The Abbreviated Pundit Round-up is a regular morning feature of Daily Kos.
Steven Zunes at TruthOut writes—Sanders Is Not Another McGovern. I Know—I Worked on McGovern’s Campaign:
With Bernie Sanders now the clear front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination, we are hearing talk that — despite polls indicating otherwise — he would not be able to win against Donald Trump in November. Repeated comparisons are being made to the 1972 landslide defeat of George McGovern — the only time the Democrats nominated a genuine progressive — with the implication that a similar fate would befall a Sanders nomination.
Speaking as a political scientist, as someone who is not voting for Sanders in the primary, and as a longtime Democratic activist who worked on McGovern’s campaign and was a friend and collaborator with the late senator, I can say there is no justification for the comparison.
First, that election was 48 years ago. Polls show that Americans are closer on the issues to those articulated by Sanders today than Americans were to those championed by McGovern in 1972. Same with important Democratic-leaning constituencies. For example, the AFL-CIO, then dominated by Cold Warriors, refused to endorse McGovern. By contrast, today’s unions are far more progressive and are likely to actively mobilize their resources for Sanders.
Second, Richard Nixon — unlike Trump — was a very popular president at that time. McGovern never came close to leading Nixon in a single poll. Trump, by contrast, has had the most consistently low popularity ratings of any president, and polls have shown Sanders topping him by wider margins than any of his Democratic rivals.
More importantly, McGovern’s progressivism was not primarily responsible for his defeat. [...]
Those who trumpet McGovern’s loss generally fail to mention that when more progressive Democrats were defeated in the primaries because voters were convinced that they needed a “moderate” at the helm, they have usually lost. Examples include 1968, 1980, 1988, 2000, 2004 and 2016.
Rebecca Traister at New York magazine writes—You Believe He’s Lying?’ The latest debate captured Americans’ exhausting tendency to mistrust women:
Chris Matthews finally contributed something meaningful to 2020 political analysis on Tuesday night when, during his post-debate conversation with Elizabeth Warren, he put on display the very attitudes that have given rise to the controversial phrase “believe women.”
Matthews was questioning Warren about her citation, during the debate, of a 1998 lawsuit in which Sekiko Sakai Garrison, a former employee of Michael Bloomberg, alleged that upon hearing that she was pregnant, he suggested that she “kill it.”
In the post-debate interview, Matthews pressed Warren on this reference, which Bloomberg has denied, and denied again onstage when Warren brought it up, as if he simply could not believe his ears.
“You believe that the former mayor of New York said that to a pregnant employee?” Matthews asked. Warren replied, “Well, a pregnant employee sure said that he did,” and then, signaling that this exchange could go deeper, asked Matthews coolly, “Why shouldn’t I believe her?” [...]
Just as Warren was affirming that, indeed, “pregnancy discrimination is real,” he interrupted her: “You believe he’s that kind of person, who did that?” he asked. Again, Warren said, “Pregnancy discrimination is real,” and noted that the exchange they were having on air was itself part of the larger pattern that has permitted this kind of unfair treatment to continue, even after it became officially illegal in 1978, noting how often she has heard, “We can’t really believe the women. Really? Why not?”
But Matthews was living the dream — of continuing to not believe it. “You believe he’s lying?” he asked.
“I believe the woman …” Warren said.
“You believe he’s lying,” Matthews interjected, just making triple sure.
“… Which means he’s not telling the truth,” finished Warren.
Gail Collins at The New York Times writes—Let’s Call It Trumpvirus. If you’re feeling awful, you know who to blame.
E.J. Dionne Jr. writes—Democrats are dealing with a generational divide:
The chaotic frenzy of the Democrats’ South Carolina debate dramatized a generational crisis and a divisive conflict over how damaging the word “socialist” will be in a general election.
There was also this: No candidate other than Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has assembled a coherent and sustainable coalition.
These problems are related because whether Sanders can defeat President Trump — the preoccupation of a large majority of Democratic voters — depends on whether he can rally a large new pool of younger voters to the polls in November.
The evidence so far is not encouraging. Yes, Sanders is the overwhelming favorite among the young, but a huge wave of new voters under 35 has yet to materialize in the first contests.
David Wallace-Wells at New York magazine writes—What Coronavirus Teaches Us About Climate Change:
[...] Not all that long ago, climate change was a story unfolding only in the future tense. Now that it has begun roaring into the present with a terrifying fury, the matter of reducing warming through decarbonization (often called “mitigation”) has been displaced, to a degree, in the public conversation among policymakers, advocates, investors, and futurists. There is more and more talk now, instead, about what’s called “adaptation” — not how to reduce carbon emissions to limit warming, but how to adapt to a world defined by climate pummeling in ways that would allow us to endure those blows. This shift has been most pronounced among the world’s conservatives — it has been the basic response of Australian prime minister to his country’s devastating fires, for instance — but it is not a perspective confined to the right. [...]
At first blush, these proposals can look like good ideas — using technological know-how and capital resources we have today to forestall and protect against the impacts we know to expect in the medium-term future. Some of them may even prove unavoidable, as climate change impacts accumulate (I have a hard time imagining New York City not building some kind of sea wall over the next few decades, for instance). But that doesn’t mean they are a substitute for decarbonization or mitigation, for two main reasons. First, adaptation projects are already astronomically expensive, and delaying decarbonization will only make them more so (and make many more of them necessary). Second, they are all inevitably limited to some degree in scope, which means they represent a choice about who to protect and who to expose. Adaptation may sound like a solution to climate change, or at least a way to avoid the need for rapid decarbonization. It isn’t. When it comes to adaptation, there are no good options, only ways of prioritizing particular catastrophes, and communities, over others. [...]
Justin Gillis at The New York Times writes—Would You Pay Higher Gas Prices to Slow the Climate Crisis? Governors in Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States are pondering that question:
A plan is under development in about a dozen Northeast and Mid-Atlantic States to tackle the country’s biggest source of greenhouse emissions, cut road congestion, clean up the air, improve public transit and ramp up electric cars.
Improbably, a Republican governor is helping to lead the way among his mostly Democratic regional neighbors. But despite this alliance, the politics are tricky.
The plan would cost money, and to pay for it, the price of gasoline at the pump would rise in participating states. The financing measure is not a gas tax, strictly speaking, but it would have a similar effect, increasing prices perhaps 8 or 9 cents a gallon.
The governors may be casting a wary eye across the Atlantic. In France, President Emmanuel Macron’s plan to place a green tax on fuel in 2018 set off the Yellow Vest movement, which quickly turned into a broad protest against inequality. The fee under consideration by the governors would be much smaller, but sensible politicians certainly need to be careful about new measures that burden working people. In this case, the payoff — investments in modernizing transportation — would be enormous.
Many citizens who care about the environment seem not to have heard of this plan. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said of the climate disinformation network founded by Charles Koch and his brother David, who died last year. That network and allied groups are working to kill the measure, with at least 18 right-leaning organizations in the region — some of them merely Koch front groups — blitzing newspapers with letters and cajoling motorists to badger politicians to stop the effort.
Leonard Pitts Jr. at the Miami Herald writes—Sanders’ most rabid fans on the left no improvement over Trump’s on the right:
Sanders’ believers — the word is apt — seem to regard the democratic socialist as He Who May Not Be Questioned. Which is at odds with what a presidential primary is supposed to be. His candidacy — like all candidacies — should expect robust cross examination.
On age, for example. At the end of a second term, Sanders would be within hailing distance of 90. How old is too old? And can Sanders, an independent, lead the Democrats, a party to which he does not belong? Then there’s his recent tin-eared praise of Fidel Castro, which, putting it mildly, will not be helpful to him or the Democrats with Cuban-American voters in Florida.
And here, let’s say the obvious: No terrorist group or foreign power poses this country a greater threat than its president. Therefore, it is a patriotic necessity to vote for whomever opposes him in November. That includes Sanders. Heck, it includes Mr. T. and Doctor Doom.
Still, it’s hard not to believe that Sanders could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters — and to wonder how we should feel about that. Not that their devotion is hard to understand. You get sick of seeing them that’s got, get and them that’s not — meaning you, your neighbors, your kin — lose buying power, college dreams, homes, health. That’s why there’s a Fight for $15 and a new Poor People’s Campaign. It’s why Sanders’ promises — free college, healthcare, childcare — resonate.
Will Bunch at The Philadelphia Inquirer writes—Media, political elites who didn’t see Trump in 2016 are blowing it again with Bernie Sanders:
Like most journalists who write about national politics, I was multitasking Monday night — my right eye on the ever-flowing stream of bile, with the occasional floating pearl, known as Twitter, and my left eye on cable news. There, a stream of mostly Boomer-era commentators could only talk about one thing: Could any Democrat can find the mojo — for the love of God! — to stop the party from nominating Sen. Bernie Sanders in Milwaukee?
But on my laptop screen was something jarring — the kind of story that you’d think might dent these news channels that have to fill up 24 hours of airtime … and yet somehow never does. In Charlotte, N.C. — the city where President Trump will be crowned by the GOP for a second term in August amid boasts of a booming economy — a downtown auto dealer has begun letting homeless people sleep in his unsold cars.
It’s hard to say what was more striking about the Charlotte Observer piece on Kiplin Automotive Group and its compassionate general manager James Charles — that about a dozen folks, some with children, have been allowed to sleep in their cars on his lot. Most of them are off gone by 7:30 a.m. Why? Because most have jobs. These homeless people, including a number of young people starting their careers, simply can’t afford the rent in a booming Sunbelt metropolis.
I don’t know if any of these souls will be voting in North Carolina’s upcoming Democratic primary, let alone whether they’d back the leading leftist choice in that race, Vermont’s Sanders. But I do know this: The sense of fundamental unfairness in this country — epitomized not just by the unhoused sleeping on car seats in a supposed “boomtown,” but also by staggering college debt, medical bankruptcies, and a lack of child care — is fueling a political revolution that has put Sanders on a White House trajectory.
Tim Wu at The New York Times writes—Quantifying Liberal ‘Suckerdom’ Do the primaries suggest that Democrats should be sick of being reasonable?
[...] [N]ew empirical research suggests: Liberals tend to be suckers.
Understanding this suckerdom, and the emerging urge from progressives to avoid it, may be one key to understanding the 2020 primaries, and the rise of uncompromising figures like Bernie Sanders. Sanders may be, as his critics say, incapable of working with others. But for progressive Democrats sick of losing for decades on end, that’s actually his selling point.
Three professors, Kristen Underhill, Ian Aryes and Pranav Bhandarkar, studied legislative compromise by studying sunsets: agreements to make a law lapse after a certain number of years. Agreeing to something you don’t like, so long as it is time-limited is a way to be open-minded and allow a law that one might personally disagree with to be tried out for a while. Their most striking finding is that self-identified liberals have been more willing to let conservative priorities be enacted, so long as there’s a sunset.
In contrast, conservatives tend to simply reject liberal proposals, no matter what. Hence, the authors have managed to quantify liberal suckerdom, concluding that “sunset clauses tend to induce a broader range of compromise beliefs and significantly more compromise support for conservative legislation, compared to liberal legislation.”
Matt Karp at Jacobin writes—Slavery Was Defeated Through Mass Politics:
In the middle decades of the nineteenth century, the United States was the largest, strongest, and richest slave society in the history of the modern world. By 1860 nearly four million enslaved laborers, valued collectively at over three billion dollars, produced an agricultural product that accounted for well over half of American global exports. The United States did not stand alone as a major slaveholding society — the slave economies of Brazil and Cuba were also booming — but it was unquestionably the most dynamic and influential in world affairs. At a moment when there were more enslaved workers and more slave-produced goods than ever before, the political and economic power of the United States led the way.
The recent flood of scholarship on this general subject, devoted to the intimate historical relationship between slavery and capitalism, would not have surprised contemporary observers. “So long as slavery shall possess the cotton-fields, the sugar-fields, and the rice-fields of the world,” declared New York Senator William Seward in 1850, “so long will Commerce and Capital yield it toleration and sympathy.” Today economic historians continue to debate the nature of this relationship: in what ways did enslaved African labor fuel and shape capitalist development, both in the United States and across the broader Atlantic World? It is not the purpose of this essay to intervene in that important debate. Instead I will take up the challenge posed by Seward in the next sentence of that same 1850 speech, in which he contemplated not the economic structures that gave slavery its power, but the political effort necessary to overthrow it: “Emancipation,” said Seward, “is a democratic revolution.” Likening the struggle against American slavery to the struggle against European aristocracy, Seward argued that any challenge to the power of the slaveholding class must come through mass democratic politics.
This political dimension of the question, as James Oakes has observed, has often gone missing from the recent debates around slavery and capitalism in the United States. And yet in some ways it is the politics of antislavery, more than the economics of slavery itself, that made the mid-nineteenth-century American experience so distinctive. The largest and strongest slave society in the modern world history also produced the largest and strongest antislavery political movement in modern world history.
Nancy LeTourneau at The Washington Monthly writes—The Political Ramifications of Dramatic Changes in Suburban America:
While politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and the other members of the so-called “squad” have garnered most of the media attention since the 2018 midterm elections, I have been more interested in newly-elected Democrats like Representative Colin Allred. [...]
In 2018, Allred ran against Republican Pete Sessions in Texas’s 32nd congressional district, which is rated R+5 by the Cook Political Report, and won by over six points. [...]
Allred’s win also puts some cracks in much of the conventional wisdom that has developed lately about the electoral strengths and weaknesses of Democrats. On the surface, it looks like Allred is simply another one of those Democrats who won in suburban districts due to the fact that upper class college-educated white voters have been repelled by the Republican embrace of Donald Trump. That might have been true of some of the people who voted for Allred. But the demographics of his district are a bit more complicated than that.
First of all, the racial demographics of the 32nd district are changing rapidly. At this point, whites are actually a minority at just over 42 percent. Twenty-five percent of the district is Hispanic, with 15 percent African American. According to William Frey, that is indicative of what is happening in other suburban areas.
Suburban America was originally created as a result of white flight from urban areas. But this kind of data demonstrates that many of these congressional districts are in the midst of dramatic change. Candidates like Allred have taken that into consideration and realize the necessity of building a coalition across both race and class lines in order to be politically viable.
Micah L. Sifry at The American Prospect writes—To Change Voters’ Sympathies, It’s Time to Go Deep:
I spent a recent Sunday in Croydon, Pennsylvania, a working-class town along Neshaminy Creek in the southeastern corner of the state, learning and practicing deep canvassing, a promising method for persuading voters to change their minds about politics.
I was there as a volunteer with Changing the Conversation Together (CTC), an independent group that first experimented with deep canvassing in 2018, training several hundred volunteers who fanned out across Staten Island and helped tip that usually Republican House seat into the hands of Democrat Max Rose.
As several studies have shown, deep canvassing, which involves deliberately developing a nonjudgmental, empathetic connection with a voter through 10 to 15 minutes of authentic conversation, can—if done properly—lead to persistent changes in people’s attitudes on issues like immigration and transgender rights. A new peer-reviewed study by academics David Broockman and Josh Kalla, soon to be published in American Political Science Review, replicates those findings and suggests that it is precisely by focusing on having a nonjudgmental attitude and working to make a real connection that canvassers can effectively move the people they talk to.
So far, no one has figured out for sure if deep canvassing can change a voter’s mind about their choice for president, particularly in this polarized age. That’s what I, along with about 80 other volunteers from a couple of Indivisible groups, was there to try.
First, we were asked to talk about love.
Robert Reich at Newsweek writes—Bernie’s Plans Are Ambitious. But Their Costs Are Peanuts Compared to the Price of Inaction:
A Green New Deal might be expensive, but doing nothing about climate change will almost certainly cost far more. If we don't launch something as bold as a Green New Deal, we'll spend trillions coping with the consequences of our failure to be bold.
Medicare for All will cost a lot, but the price of doing nothing about America's increasingly dysfunctional healthcare system will soon be in the stratosphere. A new study in The Lancet estimates that Medicare for All would save $450 billion and prevent 68,000 unnecessary deaths each year.
Investing in universal childcare, public higher education and woefully outdated and dilapidated infrastructure will be expensive too, but the cost of not making these investments would be astronomical. American productivity is already suffering and millions of families can't afford decent childcare, college or housing – whose soaring costs are closely related to inadequate transportation and water systems.
Focusing only on the costs of doing something about these problems without mentioning the costs of doing nothing is misleading, but this asymmetry is widespread.
Journalists wanting to appear serious about public policy continue to rip into Sanders and Elizabeth Warren (whose policies are almost as ambitious) for the costs of their proposals but never ask self-styled moderates like Buttigieg how they plan to cope with the costs of doing nothing or too little.
Moira Donegan at The Guardian writes—Harvey Weinstein went from untouchable to incarcerated. Thank #MeToo:
The conviction is a partial victory for the #MeToo movement, which secured Weinstein’s indictment with tremendous political pressure after the Manhattan district attorney, Cyrus Vance, had declined to bring charges against Weinstein for years, despite mounting evidence of the producer’s sexual misconduct and a taped confession secured by the New York police with the help of one of his victims.
Weinstein, whose crimes were exposed in breakout investigative articles by the New York Times and the New Yorker, was long thought to be immune to justice. His behavior had been an open secret in the industry for years, and many actresses had found that their professional success was tied to their willingness to perform sexual favors for Weinstein or look the other way when he demanded them of others. He was known to punish those who refused with blacklisting and professional disaster. After the Times and New Yorker articles made his behavior public, a slew of women came forward with similar allegations of abuse, coercion, and blackmail by men in their own industries. ]\[...]
If it were not for everything that Weinstein had come to symbolize, it is not clear that charges would have been brought against him at all. That Weinstein was indicted and ultimately convicted is less a testament to the district attorney’s commitment to women’s safety than it is a signal of the emotional and political power that was brought to bear by the #MeToo movement. Weinstein had been untouchable, but then, because of the power brought to bear by women who refused to tolerate or ignore men’s sexual violence against women, he was finally brought to justice. The conviction is less a signal that the criminal justice system can work for victims than a signal that women’s grassroots organizing can accomplish things that would never have otherwise been possible. The symbolic significance of his conviction can’t be overstated: for women, this is a very good day.
Terrell Jermaine Starr at The Root writes—Mike Bloomberg Is Full of Shit and So Are His Surrogates:
On my connecting flight from Atlanta to Columbia, S.C., I sat next to a man who was very musty. But it wasn’t in-your-face musty. It was that type of musty that whisks under your nose when someone walks by the person carrying the offensive odor. On a scale of 1 to 10, this man was around 8. There should be some FAA guidelines barring people too funky to fly because my lungs certainly felt violated during our 40-minute flight.
I’ve learned to hold my breath for at least 45 seconds at a time as a result of that experience.
But there are some people whose odor not only stinks, it STANKS. The odor sits in your clothes to the point where you have to just toss them in the washer. You can’t just leave them on after a short flight, walk into an open, airy space and you are all good. Politicians’ funk wears on the clothes in a similar way, particularly the really bad ones. But they are harder to get ride of because they are elected officials. You are stuck with them until something huge, like a democratic process takes them out of your space, along with their funk. That funky person that we’re all forced to deal with at the moment is former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.
In New York, we had to smell his shitty police and housing policies for three terms. Now he wants to take his stank-ass record with black people to the White House and expect us to believe he is better on black issues than his competitors.