be-the-ralph-nader-of-2016/2016/05/17/b091d75a-1c5f-11e6-b6e0-c53b7ef63b45_story.html (above)] commentaries [ http://time.com/4339865/bernie-sanders-supporters-violence/ ] fretting that he is now hurting Democrats’ general-election chances.

A spate of recent polls have shown Clinton tied with or slightly trailing Trump in November matchups, the apparent effect of a Republican Party that has unified and a Democratic Party that remains fractured. The Nevada convention chaos—which featured physical altercations and a continuing barrage of threats by Sanders supporters against the state party chairwoman—raised the possibility that even if Sanders eventually backs Clinton, some of his followers may be too embittered to follow his lead.

Many Sanders supporters told me they had once liked Clinton, but over the course of the primary they have come to dislike and distrust her. “I didn’t originally have a very strong opinion about her, but now I don’t like her very much,” Brett Miller, a 33-year-old waiter in Anaheim, told me at Sanders’s rally there. He’d come to see her as a bought-and-paid-for pol with no firm principles. A Sanders supporter wearing a “Hillary for Prison 2016” T-shirt got approving whistles and thumbs-ups as he strode through the crowd. A video-game developer named Adam Riggs said he wouldn’t vote for Clinton even if Sanders asked him to.

It seems fitting that this potentially final battle royale should take place in California, a big, liberal state populated by all the various Democratic tribes: the kombucha-sipping hipsters of San Francisco; the techno-utopians of Silicon Valley; the limousine liberals of Hollywood; the large black and Latino populations. All the party’s tribes are overrepresented here, and it’s not clear who is in charge of this unruly coalition.

Most of the state’s Democratic establishment has come out for Clinton. But the popular governor, Jerry Brown, has not endorsed; a former independent with a quirky political profile, he has a bitter history with the Clintons, having run against Bill Clinton in a sharply acrimonious bid for the presidential nomination in 1992. Brown and Clinton met for an hour and a half in Sacramento on Monday; the prospect of an endorsement was not among the topics discussed, according to the governor’s office. A Democratic source in Sacramento told me Brown is considering endorsing Hillary Clinton but has not made up his mind. A poll [ http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/polls/surveyusa-kabc-scng-24538 ] of the state conducted earlier this month gave Clinton an 18-point lead over Sanders, but in a new poll [ http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/poll-clinton-and-sanders-in-dead-heat-in-california-223580 ] released Thursday, her lead was just 2 points.

The question is what it will take for Sanders to be satisfied with some sort of moral victory short of the nomination. This week, he was given five slots on the Democratic platform committee, which will allow him to influence what the party stands for—presumably an important goal. Sanders is also thought to be interested in reforms to the nominating process that he has derided as “rigged.”

But while his aides have occasionally alluded to these sorts of goals, Sanders continues to behave like a candidate who still believes he can win. On Monday, he criticized Clinton for turning down one last debate; on Tuesday, he sought to wring an additional delegate out of Kentucky by challenging [ http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/05/bernie-asks-recanvass-kentucky ] the vote count in one district. His speeches give about as much critical time to both Clinton and Trump, and his crowds boo both with equal vehemence.

Is Sanders—the onetime liberal gadfly whose views few of his colleagues heeded—simply enjoying the spotlight’s validating glow for as long as it lasts? Or is he as delusional as some of his dead-ender fans? It’s impossible to tell.

I asked Howard Dean, Sanders’s fellow Vermonter and onetime insurgent Democratic presidential candidate, whether he approved of the way Sanders is conducting himself these days. “No,” said Dean, who has endorsed Clinton. But he said he understood.

Near the end of Dean’s 2004 campaign, he told me, just before the Wisconsin primary, he had started to realize he was going to lose, and he was bitterly angry about it—the unfairness of the process, the way he’d been treated. Late that night, the phone rang in his hotel room in Milwaukee. It was Al Gore, the former vice president, who had endorsed him.

“I ranted and raved for 10 or 15 minutes,” Dean recalled. “And when finally I stop for breath, he says, ‘This is about the country. It’s not about you.’ That stopped me in my tracks.”

Dean quit the race the next day. Accepting defeat, he said, was a process. “Having been there, it’s a gradual landing you have to bring yourself into,” he said. The question, he suggested, is whether there is someone close to Sanders who can say to him what Gore said to Dean.

- - -

In Riverside on Tuesday afternoon, several hundred people filled a brightly lit college basketball gym and waited for Hillary Clinton to appear. Another 1,500 were stranded outside, across a cordon from a knot of left-wing protesters. One held a sign that said, “White Feminism Is Not Feminism—Keep White Imperialists Out of Riverside!” They chanted, “Hillary is a war criminal!”

Inside, Clinton’s supporters voiced varying degrees of frustration with Sanders. Some viewed him as a well-meaning idealist who’s doing no harm; some lauded him for moving the party in a progressive direction. But others were less pleased. “I hope that, after the California primary, Bernie will revert to the gentleman he once was and get out of the race and throw his support behind Hillary,” said Debbie Boyd, a retired deputy sheriff from San Diego who was wearing a wide-brimmed white hat festooned with Hillary buttons.

“I was very loving toward Bernie Sanders until about a week ago, but now he’s working to elect Trump,” said Kathy Katz, 73, of Temecula. “We’re all way more liberal than the Democratic Party, but some of us realize you can’t win an election that way!”

“He has manipulated his campaign into something degenerate,” said Autry Harper, a pixie-haired aspiring opera singer from Lake Arrowhead. “He only became a Democrat so he could use our party, and the way he’s attacking Hillary is helping Trump.” Harper believes Sanders’s insistence that he is entitled to have a say in things despite losing the primary is fundamentally sexist. “It’s his male privilege,” she said.

Clinton, for her part, has taken to pretending Sanders does not exist. In her speech, she referred only to Trump, whose candidacy, she said, “may have started out as entertaining, but now it’s really, really concerning.” She added, “We have a bully pulpit in the White House—that doesn’t mean we want a bully in the White House!”

Earlier that day, Sanders was in Anaheim, where a few hundred people crowded bleary-eyed into a hangarline convention-center hall for a morning rally. Over and over, they told me they thought the primary had been unfair to him, particularly the media and the superdelegates. “They’re trying to silence him. He deserves a chance!” says Carlos Frank-Estrada, a 27-year-old photographer, whose plaid shirt has a slogan painted on the back: “THEY CAN’T ORDER ME TO STOP DREAMING.”

Sanders was introduced by a blind Filipino delegate and a gay actress who spoke passionately in favor of transgender rights and compared Sanders to a unicorn, because “he seems too good to be true.” Sanders, leaning on his lectern with both hands, recounted a moving encounter with a barista whose eyes filled with tears of gratitude for Sanders’s campaign. A man waved a homemade Sanders muppet in the air.

“Poverty is not discussed in Congress. It is not discussed in the media,” Sanders intoned. A voice from the crowd shouted, “Bernie or bust!”

Sanders heard. He smiled. But he did not answer.

Copyright © 2016 by The Atlantic Monthly Group (emphasis in original)

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/bernie-sanders-clinton/484439/ [with comments]

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Bernie Sanders’s ‘Scorched Earth’ Strategy Seems to Be Working

Berns so good.
Photo: John Sommers II/2016 Getty Images

By Eric Levitz
May 27, 2016 8:00 a.m.

Bernie Sanders has no realistic path to the Democratic nomination. Despite the protestations of postmodern mathematicians [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/seth-abramson/on-bernie-sanders-and-exp_b_10077684.html ], his campaign is no longer about who will represent Blue America in the main event this fall, but rather, how Hillary Clinton will choose to represent it.

The socialist senator still refuses to cop to this fact. Earlier this week, he suggested that anyone who thinks Clinton is the presumptive Democratic nominee must harbor a secret longing for authoritarian rule [ http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/281032-sanders-democratic-primary-not-a-monarchy ]. And his campaign promises to take its fight to the convention, even in the (beyond likely) scenario that Clinton boasts a massive lead in pledged delegates when all the votes are counted.

In justifying this patently anti-democratic stance, the campaign has encouraged supporters to view its losses as illegitimate – reflections of a process rigged through too few debates, too many closed primaries, and too much cooperation between the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton. For some Sanders supporters, this critique has taken on the moral authority of the candidate’s jeremiads against the “rigged” financial system, magnifying the stakes of the primary fight and the animosity they feel toward its likely winner.

Nevada’s Democratic convention illustrated [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/bernie-sanders-and-the-dnc-are-fighting-again.html ] the hazards of such sentiments. There, Clinton won by 33 votes – after 56 pro-Sanders delegates were disqualified [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/15/heres-what-happened-at-saturdays-dramatic-nevada-democratic-convention/ ]. A fight over exactly two pledged delegates devolved into a bitter melee. America’s worst leftists inundated the state party chairwoman with threatening phone calls. Sanders initially responded by condemning harassment only in the abstract – while condemning the unfair treatment of his Silver State supporters in great detail.

Elected Democrats responded by railing against [ http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/05/23/bernie-sanders-risks-berning-bridges-in-senate.html ] the Vermont senator’s aggressive tactics. Liberal commentators warned that this “scorched Earth [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/05/bernie_sanders_scorched_earth_run_against_hillary_clinton_is_a_mistake.html ]” strategy was self-defeating: At this point, undermining Clinton would only undermine his future influence within her party.

But over the past few days, a funny thing happened: A wave of polling data [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/why-is-clinton-suddenly-tied-with-trump.html ] established that Sanders really is undermining Clinton’s prospects in the general election – and the Democratic Party began searching for bones to throw the senator’s way.

In late April, when national polls consistently showed Clinton prevailing over Trump by comfortable margins, Clinton allies were whispering to the Hill that she planned to take a “hard line [ http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/278074-clinton-to-take-hard-line-with-sanders-say-allies ]” with Sanders, insisting the party’s left flank had already received its fair share of concessions. Since then, Clinton’s unfavorability rating with Sanders’s supporters has steadily increased – and her polling advantage over Trump has collapsed. Now, anonymous Clinton surrogates are singing a different tune.

“She needs to do something in the coming weeks to show that she’s also trying to unify the party,” a Clinton ally told the Hill [ http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/281300-clinton-urged-to-go-liberal-with-vice-presidential-pick ] on Thursday, arguing that Clinton should look left for her vice-presidential pick.

“Hillary Clinton’s biggest challenge is getting Bernie Sanders voters by her side,” Democratic strategist Jamal Simmons told the outlet. “The visual of Hillary Clinton and Elizabeth Warren would be everything.”

Earlier this week, pro-Clinton Democrats argued that the likely nominee should depose [ http://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/281147-dems-discuss-dropping-wasserman-schultz ] Debbie Wasserman Schultz, the DNC chair who has been a focal point for Sandernistas’ grievances over the primary process, and a longtime enemy of the party’s left flank owing to her support for payday lenders [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/03/dnc-chair-lends-a-hand-to-payday-lenders.html ] and opposition to the liberalization of marijuana laws.

“There have been a lot of meetings over the past 48 hours about what color plate do we deliver Debbie Wasserman Schultz’s head on,” one pro-Clinton senator told the Hill on Tuesday. “I don’t see how she can continue to the election. How can she open the convention? Sanders supporters would go nuts.”

Talk is cheap, of course. But Sanders already banked a significant concession [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/democrats-give-sanders-a-say-in-party-platform.html ] on Monday, when the party granted him nearly as many appointees to the convention’s platform committee as the (likely) nominee herself. Among the Vermont senator’s five picks were Cornel West – a harsh critic of Obama and card-carrying member of the Democratic Socialists of America – climate activist Bill McKibben, and Arab-American Institute President James Zogby [ http://www.aaiusa.org/dr-zogby ]. Those selections should set up a contentious fight over the party’s official policy on the Israel-Palestine conflict. However, many of Clinton’s six picks also hail from the party’s left wing, creating a progressive majority [ http://www.thenation.com/article/sanders-picks-and-allies-could-write-a-boldly-progressive-platform/ ] on the committee that is likely to deliver the Democrats’ most liberal platform on domestic policy in a generation.

To be sure, Clinton won’t have to run on that platform, just like Mitt Romney didn’t have to campaign [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/05/why_the_democrats_platform_actually_matters_this_year.html ] on the GOP’s official opposition to creeping Sharia in 2012. But on Wednesday, Clinton moved [ http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/clinton-expands-275-billion-infrastructure-plan/article/2592324 ] in Sanders’s direction on domestic spending voluntarily – promising to expand her initial proposal for infrastructure spending. Clinton had previously promised to spend $275 billion on infrastructure over a five-year period, while Sanders has campaigned on a $1 trillion proposal (Donald Trump endorsed a similarly massive [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/donald-trump-is-campaigning-on-the-new-deal.html ] infrastructure build-up in his campaign book, though he doesn’t talk about it all that often).

It’s still possible that Sanders’s decision to cultivate his supporters’ antipathy for the Democratic Party will hurt his agenda in the long run. As Slate’s Jamelle Bouie writes [ http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/05/bernie_sanders_scorched_earth_run_against_hillary_clinton_is_a_mistake.html ], for Sanders to reshape the Democratic coalition, he needs to keep his backers inside of it – a task that will be impossible “if they view the entire political system as irreversibly flawed.” And obviously, if a critical mass of young liberals in swing states embrace “Bernie or Bust” – and Donald Trump makes it into the Oval Office – Sanders will have little chance of living to see a more social-democratic United States.

But in recent days, Sanders has signaled a commitment to building his movement inside the Democratic tent, raising funds for a slate of like-minded state legislators [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/bernie-sanders-fundraising_us_5744c9cee4b0dacf7ad34b2a ], and for Wisconsin Senate candidate Russ Feingold [ http://www.politico.com/story/2016/05/bernie-sanders-russ-feingold-223603 ]. And, at least for the moment, Sanders's willingness “to harm Hillary Clinton” appears to be only increasing his influence over her party. Politics ain’t beanbag. Neither, presumably, are political revolutions.

Copyright © 2016, New York Media LLC (emphasis in original)

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/sanderss-scorched-earth-strategy-is-working.html [with comments]

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Sanders Candidacy Devolving into an Arrogant Insufferable Self-serving Disaster

By Peter D. Rosenstein
05/27/2016 02:50 pm ET | Updated May 28, 2016

Many including me have consistently given Bernie Sanders the credit for fighting for what he believes in and suggesting he should decide on his own when to leave the race. We gave him credit for beginning his campaign with grace and purpose as I did in a recent column [ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-d-rosenstein/bernie-we-welcomed-you-wi_b_10050624.html ]. Unfortunately he is choosing to end it as a boor more concerned with boosting his own ego than with moving forward the issues he espoused.

Presidential primaries are not new. Bernie Sanders knew all the rules when he asked to enter the Democratic Party primaries even though he never registered as a Democrat. The Party graciously invited him to do so. While many thought he wouldn’t do as well as he has all credit for that goes to him and the issues he has talked about. His mantra of single-payer health care, bringing down Wall Street, and free college caught on with young people and they came out to his rallies by the thousands.

What he soon found out even with his big rallies is most people who vote in Democratic primaries want a candidate who is versed in a much broader spectrum of issues. They understand the President of the United States is also the leader of the free world and must speak to a broader audience here and around the world. Very left-leaning Democratic primary voters alone can’t elect a candidate in the general election. Those who understood that voted for Hillary Clinton which is why she has over 3 million more votes than he does.

Bernie’s campaign made many mistakes. The biggest being while he knew the rules he forgot to tell his supporters what they were. Instead of blaming himself he now blames the Democratic Party for his mistakes. His own senior advisor [ http://www.msnbc.com/msnbc/superdelegates-center-democratic-nomination-fight-again ] helped create the superdelegate system. He knew which primaries were ‘open,’ where anyone can vote; or ‘closed’ where only registered Democrats can vote. He didn’t think it important to tell any of the people who came out to his rallies about that.

Then he had to have seen as he looked out at the people attending his rallies that they were nearly all ‘white [ https://www.google.com/search?q=sanders+rallies+all+white&biw=1008&bih=665&tbm=isch&tbo=u&source=univ&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiknfiP7vrMAhUqwYMKHSebC3sQsAQIIg ]‘. Any understanding of the demographics of the Democratic Party and the nation should have alerted him to the fact ‘white’ voters alone wouldn’t elect him. Yet he apparently couldn’t move to broaden his appeal because for 33 years as a politician he never before had to do that. He has no real record with the African American or Latino communities to fall back on. He was never a leader in the women’s movement or the LGBT movement for equality. While he claimed he always supported those movements in all his years in politics he never introduced legislation to move the civil and human rights of those groups forward.

All these things came home to roost because he was running against a woman who had deep contacts with all those groups and who has spoken out around the nation and the world for all of them. Yes Hillary may have had more opportunity than Bernie to do that and to her credit she took every opportunity given her to make a difference for all people. Whether it was in a meeting [ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/nelson-mandela/9455709/Hillary-Clinton-has-lunch-with-Nelson-Mandela.html ] with Nelson Mandela; supporting the United Farm Workers [ http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2016/03/03/cesar-chavez-dolores-huerta-farmworkers-union-endorses-hillary-clinton/ ]; speaking out in Beijing [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXM4E23Efvk (included at/see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=120986959 and preceding and following, http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=120897208 and preceding and following)] for women; or in Geneva [ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MudnsExyV78 (with comments; full transcript at http://www.state.gov/secretary/20092013clinton/rm/2011/12/178368.htm ; once before linked here at/see {linked in} http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=69706799 and preceding {and any future following}; also at e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WIqynW5EbIQ {next below; with comments})]

for the LGBT community; Hillary was there on the front lines while Bernie was somewhere back in the crowd.

Bernie knows primaries are about collecting the number of delegates needed to be the nominee of the Party. So for his mistakes and for having fallen short he now wants to blame everyone but himself and his campaign. He can’t afford to pay for TV in California so he plays into Donald Trump’s hand agreeing to participate in a debate with Trump which can only be called a stunt and serves to help Trump. He fights the Democratic National Committee (DNC) and suggests there will be a messy [ http://bigstory.ap.org/article/0ecb9841c6694638bb745f04a4f87ebd/sanders-democratic-convention-could-be-messy ] Democratic convention because he can’t accept or tell his supporters honestly he has lost.

It can only be hoped he has some close advisors who will help him face reality and say to him; “Bernie you LOST, it’s over. That happens in elections and the time has come to show some class.” He needs to be told “While you have achieved your fifteen minutes of fame and made a real difference in the discussion if you want to actually make a difference on the issues you care about you will gracefully leave the stage. Working with Hillary and not trying to tear her down is the way to make progress on the progressive issues you claim to care about. Any other scenario places you in the position to take the blame if Trump wins.”

Bernie if Donald Trump wins and gets to appoint a [sic - (well) more than one] Supreme Court Justice and negates all the progress Barack Obama has fought for in the past eight years, you become the 2016 Ralph Nader. The same Nader [ http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/news/article/13044677/ralph-nader-and-dc-public-libraries ] who now at age 84 walks around Dupont Circle in Washington, DC with his head down afraid people will recognize him and say “Thanks Ralph for electing George W. Bush.” You don’t want to be that person in a couple of years with people saying ‘Thanks Bernie for electing Donald Trump. “

Copyright © 2016 TheHuffingtonPost.com, Inc.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/peter-d-rosenstein/sanders-candidacy-devolvi_b_10168566.html [with comments]

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Die-Hard Bernie Sanders Backers See F.B.I. as Answer to Their Prayers

According to polls, a growing number of supporters backing Senator Bernie Sanders have said they will not support Hillary Clinton if she wins the Democratic nomination.
Credit Sam Hodgson for The New York Times

Bernie Sanders’s supporters at a recent rally in National City, Calif.
Credit Mike Blake/Reuters

By YAMICHE ALCINDOR
MAY 27, 2016

ANAHEIM, Calif. — Senator Bernie Sanders [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/bernie-sanders-on-the-issues.html ] may be trailing Hillary Clinton [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/hillary-clinton-on-the-issues.html ] by hundreds of delegates [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/us/elections/primary-calendar-and-results.html ], and Mrs. Clinton may be treating the Democratic nomination as hers, but Julie Crowell, a stay-at-home mother and a die-hard Sanders supporter, is holding out for an 11th-hour miracle: divine deliverance at the hands of the F.B.I.

Like many of Mr. Sanders’s supporters, Ms. Crowell, 37, said she hoped that Mrs. Clinton’s use of a private email server during her time as secretary of state would eventually yield an indictment, and she described it as the kind of transgression that would disqualify another politician seeking high office.

“She should be removed,” said Ms. Crowell, of Tustin, Calif., who attended a Sanders rally here on Tuesday and said she planned to vote for a third-party candidate if Mr. Sanders failed to overtake Mrs. Clinton and capture the Democratic nomination. “I don’t know why she’s not already being told, ‘You can’t run because you’re being investigated.’ I don’t know how that’s not a thing.”

Campaigning in California [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/27/us/politics/clinton-sanders-california-poll.html ], where polls show a tightening primary race, Mr. Sanders continued to hit Mrs. Clinton over her positions on Wall Street, trade deals, the minimum wage, hydrofracking and “super PACs [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/c/campaign_finance/index.html ]” — seemingly everything except her emails, which he took off the table as an issue during an early Democratic debate. But Mrs. Clinton faces renewed criticism after an inspector general’s report faulted her [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/us/politics/state-department-hillary-clinton-emails.html ] for violating the State Department’s records-retention policy. And as the F.B.I. continues to investigate the handling of classified information, attendees at Sanders rallies have repeatedly expressed hope that the scandal results in criminal charges.

“If there’s any chance of her getting indicted, they shouldn’t even consider her for the nomination,” said Zachary O’Neill, 21, of Escondido. “We can’t have a criminal in the White House.”

And what would be a more colossal comeuppance to the Democratic establishment?

“We can’t go back and undo giving her the Democratic nomination,” said Jennifer Peters, 28, of Costa Mesa.

Ms. Peters added that if Mrs. Clinton had broken the law, she should be held accountable. “I’m hoping that the F.B.I. sends a strong message to people like her, as well as other people in politics who are using their position of power to manipulate the system for their own personal advancement,” Ms. Peters said. “She feels like she can do whatever she wants with absolute impunity, and that she somehow is above any type of repercussions.”

Polls show [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/03/21/us/politics/times-cbs-news-poll-2016-race.html ] that an increasing number [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/19/us/politics/poll-presidential-race.html ] of Sanders supporters say they will not vote for Mrs. Clinton in November, a position not unlike the one many of her supporters held in 2008 before they eventually rallied around Barack Obama. And while Mr. Sanders has said he will do all he can to defeat Donald J. Trump [ http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/25/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign-news-conference.html ], the level of vitriol for Mrs. Clinton coursing through Mr. Sanders’s audiences lately — where “Bernie or Bust” signs are common and the mention of his rival prompts boos or shouts of “corporate puppet” — suggests that party unity might be even more difficult to achieve this time. Sanders supporters have also begun to protest at Mrs. Clinton’s events with signs that read, “Where are Hillary’s emails?”

Ms. Peters, who makes a living selling goods online, said that she would not vote for Mrs. Clinton under any circumstance — and that she would blame the Democratic Party [ http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/organizations/d/democratic_party/index.html ] for a Trump victory in November.

“If the D.N.C. wants to go ahead and put out the candidate who can’t win and we lose in November, it’s not because I didn’t vote,” she said. “It’s because they were looking out for their interests and not for the better interests of the country.”

Not everyone at Mr. Sanders’s rallies is dreading a Trump victory, however.

Victor Vizcarra, 48, of Los Angeles, said he would much prefer Mr. Trump to Mrs. Clinton. Though he said he disagreed with some of Mr. Trump’s policies, he added that he had watched “The Apprentice” and expected that a Trump presidency would be more exciting than a “boring” Clinton administration.

“A dark side of me wants to see what happens if Trump is in,” said Mr. Vizcarra, who works in information technology. “There is going to be some kind of change, and even if it’s like a Nazi-type change, people are so drama-filled. They want to see stuff like that happen. It’s like reality TV. You don’t want to just see everybody be happy with each other. You want to see someone fighting somebody.”

Jackie Becerra, 28, an executive assistant who lives in Lake Forest, also said she was leaning toward voting for Mr. Trump if Mr. Sanders was not the Democratic nominee. She said that she doubted Mr. Trump would keep his promise to build a wall [ http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/20/us/politics/donald-trump-immigration.html ] along the border with Mexico, and that, even though his proposal to bar foreign Muslims [ http://www.nytimes.com/politics/first-draft/2015/12/07/donald-trump-calls-for-banning-muslims-from-entering-u-s/ ] from entering the United States made her “nervous,” she did not believe he could stop people from coming into the country based on their religion.

“Everyone is like: ‘Trump has these terrible social issues. He hates Muslims and he hates the L.G.B.T. community,’ ” she said. “But our world is big enough that he’s not actually going to implement any of those changes in a realistic way. But what he will do is potentially audit the federal government, and he will try to break up some of the banks and try to at least influence government that way. However, with Hillary, it will just be a complacent, run-of-the-middle-of-the-road presidency.”

Such thinking worries Pete Navarro, 65, a lawyer in Los Angeles who supports Mr. Sanders but said he planned to vote for Mrs. Clinton if she is the Democratic nominee. “I think it’s a mistake to demonize Hillary Clinton,” he said. “I think that just serves Republican purposes. It’s chopping your nose off to spite your face.”

Yet the email investigation keeps coming up in conversations with Mr. Sanders’s supporters, who are all too aware of Mrs. Clinton’s delegate lead and increasingly desperate for an equalizer.

“If Bernie had 12 F.B.I. agents investigating him the way Hillary has,” said Robert Jost, 50, of San Diego, “the entire establishment, the entire mainstream media, would every day be consistently saying he should drop out of the race.”

Related Coverage

What We Know About Hillary Clinton’s Private Email Server
MAY 27, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/27/us/politics/what-we-know-about-hillary-clintons-private-email-server.html

Hillary Clinton Is Criticized for Private Emails in State Dept. Review
MAY 25, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/us/politics/state-department-hillary-clinton-emails.html

Emails Add to Hillary Clinton’s Central Problem: Voters Just Don’t Trust Her
MAY 25, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/us/politics/hillary-clinton-emails-campaign-trust.html

Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Rebuffs Report’s Criticism of Email Use
MAY 25, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/26/us/politics/hillary-clinton-email.html

Bernie Sanders Does Better vs. Trump? Wouldn’t Be Prudent to Assume That
MAY 23, 2016
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/24/upshot/bernie-sanders-does-better-vs-trump-wouldnt-be-prudent-to-assume-that.html

© 2016 The New York Times Company

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/28/us/politics/bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton-fbi.html

--

It’s time to look in the mirror, Bernie: Now, more than ever, Sanders needs to be criticized for his failed political theories

Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., gestures during a campaign rally in Hartford, Conn., Monday, April 25, 2016.
(AP Photo/Charles Krupa)

Sanders backers must stop calling Clinton a "sore winner," and instead learn the right lessons from his failure

Amanda Marcotte
Saturday, May 28, 2016 09:45 AM CDT

Even though Bernie Sanders continues to push the notion that he has a chance at the Democratic nomination, many of his supporters are beginning to accept that it’s all but mathematically impossible at this point for him to pull it out. So a new narrative is starting to form, about how it’s supposedly time for Hillary Clinton supporters to shut up, cease criticizing the candidate, and let him and his people continue to lambast Clinton daily without any counter fire.

Call it the “sore winner” narrative and it’s starting to take off in grumpy Sanders circles.

Jonathan Cohn
@JonathanCohn
.@ddguttenplan: "If Hillary Clinton doesn’t stop being such a sore winner, she may well end up a sore loser."
http://www.thenation.com/article/to-win-in-november-hillary-clinton-will-need-bernie-sanderss-voters/
7:15 AM - 17 May 2016
[ https://twitter.com/JonathanCohn/status/732575182402015232 (with comments)]

Name cannot be blank
@dadflannels
My mom always said "only thing worse than a sore loser is a sore winner" and I think that's why I can't stand hearing about hillary Clinton
10:35 AM - 1 May 2016
[ https://twitter.com/dadflannels/status/726797159098634241 ]

Matt Thomas
@Blackharp
My take on the Clinton aide saying "Fuck you" to Sanders. The only thing people hate more than a sore loser is a sore winner.
12:25 PM - 20 Apr 2016
[ https://twitter.com/Blackharp/status/722838639445614593 ]

Most of this is, of course, just people projecting their own feelings onto Clinton and has nothing to do with her actual behavior. As Greg Sargent of the Washington Post notes [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/05/20/stop-freaking-out-democrats-the-party-will-unify-probably/ ], “Clinton and her campaign are actually trying to signal [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2016/05/18/will-bernie-sanders-burn-it-all-down/?tid=a_inl ] to Democrats that they should dial down the hostilities with Sanders and his supporters.” Gender only intensifies this, of course, as women are already expected to beat themselves up and gesticulate about how unworthy they are, and so simply seeing a woman who is gracious but unapologetic pisses people off.

But this grousing is also an attempt to silence anyone who might continue to criticize Sanders, Clinton supporter or not. Which is understandable, to a large degree. After all, as the blogger Duncan Black notes [ http://www.eschatonblog.com/2016/05/do-you-really-believe-this-shit.html ], it’s not like doing so will win over any primary votes this late in the game, and it doesn’t really matter one way or another if it does. “Clinton won. It’s over,” he complains.

Yes, I suppose it could be said that Clinton supporters should refrain from taunting Sanders supporters or deliberately driving the knife in. (Though if Sanders supporters keep flinging accusations like “vagina voters” and “war criminal,” I hardly see why, beyond messed-up sexist expectations, Clinton supporters should suffer in silence.) But by and large, the pressure to lay off Sanders is misplaced. He and his supporters should continue to be subject to criticism and analysis, and it’s not being a “sore winner” to say so.

For one thing, Sanders refuses to accept that this is over. As long as he’s saying that, he needs to be treated like we would any other candidate. It’s ridiculous to coddle him and treat him like an old coot who needs to be handled with kid gloves like he doesn’t know any better.

But, more importantly, there are actual lessons to be learned from the Sanders loss. Refusal to do an autopsy on his campaign out of a misplaced fear of annoying his supporters is a bad idea. On the contrary, a thorough examination of why he failed might prevent similar mistakes in the future.

To wit, the Sanders campaign was, above all other things, a test of a popular political theory that’s been banging around for a long time, really gaining traction with Thomas Frank’s 2004 bestseller “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” The idea behind this theory is that Republicans are only able to get to white working class and middle-class voters with racist and sexist appeals because the Democrats don’t counter with a strong message of economic justice. If Democrats embraced economic populism, offering things like single payer health care and free college that appealed to the self-interest of these voters, they could convince these voters to abandon their crusade to ban abortion and kick all the Mexicans out.

It’s a really appealing theory, in no small part because the Democrats used to have broad appeal to white voters in the old days, and if they could win back voters that defected to the Republicans decades ago while keeping the majority of non-white voters, they’d have an unstoppable coalition.

Sanders himself is a huge proponent of this theory. In 2014, he told NPR that [ http://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/2014/11/19/365024592/sen-bernie-sanders-on-how-democrats-lost-white-voters ] the reason Democrats lost the white vote is because “if you are in the working class, you are struggling to keep your heads above water.” He suggested the way to win them back is for Democrats to suggest “a massive federal jobs program.”

Critics of this theory, including myself, have suggested that, as nice as it would be to believe that it’s all about economics, the likelier reason is that white people who vote Republican simply put a priority on maintaining racial and gender hierarchies over economic justice, and that won’t change no matter how many goodies you offer them.

You can delve into the lengthy historical evidence of this — for instance, the turn dates back to the 60s, long before “neoliberalism” was an idea — but it’s no matter, since Sanders offered the country a neat little experiment: Would running a candidate who campaigned as a bold economic populist who offered a platform built on soaking the rich and drastically expanding social spending be enough to woo independents and even Republicans over to the Democrats? It was a perfect experiment, especially since his primary opponent was exactly the kind of center-left candidate that proponents of this theory blame for losing white voters.

The answer is a resounding no. Sanders’ promise that his message of economic populism would awaken the masses turned out to be a giant whiff. He didn’t raise voter turnout or woo Republicans over. He didn’t even woo independents over [ http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/sanders-isnt-doing-well-with-true-independents/ ]. He couldn’t even get the majority of Democrats, even though they are the group most open to the idea of boldly remaking the economy into a more socialist state.

That’s why it’s important not to give up criticizing Sanders. His political theories were wrong. Instead, there’s significant supporting evidence for the competing theory, which was popularized by Barack Obama and embraced by Hillary Clinton, which is that the Democrats do better by focusing on core constituencies, like women and people of color, rather than continuing to chase the elusive white working class male vote.

That doesn’t mean giving up on economic justice, of course. Appealing to core constituencies is done best by meeting their economic needs. But it shows that hopes that a more populist-sounding appeal doesn’t actually do diddly squat to convince people who are voting their racist and sexist resentments to quit doing so.

If anything, it’s all more important now than ever for critics to stay on Sanders. Right now, he’s pushing this idea that the only reason he lost is because the system was rigged against him, rather than admitting that his bold plan to win white working class voters back into the Democratic fold failed. If he’s permitted to do this without pushback, he might convince some gullible Democrats to keep wasting time and energy on trying to win over white voters with economic populism, rather than committing to the winning strategy of building up the Democratic coalition through old-fashioned liberalism. Which, ironically, would end up undermining the long term goal of building a progressive majority.

Copyright © 2016 Salon Media Group, Inc.

http://www.salon.com/2016/05/28/its_time_to_look_in_the_mirror_bernie_now_more_than_ever_sanders_needs_to_be_criticized_for_his_failed_political_theories/ [with comments]

===

Presidential Primaries

Democrats
2,383 delegates needed to win

Through the Kentucky and Oregon primaries of May 17, 2016 and the (nonbinding "beauty contest") Wahington primary of May 24, 2016 (more next below):

Pledged Delegates:
Clinton 1,769
Sanders 1,499
Clinton lead 270

Superdelegates:
Clinton 541
Sanders 43
Clinton lead 498

Total Delegates:
Clinton 2,310
Sanders 1,542
Clinton lead 768

Additional Delegates Needed:
Clinton 73
Sanders 841

[(drawn from) as currently at] http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2016/primaries

--

An Awkward Reality in the Democratic Primary

Mike Blake / Reuters

Washington voters handed Hillary Clinton a primary win, symbolically reversing the result of the state caucus where Bernie Sanders prevailed.

Clare Foran
May 25, 2016

Washington voters delivered a bit of bad news for Bernie Sanders’s political revolution on Tuesday. Hillary Clinton won the state’s Democratic primary, symbolically reversing the outcome of the state’s Democratic caucus in March where Sanders prevailed as the victor. The primary result won’t count for much since [pledged] delegates have already been awarded based on the caucus. (Sanders won 74 [pledged] delegates, while Clinton won only 27 [ http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/2016/primaries/2016-03-26#WA-Dem ].) But Clinton’s victory nevertheless puts Sanders in an awkward position.

Sanders has styled himself as a populist candidate intent on giving a voice to voters in a political system in which, as he describes it, party elites and wealthy special-interest groups exert too much control. As the primary election nears its end, Sanders has railed against Democratic leaders for unfairly intervening in the process, a claim he made in the aftermath of the contentious Nevada Democratic convention earlier this month. He has also criticized superdelegates—elected officials and party leaders who can support whichever candidate they chose—for effectively coronating Clinton.

As Sanders makes those arguments, he runs up against a few inconvenient realities. He trails [ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2016/05/19/yes-hillary-clinton-is-winning-the-popular-vote-by-a-wide-margin/ ] Clinton in the popular-vote count and has performed well in caucuses, which consistently witness depressed voter turnout [ https://lawyerscommittee.org/caucuses-right-vote/ ] relative to primary elections. What happened in Washington is a painful reminder of this for the campaign: Far more voters took part in Washington’s Democratic primary than its state caucus, preliminary counts indicate. Roughly 230,000 people participated in the Democratic caucus, The Stranger reported [ https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2016/03/26/23871846/bernie-sanders-wins-washingtons-democratic-caucus/ ] in March. In contrast, more than 660,000 Democratic votes had been tallied in the primary as of Tuesday, according to The Seattle Times [ http://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/wash-primary1/ ]. That lopsided reality makes it more difficult for Sanders to argue that his candidacy represents the will of the people.

Overall, Sanders has tended to focus his criticisms of the Democratic primary process on aspects of the nomination race that have put his own campaign at a disadvantage. Examples include his critiques of the superdelegates system and closed primaries [ http://www.vox.com/2016/4/28/11469468/open-primaries-closed-primaries-sanders ], which shut out the Independent voters whose support has benefited Sanders. “Three million people in the state of New York who are Independents have lost their right to vote in the Democratic or Republican primary. That’s wrong,” he said in April [ http://www.politico.com/blogs/2016-dem-primary-live-updates-and-results/2016/04/bernie-sanders-ny-closed-primaries-222142 ].

The campaign has not had the same zeal for reforming other elements of the process that might also be described as undemocratic. That would include the caucus system, where it is generally more difficult for people to vote than primaries. That’s not entirely surprising, of course. Caucuses reward highly motivated and ideologically devoted voters, a dynamic which has tended to favor Sanders. The campaign’s critiques aren’t illegitimate because they’re uneven, nor are they necessarily insincere [bullshit, yes they are and have been, so consistently calculated and recalculated as necessary and/or convenient, solely and entirely to win/craft a winning narrative, any actual principles be damned]. They just show that Sanders is [just and only] a politician [as intellectually corrupt and bankrupt in character as nearly any other], and [all] he wants [is] to win.

Copyright © 2016 by The Atlantic Monthly Group

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/washington-primary-bernie-sanders-hillary-clinton/484313/ [with comments]

*

More Washington Democrats look to do away with caucuses after Clinton primary win

Clinton wins nonbinding primary, despite losing caucuses that counted

Some Democrats say it’s time to switch to using primary instead

Republicans already use primary results to award delegates to presidential candidates

By Melissa Santos
May 25, 2016 6:04 PM

Hillary Clinton’s victory in Washington’s presidential primary on Tuesday is causing more Democrats to ask why they are ignoring those results.

Jamal Raad, a spokesman for the state Democratic Party, said party officials received “a handful of emails” Wednesday morning questioning whether the state party’s use of caucuses to allocate delegates to presidential candidates truly represents the will of Washington voters.

Clinton lost the state’s March 26 caucuses in a landslide for Bernie Sanders [ http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/politics-government/article68403012.html ] that handed the Vermont senator 74 of the state’s 101 delegates to the Democratic National Convention.

But the former secretary of state then turned around and won Tuesday’s nonbinding Democratic primary election [ http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/politics-government/election/article79692542.html ], earning 53 percent of the vote compared with Sanders’ 47 percent.

Votes are still being counted in the all-mail election, but by Wednesday almost three times as many Democrats had voted in the primary as participated in Democrats’ March 26 precinct caucuses.

Reuven Carlyle
May 25, 2016 at 9:09am
28% voter turnout for the Washington presidential primary because of a chaotic, disjointed, hybrid caucus/primary structure is below us as a state. Our sense of our own exceptionalism in civic engagement has lost its veneer. We need a clean primary system for 2020 and it's time to act.

Clinton piles up lead in presidential primary that state Democrats won't count
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/politics/article/Hillary-put-well-ahead-in-primary-that-state-7943721.php
[ https://www.facebook.com/reuven.carlyle/posts/10153699524333087 (with comments)]

State Sen. Reuven Carlyle, D-Seattle, said Tuesday’s results highlighted how Washington Democrats’ system of holding both caucuses and primaries needs to go.

Awarding delegates to candidates based on primary results would be less confusing and expand the number of voters who could participate in the nomination process, he said.

“I just think caucuses have a romantic image and play a meaningful role in terms of activism and energy, but that a primary is more Democratic and reflective of the broader values of the population,” Carlyle said.

While voters can take part in the primary by simply dropping a ballot in the mail, participating in the caucuses requires voters to take time away from family or work to attend a meeting with their neighbors. The Democratic precinct caucuses where Sanders won his delegates lasted just a few hours, but the later legislative district caucuses that helped cement that victory took up to 12 hours [ http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/politics-government/article72715847.html ]. Afterward, local Democratic volunteers questioned whether a primary would be preferable.

“People can’t find a babysitter for a whole day, they can’t leave work for a whole day. They have family commitments, or their kids are in activities,” said Elaine Hansch, a Clinton supporter from Gig Harbor.

Because of those factors, Hansch said she thinks the primary results are more representative of what the majority of voters think and should therefore be used to allocate delegates in the presidential race.

“I think it does show that Hillary does have the greater support,” Hansch said of Tuesday’s results.

Greg Nickels
May 24 at 9:55pm · Missoula, MT
I hope the Washington State super delegates listen to the results from the 661,000 voters in the Democratic primary, much more representative than the 230,000 at the caucuses.
[ https://www.facebook.com/greg.nickels.5/posts/10208104971255361 (with comments)]

Others say the primary outcome only showed that many voters didn’t participate. Many Sanders supporters sat out Tuesday’s primary because they knew it was “a dog and pony show,” said Jennifer Chamberlin, a Bremerton resident and organizer of the grassroots group Kitsap Loves Bernie.

“Had it been a deciding factor for the delegates, we would have mobilized and been able to phone bank and engage voters to vote,” Chamberlin said.

Some supporters of Sanders, an independent who identifies as a Democratic socialist, also didn’t want to identify as a Republican or Democrat to participate in the primary, Chamberlin said. Voters had to check a party declaration box for their vote to count.

Still, Chamberlin said she would support using a primary to allocate the state’s delegates going forward, since she knows many people who were shut out of the caucus process by work or family commitments.

It would be a change welcomed by Republicans, who for the past year have criticized Democrats for not abandoning the caucus system in favor of using the primary to allocate delegates, as Republicans did for the 2016 election.

Susan Hutchison, chairman of the state Republican Party, issued a statement late Tuesday calling the Democrats’ caucus system “antiquated” and “out of step with the voters.”

On Wednesday, the state’s top election official urged both parties to use the presidential primary to allocate delegates in 2020. Secretary of State Kim Wyman, a Republican, also repeated her call for the Legislature to move the primary from May to March to heighten its importance in the presidential nomination process.

Raad, the Democratic party spokesman, said switching to a primary system is something Democratic party officials can consider leading up to the next presidential election.

The Washington State Democratic Central Committee, which consists of volunteers from counties and legislative districts throughout the state, will vote in late 2018 or early 2019 on whether to use a presidential primary or a caucus system, he said.

Raad he anticipates there will be ample debate about making changes.

“There certainly are some Democrats who want to move to the primary,” Raad said Wednesday. “We’ve heard their concerns, and this will certainly be a discussion in the run-up to the next presidential election.”

Copyright 2016 The News Tribune

http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/politics-government/article79954202.html [with comments]

*

The System Isn’t ‘Rigged’ Against Sanders

Greensburg, KS - 5/4/07

"Eternal vigilance is the price of Liberty."
from John Philpot Curran, Speech
upon the Right of Election, 1790

F6

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