Jamelle Bouie wrong to reject unique parts of #FeelTheBern

I like Bouie in general, at least for younger people in his position, as political writers at establishmentarian online mags.

That said, Bouie is partially wrong to say that there is no movement that's unique to Bernie Sanders' candidacy.

Note that I said partially wrong. Not entirely wrong.

He is right that Sanders follows in a trajectory from George McGovern to today.

However, not all candidates were the same in that trajectory.

Brown and Dean both had various degrees of neoliberal in them. Bradley showed more of this outside of the campaign with post-political work. Jerry Brown in his second gubernatorial stint has his picture in the dictionary next to the definition of "tech-neoliberalism," while Dean has his picture next to ... I could say various things. Yes, he opposed the Iraq War. And that was about it. Vermont's support for same-sex civic unions wasn't led by him, although he took it as what he saw as the best political alternative. And, shades of Sanders, he was actually endorsed, multiple times, by the NRA.

That said, Bradley only broke 45 percent in one primary, and struggled to break 30 percent in many cases. Yes, he was running against the standing Veep, but Gore had vulnerabilities.

It's interesting that Bouie omits two names.

One is Gary Hart, who launched a clearly neoliberalism-based challenge to Walter Mondale in 1984. He doesn't at all fit the normal insurgent profile, of course. (Some reporters have actually done that, though.)

The other, though?

Ted Kennedy, 1980.

Ted was no neoliberal, overall. And, unlike many of the other insurgents, through his family history, he had connections to black voters.

So, Bouie's wrong for trying to inflict a simplistic narrative on us. Not all Democratic insurgencies are alike.

As for the degree of Sanders' support coming from white liberals?

Erm ... while African-Americans, due to the legacy of slavery (setting aside the slavery of American Indians), always have a special claim on the ethnical (sic, my word for getting away from "racial") legacy of America in general, and post-1960, of the Democratic Party on political issues, that legacay is fading in a sense.

Hispanic Americans (of any "race," per the Census Bureau) have surpassed African-Americans for a number of years. And, beyond that, as various Americans look forward (and probably not enough years forward) with either joy, lamentation, or other emotions, to the time when the United States becomes a majority-minority nation, growth in Hispanic population, along with East Asian and South Asian immigration, will be drivers of that more than African-American growth. And, today's new wave of African immigration will also be a part, albeit a small part.

First, per the Census Bureau, in this PDF about future population trends, "Hispanic whites" (by subtracting "non-Hispanic whites" from "whites") are at 15 percent of population, compared to African-Americans at 13.2 percent. By 2060, that's expected to be 25 percent Hispanic vs. 14.3 percent black.

Even if that's too high, and I think it is, in 2060 with an estimated non-Hispanic white population at still over 50 percent, we could have a Hispanic population of 21 percent or so, or half again the size of the African-American population.

But, this still all ignores the Asian-American population. It was at 5.4 percent in 2014, but is projected at 9.3 percent by 2060, which I don't think is an underestimate.

In other words, by 2060, Asians will have moved from being a little over 40 percent of black population today to being about two-thirds of black population.

In this, Bouie, and others, are overlooking this broadening of diversity.

Bouie notes:

Black voters aren’t just palette-swapped white ones; they have interests and concerns that are specific to themselves and their communities.

This will be true of other ethnoi as well. 

And, this wasn't Bouie's primary focus in his piece, but he is nonetheless the one who's brought it kind of to the forefront of my mind. I'll be doing more about it in a separate piece.

Back to his piece.

Previous insurgents differed in other ways. Ted Kennedy went back to the Senate, never making peace with Jimmy Carter. He didn't have to, though, because he was a Kennedy. Gary Hart self-destructed, and was probably as unpopular with many Dems as Carter had been before him. Jesse Jackson got shakedown money to go to Operation Push and other organizations before having a later combination of self-destruction and irrelevance. Bradley went off into the nonprofit world, neoliberal division. Howard Dean took his mask back off and went to run the DNC.

Bernie is likely to do none of those. Bouie's half-right about him being a Senate gadfly, though not totally right. So, he won't be a Ted Kennedy. He won't self-destruct like Hart or Jackson, or sell out in the way Dean did.

But, could he sell out to some degree? Well, sure. (This all assumes Clinton is the nominee, which I think likely, but am not assuming it's so in the bag as Bouie does.)

He could continue to fight outside the convention for issues that he gets negotiated at the convention. Especially if Clinton pulls a Jimmy Carter, he couldn't be ignored between now and 2020.

Why does the media hate #BernieSanders?

Sen. Bernie Sanders

I have documented some of my own concerns about Bernie Sanders. They include the fact that he's a gun nut, wants the state of Vermont to suck off the military-industrial complex teat (and in general might not be quite so progressive on foreign policy as I'd like), and that these concerns are enough that if the Green Party ran a legit candidate, like Jill Stein again, I'd likely still vote Green versus Bernie, if he were to win the Democratic nomination. (And please participate in the poll at right about actual and rumored 2016 Democratic presidential candidates.)

However, while critiquing myth vs. reality on his positions, I don't diss the man as a candidate. I wouldn't diss him if he were a Green candidate, and certainly not as a Democratic candidate.

Unlike the New York Times and others, who have dissed him indeed, as Columbia Journalism Review reports in depth.

Let's start with how the Old Gray Lady buried his official campaign announcement:

The Times, for example, buried his announcement on page A21, even though every other candidate who had declared before then had been put on the front page above the fold. Sanders’s straight-news story didn’t even crack 700 words, compared to the 1,100 to 1,500 that Marco Rubio, Rand Paul, Ted Cruz, and Hillary Clinton got. So, one-half the coverage, buried wayyyy inside. 

The bigger issue is the Times, as part of the “mainstream media,” already engaging in crafting of narratives.

Chief of those? “He can’t win.” Why? Erm, he’s a “socialist”!

Sanders, of course, is Vermont’s junior senator, barber’s worst nightmare, and IKEA socialist (he favors the term “democratic socialist,” as in the Scandinavian variant), who quaintly maintains that people and the planet are more important than profit. Not long ago such beliefs fell well within the waters of the main stream where politicians swam, but the current has since been rerouted, and Sanders now paddles hard against the left bank. For not going with the flow, and for challenging Hillary Clinton, the big fish many elites have tagged as their own, Sanders’s entry into the race was greeted with story after story whose message—stated or understated, depending on the decorum of the messenger—was “This crank can’t win.”

That’s of course crowning Hillary long enough for harpyish spinster Maureen Dowd, among others, to then dethrone her.

Steve Hendricks, in this excellent piece, then notes more bullshit. First, it’s a lot of the MSM trying to horsecollar Sanders with the “can’t win” label, and thus dissing him:

Other major news organizations ignored Sanders as nearly as they could a sitting U.S. senator who entered the presidential race. ABC’s World News Tonight gave his announcement all of 18 seconds, five of which were allotted to Clinton’s tweet welcoming him to the race. CBS Evening News fitted the announcement into a single sentence at the end of a two-minute report about Clinton.

But it doesn’t stop there.

Hendricks continues:

In past races, when editors have explained why they scorned the likes of Sanders, they have tended to recite an editorial recipe for political long shots that is much like the Hollywood recipe for starlets: don’t cover them much, and don’t take them seriously. The trouble with this commonplace is that editors actually love covering long shots—certain long shots anyway. Ted Cruz, for example, received his serious, in-depth treatment in the Times’ news columns even as its analysts were writing pieces like “Why Ted Cruz Is Such A Long Shot.”

So, there you go.

Well, why not cover Sanders? Because, on the economic side, he is indeed a democratic socialist, and the NYT, other than letting Paul Krugman grace its op-ed pages, is a capitalist corporation, which is beholden to the standard capitalist narratives of the NY-DC axis. Hendricks notes:

The difference is that Cruz has not erected a platform whose planks present a boardwalk of horror to the corporate class atop the media. These same planks of Sanders’s, not at all incidentally, are the very ones on which Clinton most wobbles as she stands before Democratic voters.

Exactly.

 Can he win?

It's more likely than the mainstream media might admit.

Remember a junior state senator from Illinois who ran against a seemingly undefeatable person, name of Hillary Clinton, eight years ago? Sure, Barack Obama has more charisma than Bernie Sanders. Or does he, that much?

Besides, Hendricks notes Ted Kennedy running his front-runnerness in the 1972 run-up off an island bridge and into murky waters; Paul Wellstone's fateful 2002 plane crash, Jimmy Carter trumping favorites with shoe leather and a somewhat faked smile, and more.

He also notes that Sanders got off to a decent fundraising start and Clinton's suddenly gotten coy about details of her latest financials. Hendricks didn't even note Sanders' early crowd draws in Iowa. Hardly the sign of someone who can't win, on Sanders' part.

So, read the whole thing from CJR. It's worth it.

Beyond that, as Teddy White belatedly admitted, but only after helping create Camelot, there's a sort of ethical issue withe media getting too involved with creating "narratives" about politicians.

UPDATE, June 8: Add National Journal to the haters. Its 2014 piece implies, as have some others, that Sanders is somehow anti-black because he wants to try to get working-class whites to vote Democratic. Joan Walsh at Salon made the same claim just a week ago.

At the same time, I would bash Walsh less than Doug Henwood does. Race and class issues do overlap, but yes, they're not the same. It's kind of like environmentalism. A lot of environmental issues aren't out in national parks, but are about industrial companies building toxic plants in urban areas in neighborhoods that aren't just low-income, but are also high-minority. And yet, the environmental movement in general remains largely white.

Classism and racism overlap, in other words, but they're not the same thing. And, Walsh notes that our first post-racial president's stance that American needed to "look forward" is itself a problem.

Counterfactual history: LBJ names RFK his Veep

Long-term regular readers of this blog know that I occasionally like to write these essays into counterfactual history. As a history buff (college minor) I find they fulfill an inner need to ponder some of the "whys" and other things of history, as well as providing an outlet for keeping my analytical and creative thinking skills sharp.

So, here's this one, starting with the necessary historical background.

In the spring of 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson said he would consider no member of his Cabinet for the nomination to run with him as vice president. Well, without naming names, the general public and especially Democratic Party stalwarts knew just what that meant. Only one member of LBJ's cabinet, the attorney general, Robert F. Kennedy, brother of the late president, had hinted at any such interest, or been talked up by the public.

Bobby, though, had been talked up in spades. And, he had been forceful in trying to get his name on the ticket.

But LBJ, with a cabinet full of Jack Kennedy nominees, and still with fears of coming off as "Rufus Cornpone" to them and others, didn't want a Vice President Kennedy overshadowing him.

But, what if he had thought differently? And acted differently?

Things would have been a lot different, especially late in 1967 and on into 1968.

Bobby Kennedy would have been hard-pressed, even after Gene McCarthy entered the 1968 race as an anti-Vietnam candidate, to speak against the war himself. Party stalwarts would have considered it treason. Plus, LBJ would have been able to get Bob McNamara or somebody else to testify how, when Jack was president, Bobby had been at least as much a hawk on Vietnam as his brother, etc. Plus, with the revelation that Bobby knew about the 1963 CIA assassination attempts on Fidel Castro, if LBJ spun it right, the public would have believed anything about Bobby and Nam.

Related to that, any effort Bobby did make at the presidency before LBJ's March 31, 1968 withdrawal from candidacy speech would have seemed like the rank opportunism that it was. And, afterward.

Then, Martin Luther King Jr. would have been assassinated four days later. The aftermath of that would have overshadowed a Kennedy announcement.

Bobby would have either had to make a very delayed announcement while facing the Johnson machinery and possible antagonism, or waited until 1972.

Without a Vice President Humphrey to run, what would Johnson have done? Supported Bobby? Tabbed Sen. Humphrey as a likeable, pliable, still-hawkish liberal? Possibly. Certainly more likely than supporting Bobby.

Rather, LBJ would have pulled a Taft, 1912. Just as Taft used every bit of party machinery to turn back Teddy Roosevelt, LBJ would have done the same against Bobby Kennedy.

Now, as he did in real history with the Hump as his Veep, would he have forced Humphrey to take some sort of pledge to support administration policy? Likely so.

Question is, with Hubert Horatio not actually being LBJ's Veep, would he have kept at least part of his pecker in his own pocket, and at some point, say a month before the election, started distancing himself from LBJ?

Let's say "yes," with the distancing being small at first. Maybe that would have prodded LBJ to call for his bombing halt a week earlier than he did. Or, if he refused to call for one at all, in spite (many have argued that Johnson wanted Nixon to win more than Humphrey, in large part over Vietnam), HHH might just have finished growing himself a pair, and pledged a bombing halt himself.

Let us say that's enough to push the Hump over the top.

We get continued liberal appointments to the Supreme Court, though Abe Fortas still steps down. Much of the Great Society remains in place, with continued support. Reagan and Rocky square off for the 1972 GOP nomination. Reagan wins, but loses to the Hump and the GOP gets an even earlier start on becoming the party of today, or Rocky wins, then beats Humphrey and the GOP crazies are stuck, or he loses to Hump, narrowly, because the crazies refuse to vote, and moderate GOPers start the exodus.

And if Nixon won?

Bobby runs in 1972, gets nominated, but gets semi-McGoverned. Between this, Chappaquiddick for Teddy and reflections on the narrowness of Jack's 1960 win, the Kennedy dynasty and Camelot myths die a cold, painful death.

Obama is Reagan?

Noting that U.S. President Barack Obama tends to confuse, even confound, both political ideologues and pragmatists alike, Ross Douthat says he actually shows tendencies similar to Ronald Reagan. However, he says, that when either Reagan, or Ted Kennedy, told partisans they wouldn't get a better deal than a political compromise the one or other of them had worked out, they were believed, and Obama wasn't.

Perhaps that's because neither of them made such flat promises. Or else because Teddy and Ronnie were smoother liars.

While we remember Ted Kennedy – Watergate!

No, Richard Nixon didn’t commit vehicular manslaughter. But, besides spying on Ted Kennedy illegally, as well as millions of other Americans, he nearly started World War III while drunk, prevented only by the presence and intervention of Henry Kissinger.

In this case, Nixon even offered Secret Service protection after George Wallace was shot not just to protect him but to spy on him.

I don’t want to commemorate Teddy to the point of hagiography. But, I don’t want to see him torn down purely for the sake of being torn down for political reasons.
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Note to conservatives on Ted Kennedy's drinking... "W"!

Just think...

By the time George Wingnut Bush is dead, we can pull up all the similar stuff about HIS drinking history... much of it not yet written, but eventually to be dug up or leaked out.

We can even pull up his alleged cocaine use, which will surely be documented by then.

No, he may never have been involved in someone's death. But, we have had rumors of a girlfriend's abortion from that general time period.

Ted Kennedy – some inaccuracies in NYT obit

Oh page 6 of the New York Times obituary of Ted Kennedy, John Broder has a few inaccuracies, primarily of timeline implications.

Freed at last of the expectation that he should and would seek the White House, Mr. Kennedy devoted himself fully to his day job in the Senate. He led the fight for the 18-year-old vote, the abolition of the draft, deregulation of the airline and trucking industries, and the post-Watergate campaign finance legislation. He was deeply involved in renewals of the Voting Rights Act and the Fair Housing law of 1968. He helped establish the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. He built federal support for community health care centers, increased cancer research financing and helped create the Meals on Wheels program. He was a major proponent of a health and nutrition program for pregnant women and infants.

But, as the obit notes itself in preceding paragraphs, Ted wasn’t “freed” until after losing his one official attempt at the White House in 1980. And, 18-year-old votes? 1972. End of the draft? 1973. Airline dereg? Carter Administration. The Voting Rights Act? 1968, as noted. WIC? Not sure when, but well before 1980. OSHA? Nixon years.

I mean, he did plenty AFTER 1980, some of which is mentioned in paragraphs after the one cited above. But, not only were those accomplishments before 1980, Ted was one of many in the Senate, not a leading pusher, on them.
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