On this blog, we of course have biases but we also strive — or ought to strive — to get our facts straight. That’s why this website exists.
I make no secret of my biases: when it comes to parties, I strongly favor the Democratic Party. And, when it comes to the presidential race, my favorite candidate is Bernie Sanders. These are two recent diaries I posted:
In the second diary, I received a few comments from folks who asserted that Sanders is not a particularly accomplished member of Congress. That opinion is belied by the facts I presented in the first diary. In an attempt to buttress their assertion, one of these commenters provided links to a New York Times article and a Politico article. I responded with the following comment:
I need to say this emphatically: The reason Daily Kos exists — the reason the progressive blogosphere became popular — is precisely because the New York Times and other mainstream media sources proved, in critical instances (for sure not always but for sure too often) to be lousy sources.
Just for example, I encourage you to read this truly devastating take-down of a recent New York Times article about Bernie Sanders.
I also encourage you to read my diary about Sanders’s accomplishments. In it I mention, just for example, that the Brookings Institution was so impressed by Sanders’s leadership in passing crucial, large-scale legislation that they based a white paper on it in their Profiles in Negotiation series.
Jonathan Katz’s article which I linked to in that comment is more about Nicaragua than Sanders, and it really does put the New York Times to shame. I recommend it — not because it touches on Bernie Sanders but because of what it reminds us about good journalism and about a dark chapter in history that we shouldn’t forget or paper over. As far as Sanders’s track record of accomplishment, it is indeed an exceptionally strong record, and the facts to support this are presented in my diary. I didn’t post the diary to try to “convert” anyone who prefers a different candidate or to knock anyone else’s record. As I said in the diary:
Since Sanders might win the nomination, I think it’s important that folks have resources readily available to help them gain more knowledge and a good comfort level regarding his credentials.
(Obviously we have a big, talented group of candidates vying for the nomination, so I hope lots of folks will post articles about their favorites’ achievements.)
The purpose of Daily Kos is to be a high quality resource of information for progressives, and I believe my diary on Sanders’s track record serves that purpose.
Speaking of getting our facts straight...
In his most recent “Cattle Call,” Markos writes:
[Bernie Sanders’s] rally over the weekend in San Jose (California’s second third-largest city after Los Angeles and San Diego) drew 2,500, a steep drop off from the 16,000 he drew in San Francisco in March. His performance at the California Democratic Party convention was … actually, I don’t know what it was, because everyone was raving about the speeches from Cory Booker and Elizabeth Warren instead (and to a lesser extent, Kamala Harris). The party has new blood, and by refusing to update his stump speech and message, Bernie seems to be receding into the background.
I clicked on the link Markos provided to find out what “everyone was raving about” and it brought me to an LA Times article describing Saturday’s events at the convention. The article quotes a line of Kamala Harris that had the crowd cheering and quotes some of Cory Bookers’s “fiery” remarks, and it reports that
Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who along with Booker drew the day’s most enthusiastic responses, laid out a lengthy and detailed policy plank.
The article doesn’t mention anything Bernie Sanders said, which seemed odd to me. Hm, I thought, so how was Bernie Sanders received at the convention? So I googled and up popped a blog called CALmatters, and here’s what it says:
Anyone who spent the weekend at the California Democratic Party’s convention—watching 14 White House contenders try to impress what one Congresswoman called “the wokest Democrats in the country”—observed the following:
Saturday’s most rapturous cheers went to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren, who declared “the time for small ideas is over, advocated “big, structural change” and said “I am here to fight.” Sunday’s thunderous applause went to Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, when he demanded there [c]an be “no middle ground” on climate change, healthcare or gun violence.
…
“This is obviously a group of activists and there are obviously some candidates who appeal more to the activists,” Dave Min told CALmatters at a meeting of the Chicano and Latino Caucus. He lost a bid for Congress in 2018 to Rep. Katie Porter, who was backed by Sen. Warren and supported Medicare-for-All. Now he’s seeking a state senate seat.
As if to illustrate his point, minutes later Sanders, who has done more than virtually any other politician to turn support for universal Medicare into a litmus test for progressive Democratic candidates, entered the room—and was nearly trampled by selfie-seeking delegates.
So it does sound like Bernie Sanders was very well received at the convention. Here’s a Sacramento Bee article that says Sanders’s speech was met with “roaring applause and a standing ovation.” (There’s a video at that link, too.) Since the LA Times report which Markos referred to only covered Saturday’s events, it didn’t give us a complete picture.
Markos declared at the beginning of his article:
Yes, this is opinionated. Yes, I am biased. I am human. So are you. It’s okay to disagree, the world won’t end.
That’s true of course. We’re all biased. But we should strive to report information as accurately as we can. That’s why this website exists.
Crowd size
Markos cites the city size of a Sanders rally; the venue capacity would be a more useful metric here. At any rate, as we know from previous cycles, primary season rally sizes aren’t necessarily a good predictor of who’ll win the nomination — but of course no cycle is exactly like another. Bernie Sanders is not the dark horse he was in 2015. Back then, when he wasn’t being totally ignored in the news, it seems the media would always refer to him with phrases like “the white-haired self-described socialist independent senator from Vermont.” That sounds like a circus attraction! Who wouldn’t want to go see that?! But seriously, being both a dark horse insurgent and a rather atypical figure in American politics created a dynamic that saw phenomenally large Sanders crowds in that cycle. If his primary season rallies are less spectacular this cycle, perhaps that’s predictable, but I think it’s tougher to argue that it’s predictive.
A pet peeve: silly insinuations of hypocrisy
Since I’m a Sanders supporter, I’m naturally going to be most attentive toward articles and comments about Sanders, to try to judge if they are fair, and, if they aren’t, to try to correct the record.
It’s rare that I’ll post defenses (or anything else) regarding other presidential primary candidates. That’s not because I don’t like/respect other candidates. It’s because there’s a natural division of labor: each of us who favors a particular candidate will tend to focus our time and energy trying to support that particular candidate. Similarly, I’m really focused on the Democratic Party, not on other progressive parties. That doesn’t mean I think all critiques of those other parties are fair, it’s just that those other parties are not where my personal attention and energy are focused.
(Here are a couple exceptions: In this comment and in this thread, I’m defending Beto O’Rourke and Tulsi Gabbard, respectively, from what seemed to me to be unfair critiques. You shouldn’t read anything into my defending those two particular candidates: I respect their talents but there are a number of candidates who rank higher for me. I simply happened to see these criticisms of O’Rourke and Gabbard, and I happened to respond to them.)
The point is that some of us are focused on candidate X and some of us on Y and some of us on Z. And there’s nothing wrong with this division of labor. Which is why I find it silly when, from time to time, I’m defending Sanders on Daily Kos and a fellow Kossack will come along and say something to the effect of “How come I don’t see you defending other candidates?”
The implication in these objections is that we’re being somehow hypocritical or somehow insufficiently pro-Democratic if we seem to be putting lots of effort into supporting/defending our favorite primary candidate and scant effort into supporting/defending their competitors.