I didn't really want to let myself get sucked into another post-election commentary like last week's Post-Iowa, but enough links have popped up to be worth a brief post.
On the Democratic side, it's worth noting that Bernie Sanders thus far is running ahead of Barack Obama in 2008 against Hillary Clinton: sure, Obama won Iowa handily where Sanders only tied, but Clinton beat Obama soundly in New Hampshire, and this year lost that same state by even more. Geography tilts Iowa toward Obama and New Hampshire toward Sanders -- a little bad luck for Clinton there, but doesn't Clinton also have the advantage of having done all this before? In both states Sanders gained 20-30 points over the last six months. That's momentum.
Both states are atypical in various ways, and despite all the effort candidates put into winning them, their idiosyncrasies make them poor guides for subsequent primaries, where campaigning is necessarily less personal. The main thing Iowa and New Hampshire seem to do is to winnow down the field. The sixteen Republicans we started with are now down to six: Trump, Kasich, Cruz, Bush, Rubio, and Carson. Not sure if Gilmore still thinks he's running: he got 133 votes, or 0.052%, a figure that trailed three no-longer-running candidates (Paul, Huckabee, Santorum) but at least topped ex-candidates Pataki, Graham, and Jindal; see results here; all 30 names listed were on the Republican ballot, but the list doesn't break out the 1750 write-ins.)
Gilmore (and for that matter Santorum) were also beat by Andy Martin, who Wikipedia describes as "an American perennial candidate who has pursued numerous litigations" and "the primary source of false rumors that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama was secretly a Muslim during the 2008 U.S. Presidential election." Just behind Gilmore (and ahead of Pataki) was Richard Witz, a retired school custodian from Spencer, Massachusetts. The low vote getters on the ballot were Matt Drozd, Robert L. Mann, and Peter Messina, with five votes each (Messina is the only one of those three with as much as a website).
Chris Christie (6th place, 7%) and Carly Fiorina (7th place, 4%) dropped out after New Hampshire. With most of next month's primaries taking place in the South, they didn't really have anything to look forward to. Further down, Ben Carson (8th place, 2%) and Jim Gilmore (13th place, 0%) seem to still be running (as opposed to "in the running").
[PS: On Friday, after I had written the above, Gilmore gave up the ghost. NBC noted that the Republican field had narrowed to six, then gave a rundown that only mentioned five of them. Ben Carson seems to be turning into the invisible man.]
Here are some links to chew on:
Nate Silver: Republicans Need to Treat Donald Trump as the Front-Runner: Looks for comparisons in past Iowa-New Hampshire results for patterns and finds everything from Pat Buchanan to Mitt Romney (who in 2012 did 0.2 better in Iowa and 4.2 better in New Hampshire, but really pretty close, at least without adjusting for the competitive fields). The sidebar also (at the moment) shows Trump with a 55% chance of winning South Carolina (which you may recall Romney lost to Newt Gingrich; he has Rubio at 22% and Cruz at 15% but only in the fishy-sounding "polls plus" column). Then Silver abandons the stats and starts dreaming:
If you could somehow combine Rubio's likability and appeal to conservatives, Kasich's policy smarts and post-New Hampshire momentum, and Bush's war chest and organization, you'd have a pretty good candidate on your hands. But instead, these candidates are likely to spend the next several weeks sniping at one another. The circular firing squad mentality was already apparent in New Hampshire, where fewer advertising dollars were directed against Trump despite his having led all but one poll of the state since July.
By pegging Trump as the "front runner" Silver seems to be daring the "Republican elites" to get their act together and settle on one anti-Trump miracle and be done with it. Still, you have to wonder (as Elias Isquith does), if, having downplayed Trump's changes, Silver isn't just looking to salvage his reputation. What Silver's own data shows is that Bush-Kasich-Rubio (maybe even Cruz) understand that only by getting past each other does one have a chance of taking on Trump -- the problem is that none of them come close to Silver's dream criteria. What I suspect will eventually happen is that those "elites" will in the end reconcile themselves to Trump, because in the end Trump is no threat to them. That's far more likely than the prospect of the Democratic Party apparatchiki giving in to Sanders even if Sanders sweeps the primaries as thoroughly. Part of this is, as David Frum put it, because the GOP fears its base, whereas the Democrats loathe theirs. But mostly it's because Trump is just another corrupt demagogic symptom of a system that Sanders is promising to upend.
Paul Krugman: Hard Money Men: Ohio Governor John Kasich skipped Iowa and ran pretty close to the perfect New Hampshire campaign -- lots of town halls, one-on-ones, presenting a low-key personality with a command of issues and his own temper -- and wound up getting 16% of the vote, pretty unimpressive totals except that he topped Cruz, Bush, and Rubio for second place. Tempting, given his competition, to argue that he's a sane oasis in the Republican field, but Krugman isn't having any of it:
[N]ote that on economic policy -- which sort of matters -- Kasich is terrible, arguably worse than the rest of the GOP field.
It's not just his balanced-budget fetishism, which would be disastrous in an economic crisis. He's also a hard-money man.
Ted Cruz has gotten some scrutiny, although not enough, for his goldbuggism. But Kasich, when asked why wages have stagnated, gave as his number one reason "because the Federal Reserve kept interest rates so low" -- because this diverted investment into stocks, or something. No, it doesn't make any sense -- but it tells you that he is viscerally opposed to monetary as well as fiscal stimulus in the face of high unemployment.
So no, Kasich isn't sensible. He's just off the wall in ways that differ in some ways from the GOP mainstream. If he'd been president in 2009-10, we'd have had a full replay of the Great Depression.
For more on Kasich, see Heather Digby Parton: John Kasich is a right-wing Trojan Horse. On the other hand, Jon Huntsman received 17% of the vote in New Hampshire in 2012 (3rd place behind Romney and Ron Paul) and was never heard from again.
Emily Douglas: Last Night, Rachel Maddow Perfectly Captured What Bernie's Win Means for the Left: Follow the link for that quote (and some video). What I find more interesting is this later bit:
Think back to the 1992 conventions, when Pat Buchanan gave his infamous culture-wars speech, announcing a "crusade," as Maddow put it, against gay people, minorities and feminism and concluding that "There is a religious war going on in our country for the soul of America. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we will one day be as was the Cold War itself." In response to that declaration of war, the Democratic Party didn't have much: "As a gay person watching that in 1992, I didn't feel like Bill Clinton had my back. I didn't feel like the Democratic Party had my back," she added. "He was talking about agreeing with Ronald Reagan that government was the problem."
I saw a little bit of Maddow in the election coverage. She was talking about how Trump is viewed, at least in Europe, as analogous to the neo-fascist right-wing parties there. That's probably true, but Americans have little experience with native-grown fascism, so the same resonance isn't easily felt here. On the other hand, most European countries experienced native fascist movements as well as the fascist-driven World War -- so bad that surviving right-wing parties can't help but be tarred by the experience. You find, for instance, in France large numbers of people who will vote for anyone against Le Pen. The closest analogue in the US was when Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke ran for governor of Louisiana. But aside the KKK, the US has never really had fascist movements. In a sense, the hallmarks of fascism -- racism, rabid xenophobia, militarism -- have become so mainstreamed here that they don't get flagged as such.
Martin Longman: Why Sanders Is Still Behind the Eight Ball: Points out that the way the Democratic Party selects "superdelegates" creates a huge baked-in advantage for Clinton (currently 394-42). By comparison, with the proportional split of delegates in New Hampshire, Sanders has made a net gain of 13 delegates. At that rate, it's going to take a long time and a lot of landslide victories for Sanders to catch up. Sure, Clinton had a similar advantage in 2008, but not as extreme as this year: Obama had a number of prominent Democratic supporters (Longman emphasizes Tom Daschle). Still hard to say what happens if the primaries go overwhelmingly for Sanders: those superdelegates may save Clinton, but won't make her look like the people's pick.
Joel Beinin: More details about Bernie Sanders and Kibbutz Sha'ar ha-'Amakim: In case you're curious. I've heard reports that after New Hampshire Clinton was going to attack Sanders for being anti-Israel. Good luck with that. Chances are that most supporters of Sanders are already more disturbed by Israel's right-wing polity (not to mention the alliance of Netanyahu with the Republicans) than Sanders himself is -- so attacking him on that is more likely to shift voters against Israel/Likud than it is to harm Sanders.
Michelle Alexander: Why Hillary Clinton Doesn't Deserve the Black Vote: "From the crime bill to welfare reform, policies Bill Clinton enacted -- and Hillary Clinton supported -- decimated black America." Then, and these are not unrelated, there's "the economy, stupid":
An oft-repeated myth about the Clinton administration is that although it was overly tough on crime back in the 1990s, at least its policies were good for the economy and for black unemployment rates. The truth is more troubling. As unemployment rates sank to historically low levels for white Americans in the 1990s, the jobless rate among black men in their 20s who didn't have a college degree rose to its highest level ever. This increase in joblessness was propelled by the skyrocketing incarceration rate. [ . . . ]
Despite claims that radical changes in crime and welfare policy were driven by a desire to end big government and save taxpayer dollars, the reality is that the Clinton administration didn't reduce the amount of money devoted to the management of the urban poor; it changed what the funds would be used for. Billions of dollars were slashed from public-housing and child-welfare budgets and transferred to the mass-incarceration machine. By 1996, the penal budget was twice the amount that had been allocated to food stamps. During Clinton's tenure, funding for public housing was slashed by $17 billion (a reduction of 61 percent), while funding for corrections was boosted by $19 billion (an increase of 171 percent), according to sociologist Loïc Wacquant "effectively making the construction of prisons the nation's main housing program for the urban poor."
Josiah Lee Auspitz: For GOP, It's 270 to Win, but Also 1237 to Lose: Reviews the strange delegate allocation procedures the Republican Party adopted to help ensure the dominance of conservatives by tipping the scales toward smaller states in the west and south.
Eric Alterman: Why There Will Be No New New Deal: Draws on the argument of Jefferson Cowie in a new book, The Great Exception: The New Deal and the Limits of American Politics. Cowie seems to believe that the New Deal was an unrepeatable exception because it occurred at the one point in American history when the internal divisions of America's working class -- race, ethnicity, religion -- were at low ebb (even so, he sees the exclusion of blacks from many New Deal benefits as necessary for their passage -- for details see Ira Katznelson's When Affirmative Action Was White). Civil rights for blacks and increased immigration only serve to undermine the New Deal's unique focus on class and solidarity. Alterman also cites Robin Archer's Why Is There No Labor Party in the United States? and Robert J Gordon's The Rise and Fall of American Growth to pile on inevitability. Yet he also notes:
Beginning midway through Jimmy Carter's presidency, with the New Deal order wheezing on life support, Democrats tried to save themselves by aping right-wing arguments about government being the problem, not the solution, to the challenges that ordinary Americans faced. By tying themselves to the mast of a corrupt campaign-finance system, they have helped to make it so.
Uh, maybe it wasn't so inevitable. Maybe it had more to do with some bad decisions certain politicians made because the Cold War had blinded them to thinking of America in class terms? Someone like, oh, Bill Clinton? Cowie points to the Great Depression and WWII as the key events that forged the sense of unity and solidarity that made the New Deal, and implies that they are irrepeatable. On the other hand, it's not that we lack for depressions and wars -- just the critical analysis to understand and overcome them.
Gar Alperovitz: Socialism in America Is Closer Than You Think: Lest you think that socialism is un-American, Alperovitz has a number of examples of things that already exist that go beyond Sanders' own program. Not all are advertised as "socialism" -- a brand that hasn't fared all that well, not that socialists don't have an honorable legacy, often moving well ahead of more mainstream politicians.
Josh Marshall: A Clarifying Encounter: On Thursday's Democratic debate, which Marshall thought was good for both but maybe a bit better for Clinton. He complains, "and yet there's a vague hint of Rubio-ism in Sanders" -- an objection to Sanders repeatedly hitting his campaign talking points. Having heard them all many times I can't say that's something I especially enjoy, but I suspect such repetition is needed to drive his points home -- and they are points that encapsulate broad programs, unlike Rubio's whatever. I caught about three minutes of the debate, which included Sanders citing the 1954 coup against Mossadegh as a lesson in unintended consequences -- and he wasn't just name-dropping; he explained it very succinctly -- and blasting Kissinger's guidance of American foreign policy, citing how the Kissinger's expansion of the Vietnam War destabilized Cambodia and led to three million deaths and how his opening to China has cost millions of American jobs. That's all stuff I know like the back of my hand, but it's also stuff you never hear politicians say. When Sanders promised he wouldn't be seeking Kissinger's advice, Clinton asked he would listen to on foreign policy, and Sanders ignored her. What should he say? The Democratic Party mandarins, like Zbigniew Brzezinski and Madelyn Albright, are every bit as compromised as Kissinger and Condoleezza Rice: indeed, you can't be certified as a "foreign policy expert" in Washington without having been systematically deluded for decades. Maybe Marshall is right and Clinton is exceptionally knowledgeable about wonky policy specifics. But Sanders knows his history, and that's where lessons are to be learned -- not least the ones that have blindsided Clinton time and again.