Democratic elites and the media sold out to Hillary this time, but change is coming | SALON

[nashville_brook]

This story ran on Tuesday, March 29 and was overlooked by many. It's a shame because it's a decent analysis of the "establishment v insurgent" phenomena that's taken root this election cycle. Click on the link for the whole article in order not to miss Curry's thoughts on neoliberal tactics. -- Brook


Democratic elites and the media sold out to Hillary this time, but change is coming
Neoliberals, D.C. careerists and the pundits lined up this time. They won't be able to rig contests moving forward

http://www.salon.com/2016/03/29/we_must_smash_the_clinton_machine_democratic_elites_and_the_media_sold_out_to_hillary_this_time_but_change_is_coming/

Bill Curry - Salon (Bill Curry was White House counselor to President Clinton and a two-time Democratic nominee for governor of Connecticut. He is at work on a book on President Obama and the politics of populism.)

(snip)

Sanders often says he took on “the most powerful political machine in America,” by which he means the Clintons. He’s really fighting the whole Democratic Party: White House, Congress, DNC, elite media and, sad to say, national progressive groups. That includes organized labor but also nearly every liberal lobby in town. He’s been a more constant friend than Hillary Clinton to almost all of them — but he must face and defeat them all. That he’s done so in 14 states — 15 counting Iowa-and fought four more to a draw is a miracle — and a sign their days are truly numbered.

Donald Trump has accomplished little by comparison. Everything was easier for him. When he hit party elites, no one hit back. Democratic elites had a flawed but still formidable Clinton to carry their water. Republicans had Jeb Bush, and now Ted Cruz. Trump took the low road and then lowered it some more, yet could help himself to issues of broad populist appeal without an establishment type feigning agreement. The media that ignored or dismissed Sanders coddled and appeased Trump. Eight years of open GOP warfare prepared Trump’s way. Bernie’s in the first wave to hit the Democratic beach.

With each call to surrender, Sanders just gets stronger. The day the Politico story ran, he swept Democrats Abroad 69 percent to 30 percent. The next day Hillary took Arizona with 58 percent of the vote but Sanders blew her out in Idaho and Utah, polling an unheard-of 79 percent in caucuses that shattered turnout records. On Saturday he’d chalked up three more wins in Alaska, Hawaii and Washington with average margins of 76 perfent. In a Times/CBS poll out this week the man who started the race 60 points down closed the gap to five. In a Bloomberg poll released Saturday he took a 1 point lead.

It raises a question that the elites who rig rules, stifle debate and call on Sanders to withdraw must answer: Who do you think you are? It also raises a question for Washington-based organizations allegedly safeguarding progressive values: What have you done? With all her money, contacts and celebrity and full, albeit covert support of her president and party, Clinton needed every last liberal endorsement to survive Iowa, Nevada, Missouri, Illinois and Massachusetts. How did she get them?


(snip)


Clintonites say Bernie should quit so she can focus on Trump. But Trump’s no more inevitable than Clinton. If he gets croaked in Cleveland, does anyone believe she has a better shot than Bernie of bringing some of his followers back into the Democratic fold? In any case it’s not Bernie but her response to him that kills her. Coming out against the TPP or the banks would help if she seemed at all sincere. Her clumsy smears—Bernie wants to repeal Medicare, Bernie opposed the auto bailout, Bernie loves the Minutemen etc., etc.—serve only to fuel doubts about her character. Her shameless surrogates accuse him of partisan disloyalty. Could voters care less? Bernie won’t quit but even if he did it wouldn’t fix what ails her.

Both Clinton and Trump argue their inevitability. It’s an illusion propped up by rules meant to stifle dissent. (Superdelegates in her case, winner-take-all in his) She’d be the weakest candidate Democrats have nominated in half a century or more. He’d be the worst ever nominated by either party. Neither will finish strong. Both may crumble. Each will then say early wins in a rigged system entitle them to nominations. Will either party have the wisdom to say no?

(snip)

[highprincipleswork]

1. This hits the nail on the head exactly. And that change couldn't happen a moment too soon.

[snowy owl]

2. It's all about blowback and it's going to hit Clinton where it hurts. Esp. Brock's slime art

She needs to calm down and quit the dirty tricks. She had the country if she could have stayed Presidential. On the other hand, she really hated having to move further left. So maybe that was a pressure she couldn't handle. She's still way ahead but she's blowing it at every opportunity.

[fun n serious]

4. Do you have proof of dirty tricks?

What Slime art?

[snowy owl]

9. yes - they've been posted over and over. I'm tired of distractions.I'll let him say it about himself

"The former “right-wing hit man,” and impresario of “dirty tricks,” as Brock has said of himself, made his living in the ’90s sliming Anita Hill as “a little bit nutty and a little bit slutty” and breaking the Troopergate story, which accused Arkansas state troopers of setting up liaisons for Bill Clinton and spurred Paula Jones’s 1994 sexual harassment lawsuit."

"The Clintons appreciate the fact that Brock, like Morris, is a take-no-prisoners type with the ethical compass of a jackal."

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/opinion/sunday/maureen-dowd-call-off-the-dogs.html?_r=0at it.

So much for his reputation.

In the dirty trick catagory, how about just a little rabid:

http://observer.com/2016/03/hillary-clinton-must-sever-ties-with-dirty-tricks-hitman-david-brock/

Despite vocally advocating for campaign finance reform, Ms. Clinton has received millions of dollars in contributions through her joint super PAC with the Democratic National Committee—the Hillary Victory Fund—and several other super PACs lobbying on her behalf. One of them, the American Democracy Legal Fund (ADLF), had the audacity to file three ethics complaints with the Federal Election Commission alleging Mr. Sanders—who does not have a super PAC—received too much money from individual donors, and accused the National Nurses Union of operating as a super PAC.

The ADLF is run by Brad Woodhouse, president of the pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC, Correct The Record. Mr. Brock is the founder of ADLF, and is also involved with Correct the Record as well as another Clinton super PAC, American Bridge—where he simultaneously advises Ms. Clinton’s campaign and helps their super PACs raise millions of dollars from wealthy contributors.

So he's involved with raising huge sums of money for Hillary via super pacs which she's campaigned on reforming, he's filing ethics complaints on Bernie's massive sums of money when the problem for Bernie is simply so many small donations, his organization is having trouble accounting for it all. Nothing malevolent or intentional.


The ADLF is run by Brad Woodhouse, president of the pro-Hillary Clinton super PAC, Correct The Record. Mr. Brock is the founder of ADLF, ad is also involved with Correct the Record as well as another Clinton super PAC, American Bridge—where he simultaneously advises Ms. Clinton’s campaign and helps their super PACs raise millions of dollars from wealthy contributors.
http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/274665-report-clinton-ally-files-fec-ethics-complaint-against

A group founded by longtime Hillary Clinton confidant David Brock has filed three ethics complaints with the Federal Election Commission (FEC) against Bernie Sanders and his allies.

The American Democracy Legal Fund (ADLF) accused Sanders’s Democratic presidential campaign of accepting more money from individual donors than allowed under federal law, MSNBC reported.

The group also accused the Vermont senator’s camp of failing to include a proper disclosure on a Facebook ad it ran after the New Hampshire primary last month.

And it alleged a pro-Sanders super-PAC is improperly using his name and engaging in illegal coordination.

The ADLF’s filings are its first targeting of a Democrat since the organization’s founding in 2014, MSNBC reported. The group’s co-founder is Brad Woodhouse, who is also the president of a pro-Clinton super-PAC called Correct the Record.

Sanders’s campaign on Wednesday said the ethics complaints had no merit.

You may not know that he has so many small donors (unlike Hillary) that he's having trouble keeping donations under the law. Small donors are his superpac!

The Federal Election Commission has asked the presidential campaign of Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont to re-examine contributions from more than a hundred donors who appear to have given more than the legally permissible amount.
www.democraticunderground.com/?com=post&forum=1251&pid=1635108

The vast majority of the donors gave several small contributions to Mr. Sanders for the Democratic primary that eventually totaled more than the $2,700 limit, according to a letter the election commission sent to Mr. Sanders on Thursday.

Such glitches are common in political campaigns, which are required to track small donors and begin itemizing their contributions when their total reaches $200. That can be harder when donors use slightly different variations of their names or contribute from more than one address. Mr. Sanders’s campaign may choose to refund the excess contributions or re-designate the excess for use in a general election campaign, when candidates can accept another $2,700.

But the F.E.C.’s review suggests that the sheer volume of small contributions Mr. Sanders is receiving — more than 3 million of them so far, according to his campaign — may be straining his campaign’s ability to keep track of which donors are which. Most of the contributions cited by the commission were given by donors with relatively unusual names, whose small checks are generally easier to tally.

In early February, after the end of the fourth fund-raising quarter, Mr. Sanders’s campaign announced that it had more than 1.3 million donors, an astonishing number for so early in the campaign cycle. And last week, the campaign announced it had received 3.25 million total donations, the most of any presidential candidate in the race. The campaign’s most recent F.E.C. filing was nearly 100,000 pages long.

Since this is already known and being looked into, Brock's challenges are simply piling on. I wonder to what lengths he will go if Hillary's numbers begin to really sink in NY which I think is unlikely but you never know.

A leopard never changes his spots and Brock wants to win at all costs - that is his soul. So we'll see.

[nashville_brook]

10. well, there's this --> "Was HRC the original birther?" Factcheck.org

http://www.factcheck.org/2015/07/was-hillary-clinton-the-original-birther/

Politico, April 22, 2011: The answer lies in Democratic, not Republican politics, and in the bitter, exhausting spring of 2008. At the time, the Democratic presidential primary was slipping away from Hillary Clinton and some of her most passionate supporters grasped for something, anything that would deal a final reversal to Barack Obama.

According to the article, the theory that Obama was born in Kenya “first emerged in the spring of 2008, as Clinton supporters circulated an anonymous email questioning Obama’s citizenship.”

The second article, which ran several days after the Politico piece, was published by the Telegraph, a British paper, which stated: “An anonymous email circulated by supporters of Mrs Clinton, Mr Obama’s main rival for the party’s nomination, thrust a new allegation into the national spotlight — that he had not been born in Hawaii.”

Both of those stories comport with what we here at FactCheck.org wrote two-and-a-half years earlier, on Nov. 8, 2008: “This claim was first advanced by diehard Hillary Clinton supporters as her campaign for the party’s nomination faded, and has enjoyed a revival among John McCain’s partisans as he fell substantially behind Obama in public opinion polls.”

Claims about Obama’s birthplace appeared in chain emails bouncing around the Web, and one of the first lawsuits over Obama’s birth certificate was filed by Philip Berg, a former deputy Pennsylvania attorney general and a self-described “moderate to liberal” who supported Clinton.

[nashville_brook]

11. this, of course, comports with Mark Penn's infamous 2007 strategy memo for HRC

wherein Penn proposed targeting Obama's "lack of American roots."

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2008/08/penn-strategy-memo-march-19-2008/37952/


so, if you hate birtherism, you might look to HRC's campaign strategy to thank/spank.



http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2012-05-30/the-democratic-roots-of-the-birther-movement


The Democratic Roots of the Birther Movement - Bloomberg

The idea that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the U.S. and is therefore an illegitimate president—an idea thoroughly discredited after Obama released his long-form birth certificate last year—was mainlined into the femoral artery of the presidential campaign on Tuesday, as Mitt Romney prepared for his high-profile fundraiser in Las Vegas with Donald Trump. Trump is the loudest, brashest, most insistent exponent of “birtherism,” and Romney’s public embrace of him has brought it roaring back. “Is it the most important thing?” Trump said on CNBC on Tuesday. “In a way it is, because you’re not allowed to be president if you’re not born in the country.”

People of every persuasion tend to be baffled about why birtherism stubbornly persists. Many dismiss it as a loopy, far-right conspiracy theory, the province of a few wild-eyed zealots and racists whom the media cannot resist. But on every level it’s a much broader phenomenon.

At its root, birtherism is the extreme manifestation of the belief that Obama is, by virtue of his race, name, and background, something other than fully American. The power of this idea, odious though it is, can be glimpsed in the wide swath of people who say they believe that Obama was not born in the U.S.—51 percent of likely Republican voters, according to a Public Policy Polling survey last year.

The idea of going after Obama’s otherness dates back to the last presidential election—and to Democrats. Long before Trump started in, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, Mark Penn, recognized this potential vulnerability in Obama and sought to exploit it. In a March 2007 memo to Clinton (that later found its way to me), Penn wrote: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared toward showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting it in a new light,” he wrote. “Save it for 2050. It also exposes a very strong weakness for him—his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values.”

[bjo59]

3. The full article is a truly great read.

It should be read by everyone; however, the people who would benefit most from doing so will deny everything in it in the name of the ideology (and tyranny) of tactical thinking.

[noretreatnosurrender]

5. Curry Has Been Writing

some wonderful pieces. He is so spot on. I encourage everyone to read this.

[nashville_brook]

6. it's especially compelling since he spent time in the Clinton admin

[noretreatnosurrender]

7. Yes

it is.

[KoKo]

12. Yes he has and he makes so much sense... n/t

[Marr]

8. Great article.

It seems like the Hillary campaign's tactics have gone from the gutter into the sewer lately. They're getting worse-- and doesn't seem to resonate with anyone but their most rabid fans.