If the Dog Hadn't Stopped...

Still at large

Curmie knows next to nothing about his great-grandfather (his paternal grandfather’s father) except that he was a fount of aphorisms.  His cruder, and therefore in times like these more appropriate, version of “if frogs had wings…” was “if the dog hadn’t stopped to shit, he’d have caught the fox.”

That saying resonates in Curmie’s mind as he gazes at the dumpster fire that is the American political scene.  (Curmie wishes his commentary from 17 months ago were a little less apt.)  On the one hand, we have a convicted felon who is walking the streets at all only because judges he appointed have made up ridiculous reasons to let him off the hook.  Was his prosecution political?  Probably.  But the fact remains that the lawyers for the guy who boasts that he hires only the best people were there for the voir dire.  If a single one of the jurors they helped select had as much as “reasonable doubt” that Donald Trump had done the things that he was accused of doing, and that they were felonies, he wouldn’t have been convicted.

One could make the case that Trump wasn’t the worst President in US history (he’s a contender, though), but he is surely the most vulgar, narcissistic, mendacious, and authoritarian.

On the other hand the Democrats have apparently anointed one of the most singularly unaccomplished vice presidents in American history, a smug but not terribly intelligent partisan hack who got the gig by demographics rather than competence.  (Yes, Curmie knows that could be said for a lot of white men, too.)  She was polling in single-digits even in her home state in her presidential run in the last election before dropping out before primary voting even started.  Once elected as VP, she lasted about a month on the job before she was shunted to the background, as she offered little in the way of policy expertise and made the often gaffe-ridden Joe Biden look like Cicero himself by comparison.  Jolly.

So… how’d we get here?  Well, a lot of dogs stopped to shit.

If the press hadn’t given Trump far more free media coverage than all the other Republican candidates combined in the 2016 primary season, we’d have caught the fox.

If the Clintonites didn’t actually encourage that practice, believing (wrongly, of course) that Trump would never win the nomination, let alone the presidency, but would push the more viable candidates to the right, making Hillary’s path easier, we’d have caught the fox.

If the GOP didn’t have a ridiculous policy of giving all the delegates from a primary election to the “winning” candidate, even if that person got barely a quarter of the votes, one of the not-Trump Republicans would have emerged as the nominee, and we’d have caught the fox.

If the DNC hadn’t colluded to get Hillary Clinton the 2016 nomination, there’s a good chance we’d have caught the fox.

If she’d run a competent campaign focusing on swing states instead of smugly assuming an easy victory, we’d have caught the fox.

If presidential elections were won by the person who got the most votes instead of following an archaic system designed to appease slave-owning states, we’d have caught the fox.

If the DNC hadn’t colluded to get Joe Biden the 2020 nomination, there’s a good chance we’d have caught the fox.

If Biden hadn’t made a stupid pledge to select a BIPOC woman as his running mate, we’d have almost certainly caught the fox.  [N.B., Curmie grants that Harris is a far better choice than either of Trump’s VP choices.]

If Trump were appropriately held responsible, either by the courts or by the populace (including Republican voters), for the events of January 6 and for his clear attempts to overturn a fair election, we’d have caught the fox.  [Side note: if you want to say that the press treated Trump unfairly, Curmie will listen.  But if you want to dispute the testimony of a series of Republican governors and secretaries of state that Biden had won their state, please leave.  This blog is for people who can think.]

If the GOP had said, as they certainly could have, that you’re not going to be our nominee if you don’t participate in the primary debates, we’d quite possibly have caught the fox.

If the GOP had literally any other candidate who might conceivably attract the attention of a swing voter, it’s pretty likely we’d have caught the fox.  But when Nikki Haley is the most palatable of the alternatives…

If Trump had been jailed for contempt of court, as literally any other defendant who pulled his antics would have been, we’d be well on our way to catching the fox.

If SCOTUS had refused to hear Trump’s absurd assertion of absolute immunity instead of delaying… and delaying… and delaying… and then finally granting partial immunity, denying intent as a determining factor and sending rest of the whole business back to the lower courts, thereby ensuring there would be no real ruling before the election, we’d have caught the fox.

If, indeed, any Trump-appointed judge (Curmie’s looking at you, Aileen Cannon) cared more about the nation than about their blubbery hero, catching the fox would be within reach.

If Joe Biden’s inner circle and the major media hadn’t so obviously lied to the public about the man’s mental health issues, we’d be closer to catching the fox.

If Joe Biden, his advisors, and pundits from the left really cared about their country (and their party), he’d have announced that he wasn’t going to seek re-election a year ago, when his faculties were clearly already in decline.  Then at least a sizeable chunk of the $100 million or so in Biden’s campaign coffers would have gone to a candidate whom actual voters would have had at least a little say in selecting.  Yes, the DNC would have stacked the deck for Harris, but Curmie still doubts that she’d have emerged victorious.  If she did, however, the process would have had at least some legitimacy.  Either way, we’d be in a better position to catch the fox.

If Biden had trusted his own delegates to come to their own conclusions about who should be the nominee after his withdrawal from the race, we’d be closer to catching the fox.

There’s a reason the cover photo on Curmie’s Facebook page is of John McEnery as Mercutio in the Zeffirelli film of Romeo and Juliet, uttering the character’s most famous line, “A plague o’ both your houses.” Since the only alternative, Baby Bobby, is a full-fledged wackadoodle, our choice, it appears, is between about the worst possible candidates for both major parties, although to be fair Biden (or DeSantis or Haley or Ramaswamy) would have been awful, too.  Curmie is going to vote for the mediocrity instead of the hubristic sociopath, but, Gentle Reader, we’re going to need a bigger pooper-scooper.

And the fox is still at large.

10 Honest Answers to 10 Less-Than-Honest Questions

Bernie Sanders demonstrating his unelectability

Last week, someone named Cara Harris published an article that is depressing in its predictability. Like Barney Frank before her, she would really, really appreciate it if we would all accept the inevitability of a Hillary Clinton candidacy.

Her essay, titled “Ten honest questions I’d like every Bernie Sanders supporter to answer,” consists—as might be expected from a Hillary fan—of ten considerably-less-than-honest-and-actually-rather-smug questions directed at those audacious enough to think that someone with actual ideas and a reputation for integrity might be preferable to someone who meets neither of those criteria. (See, Cara, Curmie can be a condescending asshole, too, but tries to confine such manifestations to a specific individual who richly deserves it.)

Allow me, then, to answer those questions.

1. If Elizabeth Warren were in the race, most of you would be supporting her instead. If neither Warren nor Bernie were in the race, most of you would be supporting Martin O’Malley despite knowing nothing about him. How are we supposed to take your endorsement of Bernie seriously when you appear to be simply backing him because he’s not Hillary?

First off, how fucking dare you tell me whom I’d support in a hypothetical situation? Had Elizabeth Warren run, then the chances are that Bernie would not have done so. If both were in the race, however, I’d still be supporting Bernie. Secondly, yes, I’d vote for virtually any Democrat (and probably a Republican or two) over Hillary. But I’d suggest that the problem isn’t with the “seriousness” of my support for Senator Sanders, but with your candidate.

2. Do you honestly believe that Bernie would do well with foreign policy? Do you think he’d really be able to get congressmen of either party to vote for any of his initiatives once they see that he’s not willing to compromise even a little? Are you envisioning a scenario in which President Bernie would be able to get anything accomplished at all? Even his most prominent supporters like Noam Chomsky have acknowledged he would get nothing done in office. Are you so enamored with the very idea of a protest candidate winning, you wouldn’t care that he’d be ineffective?

Yes, I do. And I see no evidence that Senator Sanders is unwilling to compromise. He does have core beliefs on policy issues, whereas Senator Clinton’s only readily apparent core belief is her narcissism, but that’s a different matter. And sorry, Noam Chomsky isn’t a “most prominent supporter,” just someone who sees Sanders as a “thorn in the side of the Clinton machine, which is not a bad thing.” Chomsky is more of a pessimist than Sanders; they agree on the substance, but Chomsky thinks it’s already too late. Let’s find out, rather than conceding defeat to the oligarchs. And yes, I’d rather have a President Sanders who might not make things better than a President Clinton who would almost certainly make things worse.

3. Are you unable to understand national polls, or do you just like to ignore them because they reveal that your guy is losing by thirty-eight points within his own party?

So I shouldn’t support the candidate of my choice because he’s currently behind? Oh, and by the way, it’s currently more like 32 points, down from pretty close to twice that in June. In the words of the great modern philosopher Satchel Paige, “Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.” Right now, that “something” has #FeeltheBern on its t-shirt.

4. Are you under the impression that the people showing up to Bernie’s rallies each get more than one vote? Is that how you think he closes the gap? Or have you intentionally saturated yourself so thoroughly with people voting for your guy that you’ve honestly forgotten the vast majority of the nation says they favor someone else?

Nope. Have you forgotten that not a single person has actually voted yet? Or that eight years ago right now the “experts” were all predicting with great confidence that the ’08 election would be a showdown between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani? Funny, I don’t remember that election. And while we’re on the subject, have you forgotten that the corporate interests bankrolling Hillary’s campaign don’t get multiple votes, either? Money does matter; votes matter more.

5. Do you understand that Bernie’s refusal to take traditional SuperPAC money means that even if he did get the nomination, he’d be outspent ten to one by his republican opponent? Are you aware that moderates and undecideds make their decisions based primarily on television ads, which are the most expensive part of any campaign? Do you get that nearly every ad would be for the republican? Do you get that he’d almost certainly lose? Would you really rather Bernie get the nomination and lose, than Hillary get the nomination and win? Because that’s how it looks to the rest of us.

Nice try. Care to provide any evidence of that rather scurrilous assertion about moderates and independents? And, should Bernie win the nomination, the campaign funds will be there; they just won’t be dark money. Also, of course, such an eventuality would mean that he’d already proven his ability to win against an establishment (read: corporate) candidate funded largely by SuperPacs. Moreover, every poll (example here) in swing states shows Bernie doing essentially the same as or better than Hillary against the leading GOP contenders.

Hillary has huge negatives, and they’re not going away just by wishing. Bernie is less well known, meaning there’s more of an upside, and a recent poll in swing states has him the only candidate in either party to be in positive territory in terms of positives vs. negatives. Hillary is losing by more than the margin of error to all of the most likely GOP candidates in virtually every contested state; Bernie couldn’t do any worse. Finally, “he can’t win” is a familiar motif in Clinton campaigns: they clung to it as their last hope as Barack Obama took the nomination seven years ago, too. He did OK in the general.

6. Why do you spend more time pushing crazy lies about Hillary than you do talking up Bernie’s ideas? Bernie himself has made it clear that he thinks highly of Hillary, and he scolds any reporters who try to get him to trash her. If you’re primarily supporting him because you think lowly of her, have you considered the extent of the disconnect between you and your candidate? Has it occurred to you that if Bernie heard you talking about Hillary the way you talk about her, he’d angrily tell you off?

What “lies” would those be? That she is beloved of Wall Street (to the tune of millions of dollars of funding)? That she refuses to state actual policies on a host of issues, and that when she does, they’re something Bernie said earlier? That her response to her multitudinous scandals has always been to act guilty while bellowing her innocence? That she ran a far more vicious and indeed racist campaign against Obama than either McCain or Romney did (does anyone but Curmie remember the conflation of “hard-working Americans” with “white Americans”?)? That she is perfectly capable of gross prevarication if it serves her short-term self-interest (and even if it doesn’t)? All those are true. I don’t know if Senator Sanders actually likes her or not; could be he’s just being polite. Nor do I care. And anyone who votes for or against a candidate based on what supporters say or do rather than on what the candidate says and does: this person is an idiot.

7. Do you really think that Bernie’s strong showing in New Hampshire, a tiny state five minutes from where he lives, where he’s been locally popular for decades, is representative of the nation? Do you really think that New Hampshire’s four electoral votes will make a difference in this primary? And again, do you not know how to read national polls, or do you just like ignoring them because those polls reveal that your guy’s candidacy is already finished?

Well, I’ve lived in New Hampshire, and I know that its proximity to Vermont is far more geographical than ideological. No, I don’t think it’s representative of the nation. But I do think that a win in New Hampshire, however much the corporate media tries to spin it as you just did, would legitimize the Sanders campaign and that we’d see a nation-wide bounce for his candidacy. I’m not predicting a win; I’m saying we should see who gets the most votes.

No, I don’t think “New Hampshire’s four electoral votes will make a difference in this primary,” largely because electoral votes have nothing to do with the primaries. Did you go to Sarah Palin High School, or what? Might New Hampshire make a difference in the general? It could. And if you think Sanders’s “candidacy is already finished,” then you’re an utter moron, no matter how condescendingly you strut your ignorance. Are you sure you’re supporting Hillary and not Michele Bachmann, because that comment is just nuts.

8. Do you get that you’re supporting Bernie for essentially the same reason that conservatives are supporting Donald Trump? Do you realize that both men are basing their campaigns entirely on “government sucks, the system sucks, both parties suck, politicians are idiots and a trained rat could do better, and I’m just that trained rat.” Do you not understand the parallels between your desire to stomp your feet at Bernie’s generic indignance [sic.], and conservatives’s [sic.] desire to stomp their feet at Trump’s generic indignance? Does that not embarrass you?

So… someone who has spent a quarter century in politics thinks “government sucks” because some jackass with a laptop says so? Bernie’s “indignance” (the actual word is “indignation,” incidentally) is anything but generic. It is indeed far more specific than any of the equivocating pabulum Hillary has spewed over the past few weeks. And I’m not stomping my feet. I confess to being a little embarrassed, however: that you and I are apparently members of the same political party.

9. Most of you supporting Bernie are also fans of Obama. Seeing how Obama has all but endorsed Hillary, and how Obama sees her as his natural successor, don’t you find it odd that you’re instead rooting against her – even as you still try to take credit for supporting Obama? How does that make you any different from the republicans who try to take credit for Obama’s accomplishments while insisting he should be replaced by republican?

First off, I’m not a “[fan] of Obama.” I was, and I voted for him twice, but I think he’s been a disappointment. His education policy is horrendous, his foreign policy feckless, his ethics questionable at best. His signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act, is a step in the right direction, but it’s also a nightmare of impenetrable bureaucracy. And, by the way, do you have the slightest whiff of evidence to support your allegation that he’s supporting Hillary per se, anyway?

10. And the only question that truly matters: when Hillary becomes the democratic party nominee, will you pout and stay home on election day and hand the nation back to the republicans? Or will you show up and vote for Hillary because you know she’s the far better of the two candidates? While none of us understand why you’re supporting a less-qualified protest candidate whose ideas aren’t realistic and who can’t win anyway, we’re really only going to judge you based on what you do on election day. So when it’s Hillary vs Jeb TrumpCruz, what’s it going to be?

If Hillary is the Democratic nominee, the chances are very good that I’ll vote for her, but that’s a function of the clown car that is the GOP field, not of Hillary’s candidacy. There are a couple of second-tier Republican candidates I’d consider, but envisioning another Scalia on SCOTUS will probably swing me back to the Dems. I’m not sitting out, and my third- (and fourth- and fifth-) party days are over.

You say Bernie’s less qualified, that his ideas aren’t realistic, and that he can’t win. That sounds suspiciously like the litany leveled against then-Senator Obama eight years ago. Funny thing, that. Of course Sanders is a far better-qualified candidate than Obama was in ’08 (or than Clinton is now, for that matter); his ideas just sound radical because they aren’t politics-as-usual (you’re free to identify which of his policies isn’t “realistic” and explain your rationale); the chances of the two candidates’ winning the general election, having become the nominee, are virtually identical.

The only real argument adduced here on Secretary Clinton’s behalf is inevitability. Actually allowing the voters to decide is contrary to your plan.

Barney Frank may be a Democrat, but he’s no democrat

Barney Frank: he should know better than this.

Former Massachusetts Congressman Barney Frank did a lot of good things in office. He served as a champion for gay rights, as he was the first Congressman to voluntarily come out as gay, and the first to marry a same-sex partner while in office. He chaired the House Financial Services Committee, from which position he co-sponsored the Dodd-Frank Act, an important if bureaucracy-laden reform of the financial sector. Known for quick wit and a bluntness his admirers adored and everyone else despised (remember “trying to have a conversation with you would be like arguing with a dining room table” line in a town hall meeting on Obamacare?), Frank was regarded as one of the smartest and most eloquent politicians around.

Even his supporters would have to admit, however, that his cleverness sometimes smelled too much of glibness, pomposity, and privilege, and his ethics were, shall we say, not always beyond reproach. Since deciding not to run for re-election in 2012 and being passed over to fill the remainder of John Kerry’s Senate term when the latter was confirmed as Secretary of State, Frank has become the Democrats’ answer to Sarah Palin: a divisive has-been who can be counted on to say something controversial any time a microphone is within range. And that means that a lot of what he says is utter crap.

Witness, for example, this screed in Politico this week, urging supporters of Bernie Sanders (and, by implication, those of Martin O’Malley, Lincoln Chaffee, and Jim Webb) to be good little boys and girls and roll over and play dead so that the anointed Hillary Clinton can cruise to the nomination and be able to save all the millions of dollars donated to her campaign by her cronies on Wall Street and in the oil business for the general election. Needless to say, he doesn’t use precisely those words, but that is his clear intent.

Like his chosen candidate, Frank is more interested in wielding power than in making the right decision, and, again like HRC, he’s at best amoral about the process. Allow me to paraphrase Frank’s argument: “Finding a candidate the members of the Democratic Party want to support is of little concern. After all, what do they know? We should nominate the obvious choice, just like we did in 2008. Oops. Bad example. I mean, we should nominate the electable one, not the one with actual ideas, like we did in 2004, because that worked out really well. Oh. Well. We should nominate Hillary right now without all that messy input from… you know… voters, because… because I said so.”

Because it’s taken me a couple of days to get to this story, there’s already an excellent response out there from Cristóbal Reyes at Young Progressive Voices. Reyes does an admirable job of countering Frank’s anti-democratic impulses, and doesn’t pull any punches:

It is cynical to believe that hand-picking a candidate is preferable to allowing the people to choose, and egomaniacal to suggest that your allies will object to your truth simply because you had the audacity to speak it, even though there is next to no truth in your words. There is nothing tactical or strategic about it. The arguments are based on falsehood and speculation and protected behind the need for one such as myself to disagree, as if doing so will validate your nonsensical submission.

Still, whereas Reyes doesn’t concede the electability argument, he rightfully acknowledges that the media—occupied mostly by Clintonian faux progressives—are falling over themselves to declare Sanders unelectable. I think they’re wrong. This is not to say I’m predicting a Sanders presidency, but I’d say the only announced candidate on the Democratic side who has literally no chance of being elected President is Jim Webb, and even he might be in the running for VP.  That is, completely apart from the Stalinistic stench of Frank’s thesis, it’s also wrong on the facts.

Frank’s key assertion is this: “There is… no chance—perhaps regrettably—for Sanders to win a national election.” If I might channel Stevie Nicks for a moment, that argument is hauntingly familiar. Where HAS Curmie heard that before? Oh, yeah, it was the riff employed by Hillary Clinton herself (and, of course, the wannabe First Husband) to attract superdelegates when it was becoming clear that Barack Obama was the people’s choice (or, rather, the Democratic voters’ choice) for the Democratic nomination: “he cannot win.” Obama, of course, took 365 of the necessary 270 electoral votes that fall. Oops.

Curmie—in a previous blogging iteration—commented more than once on the 2008 election, specifically with respect to the “horserace” elements of the Democratic nomination process. On April 24, a mere three weeks after Clinton was using electability as an issue, I called on her to drop out of the race for two reasons: the nomination process was de facto over because Obama had a virtually insurmountable lead in actual delegates (as opposed to polls taken over six months before the Iowa caucuses), and because “he generally (admittedly, not always) fares better than Clinton in head-to-head match-ups with Senator McCain.”

Two days later, I posted a state-by-state analysis of which of the two candidates—Obama or Clinton—would have a better chance of winning. The result: a literal dead heat. A couple of weeks later still, when any candidate more interested in the country than in herself would have dropped out and endorsed her fellow Democrat, Hillary Clinton was running a borderline racist campaign, conflating “hard-working Americans” and “white Americans,” and sending the aptly named Harold Ickes out to say that Obama couldn’t win. Here’s Newsweek’s Suzanne Smalley:

[Ickes] stressed that if Obama can't win Florida or Ohio—both states in which he has polled less favorably than Clinton—then states like New Mexico and Nevada will take on more importance. And Ickes suggested Obama can’t win in those places either.

Obama, of course, won all four of those states.

By the way, it wasn’t until June, when the proverbial fat lady had not only already sung but also taken several curtain calls, that then-Senator Clinton finally conceded the obvious and withdrew from the race. It’s more than a little ironic—not to say disgusting—that Clinton minions are now calling on everyone to make way for her candidacy before a single vote has been cast, lest it hurt the party’s chances.

More to the point, just as was the case in the 2008 election, it’s not exactly clear that Clinton is indeed the more electable candidate. Saying it’s so doesn’t mean it’s so, and the evidence is certainly a good deal short of overwhelming. A Quinnipiac poll released this week, for example, shows that in three important swing states, Clinton and Sanders fare about equally well against three plausible GOP contenders—Bush, Rubio, and Walker. All three Republicans beat both Democrats in Colorado, Iowa, and Virginia. Clinton does better against Bush and Rubio in CO and VA, Sanders does better in IA; against Walker, Clinton does better in VA, Sanders in CO, and they’re the same in IA. Pretty much a wash in those terms, with a slight edge to Clinton.

But if we look past that bottom-line number, it certainly appears that Sanders has much better odds of improving his standing. In favorability, Sanders is at a -2 in CO, with a huge 39% not knowing enough about him to have an opinion; Clinton is at -21, with a 56% negative rating. In Iowa, Sanders is at +4, Clinton at -23, again with lots of DK/NA (don’t know/no answer) for Sanders and 56% negatives for Clinton. In Virginia, Clinton’s best state of the three, Sanders is at +1, Clinton at -9; the DK/NAs for Sanders are at 43%, and Clinton has 50% negatives. That gives Sanders an overall +1 between the three states to Clinton’s -18: nearly a 20 point advantage for Sanders.

Sanders is already in plus-territory in two of the three states, and needs only break even there with voters who don’t yet know much about him to stay ahead of Clinton in this metric even if every voter currently undecided about Clinton decides they like her. In Virginia, Sanders needs approval from only a slight majority of IDKs to best her there, as well.

The contrast is even starker in the “honest and trustworthy” metric. Clinton’s numbers are scary: -28, -26, and -16; her best state of the three, Virginia, gives her a 55% negative rating. Sanders? +17, +21, +26. Sanders wins this category by 45 points in Colorado, 47 in Iowa, and 42 in Virginia. Wow. Clinton does do a little better than Sanders in “strong leadership qualities,” averaging a +8 to Sanders’s +7. Anyone want to try to tell me that’s a significant difference?

True, a single poll doesn’t tell us much, especially if, as in this case, it’s not only very early but also likely to be an outlier. The Daily Kos’s Steve Singiser spells out some of the problems with giving too much weight to this data. (Interestingly, Singiser discusses only Clinton’s numbers, seeming to take Sanders’s at face value.) On the other hand, Quinnipiac is a well-respected polling operation, and whereas it’s likely they’re off a little, it’s unlikely they’re totally out in left field. In other words, it probably isn’t true that Clinton averages 54% negatives in the three states, but I’d be willing to bet they’re at least well into the 40s. And I’m virtually certain she’s in negative territory in the trustworthiness metric, too, although perhaps not by more than 20 points.

And there’s a new Gallup poll, too, this one nation-wide. It shows that Sanders has grown in both favorables and unfavorables since March (as would be expected). Meanwhile, Clinton’s favorables dropped and unfavorables climbed, leaving her at an overall -3. Sanders, meanwhile, is at +4, albeit with lower numbers than Clinton in both categories simply because she is better known. Clinton does have a substantial lead among Democrats, with an overall +56, compared to Sanders’s +29, but the ratios are almost identical: Clinton gets a favorable rating 4.1 times as often as an unfavorable one from Democrats expressing an opinion; Sanders is at 3.9. Moreover, Clinton’s positives are down since March among both constituencies who even might vote for her: down 5 points among Democrats and Democrat-leaning independents, down 6 points among non-leaning independents.

Indeed, Sanders is the only Democrat in positive numbers in favorability ratio, and there’s only one Republican, Marco Rubio, who can match Sanders in both raw and net favorability scores (Sanders: 24-20, +4; Rubio: 29-23, +6). Putative GOP front-runner Donald Trump, by the way, checks in at 32-56, -24. That’s the worst in either party by 17 points!

There’s no doubt that Hillary Clinton is the candidate to beat on the Democratic side. But she was eight years ago, too, and we know how that turned out. Indeed, it sort of speaks to desperation on the part of a purported front-runner that she and her surrogates are resorting to electability arguments before voting even starts, especially when the last time we heard about a Clinton primary opponent’s “unelectability,” he got a higher percentage of the raw vote than any Democrat since LBJ. So before we simply gift-wrap the nomination and present it to HRC like a donation to her Superpac, let’s see how those numbers look when more people know Sanders.

This is really about whether the voters are going to get a say or whether we just turn over the process to the power elites. Barney Frank should be ashamed of advocating for the latter.

The AFT Leadership’s Anti-democratic (and Anti-Democratic) Power Play

Hillary Clinton and loyal minion Randi Weingarten.

Curmie’s intention in terms of catching up on his writing was to alternate between education-related and other topics (mostly but not exclusively politics) for a while, at least until the backlog was brought more or less under control. So, having written last about FIFA and the Women’s World Cup, I should talk about education again. Well, I am… but it’s politics, too, so think of this as a transition piece into the next education essay.

So, what’s it about? The American Federation of Teachers has come out with a very early endorsement of Hillary Clinton for President. Oh, so coincidentally, this happened as Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, who actually is a friend of labor, has begun to surge both in the polls and in campaign contributions (despite the fact that he won’t accept money from Superpacs). And AFT President Randi Weingarten is accurately described by the Washington Post’s Lyndsey Layton as a “longtime Clinton ally.” Funny how these things work out, isn’t it?

There’s a lengthy rationale on the union’s website—including, by the way, grammatical errors in the both the third and fourth sentences—all about “vision, experience, and leadership.” Not much about education policy, though, largely because Hillary Clinton is one of only two major Democratic politicians I can think of who’s worse on education policy than Barack Obama is (the other is Andrew Cuomo, in case you were wondering). She’s a fan of charter schools, Teach for America, and high-stakes testing (her silence is deafening on whether test scores should factor into evaluating teachers). Whether these are the best policies for America is a matter of opinion: Curmie thinks they’re awful, but you, Gentle Reader, are free to disagree. Whether such a platform is endorsed by a majority of union members, however, is not opinion. It purports to be a factual statement, and it is, quite simply, a lie.

Ah, but the union leadership “conducted a phone survey calling more than 1 million members, commissioned a second major scientific poll from a nationally respected polling firm, and solicited your [i.e., the membership’s] input online and in person.” And the membership allegedly voted overwhelmingly (more than 3:1) to endorse HRC.

There are a little over a million and a half members of the AFT, so roughly 2/3 of them were allegedly called. Plus, of course, there was the solicitation of online input. Curiously, however, actual AFT members not only weren’t contacted, themselves, they also don’t know of anyone who was. And no one saw any announcement of an online solicitation. Funny thing about that.

It didn’t take long after the endorsement announcement for the fecal matter to interface the whirling rotors. The very next day, for example, Candi Peterson, the General Vice President of the Washington Teachers Union (WTU) wrote a blog piece with the headline “Teachers Say No Freaking Way to AFT Endorsement of Hillary Clinton.” Peterson cites a host of tweets from… you know… actual teachers. Here’s a sampling:

”...AFT Link says they used telephone town halls and a web-based survey, I didn't even know existed.”

“I know many AFT members too and have not heard one person polled either.”

“B.S. … how many of the over 1 million members responded?”

“guessing you did not poll your members! No to Clinton who promotes Teach for America and charters!”

“Clinton endorsement is a joke; local union voices are being silenced to retain AFT union funding.”

“sad day when political expediency trumps legitimate representation of members’ real priorities.”

You know, Curmie can be kind of dumb sometimes, but that sure sounds like those folks aren’t pleased. Peterson also observes that:

Given no one could locate AFT’s poll of members, the Badass Teachers Association (BAT) took matters into their own hands by conducting a poll on Face Book. So far 1240 teachers endorsed Bernie Sanders and only 84 endorsed Clinton. One teacher said “Weingarten has this thing about giving false information via polls... It’s scary.”

As it happens, Curmie is a BAT, and therefore can check the current numbers: as I write this, that Facebook poll is Sanders 1361, Clinton 94. (Sorry, you’ll have to trust me on those numbers, as the site is “members only.”) In percentage terms, that’s a 94-6% advantage for the guy the AFT leadership would have us believe could garner only 17% of the votes from AFT members. Yeah, I’m calling “BULLSHIT” on that one. Sure, although there’s no doubt some overlap between AFT members and BATs, they’re not exactly the same people. And outraged Sanders supporters are more likely to vote in that poll than relatively speaking complacent Clintonites. But those factors don’t come close to explaining the discrepancy. And whereas this isn’t a scientific poll, it is at least an honest one: you can’t get to the poll without being a member of the group, and you can vote only once. It’s easy to come to the conclusion that Weingarten cooked the books.

A day after Peterson’s essay came one on the “In These Times” blog, entitled, “The AFT’s Endorsement of Hillary Clinton Is an Insult to Union Democracy” (the essay also appears on the Jacobin magazine site under the title “What Is Wrong with the AFT,” with the blog piece’s title as a subtitle). The author, Lois Weiner, a professor of education at New Jersey City University, writes that “The decision couldn’t be more wrongheaded,” that the endorsement “has disempowered members at precisely the moment when we most need revitalized teachers unions to save a system of education that is being destroyed as a public good by powerful elites and the politicians they control,” and that “[the] process of seeking member opinion was an embarrassingly transparent cover for Weingarten’s longstanding desire that Clinton be the AFT’s candidate.” In other words, Weingarten cooked the books.

Another day later, over at Slate, Laura Moser found only one possible explanation for the endorsement and its timing:

The obvious answer is that the Clinton camp choreographed the AFT endorsement as a safeguard against the unexpected threat posed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders—a candidate, incidentally, that unions seem to like so much that earlier this month [AFL-CIO President Richard] Trumka had to remind state and local leaders that they weren’t allowed to endorse Sanders without his say-so.

Translation: Weingarten cooked the books.

Maureen Sullivan takes a different approach in an article in Forbes (not, the last time I checked, a liberal bastion):

In the three months since she announced her run for the White House, Clinton has avoided going on the record about the nitty-gritty of school issues. No doubt she’s keenly aware that supporting the teachers union in their fight against charter schools means ticking off black and Hispanic families who swear by them. And many deep-pockets at Democrat party fund-raisers also favor vouchers in the form of “opportunity scholarships.” Also, how does she explain away school choice for her child but not for the Democratic voters she needs in the primaries?

…. Clinton did not go on to say [in a stump speech in Iowa] what she thought of the new standardized assessments such as PARCC and Smarter Balanced that stretch for weeks at schools across the country. Nor did she mention whether she thought students’ test scores should be used to evaluate teachers or play a role in determining their compensation.

In other words, Clinton has ducked every major education issue, and won’t, in fact, work for what she believes is right if she might lose votes by doing so. And why should she, if she has friends like Weingarten who are almost as corrupt as she is, and who will grant her an endorsement she doesn’t come close to deserving, without having to deal with real teachers, real students, or real parents? Weingarten cooked the books.

There’s a problem with the above analysis, however. It’s not that the Clinton campaign or Randi Weingarten are too honest to manufacture evidence: that’s not remotely true. But the folks at Hart Research are, unlike their clients, unwilling to condone an outright fraud. And they produce numbers that support the AFT leadership’s outlandish claim that members actually prefer Clinton over Sanders. How could that be? (Note: it tells us something about the AFT and something about the GOP that no Republicans were on the list of choices, and only prospective Democratic primary voters were polled. But that’s a screed for another day.) Well, just because their numbers are accurate doesn’t mean their methodology is either honest or competent.

One argument that has been noised around some (on comments pages if nowhere else) is that a very high percentage of AFT members are women, and they responded to the poll as women first and educators second. Another interesting point is that the candidates’ responses to questionnaires weren’t distributed by the AFT’s Politburo until after the endorsement. That would be when at least some of them realized that their interests align far more with “the Bern” than with HRC. Plus, the questionnaire was loaded with queries about issues that have nothing to do with education, plus stuff about “electability.” Of course, those Gentle Readers with good memories may remember that oft-repeated refrain from the 2008 campaign, and if I recall correctly the “Obama can’t win” rhetoric was proved to be less than entirely accurate, as opposed to the “electable” John Kerry four years earlier.

In other words, the selection of voters, the questions asked, and especially the timing all favored Clinton (Hart knew who their client was and what they wanted for results, after all), leading Curmie to suspect that getting the poll taken before even the reasonably sophisticated membership of the AFT had a chance to look at the candidates may have been the real reason for the absurdly early endorsement. Hillary has name recognition, has been the presumptive nominee since Obama’s re-election (as she was in ’08, I hasten to note), and has been (disingenuously) presented as a friend of public education and educators.

Curmie’s kindred spirit in curmudgitude, Peter Greene, gets to the heart of the skepticism felt by any real educator at any level towards the Clinton candidacy in a piece called “How AFT Blew It”:

My opposition to Clinton (and support for Bernie Sanders) is not based on any belief that she is a terrible human being, a crazy-awful person, or some evil mastermind bitch on wheels. My reluctance to support her is not even based on my perception that she is extraordinarily inauthentic (though I think that magnifies her other issues). I just don’t think she is remotely a supporter of public education or the teachers who work there. I think she would be perfectly comfortable continuing the exact same policies that we’ve suffered under for the past fifteen years and in fact would prefer to continue with them….

I believe some folks have grossly over-estimated Clinton’s electability, under-estimated Sander’s electability, and hugely under-estimated how much Clinton really doesn’t support public education and the people who work there. I suppose time will tell.

But in the meantime, I’m really, really hoping that NEA [of which Peter is a member] will take a more careful approach to an endorsement. I hope we don’t send the Dems the message that we will always be there for them, no matter how badly they treat us. I hope we don’t cut the membership out of the process and just expect them to fall in line. And I hope we endorse somebody who isn’t going to, once again, stab us in the back, front, and side.

The AFT’s early endorsement of Hillary Clinton, then, should be applauded by no educator, no union supporter, and no Democrat. At best, it is a mismanaged political stunt for a candidate unworthy of support by an organization of public school educators. At worst, it is a cynical power play by a dishonest and Machiavellian union leader to pour resources into the campaign of a candidate who already has more than enough money flowing in from Wall Street and similar cronies. Either way, it has embarrassed the AFT in front of its members and the world, and it has diminished the authority of actual educators both inside and outside the organization. And that, Gentle Reader, is not a good thing.