Good morning to all and we are jumping right into the fire with Bernie Sanders’ resounding win in the Nevada Caucuses lat night and what that emans for the primaries.
jennifer Medina and Astead W. Herndon of the New York Times shows us how Bernie got it done in Nevada.
For at least one day, in one state, the long-promised political revolution of Mr. Sanders came to vivid life, a multiracial coalition of immigrants, college students, Latina mothers, younger black voters, white liberals and even some moderates who embraced his idea of radical change and lifted him to victory in the Nevada caucuses on Saturday.
By harnessing such a broad cross-section of voters, Mr. Sanders offered a preview of the path that he hopes to take to the Democratic presidential nomination: uniting an array of voting blocs in racially diverse states in the West and the South and in economically strapped parts of the Midwest and the Southwest, all behind the message of social and economic justice that he has preached for years.
His advisers argue that he has a singular ability to energize voters who have felt secondary in the Democratic Party, like Latinos and younger people, and that Nevada proved as much — and could set the stage for strong performances in the Super Tuesday contests on March 3. The Sanders campaign is looking in particular to the delegate-rich states of California and Texas, whose diverse Democratic electorates include a high percentage of voters from immigrant backgrounds.
Matthew Ygleasis of Vox insists that we have nothing to fear from an Sanders’ nomination or presidency.
...For all the agita around Sanders’s all-or-nothing rhetoric, his behavior as a longtime member of Congress (and before that as a mayor) suggests a much more pragmatic approach to actual legislating than some of the wilder “political revolution” rhetoric would suggest.
On the vast majority of issues, a Sanders administration would deliver pretty much the same policy outcomes as any other Democrat. The two biggest exceptions to this, foreign policy and monetary policy, happen to be where Sanders takes issue with an entrenched conventional wisdom that is deeply problematic.
Some of the anti-Sanders sentiment is driven by pique at his followers’ most obnoxious behavior. But it would be better to bring these voters into the tent than leave them outside attacking inward.
Sanders’s wins are hardly the end of the 2020 Democratic primary. Joe Biden remains a contender; there are many delegate-rich states with large African American populations that may be more favorable to him, and it’s been known for a long time that the idiosyncrasies of the caucus structure give Sanders an edge he won’t have in future primaries.
Here are the entrance poll results from The Washington Post.
As far as Mike Scocca of Slate is concerned, Michael Bloomberg is “the crisis and no the cure.”
Everyone in and around the Democratic field shares the understanding that Donald Trump represents a crisis of democracy. The candidates are all, to a greater or lesser extent, running on the message that they are each the singular person best positioned to resolve the crisis, by defeating Trump and what he stands for: Bernie Sanders because of his mass mobilization of supporters, Elizabeth Warren because of her policy acumen, Pete Buttigieg because of his bright-eyed affection for unity, Joe Biden because of his long-established public profile, Amy Klobuchar because of her feisty moderation.
Bloomberg’s message is that it’s too late for any of that. Michael Bloomberg is the only person who can beat Donald Trump, because he has the power to beat Donald Trump, because he has the money. The voters’ preferences don’t matter. The crisis is too urgent for that. He alone can fix it.
Wired’s Brian Barrett reminds of what Russia wants out of our country’s 2020 elections: chaos
The 2020 playbook remains the same, say Clint Watts, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute who studies Russian interference efforts: Elevate Trump, play up that Sanders got a raw deal, and tear down the leading institutional Democrat—then Clinton, now Biden and Bloomberg. Instead of Jill Stein, 2020 has Tulsi Gabbard, who has not left the race and whom Russian media, Watts says, regularly praises.
“The Kremlin’s strategy for a year has been very straightforward,” Watts says. “They would like to see Trump reelected.”
Russia has already gone after Biden aggressively, likely hacking into Burisma, the Ukrainian gas company whose connection to Hunter Biden has been the focus of conspiratorial narrative by Trump and his allies. Moscow's disinformation efforts in support of Sanders once again focused on Iowa, whose caucus earlier this month was beset by technical difficulties (which, to be clear, have not been connected to foreign hacking).
“We saw Russia amplifying conspiracy theories suggesting that delays in reporting returns were part of an effort to deny Senator Sanders a clear win,” says Jessica Brandt, head of policy and research for the Alliance for Securing Democracy, a bipartisan nonprofit that tracks and counteracts Russian disinformation. “We also saw them highlighting theories purporting murky ties between other candidates and the company that created the caucus app.”
Kristina Karisch at the Washington Monthly writes about some unexpected voters that could decide who wins the 2020 presidential election outright.
Ahead of the 2020 election, everyone wants to know one thing: What will make the difference between Donald Trump winning or losing a second term? Polling suggests that health care, the economy, and immigration are the issues voters care most about. And for many Americans, the erratic and destructive nature of Trump’s presidency itself is a galvanizing force. But there’s another factor that has barely made headlines—the potentially potent influence of the overseas vote.
In 2016, for instance, there were roughly three million Americans living abroad who were eligible to vote, according to data from the Federal Voting Assistance Program (FVAP). Yet in the presidential election, only seven percent of these voters actually cast a ballot.
It’s not clear what states those citizens are registered in, but while Hillary Clinton won the popular vote by three million votes, she lost by thin margins in swing states like Michigan, Wisconsin, and New Hampshire. In other words, the 2.7 million voters abroad who sat out the last presidential election had the power to make a difference.
This year, those voters may not be as hands-off. Experts cite a number of factors that explain the historically low participation rate of overseas voters—like complicated registration systems and a lack of government outreach—but the 2020 election could be different for the simple fact that the reality of a Donald Trump presidency will inspire more Americans abroad to vote. In the leadup to the election, the Democrats have an organized effort to mobilize Democratic voters living in other countries, whereas the GOP doesn’t have a comparable organization.
Ida Auken is a member of the Danish Parliament representing the Danish Social Liberal Party and she writes, for the Washington Post, that Denmark might not be all that some Democratic presidential contenders say it is.
It is true that Denmark is a country with low inequality, mostly due to a tax-based redistribution of wealth and a welfare state that delivers free health care and education for all. However, Denmark is not living out the American Dream the way Buttigieg describes it. James J. Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist at the University of Chicago, has shown how Denmark scores low when it comes to creating social mobility that may elevate people from the bottom to the top of society. If your parents have no or little education, chances are high that you will end up at the same level yourself, even in Denmark.
Our country could do a much better job when it comes to social mobility. This is a challenge we happen to share with the United States, but it is also something that the new Danish social democratic government is addressing, together with the Social Liberal Party that I belong to. We have agreed to invest in early childhood development in our child-care institutions, especially from ages zero to 6, to try to improve social mobility.
Omar Suleiman of AlJazeera reminds us that Malcolm X was well aware of what his complicaed legacy would become even as he lived
Martin is the perfect hero who preached non-violence and love, and Malcolm the perfect villain who served as his violent counterpart, preaching hate and militancy. The result is not just a dishonest reading of history, but a dichotomy that allows for Dr King to be curated to make us more comfortable, and Malcolm X to be demonised as a demagogue from whom we must all flee. Reducing these men to such simplistic symbols allows us to filter political programmes according to how "King-like" they are. Hence, illegitimate forms of reconciliation are legitimised through King and legitimate forms of resistance are delegitimised through Malcolm X.
Malcolm was never violent, not as a member of the Nation of Islam, nor as a Sunni Muslim. But Malcolm did find it hypocritical to demand that black people in the United States commit to non-violence when they were perpetually on the receiving end of state violence. He believed that black people in the US had a right to defend themselves, and charged that the US was inconsistent in referencing its founding fathers’ defence of liberty for everyone but them.
Malcolm knew that his insistence on this principle would cause him to be demonised even further and ultimately benefit the movement of Dr King, which is exactly what he had intended. Just weeks before his assassination, he went to Selma to support Dr King and willingly embraced his role as the scary alternative. In every interview, in his meeting with Dr Coretta Scott King, and elsewhere, he vocalised that the US would do well to give the good reverend what he was asking for, or else. (...snip)
...But it was not just that Malcolm and Martin had complementary strategies to achieve black freedom, they also spoke to different realities. Malcolm spoke more to the Northern reality of black Americans who were only superficially integrated, whereas Martin spoke to the Southern reality where even that was not possible.
As someone who studies this stuff, I have a big problem with the selective quoting of Dr. King and, especially of late, his quote about the “white moderate.” I’m going to start firing Malcolm X’s quote about the “white liberal” back at some of y’all since, from my perspective (Midwestern born and raised) that quote is the better fit for the circumstances of my birth and existence...oh, and read HamdenRice’s “Most of you have no idea what Martin Luther King actually did.” Please.
Everyone have a great morning!