It is too early to know the delegate count, but it is now
clear that Biden will be the nominee.
Bernie performed remarkably well in the Latinx community, but failed to get
any substantial portion of the Black vote.
Bloomberg will drop out at some point and throw a billion dollars behind
Biden, who, you will recall, began his run by assuring a private meeting of
Wall Street bankers that they would be all right and nothing would change. I feel like Charlie Brown and the
football. Oscar Wilde famously observed,
“Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage
is the triumph of hope over
experience.” One could, without too
much trouble, adjust this to my enthusiasm for Bernie’s 2016 and 2020 runs.
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A small positive from yesterday's results. In a special election in Maine, the Democrat won in a district that Trump had carried by 7%. This does not bode well for Susan Collins.
If there's to be permanent change in this country, it has to occur at this level. I remain convinced that, while I prefer Bernie, I doubt if he would get much more done than Biden. Biden may have reassured Wall Street that he's for business as usual, and Bernie would never do that, but without the consent of Congress, Bernie could not stop business usual. President's can do very little domestically without legislation. The Left's political enthusiasm seems largely to be confined to presidential elections. This has to change. The Left needs to do more at the state legislative level, even better, at the local level--which is large feeder of candidates for the state level, which in turn etc etc.
The Hail Mary Pass:
Warren stops being a jerk, drops out, and endorses Bernie. Never happen? Probably, but Warren got her start by
challenging the neoliberalism of Biden and it is likely that she knows Trump will crush Biden and in his second term crush what's left of the democratic republic in his second term.
So Bernie swallows hard, gives Warren a call, "Look Liz, I know you are an ambitious MF, so here's the deal. Drop out and support me. We will prevail at the convention. You will be my VP pick and I'll serve only one term, giving you your only real shot at the presidency. I'll even call AOC and tell her to wait until your time is up."
I think I'm still at the imagination over intelligence phase.
Jerry, that has long been my fantasy, but it depends on two things, neither of which looks possible: first that Bernie has a commanding plurality, and second that Warren collects a reasonable pot of delegates.
"Hello Liz, I just got another idea that some may say is another instance of imagination over intelligence. Here it is:
once you drop out and endorse me, I will then name you as my running mate and for the rest of the campaign, we'll campaign together. I realize that you tilt to the center but just think about it. This will be historic, we'll excite the Dem base for real. You'll be a star...and a future president."
Oscar Wilde can be very amusing, but he's not my guru.
I don't see what's wrong about letting your life be guided by hope and not by past experiences.
If Marx had let his life be guided by past experiences and not by hope, he would have given up writing about the revolution fairly early in life and dedicated himself to the family business. The same can be said for almost everyone else whom I and probably most of the rest of the regular commentators admire.
I almost feel worse about Bernie losing to Biden now, than I did about Trump winning in 2016. I am utterly befuddled by Biden's apparently enduring popularity.
I predict that Trump will beat Biden handily, and that the DNC will continue its slide into laughingstock-dom.
I've been politically active, off and on, since I was nine, when I doorbelled for Bob Eberle in his campaign against Brock Adams in Washington's 7th Congressional district. (Eberle lost.) I've served in various capacities over the years, including union organizer and building rep, campaign grunt, district officer, peace activist, and so on. Now that I'm becoming an old man, I've reached the point that I act less out of a sense of duty and more out of the pleasure of working with people on causes I care about. I now know that I simply won't get involved in something unless I enjoy the people I'm getting involved with. In other words, it's not just the cause; it's also the comrades.
In my small area of the world, I've simply preferred the Warren campaign over the Bernie campaign. There's a history to that, which I won't go into. Suffice it to say that after I supported Bernie in 2016 and my wife served as a delegate to our district convention, I soured on the local Bernie activists. This election, I joined my wife on the Warren campaign, and I felt good about the work we did for her in our state and I liked connecting with the people on her campaign. That oft-quoted line from Howards End comes to mind: "Only connect."
Having said this, I think it's time for Warren to suspend her campaign. If Biden loses and we still have elections in 2024, she can run again. Meanwhile, I always thought it was a mistake to count Biden out. I never really believed 538's prognostications of a Bernie victory. My intuition was that the party would revert to the mean. And so it has. Bernie will continue to be a force, and I wouldn't entirely count him out. Politics is too unpredictable for that.
Whatever happens, our connections with our comrades are going to matter. Way back in 2016 (which seems like an eternity), I thought that it would be important that the so-called Resistance, to be sustainable, would have to be able to endure disappointments. While the blue wave in 2018 cheered us up and gave us hope, we have to realize that there are going to be setbacks, and we have to be in it for the long haul, because things are sometimes going to look bleak in the coming years. Climate change, as the young know, ensures that.
So I will look to where I can be useful and join with others who want to do the same. That might mean working on a Congressional campaign (coming full circle) or something else. "Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon."
To paraphrase the fact of the French June Rebellion to the fiction of Les Miserables and then update it to a 1970's Michael Buble' song, "Nothing changes, nothing ever will".
Bernie Sanders was a young curly haired boy once playing in the sun and now is facing living as an adult in a very harsh world. Let this be a wake up call to all the young children playing today the will eventually become cannon fodder or a greedy SOB, or a wimpy idealist polititian wanna-be. Of course those chilren will be living in a smoggy, virus infested soiled world anyways, with a little electronic window to be brainwashed into whatever the one percent fells is the flavor of the day. I'm good with it now.
This one stings because after Nevada, you almost felt like Bernie had it in the bag. The whiplash is enough to cause the sensation of this one having been stolen, even though it wasn’t, really. What happened yesterday was the same as ‘16: Bernie simply ran into a buzzsaw of black voters and bourgie white suburbanites. Yes, the dishonest media (looking at you MSNBC) did its part. But still. Where was the promised youth tsunami? You can almost understand how even after the Clinton election was long over, so many misguided souls persisted in decrying how Bernie was robbed, so palpable is the feeling this time.
Based on commentary from places like The Young Turks and Jacobin, it looks like the pro-Bernie media, such as it exists, is going to go after hard after Biden on his warmongering, his coddling of payday loan grifters, his calls for cuts to Social Security, not to mention his noticeable cognitive decline. I’ve also heard mentioned his claim to have been arrested alongside Nelson Mandela. Can Hunter Biden be far behind? How much will Bernie himself turn up the heat?
They’re insisting it’s not over. And I suppose they’re right. Is Biden about to get “dirtied up” before the general? Yes. Will it deprive him the nomination? Probably not. Will it hurt him in the general? Maybe, but I still think the signs from last night — massive turnout, exceeding Hillary’s numbers, of African-Americans, white suburbanites, and even some white working-class — bodes well for Biden’s chances against the current occupant. I won’t say T***p is toast, but he’s browning bread. And I agree with Senator Sanders that that should be our paramount concern.
Then again what do I know? What does anyone know?
Ed Barreras, I'm glad you brought up black voters. I recommend Denise Oliver Velez's post in the Daily Kos, "'God don't like ugly' is what my grandma used to say":
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2020/3/4/1924191/--God-don-t-like-ugly-is-what-my-grandma-used-to-say
If we don't take seriously the African American turnout for Biden in multiple states, we aren't seeing the whole picture. Come November, if Biden is the nominee, I will vote for him, and it will be good to remember whom I'm joining when I do vote for him.
After months of enjoyment reading this blog, I can't help but chime in with one comment.
David Palmeter's comment is 100% correct.
My personal take on why Bernie could never win:
"My reach must extend my grasp, for I refuse to buy a ladder from a billionaire."
I see a lot of people resigning themselves to Biden, some more gleefully than I would have expected. To them, too, I'd like to repeat your observation:
“Marriage is the triumph of imagination over intelligence. Second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience.” One should adjust this to their enthusiasm for Hillary's 2016 and Biden's 2020 runs.
I, whatever you may think of it, am, however, not done. The Michigan primary is close at hand, and I will do everything I can to win it for Bernie here. I was with him in the dark days after his heart attack--the end, one might say, of act one of his campaign story. And now, here, at the end of act two, during his Dark Night of the Soul, I'll be here for him again.
I'm anxious to see how this story will end.
David,
That blog post is a striking example of the kind scathingly anti-Sanders piece one frequently sees emanating from what we would call the “identity politics” left. It certainly won’t win plaudits in these parts. But let me say a few things about it.
1) The author excoriates Sanders for “endless attempts to convince us that ‘he marched with King’ and was there for the struggle,” calling this “laughable and insulting.” But this seems like a smear on Sanders. The fact is that Sanders did attend the March on Washington, and he should be proud he did. There was a photo circulating that was purported to show a young Sanders marching closely behind King himself, but the Sanders campaign swiftly confirmed that the man depicted wasn’t Sanders. At the University of Chicago, Sanders is well-documented to have been deeply involved in anti-segregationist struggles and was even arrested on one occasion, as can be seen in a photograph.
2) “We know that Bernie Sanders is uncomfortable with us. His analysis which avoids directly addressing racism, his ‘working class’ (unspoken white) excludes us.” I think this is false. Again, see Sanders’s record on civil rights. But in general, how does a politician advance a critique foregrounding class struggle that doesn’t also end up stoking racial resentment? Judging from this article and arguably from last night’s results, Bernie failed to square that circle.
3) “Labeling the hard decades long fight to get the vote and get some of our folks elected, to then be dubbed ‘Establishment’ and dismissed as ‘corporate whores’ — y’all so-called ‘progressives’ have built up a deep well of dislike.” This is a pretty stark statement of identity politics. The author seems to be saying that a candidate’s race — the fact that he or she is “one of our folks” — should automatically inoculate him or her against charges of belonging to an establishment, of serving entrenched power. But the author contradicts herself, because in another place she dismisses the likes of Van Jones, Joy Reid, and Cornel West (!) as shills put forth by white people as spokesman for the black community, when really they’re no such thing, she insists. But if those individuals can serve as shills then surely so can, potentially, the likes of Obama, or any other black politician whom the author approves of.
4) How would this author analyze Sanders’s strong support from Latinx’s such as myself?
5) “So we chose to vote for a man, a white man, who has exhibited empathy over decades, who went to Selma on Sunday, who showed up at Mother Emanuel, who attended Elijah Cummings funeral, and who had Obama’s back for eight years.” Ah, so it turns out she just likes Obama and Biden, when the whole time she made it seem as though she would argue for Biden as the pragmatic choice for black voters. This seems pretty egregious, though. Did Biden demonstrate empathy for minority communities when he was drafting that crime bill in the 90s? What about his empathy for those old segregationist Senators he recently waxed nostalgic about? Again, compare Biden and Bernie on these grounds.
Ed Barreras,
In the whole article she didn't give a single rational argument in favor of Biden and against Sanders.
By the way, are we entirely sure that she writes in good faith? Couldn't she be working for the Biden campaign?
Thank you for your critique, Ed Barreras.
What struck me about Denise Oliver Velez's post is that there is no getting around the fact that large numbers of African American voters turned out for Biden in southern states. I would not be dismissive of that, nor would I just chalk it up to some manifestation of the Establishment working its will through black voters.
Black voters had reasons for their votes, and any critique of the party's "reversion to the mean" should take those reasons into consideration. Bernie did not win over the black voters that were lost to Biden, and Denise Oliver Velez offered an explanation for that. If her critique is unfair or inaccurate, then what accounts for Bernie losing African American votes to Biden?
I supported Warren, but she did even worse in the African American community than Sanders did. It's not hard to see why. She did not have deep, long-established ties to the black community, and doing "outreach" during a relatively short Presidential campaign isn't going to change that.
s. wallerstein,
Denise Oliver Velez is not some shill for the Biden campaign. Here is a bio from Wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Oliver-Velez
David,
Thanks..
She doesn't seem to like Sanders, and she really doesn't give an good explanation for her dislike. There are always complex cultural issues involved in our liking or disliking someone and it could be that there is something about Sanders which turns a lot of black people off. However, it doesn't seem to be so much anything about Sanders' politics as his vibes.
I for one will admit that I feel very comfortable with Sanders' vibes and he seems to be a guy I could have known back in the university and might have been friendly with back then.
Working for? Perhaps not. Working in tandem with? Undoubtedly.
These things always present a thicket of ideological conflicts. The most we can do is point out rational contradictions where we can and defend our cause where we must. The most frustrating thing about that piece is that Biden was being awarded points for things that are largely symbolic (albeit not unimportant), whereas Sanders’s actually much better record on issues affecting black and minority communities was being completely ignored and even trashed.
David,
I agree that Biden’s black support hasn’t been manufactured by the establishment, or, as some are now trying to claim, by the media that refused to air an honest accounting of Biden’s record (although the latter surely accounts for *some* of his success).
What’s actually going on? I don’t know. But I did find interesting Velez’s quotation of the author who stated that black voters are aware that given a choice between “money and morals,” white people will always choose their money; hence they’re pessimistic about the electoral chances of politicians like Sanders and Warren who are promising to take white folks’s money. That at least is a dispassionate bit of psychological analysis, and it’s one that paints Biden as the choice of a hard-nosed realist as opposed to that of an optimistic idealist. But then why go on to apply the gauzy filter to Biden’s record while illicitly attacking Sanders?
Has Sanders committed missteps in his outreach to the black community? Sure. But to smear his movement as somehow implicitly racist is sick and outrageous. Again, why is it that Sanders’s legion of Latinx supporters don’t feel the same? The selective charitableness of people like Velez when it comes to Biden versus Sanders is quite something to behold.
A couple points on the 'rationality' of older black voters type arguments: firstly we take for granted that poor, white voters in the South and Appalachians vote on group-rationality rather than utilitarian-rationality lines ('What's the Matter with Kansas', etc). It would be unfair to impugn older black voters for an unusual degree of 'irrationality' when we take for granted the 'group rationality' of those Republican white voters. Of course the obverse also applies - if we criticize poor white rural Republican voters we should also be allowed to criticize older black Biden voters in the South.
More cynically (and depressingly)I think there is a a real group logic to older black voters going for Biden - I wonder whether all the media talk about Bernie's Latino support stirred up zero sum game fears among black voters. A 'class' based set of policies might be seen as implicitly favoring Latinos over African Americans by (down the road) diluting black power in the Democratic Party and erasing patronage linkages to Democratic elites.
Even more cynically, Sanders is Jewish. This may have had an impact.
Ed, David, s.wallerstein,
I'm black myself, speaking from Detroit, with family in the south.
I'll tell you why Bernie did poorly in South Carolina and then across the south. And it's no big secret. The numbers are pretty clear, as are those with whom I speak:
South Carolina's victory came down to Clyburn's endorsement. Black voters are, let us remember again, like all voters: We like to back a winner. Clyburn gave Biden the win in South Carolina, and the coalescing around Biden following that win gave him the rest of the south (and the north yesterday).
This is my first time hearing of Denise Oliver-Velez, but her critique strikes me as disingenuous. There's no great hive-mind of black consensus on either Bernie's record or Biden's record. Again, Bernie lost in the black community for the same reasons he lost around the country: The establishment consolidated and the youth vote didn't materialize.
To David,
If you're going to back Biden, go ahead. But please don't do so with the belief you're following the wise voice of black voters. We're just as split as everyone else, and we're just as capable of being wrong as everyone else. Don't forget: before Biden's surge, Bernie was either right on his tail or past him in the black vote. This narrative that Bernie or the progressive movement couldn't get minority votes is a vicious lie that erases the black and brown progressives across this country who support him.
Having lived most of my life in Latin America (Chile), let me hazard a guess about Latinx voters. Most Latinxs, except the Cubans and Venezuelans who mostly congregate in Florida, come from societies where socialism is not a dirty word and where everyone expects the government to solve the kind of social problems that Sanders proposes that the government deals with, for example, education and healthcare.
Sanders praised the Cuban educational system and received a barrage of criticism from "moderate" Democrats. Everyone in Latin American knows that the Cuban educational and healthcare systems are excellent. Chileans go to Cuba for certain types of surgery and for abortions and I assume people do so from other Latin American countries where access to abortion is limited (as in Chile) or completely prohibited. Even rightwing Chilean senator Andres Allamand went to Cuba for some special medical treatment for his son (I don't recall the exact problem), which was not available in Chile.
Yes, I too thought that Sanders being Jewish might have had an impact, but I didn't dare to say that.
Sparks,
Point taken.
Just to be clear, I already voted for Warren. If Biden is the nominee in November, I will vote for him. If Sanders is the nominee, I will vote for him. In the meantime, I'll probably be thinking about Congressional campaigns or some other endeavor not directly related to the Presidential campaign.
I particularly appreciate Sparks's adjuration not to talk too casually about "the Black vote," or, to extend his point, not to talk too casually about the "X vote." It seems to me that is a sloppy way of thinking/talking we've taken over from the pollsters, a way which, to go back to one of Ed's points, all too readily mirrors and encourages identity politics.
Otherwise, am I wrong to imagine that yesterday's results have been as traumatic for those of us who think of ourselves as being on the left as the 2016 election outcome was for the mainstream liberals? Are we in danger of spending the next many years looking for some scapegoat? I hope not.
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