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This is my first post on the US presidential race in four months, which in no way signifies that I have not been following it. Au contraire, I have been riveted to the campaign—borderline obsessed—exchanging views on it regularly with friends and others via email and social media. I watched the first eight debates in full (en différé; catching the highlights of the last two) and have intended to offer my 2¢ on the race at a number of points, but it’s perhaps just as well that I didn’t, as whatever I would have had to say would have been obsolete within a week and with me possibly changing my mind as well.
One thing I did not change my mind on, even momentarily, was Elizabeth Warren, whom I supported 100% from the outset. I am deeply saddened by the failure of her candidacy and early exit, which just seems so unfair, as she has been without question the most impressive candidate of the lot (a case well made by Michelle Goldberg and Ezra Klein)—and ever more so after other impressive ones (notably Kamala Harris and Cory Booker) quit the race—with the best, most thoroughly thought-out policy positions and an impeccable discourse on combating corruption in the deeply corrupt American system and tackling inequality. She was also clearly the candidate who could best bridge the gap between the moderate and progressive lanes of the Democratic Party. She’s a great communicator in addition and is, quite simply, a good person—and in this, the utter, total antithesis of the unspeakable current president of the United States.
As to why Warren’s candidacy failed, she did commit errors, e.g. getting tangled up in questions over the financing of Medicare-for-All and not specifying from the outset that this was a long-term objective—to be realized by the end of her second term—not a policy goal that could be imposed by executive fiat the day she took office. She also probably talked too much about transgender issues. And calling for a ban on fracking was not wise, as this would win her no swing votes in November but could create complications in key swing states. The media’s erasure of her after the Iowa caucuses was real (I noted it almost right away). And despite her compelling personal story, of growing up in a lower middle class family in Oklahoma, her image as the candidate of the “wine track”—of educated liberals, i.e. people like myself and the great majority of Americans with whom I interact (a mere slice of the electorate)—got locked in.
And then there was sexism/gender, which was incontestably a factor, discussed in numerous articles, notably Caroline Fraser’s in the NYRB, ‘Warren in the trap,’ though the issue needs to be nuanced. The notion that Americans are somehow not ready to elect a woman as POTUS, which I have come across countless times on social media, but also in my US entourage, exasperated to no end, as not only is it so utterly wrong but is, moreover, complete bullshit. Insofar as this matter needed to be laid to rest, it was in the 2016 election, when the otherwise unpopular Hillary Clinton—the lightening rod of so much antipathy on both the right and left—nonetheless won 48.2% of the national popular vote—2.1% more than her opponent—only losing the Electoral College in a freak accident foreseen by almost no one and following an October Surprise (the Comey letter) that, according to polls, cost her 2% of the overall national vote. Case closed. Had Mme Clinton’s campaign not ignored Michigan and Wisconsin and/or had the Comey letter never been sent, she would have won the election and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. As for Warren, many Democratic voters who were otherwise fine with her assumed nonetheless, for some incomprehensible reason, that other people—whom they did not know and based on no evidence—would not vote for her precisely because she was a women, so that Warren was ergo not “electable.” This crazy reasoning clearly undermined her candidacy.
Quoting Michelle Cottle in the NYT:
Last summer, a poll on perceived electability by Avalanche Strategies found that gender appeared to be a bigger issue than “age, race, ideology, or sexual orientation.” When voters were asked whom they’d pick if the primaries were held today, Mr. Biden came out ahead. When asked whom they would make president with the wave of a magic wand, without the candidate needing to win an election, voters went with Ms. Warren. Women were more likely than men to cite gender as a concern.
Nate Silver of FiveThirtyEight lamented that such anxiety can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. “So there are a lot of women who might not vote for a woman because they’re worried that other voters won’t vote for her. But if everyone just voted for who they actually wanted to be president, the woman would win!”
On Elizabeth Warren making a great president—which she certainly would—the ultra-rightist polemical bomb-thrower Ann Coulter paid her this back-handed compliment:
We’ll never know, alas.
BTW, the entire Democratic Party owes Elizabeth Warren a big thank you for her demolition of the billionaire ersatz Democrat and troll Michael Bloomberg in the Las Vegas and Charleston debates, which effectively put paid to his attempt to buy the party’s nomination. Had Warren not done to Bloomberg what she did—had his candidacy thereby gained traction and eclipsed Joe Biden’s—the Democrats would have faced near certain disaster in Milwaukee in July, not to mention nationwide in November. Democratic officials who endorsed Bloomberg should hang their heads in shame.
Here’s an article just up in The New Yorker by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, “Elizabeth Warren’s American leadership.”
On the two candidates left standing—who would have ever thought this even a week ago?—The Nation’s Joan Walsh has this to say:
This has been my sentiment from the very beginning, of being dismayed by and opposed to the late septuagenarians Bernie Sanders and Joe Biden running for the presidency at their age—and crowding out the rest of what was a very good field. As I have said countless times, it is simply not reasonable for a man in his late 70s to be doing this. But alas, that’s where we are.
On Bernie, who barely a week ago looked to be the prohibitive favorite for the nomination, vanquishing the fragmented moderate lane and leaving Warren in the dust, I have been deeply conflicted. On domestic policy and most foreign, I have practically no differences with Bernie. He can give a speech and I will agree with every last word of it. His values and objectives are mine. As to qualms about “electability,” I have been more-or-less persuaded—or tried to persuade myself—by data-backed analyses positing that negative partisanship has become so determinant in US elections, and there are now so few swing voters left, that Democratic Party voters will turn out for their candidate against Trump regardless of his or her identity, including for Bernie. “Vote blue no matter who.” Much has been written on this, the latest in TNR by the very smart number-crunching political scientist Rachel Bitecofer (profiled in Politico), “Hate is on the ballot: The hidden dynamic that’s transformed our politics—and will loom large in the 2020 election.” And Matthew Yglesias made a strong argument on how “Bernie Sanders [could] unify Democrats and beat Trump.” Supporting this have been Bernie’s consistently robust head-to-head poll numbers against Trump (more so than any other candidate save Biden). So not to worry about Bernie Sanders in November.
But still. Strong polling in the winter does not necessarily carry into the fall. And while 90+% of Democratic voters—spearheaded by the army of enthusiastic millennials and Gen Zers—will certainly turn out for Bernie to beat Trump, it is legitimate to fear that at least some of the moderate Republicans (notably suburban women) who defected to Hilllary Clinton in 2016—and voted Democrat in the 2018 midterms, enabling the party to take back the House—would not bring themselves to vote for the “socialist” Sanders, that they would abstain or even go for Trump. To the retort that such a fall-off would be compensated by increased turnout of young voters—and the fervent support for Bernie by millennials and Gen Zers is impressive indeed—political scientists David Broockman (UC-Berkeley) and Joshua Kalla (Yale) threw cold water on this contention in a widely-read piece in Vox dated Feb. 25th, “Bernie Sanders looks electable in surveys—but it could be a mirage: New research suggests Sanders would drive swing voters to Trump—and need a youth turnout miracle to compensate.” The upshot: Bernie’s strong poll numbers have been predicated on a level of youth turnout that has, in fact, never materialized. Not that it couldn’t but a campaign is taking a big risk in banking its election prospects on this happening. And we are in fact witnessing a lower youth turnout compared to older cohorts in the primaries and caucuses so far; the young people have not been showing up at the polls for Bernie in the numbers announced (Seth Ackerman, the executive editor of the Uber-gauchiste Jacobin webzine, has posted a frantic, 4,000-word response to the Brookman-Kalla paper, which he calls “bunk” and “nonsense,” but that I had a hard time following, abandoning it around the 2,000-word mark).
On Bernie’s political baggage from the 1970s and ’80s—e.g. support for the Trotskyist Socialist Workers Party (whose candidate—disclosure—I voted for in the 1976 presidential election), honeymooning in the Soviet Union during the Gorbachev era, drunkenly singing Woody Guthrie songs while cruising down the Volga, etc—this is no big deal IMO. Only a few ageing boomers care about who said or did what during the Cold War—and it’s pretty unlikely that anyone’s vote would be swung on this. As for Bernie’s extolling Cuba’s 1960s literacy program, pundits and others decreed that he had, in one fell swoop, ceded Florida’s 29 electoral votes. Perhaps, though, in point of fact, Florida is going to be a hard state for the Democrats in any case, with all the well-to-do Republican-voting retirees moving there and massive voter suppression targeting Democratic-leaning minorities. While Bernie did take care to call the Cuban regime “authoritarian”—no, it’s more than that: totalitarian is more like it—his finding positive aspects in it was still highly problematic, pointing to a blindness on the American left—and particularly the boomers among them—on the subject of left-wing Latin American regimes. While not too many still support the Cuban Communists outright, there’s still a lot of apologizing for that indefensible regime—of blaming the state of Cuba’s economy on the US embargo, which is utter BS—or simply withdrawing into silence when the matter is raised. For US lefties—and Bernie for much of his adult life—US imperialism was/is the enemy, so any regime in its cross hairs couldn’t be entirely bad. But in fact, there is nothing in the Cuban Revolution to defend (and please don’t tell me about the health care system or literacy, which (a) we don’t have the full story on and (b) do not require dictatorships to achieve positive results). It has been a disaster from A to Z (if one would like an elaboration on this, go to the ‘Americas’ category on the sidebar, click, and scroll). It is likewise with Daniel Ortega and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua (a cause célèbre of the US left in the 1980s, and which included myself). And don’t even talk about Venezuela.
As Masha Gessen wrote in The New Yorker, “Here’s what Bernie Sanders should have said about socialism and totalitarianism in Cuba.”
So Bernie’s words on Cuba were an unforced error on his part. As with Elizabeth Warren on fracking, they will win him not a single vote but create needless problems for his eventual general election prospects.
This points to a big qualm I and others have about Bernie, which is his ideological rigidity and overall persona. Situating him on the French political spectrum, he would be a frondeur Socialist of the 2014-17 era, a rough equivalent of Benoît Hamon (my candidate in the 1st round of the 2017 election). But he has just a little bit of Jean-Luc Mélenchon in his personal style, which is a problem, as JLM is—and this is an objective fact—one of the most detestable, insufferable personalities in the French political class. Now I don’t want to push the comparison too far—I would never say that Bernie is detestable or insufferable—but quite a few Democratic voters—if my Twitter feed is anything to go by—do seem to feel this way. As Paul Krugman tweeted the other day:
Bernie’s big problem isn’t that he’s a progressive; it’s that he’s a progressive with an attitude: calling himself a socialist when he isn’t, denouncing anyone who raises questions as a corporate tool. This thrills his followers, but scares off key constituencies.
While Bernie has gotten along fine over the years with his colleagues in Congress and is capable of some political flexibility, he strikes one as a “my way or the highway” politician (as is JLM), not a big tent compromiser (thus his attacks on the despised Democratic “establishment”). And as Krugman observed, this has indeed put off many Democratic Party primary voters—including more than a few Warren supporters—witnessed by the surge to Biden on Tuesday.
And the problem here goes well beyond Bernie. It’s also his hardcore fanaticized base: the famous Bernie Bros; his massive Twitter army of young white male punks. Unlike the candidate, these white male punks are indeed detestable and insufferable, and are causing important prejudice to their champion. Many, many Democratic voters, including older progressives, cannot stand them.
The bottom line is that in order to win in November, the Democratic Party—indeed any party—must be united behind its candidate. If the Dems come out of Milwaukee divided or with a lot of bad feelings, they will definitely lose in November to a Trump whose party is 100% devoted to him. If Bernie were to somehow win the nomination and unite the party—which, pour mémoire, he still declines to call himself a member of—for the general election campaign, he would stand a good chance of winning. But that simply does not look likely in view of the resistance to him by a large portion of the party’s base—the majority of which remains in the moderate lane—not to mention by the party’s elected officials—and with many congresspersons up for reelection likely distancing themselves from his ticket, which would not help anyone win. In this respect, there is no comparison with Trump and the Republican Party in 2016, whose base quickly became Trump’s and with elected Rs falling into line (and whom Trump has cultivated and flattered behind the scenes, and giving them everything they wanted policy-wise while he’s been at it). This is not in the offing with Bernie and the Democratic Party.
Another bottom line: the American left is simply not ready to come to power. If Bernie were to win the White House, he would, as Ann Coulter said above, not get anything done. Even in the event (unlikely) that the Dems were to take back the Senate with him heading the ticket, a President Sanders would not be able to get much of his legislation through Congress. With Mitch McConnell at the helm, he would get nothing through. Disillusionment would set in, the Dems would likely be routed in the 2022 midterms, and with Bernie, in view of his age, a probable lame duck from the get-go. A Sanders administration would almost certainly not work out. If the left is to come to power, it needs to build up from the bottom, to take state legislatures and dramatically increase its representation in Congress. In other words, the left has to do what the movement conservatives did in the Republican Party over the past five decades—taking over one GOP state organization after another and finally conquering the national party, as they did with the Tea Party in 2010, and crowned with the ‘divine surprise’ of 2016.
Bernie Sanders is a historical figure, as Michael Tomasky justly put it, who has almost single-handedly pulled the Democratic Party to the left over the past four years. But if the left is to win the White House, it will be with one of his protégés, not him. #AOCin2032.
On Sleepy Joe Biden: I won’t say much about him here, as, barring unforeseen rebondissements or some stunning coup de théâtre, he is going to be the Democratic Party nominee (FWIW, Nate Silver today rates this an 88% probability)—and can all but seal the deal with a win in Michigan next week—so there will be ample occasion to do so down the line. Just a few points.
First, Biden is, as we all know, carrying a lot of baggage from his five decades in Washington, e.g. opposing busing in the 1970s and palling around with segregationist senators, Anita Hill, the Iraq war, calling for cuts to Social Security, to name just a few. Having recently seen the movie Dark Waters, I shuddered imagining the heavy-lifting Biden must have done in the Senate—and perhaps even as V-P—in favor of DuPont. But none of this matters today. It’s water under the bridge. Nothing that Biden did in past decades as Senator from Delaware will inform what he does as president of the United States in the third decade of the 21st century. In short, Biden’s record as a politician in the political distant past will be irrelevant in the 2020 election against Donald Trump.
Second, it is now commonplace to observe that Biden’s positions today are well to the left of Obama’s in 2008 or 2012. He’s a professional politician—i.e. malleable and opportunistic—generically liberal, and will go with the flow of his party. If the gravity of the Democratic Party is on the center-left—which is further to the left than what it was ten years ago, not to mention twenty or thirty—then that’s where Biden will be. On this, please read the commentary by the right-leaning Peter Suderman in the libertarian, not progressive website Reason, “Joe Biden is no moderate: [He] is a classic big-government liberal.” Sounds good to me.
Third, Biden, given his age, will be a transitional figure, a placeholder for whomever the Gen Xers and millennials put forth after him. One may assume that, in the White House, his staff, along with the Democrats in Congress, will play a central role in formulating policy. On this, journalist and IR policy intellectual David Rothkopf had an interesting tweet storm the other day, which begins:
As you who follow me know, I was not a @JoeBiden supporter at the outset. I have been energized and inspired by @kamalaharris and @ewarren since the beginning of the campaign. But with the inevitability of @joebiden as the candidate now clear, I’d like to share a brief anecdote.
Biden is surrounded by excellent advisors, some of the very best and the brightest in Washington. I’ve spoken to several of them over the past few months and their commitment to him and their reasons for supporting him have been quite thought provoking and persuasive.
A few weeks ago, I had a conversation with @RonKlain, a close Biden aide, formerly his chief of staff, and one of those folks in DC whose views I value above most others. He described that he too, like me, shares some deeply held progressive beliefs.
He underscored that Biden shared many of them too. But then he explained that in his very sensible view, advancing those beliefs began with defeating Donald Trump. You have to protect our system and defeat the enemies of serving the people as job one.
To read the rest, go here.
Fourth, I have been insisting from the very beginning that the Dem ticket will need to have a woman and Afro-American. No need to explain why car ça va de soi, i.e. it goes without saying. With Biden the nigh inevitable nominee, his running mate will thus need to be an Afro-American woman. The name that automatically rolls off everyone’s lips is Stacey Abrams. Sure. Why not? She does, however, seem to be situated in the moderate lane of the party, so it would be more politic of Biden to choose a high-profile progressive, and who could energize Bernie’s disappointed supporters. My candidate, whose name I have been touting to no one in particular over the past couple of weeks: Ayanna Pressley, a Bernie-compatible Warren supporter and bona fide member of ‘the Squad’. Any objections?
Fifth, the Democratic Party will be united behind Biden. Sanders supporters will faire la gueule, i.e. sulk, but they’ll turn out and vote for him in sufficient numbers to eject Trump. Of course they will.
Sixth, Biden is not an antipathetic person. No one despises him. As The Washington Post’s humor columnist Alexandra Petri reminded everyone, “Joe Biden is fine!”
Seventh, the big concern with Biden is cognitive decline. As everyone has observed, he shows signs of not being all there. But then, that’s an even bigger concern with his opponent. God save America (and the world).
A couple of comments on the other candidates who dropped out this week, both of whom have brilliant political futures.
Pete Buttigieg: I am relieved that it was Biden and not him, as he was reminding me a little too much of Emmanuel Macron, which is not a compliment. In the future he will be well-advised to move away from neoliberalism, of advocating reducing budget deficits and the public debt.
Amy Klobuchar: After her brilliant performance in the New Hampshire debate, I declared to friends in an email loop that she would have my vote if Warren left the race, to which a friend replied with a reminder of her numerous non-progressive positions. Better that she stay in the Senate.
À suivre.
UPDATE: For the record, the best analyses I’ve seen of Super Tuesday and Bernie Sanders’ counter-performance are the excellent Eric Levitz’s in New York magazine, “Bernie’s revolution failed. But his movement can still win,” and Ron Brownstein’s in The Atlantic, “Bernie Sanders gets a rude awakening.” The lede: “Super Tuesday’s clearest message: While the senator has inspired a passionate depth of support, the breadth of his coalition remains too limited to win the nomination.” This latter observation is central: Bernie’s left-wing base is simply too narrow to underpin a governing Democratic majority. Numerically-speaking, it comes nowhere close to the third of the American electorate that fanatically supports Trump.
Well worth the read is Esquire’s invariably spot-on Charles P. Pierce, “Elizabeth Warren was more of a threat to the money power than Bernie Sanders.” The lede: “This is not a country that is ready for what she called, endlessly, ‘big, structural change.’ This is a country fearful of any kind of change at all.”
2nd UPDATE: A smart political science friend with whom I exchange views on US politics (and we invariably agree) had this social media comment on my post (which he otherwise thought a “great analysis!”):
One small disagreement: While I like your possible VP picks, and I agree that a woman of color would be best for a number of reasons, I think that Kamala Harris would be a great pick, and one Biden is apt to feel more comfortable with. I think he will want to address concerns about his age and mental and physical health by picking someone with the experience to allow her to “do the job right away.” And if party unity becomes a problem (God, I hope you’re right about that) I think Biden would feel pressure to pick Warren.
Yes, I entirely agree on Harris, who would be a great pick. Some lefties would whine and kvetch—bringing up her record as San Francisco DA (which is completely irrelevant)—but it wouldn’t sink the ticket.
As for Warren, I think she’d be better and more effective staying in the Senate, particularly if the Dems take it back. Attorney General with carte blanche would also be a good place for her.
3rd UPDATE: Another point on the Elizabeth Warren/sexism thing that I neglected to mention above. We all know that women in politics—and particularly the ambitious ones—are raked over the coals and subjected to double standards and negative stereotypes in a way that men are not. This is the case *everywhere*. But it has not prevented women from being elected to the highest executive office (president or prime minister) in all sorts of countries and on all continents. There is no reason why it should not be likewise in the United States, whose society is, until proof to the contrary, no more sexist than, e.g., Argentina, Chile, Great Britain, Germany, Slovakia, Liberia, Sri Lanka, Burma, New Zealand, etc. etc.
4th UPDATE: Here’s a corrective by Nancy LeTourneau in the Washington Monthly (Mar. 6th) on “The disinformation campaign being launched against Biden,” for which “[t]here is no data to support the allegation that he is in cognitive decline.”
5th UPDATE: The NYT’s Sabrina Tavernise has a must-read piece (Mar. 7th): “A Sanders voter, weary of debt at 29: ‘I have nothing to lose’.” The lede: “Brian Michelz has never worn a political T-shirt or been to a campaign rally. But when he voted for the first time in his life, it was for Bernie Sanders. What will he do if Mr. Sanders loses?”
6th UPDATE: Robert Reich explains in The Guardian (Mar. 8th) that “Older people who feel unsafe seek the familiar. That’s why they’re flocking to Biden.”
7th UPDATE: Economists Erica Groshen and Harry J. Holzer have a useful op-ed (Mar. 4th) on the Brookings Institution website on “Bernie’s populism – and what it says about the job market.”
David Corn of Mother Jones had an excellent next-day Super Tuesday post-mortem that I had missed, “Sanders said it takes a revolution to beat Trump. On Super Tuesday, most Democrats disagreed.”
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