The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    It's all good - for Democracy?

    By PeraclesPlease on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 7:44pm |

    Less than 3 weeks to Iowa, & we're into reading tea leaves and divining political augury. 

    I'll identify a few things in the campaigns & political structure that I find capricious and curious - largely from a Hillary vantage, in case not obvious. Toss your own salad, observations & thoughts, as you please.

    1) Endorsements as persuasion - so far Hillary's picked up 197 current congressional & governor endorsements; Bernie's picked up 2 (+ VP Biden). It's possible to interpret this as "who in federal government will this candidate be able to persuade and work with", yet aside from 538 blog, it's largely ignored.

    2) Unions - judging from Hillary vs. Bernie lists, Hillary has unions with 18 million members behind her, while Bernie has perhaps 1.5 million. There have been complaints that leaders picked HIllary over the wishes of the rank-and-file, but there was no transparency in Sanders' NNU endorsement either. But in current folklore, Sanders' backers are proud & true, Hillary's are a mirage and deceit. Nice spin.

    3) Polls - largely a mess, we're stuck with either individual polls or RCP & Huffpost aggregating the last 3 - no matter how shitty any of the pollsters are, & no attempt to clarify or weight bad polls. Instead, blend it all together and it's all good - yum. Similarly, we can see polls hugely tighten over the last 2 weeks, but polls showing individual matchups of who would win in a year against Republicans are to be believed? Wish I had a lot of used cars to sell people.

    4) Predictions - no attempt to figure out who the likely voters are & what the dynamics will be. Iowa is a caucus - so who's best prepared to coordinate the chaotic process is a hugely important criteria - but crickets on that. New Hampshire has maybe 1/3 independents and anyone can vote in either Dem or Rep primaries. I've seen no analysis about who's likely to go mess with the GOP count (Trump, Cruz, or bore-me-to-tears Bush?) vs. who'll weigh in on the Clinton/Sanders contest. Instead it's simply polling as usual.

    5) Money - at one point the predictions were going around that Sanders would pull in more than Hillary for Q4. Instead beat him by about $4m, plus another $18 million in Democrat-level cash. Had Sanders outraised her, that would have been deafening news all through January. Instead, the opposite is a ho-hum affair. Arguably Sanders can stretch his $28m cash-on-hand farther than Hillary's $38m, but you can imagine him hoping for another Solis Doyle screwup in running out of money early. Unlikely to happen. (she seems to have an 86% burn rate).

    6) Contributions - Bernie prides himself on having mostly small donors - people who didn't max out $2700, so they might give some more - plus to show he's appealing to the common folk, not the big spenders. But Hillary's last quarter had 94% of contributions at $100 or less, and . Any applause? Thought not.

    7) Women - 60% of Hillary's donors last year were women. How does this affect likely voters & the tilt of typical predictions, including get-out-the-vote, organizing caucuses & other activities? Hillary's backing orgs include Planned Parenthood, EMILY's List, NOW, NARAL, the Lesbian PAC & Stonewall LGBT (AZ), a Nevada brothel & the 500,000 strong US Women's Chamber of Commerce.

    8) Ground-game - very few media outlets cover the size and distribution and especially the effectiveness of the door-to-door campaigning (aside from the stories on voter targeting when the December database scandal hit). Earlier there were reports like "overall, Clinton spent more than $76 million last year, with huge investments in digital technology and an on-the-ground network of organizers." - what are the results of such spending from both campaigns? Any perceived efficiencies, advantages, etc.?

    Sadly, the state of analysis across the campaigns is pretty rote and unimaginative. Which considering media hardly covers actual campaign issues, you'd think they might do a better job of covering the horse race. But you'd be wrong.

    Update: 538 decided to say more about the contests & polls & "polls plus", but the main issue someone brings up is that all of the Democratic contests are proportional, not winner-take-all, so it's nearly guaranteed that regular delegates will be fairly evenly split, while Hillary has a big jump on pledged superdelegates thanks to endorsements. That said, if it's close, media will do its best to declare Bernie the winner, even if he's behind on delegates - surpassing expectations, etc.

    Comments

    Let me go through these:

    1) Clinton's overwhelming lead in endorsements could reflect the measured view of well-informed people that she would be a better President.  Or it could mean that they are afraid to buck her and they fear she would retaliate if she becomes President which most everyone has believed was far more likely than that Sanders would become President.  Or it could mean that they believe she would be a better President for them not necessarily a better President for us.  Or it could mean that they believe she would be better for the small number of people who have helped them get into office and whom they wish to help in return.  Or it could mean that they are being told by those self-same funders that they better endorse Clinton.

    2) There was transparency in the NNU endorsement.  On August 25, 2015, I interviewed Deborah Burger the President of the National Nurses United and she outlined for me the process which included many town halls, meetings, and candid conversations with the rank and file.  She had no personal relationship with Bernie Sanders until after the endorsement.

    3) Pollsters do a pretty good job when you aggregate their output.  Currently, the polls show a very significant move over the past week towards Bernie in Iowa and nationally.  He has also solidified his lead in New Hampshire.  The polls also show with a surprising degree of uniformity that Sanders does better than Clinton when matched against various the Republicans leaders.  You are correct that these are close to meaningless but then they do belie any claim that Clinton is more electable don't they?

    4) If your point is we put too much emphasis on the early states, I agree.  But then again Obama's win in Iowa in 2008 made him an immediate threat to Clinton and her win in New Hampshire meant we were in for a slugfest rather than an early Obama wrap-up.  So, the early states really do have a disproportionate impact on the outcome.  If Clinton wins both Iowa and New Hampshire, she will be the overwhelming favorite.  If Sanders wins both, we will probably be in for a long winter. 

    If your point is we can't know who'll win because nobody's asking who's more organized in the states, that's not true.  The chair of the Iowa Democratic Party Chair Andy McGuire was on MSNBC the other day to explain that she was not surprised the race was very close and that all three candidates had done a tremendous job organizing there.  Likewise, the New York Times has a pretty good article out about the efforts of the various campaign efforts in Iowa.

    5) I'm not aware of any predictions that Sanders would outraise Clinton but the fact that he is competitive is truly astonishing and is a major cause of concern in the Clinton camp.  See NY Times article referenced supra.

    6) The vast majority (94%) of Clinton's contributions may come from small donors but she is outpacing Sanders in total amount raked in solely because of the huge contributions coming from the 6% of big donors.  We know this because Sanders has received contributions from well over 2 million people while the total number of people who have contributed to Clinton is a fraction as large.  Her campaign boasts of "hundreds of thousands" of donors.  In other words, absent the big donors, Clinton would be way behind Sanders in fund-raising.

    7) The impact of the gender gap.  This is a great question PP.  What do you think its likely impact will be?  My guess is that without the loyalty of a disproportionately high number of women, Clinton would have no chance to win this race.  So basically, it's a double-edged sword.  Women can keep her in and maybe win it for her but if they begin to abandon her, as they did in 2008, she'll be in a lot of trouble. 

    8) Again we have had reports on the campaigns' ground games and they appear to be strong.  But this too could come back to haunt Clinton.  Expectations for her are legitimately higher.  This is the fourth Presidential campaign she's been very intimately involved in.  Neither O'Malley nor Sanders has run for President  before.  Given Clinton's enormous advantages in cash, name recognition, experience, and the built-in loyalty she has from over 50% of registered voters, If she can't wrap this up relatively early and easily against a democratic socialist, then doesn't this tell us she's not a particularly good candidate?


    by HSG on Tue, 01/12/2016 - 10:18pm

    #! - Fear. Sure. #2 - what are the numbers? "many" meant 7 when I was 3 years old. #3 - polls aggregated together for a year from now are a shittier mess - where' s Ben Carson now? he was a contender 2 months ago. #4 - predictions ignoring bank accounts/cash on hand, organization past the first 2 states, etc. What does Bernie have past the first two states vs. what Obama had? Not even South Carolina, much less Florida & Michigan. #5 - wow, a point of agreement. #6 - absent big funds Hillary would be behind - & the problem is what? she's way ahead. Flip it around & you see Bernie has a problem - and it would be bigger if he won the primaries. #7 - women didn't "abandon" Hillary in 2008 - they had a strong candidate to choose from and she still did better. But see how it looks in 2016. #8 - Bernie's focused on 2 states - Hillary on 50. If he wins, maybe his odds change quickly in others, but there's no huge ground game everywhere else like Obama was able to pull out & his relied on 2 large states disqualified. So since everyone focuses on the first 2 states, and the media loves to play up the opposition, no, it doesn't tell whether a candidate is particularly good or not. Even Iowa & New Hampshire want to prove they're important as much as they care whether they like a particular candidate - every citizen's a rock star every 4 years. BTW - very very white rock stars - so leading to #9:

    9) white audiences - appealing to a very white audience is bad if it's Hillary, good if it's the progressive anti-Hillary. All rather arbitrary rules.

    and 10) media coverage - Hillary has been "losing" every since July or so - her campaign's in free-fall, Joe Biden needs to step in, etc. Aside from 2 weeks in November, there's been very little positive press for her. Bernie's big complaint is that they don't talk about him enough - but he should be careful what he wishes for. Yesterday the New York Times "defended" her with an editorial about Trump that was as slimy towards her as anything Trump had said (minus the "schlong") - she had attacked those women protecting her turf - and managed to drag out "a subject few Americans want to hear about" into another review of the Clintons going back to 1992, quoting Trump profusely while complaining he's dredging up the past, and criticizing Hillary for "attacks on her [husband's] accusers", even re-painting Gennifer Flowers' accusations [12 year affair?] as being true. Yes, news writers can always have it both ways - if someone gets to be sensational and inaccurate, they're the ones, even as they tut-tut the others for starting food fights. Especially the Old Grey Lady.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 1:36am

    That Sanders is a legitimate threat in New Hampshire and Iowa and that he is closing the national gap can only be good things, in my mind.  To put it in pro wrestling terms, Hillary Clinton gains nothing by beating a "jobber" who everybody expects to lose before the bell even rings.  Such a win is a waste of time, it proves nothing, has no drama, doesn't force her to get better or to display good qualities that have been overlooked .  Also, it gives the appearance of a rigged system, which is just not good for somebody who people have watched pursue the presidency for as long as Hillary has.  It turns her into Frank Underwood.

    Besides, I don't want to see Sanders crushed.  He just doesn't deserve that, for one thing.  Also, if he goes back to the senate with increased stature do to his primary performance, that can only be good for a Clinton presidency.

    So, I'm glad we seem to have a race on our hands. She'll still win, though, and needs to stop sending me panicky fundraising emails because I'm not buying it.


    by Michael Maiello on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 8:38am

    Which overlooked good qualities did Hillary display in 2008 in response to the unexpected competition she faced from Barack Obama's? 

    If Clinton does win, the one obvious positive impact of the Sanders' surge will have been that it's forced her to adopt progressive positions that she'll find very difficult to walk back:

    E.g., 1) rejecting expanded fossil fuel extraction, 2) pushing for more restrictions on the biggest banks, 3) opposing the TPP, 4) calling for a 4% income tax surcharge on the wealthiest Americans.


    by HSG on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 11:16am

    Why do you think she'd want to walk this stuff back? She was working progressive causes back in the 70s - you act like Bernie's her Saul Alinsky teacher. Too funny.


    by PeraclesPlease on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 2:27pm

    It is funny.  Also, Hillary Clinton's maturation as a leader since the 2008 loss to Obama seems evident and it all started when she became the epitome of cool as SecState.


    by Michael Maiello on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 5:06pm

    Thanks Mike.  I'm going to chalk "epitome of cool" up as one of those humorous asides I'm too dense to get.  Regarding her "maturation as a leader", I guess this is what you meant by "overlooked qualities" that come to the fore when she loses.  Can we look forward to more maturation over the next few months?

    Regarding the question of why she would want to walk back her recent foray into true progressivism, I think the better question is why wouldn't she.  Nearly all Presidential nominees tend to campaign for President according to the plexiglass principle.  They bounce back to the center after the primaries.  There's no reason to believe Clinton will be any different.

    Moreover, Clinton has never adopted positions as populist as she is now taking.  Remember she was for the TPP and appeared to support the Keystone XL before she was definitively against them.  She opposed raising taxes on investment income above 20% before she supported the current levels of 28% .  Quite simply, she's "moderate and center".


    by HSG on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 6:01pm


    by Michael Maiello on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 8:34pm

    Hal, you have trouble with answers like "I'll look at the situation and see". Hillary blew her reputation over health care when many wouldn't lift a finger or Shalala insisted on "abortion for immigrants", ie the craziest most difficult framing of issues. But you just want a soundbite, not solution, and whatever it is you want it to trash Hillary, so frankly I don't really care about your opinion - you've shown you're just out to find some arbitrary number and peg it on the wall.


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 01/14/2016 - 12:46am

    Agree. So far this is turning out well. I have no problem voting for Bernie if he is the nominee.


    by Oxy Mora on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 8:54pm

    They're two talented people .

    Bernie is a transparently decent one. Hillary may be as well for all we know but in fact, that "all" is very little. Which would also have been the case with any other woman living  with Bill . As with most of the string of  marital- related " abuses" of which Maureen Dowd  reminds us. And reminds us. And re.........At some point Hillary accepted that if she wanted to remain married to this guy,  or better -if she loved this guy- then she had to live the way that any spouse of his would have to live.So she did. And does.

    I don't even speculate about who would be the better president since -of the two -only Hillary can be elected.


    by Flavius on Wed, 01/13/2016 - 10:35pm

    Wow, I just watched a lot of Bowie and rock 'n roll documentaries the last 2 weeks, and they were all full of sex, drugs and rock 'n roll. I didn't think sex in the bathroom stalls or Oval Office changed much of anything. Much of the lbtg rights movement is about fucking, not just marriage, and high up in "what people like to do" from 14 to 90. Angie Bowie lived with David Bowie through all his queer/bi- days and helped him BUILD his career - she & Ronson's wife made him do his Ziggy haircut, thus a star was born. Was she just some groupie that had to accept Bowie or he'd find someone else? Pathetic summation - she picked him up when he was feeling shitty, overall stronger than him in many ways.

    The stupid paleolithic sexism on the left really pisses me off. All the wailing about Trump and the left is frequently as 1950s June Cleaver retarded. People fuck around, have dicks and cunts they need to get off, (females) get abortions, have messy entanglements, and it's just 1 part of them and usually doesn't define their work or their ethics outside of relationships or much of anything else, though women have been putting up with men's shit since we crawled out of trees and men discovered they were bigger and nastier, so please give the misogynistic tut-tutting and marital second-guessing and backseat power relationship doctoring a rest. A man can be divorced 3 times and no one discusses why he did or didn't stay with some woman - they're just fashion accessories, someone in the background presumably raising kids and doing the dishes. Even Bowie had his fashion supermodel trophy wife - that is how our world works.

    [Bowie before & after haircut - with Angie & kid, with Mick - which alien would you follow? and clearly disgusting, that guitar fellatio - what about the message it sends to children & young guitars? think how it's destroyed society since! Reality check - Bowie got more blowjobs in 1 night than Clinton got his whole presidency, and no one remembers Bowie as "oh, he had too much sex and banged an underage girl 3 decades ago and how his wife must have enabled all this tramping around". Bill should have been President of Mars instead - they're a lot more fun up there.]


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 01/14/2016 - 2:49am

    The Clintons' problem is that Bill's side activities are imaginable, thus they will be covered by the press forever.  

    But take Trump and Murdoch---they would have to be pissing straight vodka to get a blowie from one of their Trophies. And who's going to cover that?

    (you are such an inspiration)


    by Oxy Mora on Thu, 01/14/2016 - 9:04am

    Hmmmm, that reminds me of some girls in a club in Vegas, caught me at the door with a 3 foot stream of some red-pink vodka shooter, had me down on my knees in no time flat. [only to get the Trump image out of my head]


    by PeraclesPlease on Thu, 01/14/2016 - 10:47am

    Sadly Angie Bowie's getting trashed by the audience of British Celebrity Big Brother for using Bowie's name all these years instead of switching back - some kind of parasite, eh?

    Except she was with Bowie from April 1969, 2 months before he recorded Space Oddity (the hit version) until the month he started recording Scary Monsters in Feb 1980 - e.g. his creative non-pop years, acting as his default manager & creative director and of course fashion/love partner during some of the earliest of times when in New York at Warhol's with the Velvet Underground & while crafting Ziggy up to the Thin White Duke. Not sure where exactly she was during Bowie's Berlin Trilogy & collaboration with Iggy. But women should just accept their role and move on when they're used up, expecting nothing in return.


    by PeraclesPlease on Sun, 01/17/2016 - 3:04pm