To My Friends Who Are Bernie Beliebers

I have many friends who are supporters of Senator Bernie Sanders. I have many other friends who are supporters of Hillary Rodham Clinton—as am I. I have a smaller but still nice set of friends who are supporters of various Republican candidates. The GOP candidates have been for the most part self-parodying, so I won't go into them here. But I have been troubled by the bullying, dream-fulfillment approach of some of the Sanders people. Yesterday, in an exchange on my Facebook page, I wrote the following:

For all the revolutionary talk, consider: the last progressive U.S. president to push through a big-scale change was FDR. He had help from a shattered economy (so lots of scared people) and, most important, huge majorities in the U.S. Congress. Sanders would have neither. 

Not only that, he would need to have rock-ribbed support from whatever Democrats are in the U.S. Congress, and he wouldn't have that. He hasn't even been a Democrat, fer cryin' out loud, and those congressmen and -women need to know that the president will be on the stump in their districts supporting them at re-election time, when you can bet there would be an extremely well-funded right-wing reaction that would make the tea party movement look like a bunch of marxists. 

Those congresspeople would have to know he would raise a ton of money for them to withstand the withering attacks of the right wing reaction. They would have to know that he would have a national messaging effort that could talk to the entire Democratic coalition and could reach beyond; Sanders has the hard-core left of the party, but hasn't gone beyond that. No, momentum isn't luring adults to his banner. 

I understand the thrill of thinking your candidate will lead a revolution that will change all. I wanted John Anderson in 1980 and Gary Hart in 1984. But I also know politics (as does Hillary, but y'all hold that against her), and Bernie has no more chance of (a) becoming president (sorry, the rest of the country isn't Iowa and New Hampshire) or (b) if lightning struck and he somehow got the nomination and his opponent was Ted Cruz or some other whackjob so he was able to win the general election, he wouldn't be able to put his "revolution" into effect. 

Other than that, party on, dudes. 

But also please understand that most of the vitriol that the Bernie Sanders crowd is throwing at Hillary Clinton is regurgitated lies straight out of the playbook of Karl Rove's GOP machine, and the debunkers are getting tired of debunking the stuff you all were supposed to be paying attention to all these many years.

And, serendipitously, right after I posted the above message, I happened to stumble across this article that illustrates just how unable Sanders will be to do the party support work I discuss above. In it, a longtime Vermont journalist who had many interactions with Sanders, recounts how Sanders got irate when he was asked why he didn't lend support to other progressives.

I asked about his unwillingness to endorse his fellow progressives. He said it wasn't his role. I suggested voters might expect him to weigh in. He disagreed, clearly annoyed at the persistent questioning. Finally I suggested that he had a larger moral responsibility to the progressive movement. At which point he jumped out of his seat, told me to go f*** myself and stormed out of the edit board meeting.

The writer, Mickey Hirten, then goes on to highlight reporting by others about Sanders' inability to reach out and support others. Read the full article and judge for yourself.

So when you hear stories about Hillary Clinton going around and raising money for other down-ticket candidates, think twice about just concluding that she's a political machine beholden to monied interests. She's building the best support in Congress she can get, because she'll need them to stick with her when things get tough. And things always get tough for every president.

If you support Bernie Sanders, good for you. I do not dislike the man, and I do agree that he is highlighting some very important things that are wrong with our country. That does not mean I have to believe he has the best plans for dealing with it, nor does it make me conclude that he has the personal abilities to deal with it.

It'll all come out in the primaries.

Barack to Clint: Right Back Atcha

We've all known Clint Eastwood is a Republican. He's been a public (and at one point publicly elected) GOP person for decades. And he's earned respect even from his political opposites because of his integrity and independence. I'll say I agree with him on a lot of things; disagree with him on a few important things, so we'll each be voting for different candidates this November. Fair enough.

But, oh dear, did he not do himself or his legacy any good last night with his speech to the Republican National Convention. Worse for him, he didn't do his preferred candidate any good.

The Democrats are having a field day. (I liked the simple "Wow" of one deputy Obama campaign manager in response to the speech, or the campaign's statement that they would refer questions about Eastwood's speech to surrealist Salvador Dali.) And here's President Obama's response to Clint Eastwood's empty-chair ramble:

Courtesy Towleroad.

DC3's Newest Copilot

Also in this issue of the Marina Times, I spoke with rising local politician Kat Anderson.

Kat Anderson’s task for DC3: Unity  

by John Zipperer 

With the election of Marina resident Kat Ander-son to San Francisco’s Democratic County Central Committee (DC3), the City’s Democrats have put one more piece in place for ending what has been at times a destructive intraparty contest. 

Anderson, who was sworn into office July 25 for a two-year term, said it is time the City’s left-wing and moderate sides of the Democratic Party stop fighting ...

Read the entire article

Now I Really Believe in Evolution

New bumper sticker idea: "I believe in evolution, and I vote"

Because.

Note to Politicians: Ignore the Young

Is it finally time to end our fascination with the youth vote?

During the 2008 Democratic primary campaign, I had an ongoing friendly debate with an Obama-supporting friend. I, a Clinton supporter, argued in favor of Hillary's experience, pragmatism, and general outlook. My friend was smitten by Obama's newness and optimism.

A recurring theme in any such discussion of Obama's 2008 campaign is its strong appeal to young voters. I acknowledged that at the time, but I warned my friend that young people are fickle in their political involvement. The real test for them would not be if they could stay sober enough and put down the Wii controls long enough to head to the voting booths in November 2008, but it would come two and four years later, when their naive assumptions about how Obama would govern would be tested by the necessary compromises and inevitable defeats along the way.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but I was correct. Sadly so, because I think Obama's a very fine president and I fully expect vote for him again in 2012. But young voters were one of the heavily underrepresented populations in the recent midterm elections.

So is it finally time to stop worshipping at the alter of youth? I know that's a terribly un-American thing to say, but if your campaign (and eventual re-election) is based on getting support from people who ultimately don't believe in the responsibilities of voting and representative government, then doesn't that suggest a flaw in your strategic governing approach?

During the 2008 Democratic primary season, The New Republic's Leon Wieseltier wrote a rather good short essay entitled "Forever Young." Responding to the Obama supporters' desire for newness, freshness, someone untainted by actual experience, he argued that there can be something as too young:

"False hopes?" Obama told a crowd in New Hampshire. "There's no such thing." How dare he? There is almost no more commonplace trait of human existence (and of African American existence) than false hopes. … After Bush, who is not for a fresh start? But there is something unfresh about Obama's movement for freshness. … [C]an we agree on a ground between cynicism and myth? Or must we have Camelot once more? After all, being young again is also a way of living in the past. There was something mildly farcical about the Kennedys' endorsement of Obama – of this candidacy that is alleged to signify an alternative to the dynasties, and a break with ideological antiquity; but worst of all was its brazen delight in mythologization. (Thanks to the Obama campaign, millions of Americans now hold that John Kennedy was a great president and that Lyndon Johnson was not responsible for making civil rights and voting rights into law.) I understand that no one, except perhaps Lincoln, ever ran for the presidency on a tragic sense of life; but if it is possible to be too old in spirit, it is possible also to be too young.

It's not that young people don't vote. It's that you can't talk about young people (let's just roughly define them as people from 18 to 30 years of age) without piling on the qualifiers. They don't vote much. They don't vote consistently. They aren't informed enough when they vote. They lack long-term perspective about the effects of their votes. Even if you try to qualify the qualifiers by pointing out the dreadful ignorance of most voters, it doesn't help to correct it even further and say that young people are even worse.

I don't mean to hold up Wieseltier as any great sage; I think he's gone over to the demagogic side of life in recent years, which puts the nail in the coffin of my former reverence for The New Republic (my political bible during the 1980s). But I think he puts it nicely about the deficiencies in this endless (and groundless) belief in the virtues of newness and youth. I would take that line of argument further and say there's a related problem: the American faith in the virtue of fast decisions, in fast results.

People who don't vote often and are only induced to vote when they're unnaturally angry or unnaturally inspired are also people who will not stick with the political process for their problems to be sorted out the way problems have been sorted out for centuries in civil societies: slowly, patiently, frankly conservatively, and usually the fairer for it.

Corina Casanova, the federal chancellor of Switzerland, recently compared California's love of citizen initiatives with her own country's famed use of such direct democracy. There were many similarities between the two political systems, she noted, but Switzerland is willing to invest more time in considering each initiative and trying to come up with alternatives, counter-proposals, and compromises that suit everyone. As a result, many of the initiatives are ultimately withdrawn, many more have compromises and counter-proposals debated and voted on by the government, and fewer than 10 percent win voter approval. Compare that to California's more do-it-now, don't-consider-the-alternatives system, in which one-third of initiatives are voter-approved but there is no system to work out compromise and deal with the underlying difficulties that created the citizen demand for the initiative in the first place. "The essential consequence of this cultural difference is that considerably longer periods of time are allotted in Switzerland for the handling of popular initiatives," Casanova said.

Time is a buzz-kill. You can't keep people with short attention spans interested when problems move beyond the emotional chest-beating stage and turn into committee hearings and legislative wrangling. Sooner or later, you need adults to do the hard work, and if you've only voted in people who are "forever young," then you're in trouble.

California Politicalanalia

Politics isn't pretty, even if many of the youthful (read: naive) supporters of Obama thought so. They know that in Chicago and New York. The should know it in California, but they keep forgetting it (which is, I guess, part of the state's charm to many people).

Back in 2000, when George W. Bush's political team and GOP activists defeated Al Gore's team in the Florida election debacle, writer Molly Ivins quipped, "These Gore people have no idea how to steal an election. What happened to the Democrats? They used to have some skill at this."

When the Tea Party and the Republican Party made a mockery of the congressional town hall meetings two Augusts ago, I was stunned that the Democrats were completely taken by surprise and seemed unable to stand up to the political thugs who were derailing the public health-care debate. Only Rep. Barney Frank, bless 'im, slapped them back with the force they deserved.

Now in California, we have an "October surprise" sprung on billionaire GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman, in which a former housekeeper is claiming that Meg knew the housekeeper was an illegal alien when she worked for the zillionaire for nine years. Whitman not only says that's not true, but she blames her opponent, Democrat Jerry Brown, for pushing the story.

My thought: I kind of hope Brown is behind it. Or, at least, I hope the Brown campaign has the political toughness to be capable of playing hardball with Whitman's camp, which has been slandering Brown and his supporters for months.

What? you say. Aren't you Mr. Good Government? Yes, and thank you for remembering. But this isn't a case of the housekeeper's story being totally manufactured; both sides agree on large parts of it, and frankly my interpretation is that it's probably not as bad as the housekeeper (or her celebrity-hunting lawyer) alleges, but it's certainly not as good as Whitman and her money-machine claim. In fact, the only thing that makes me think the Brown camp might have had anything to do with it is that it extremely conveniently broke in the news the week before the Brown-Whitman debate on Spanish-language media. Yes, it could have happened that way without Brown's fingerprints, but it does seem a bit suspicious. Then again, Whitman has repeatedly failed to offer any evidence of her claim that the Brownies are behind the story, so Whitman's reckless allegations might end up being Brown's biggest defense.

But regardless of who pushed the story, it serves Brown's needs. Even if it doesn't dramatically dent Whitman's already thin support among Hispanic voters, it has derailed her message for at least a week and likely for a bit more. She has had to go on the defensive, instead of speaking her robotically repetitive talking points about her gubernatorial plans.

So, whether the state Democrats have rediscovered how to play hardball, or if it was just good timing, or even if there is no direct wrongdoing proved by Meg Whitman, this story has served a higher purpose.

Sen. Barbara Boxer: Senate Filibuster Abused, But It Has Its Place

So I guess this is turning into a political blogging day. I didn't plan it that way, but let's just go with it.

Barbara Boxer, Democratic U.S. senator from California, was asked today about the filibuster, which allows a senator or a party to hold up all action on a bill it dislikes.

Responding to an audience question at San Francisco's Commonwealth Club, a public forum, she said the filibuster has its place. The problem, she said, is that it's being abused just to be obstructive. The filibuster formerly was used rarely and for major points of contention between the parties in the Senate, she said, but now "it's being used on motions to adjourn."

Boxer also shared her suggestions about ways to reform the filibuster process. "I think you should have to stand on your feet all night if you want to filibuster," she said. Boxer added that the number of votes required to end a filibuster should be reduced from 60 to 55, which would still present enough of a hurdle to protect the minority party.

Conservative Democrats Scared of Pelosi, Clueless about Politics

Politico's main story this morning declares that weaker Democrats are trying to distance themselves from Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. This will supposedly protect them from "charges that they are beholden to the unpopular House leader and supportive of the ambitious national Democratic agenda."

Okay, two things.

First, Nancy Pelosi is the only reason the Democrats have a successful agenda. She doesn't begin with the weak assumption that the GOP is going to help; she welcomes their input and support, but she doesn't cave to their demands. As a result, millions more people will have longer and healthier lives and not be taken to the cleaners to pay for outrageous health-care bills. As a result of Pelosi, we got financial regulation reform for the first time in, what, seven decades? As a result of Pelosi, the government has reigned in some abuses of the student loans system. As a result of Pelosi, the government prevented a Great Recession from becoming another Great Depression. Yeah, run from that "ambitious" record if you want, but since your Republican opponent is already running against it, you've already lost your re-election, Mr./Ms. Conservative Democrat.

Second, this just makes me think that too many Democrats simply don't know how to be politicians. They think it's an office job (with lots of fundraising dinners). They forget that it's a matter of convincing people – hundreds of thousands of people, maybe millions – that they are worth supporting, that their prescriptions for laws are worth supporting.

The Republicans, of course, know it's a pitched battle, and they have played their weak hand absurdly well. It is hard to imagine a party and ideology that were still viable despite having been as discredited as the Republicans are now, following the failure of their economic and foreign policies (policies which have hastened the relative decline of this country – so much for country first). It's like Kaiser Wilhelm making a triumphant return to Berlin in 1923. Michael Foot moving into Number 10 Downing Street in 1983.  It's like Mikhail Gorbachev becoming Russian Federation president in 1992. But the Republicans are currently up in those generic congressional polls that measure basic public feelings toward the two parties, so some Democrats are losing their heads. They shouldn't. They should embrace their ambitious agenda and actually sell it. If they're politicians, that's what their supposed to be able to do.

But too many of the Democrats are clueless about their chosen profession. These are the people, after all, who were blindsided by the manufactured fury of the health-care town halls from August 2009, with only Rep. Barney Frank having the guts and brains to go face-to-face with a crackpot protestor. They should look to Pelosi's legislative success for answers to their cluelessness. They should look to Barney Frank (and senators Feingold and Franken and others) for alternatives to their flailing around. Because if the Democrats lose control of either house of Congress this year, it'll be a major self-inflicted wound, not of too much ambition, but of too little brains and guts.

Arlen Specter Switches Parties

The New York Times is reporting a huge breaking news story: Republican Sen. Arlen Specter is going to switch parties and become a Democrat. That, together with Al Franken's win in the Minnesota race, would give the Democrats their filibuster-proof 60 votes in the Senate.

More here.

Arianna Huffington on Why the GOP Is in Dire Straits

Huffington Post Editor Arianna Huffington spoke today at The Commonwealth Club of California. As part of her tour for her latest book (Right Is Wrong), she was making her case that the far right has taken over the Republican Party and driven it over a cliff.
Watch the video clip. More to come.

New Hampshire Primary Night

Hooray.

Iowa Caucus Night

Ugh.