Delaware Liberal

Open Thread for Wednesday, June 8, 2016

Delaware Dem

NY.Times

So that’s it. It’s over. Pardons of course to the residents of the District of Columbia who get to vote next week, but it’s over. Hillary won a rather commanding double digit victory in California, won close races in South Dakota and New Mexico, lost a close race in Montana, lost a caucus in North Dakota, and scored a Maryland-style blowout win in New Jersey. In so doing, she clinches majority leads in the popular votes, in states/territories won, in pledged delegates, in all delegates. By every single metric there is, she is the nominee.

And I hope everyone takes a minute, to reflect on that. We have just nominated the first woman Presidential candidate to lead our party in American history. What took us so long? It is a historic moment that will be remembered by our great grand children. It will be in the history books. Indeed, we are living in an era right now that will be spoken of in 100 years with awe. The election of the nation’s first black President followed by the election of the first woman President. Stop and appreciate it for a little bit.

I fell asleep before Bernie’s speech last night, but I have seen it described as a deescalation of tensions if not the beginning of a stand down. Senator Sanders is due to meet in Washington tomorrow, at his request, with the President of the United States and Senator Harry Reid. I expect that during both meetings with Obama and Reid, Bernie will be offered incentives to bow out gracefully now. Everything from certain platform concessions, changes to the primary process, and declarations that he will be the leader of the Congressional Progressive Caucus and the Progressive Wing of the party, and encouraging him and Jane to form a progressive campaign organization that will elect mini-Bernies across the land. Where there are carrots, there are also sticks to make it apparent to Bernie that if a graceful exit is not achieved, there will be consequences. But let’s be positive and not speak of that right now. I choose to believe that Bernie, after resting and reflecting after some much need sleep, will do the right thing.

That said, there is an aspect of the end of campaigns that is unpleasant: the losing campaign’s postmortem. I hesitate to post this link to the blockbuster Politico piece on the last days of the Bernie Sanders campaign, because I really don’t want to be seen as a sore winner, because I am not. But I think a number of people, myself included, diagnosed Bernie Sanders and his campaign exactly as described in the article, and speaking for myself, it was one of the reasons I did not support his candidacy. I post the article here because it is being widely talked about today, and we all here are political junkies, and campaign postmortems, even unflattering ones, are part of the process. Hell, Hillary had her own unflattering postmortem in 2008.

Ezra Klein says it is time to admit that Hillary Clinton is an extraordinarly talented politician:

There is something about Clinton that makes it hard to appreciate the magnitude of her achievement. Or perhaps there is something about us that makes it hard to appreciate the magnitude of her achievement.

Perhaps, in ways we still do not fully appreciate, the reason no one has ever broken the glass ceiling in American politics is because it’s really fucking hard to break. Before Clinton, no one even came close.

Whether you like Clinton or hate her — and plenty of Americans hate her — it’s time to admit that the reason Clinton was the one to break it is because Clinton is actually really good at politics.

She’s just good at politics in a way we haven’t learned to appreciate.

Taegan Goddard:

The Republican party is a bitterly divided party with no core beliefs unifying their elected officials, big money donors and rank-and-file voters.

Hillary Clinton has already discovered that almost all issues can be wedge issues in the presidential race. She has just begun to hammer away at the divisions in the party and tear them open even wider. President Obama will soon join her on the campaign trail to lend a helping hand.

The GOP faces a critical moment as a political party. If they excuse Trump’s behavior — especially his doubling down on racist statements — they’ll own him more than ever. But if they back away as Sen. Lindsey Graham is urging, it’s almost certain they will lose the presidential race.

At some point, they may just need to kill the party and start over.

Karen Tumulty:

Hillary Clinton has been part of our national consciousness for so long that it is easy to forget how far she has pushed the edges. It is not just that she has made history by becoming the first woman to claim the presidential nomination of a major party. Hillary — known on a first-name basis, both by her fervent supporters and by those who despise her — has been the avatar of a different way of thinking about women and what they can do. […]

The arc of her career has not been a graceful one. Again and again, the sequence has been the same: She sets out, stumbles, gets up again, grinds on.

And as she herself has acknowledged, she lacks the natural political talents of the two men against whom she is inevitably measured — the one she married, and the one to whom she lost in 2008. […] It was never much in doubt that she would try again, because that is her laborious way. She is determined to make history, and she has; what she will never do is make it look easy.

Shane Goldmacher points out that one of Bernie Sanders’s historic accomplishments is his massive donor list:

“Campaigns can be ephemeral. They exist. They are very important — the most important thing. And then, win or lose, they go away,” said Erin Hill, ActBlue’s longtime executive director. But the idea of ActBlue is that it lives on, she said, allowing each successive campaign to reap the benefits of the previous cycle.

The Sanders camp knows that, long after the Democratic primary is over, this is the key part of the digital inheritance it is leaving for the political left.

“Sen. Sanders’ participation in building up the Democratic fundraising ecosystem will pay dividends for progressive candidates up and down the ballot for years to come,” predicted Kenneth Pennington, digital director for the Sanders campaign.

Lisa Belkin interviews Jane Sanders, who seems for her part to be winding down and moving on to another project:

“It’s not just about winning the presidency, it’s about changing our country to have it be what we all want it to be and know it can be,” she says. “As president, he’d want an outside, really organized group of people helping support him, moving it in the direction of the issues that he’s talked about. And if he’s not the nominee, it will be him leading that group, leading that transformation.”

She’s been spending some time noodling on the details of such a group — something like MoveOn or Organizing for Action, but with a Sanders-issues focus. “It’s something I’ve thought about and will be able to bring to him at a future moment, not in the middle of a campaign. This is something we will move on regardless of the outcome of this election, and I will definitely be involved in that.”

Good. That is what Bernie and Jane Sanders should be doing. Take that huge donor and email list and elect Progressives up and down the ballot. I have no problem with that. It will make a President Hillary Clinton’s job easier.

James Fallows analyzes Trumps’ attacks:

[W]hat’s clear about Trump’s argument, and what is deeply un-American about it, is its essentialism. Trump is saying that because of who you are, in an ethnic or hereditary sense, he will make judgments about what you think and what role in society you can play. The related assumption, as Garrett Epps explains to irrebuttable effect, is that people’s public roles cannot be separated from their ethnic or religious identities. A “Mexican” judge will think and act as a Mexican, not as a judge. There is no more un-American concept.

Jonathan Bernstein on Republigeddon:

Donald Trump is having his third consecutive terrible week.

Over the weekend, Republicans who have endorsed him slammed him for his bigoted comments about Gonzalo Curiel, the judge who is overseeing the fraud case against Trump University.

Then Bloomberg Politics reported on a conference call Monday between Trump and his surrogates in which Trump dismissed the criticism of his attack on Curiel and blasted his own campaign for (sensibly) telling them to change the subject away from why “Mexicans” can’t be fair judges.

Added to all this are more details (via MSNBC) on how Trump barely has a campaign, something I mentioned last week.

I don’t think the Republicans who chose to accept Trump as a done deal in April are at a panic point yet, but it’s worth noting: All it would take to dump him in Cleveland would be a vote to free the delegates, followed by having at least half of the convention oppose him on the first ballot.

Dana Milbank:

A confluence of three factors has caused a sudden and sharp change in Trump’s fortunes. The media scrutiny has increased significantly since he secured the nomination, and journalists, rather than chasing his outrage du jour, are digging in to report more on Trump University, Trump’s stiffing of charities, his lies and his racism. Hillary Clinton has, finally, made the shift to attacking Trump vigorously over his instability. And Republicans are, belatedly, discovering that their presidential candidate wasn’t putting on a show during the GOP primaries: He’s an actual racist.

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