His run for President didn't begin with his announcement taking place at Trump Tower as I type this. Here he is trying to draw the cameras' attention to his famous baroque hairstyle with a "run for President" on the Reform Party ticket in 2000:
“Like Eugene McCarthy in 1968, Sanders will offer a way to cast a protest vote in a primary against Hillary Clinton, but I don’t expect him to register much support beyond that.”
-- Douglas E. Schoen, Democratic Strategist
A look at the Schoen Consulting website shows that Douglas Schoen has worked for US politicians, including both Clintons, Mike Bloomberg, Jon Corzine, and Evan Bayh; US corporations, including Walmart, P&G, and AT&T; and international politicians Tony Blair, Silvio Berlusconi, and three Israeli Prime Ministers. In other words, he's as Establishment as they come and his thoughts are representative of the "common knowledge" and "conventional wisdom" of the power elites. He's also wrong.
If you look at the support Eugene McCarthy got in 1968, he was far from being a fringe figure or a mere "protest vote." Peace-candidate McCarthy was not expected to do well against Lyndon Johnson in the first primary in New Hampshire, but his strong 42% second-place showing against the sitting President was at least one of the factors that led to LBJ's withdrawal (and RFK's entry into the race). McCarthy won the most popular votes in the 1968 primaries,but it was a time when party machines were able to give the nomination to the candidate who had received the fewest votes, LBJ's VP Hubert Humphrey, who had concentrated on the wheelers and dealers in non-primary states rather than attracting primary voters. There was a reason there was chaos in the streets outside the Democratic convention.
"...you learn really how strong the Establishment is, not just the political Establishment, but the business Establishment...the business community and the political institutions are all geared to the Establishment, and when they're really tested they're all militarist..."
--Eugene McCarthy (at the 2-minute mark in the video)
I felt I needed to capitalize "Establishment" when transcribing the quote pulled from the video, because that's the way we thought of that word at the time. It's a word that would serve the Bernie 2016 campaign well (I'm sure it's a word Bernie Sanders used very freely in his political past).
I had the pleasure of seeing a new production of Molière's Tartuffe at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in D.C. last Saturday night. While standing in the lobby with my wine during intermission, I was surprised to see a badly-dressed man wearing William Kristol's familiar permanent frown walk past. A couple of days later, something made me search for "Bill Kristol Tartuffe" on Google and I was led to his tweet about the show.
Just fled at intermission from ghastly production of Tartuffe @ShakespeareinDC. Perhaps worst single production of any play I've ever seen.
The Saturday performance was a preview that received a standing ovation from those of us who stayed until the end, but it hadn't been reviewed yet. When the play officially opened on Tuesday, it received unanimous rave reviews in all the places I could find: The Washington Post, DC Theatre Scene, Broadway World, and DC Metro Theater Arts, but, then again, all of these reviewers seem to have watched the end of the play rather than storming out like an offended French noble watching the first version in 1664 (before the royally-mandated happy ending in the 1669 version).
Of course, Bill Kristol has been known to make extremely hasty and seriously erroneous judgments before. Here he is on C-Span in 2003 mansplaining to Daniel Ellsberg how George Bush's decade-long war in Iraq would be nothing at all like Vietnam.
"This is going to be a two-month war, not a year war..." --Bill Kristol, 28 March 2003
The last time I voted in a primary that mattered was 2008 when I was living in New Jersey and did not need to enroll in a party to vote for Barack Obama. However, since moving to New York and registering as "No Party" in 2010, I have not been able to vote in a New York primary election. That didn't matter in 2012, but when Vermont's independent Senator Bernie Sanders announced his candidacy for the Democratic nomination, I decided it was time for me to make the same change. I went to the New York State Board of Elections website to get the proper form to convert my independence into Democratic Party membership, and on May 26th I mailed the form to my county board of elections.
Yesterday, June 4th, I got home to find the following letter in the box at the end of my driveway.
Dear Voter: Your present enrollment is No Party and must remain the same, according to New York State Law, until after the General Election 2015. Your new enrollment will be changed after the General Election 2015, which is November 03, 2015.
So, if you are a potential Bernie Sanders supporter in New York or another state like New York with closed primaries and rules written to favor official party candidates, then please check your voting status as soon as possible.
Telephone polls will keep reporting results for as long as there are telephone poles and for as long as there are lazy and competitive news outlets looking for ways to draw curious eyeballs to their advertisements.
I've been doubting their utility for years (polls, not poles). However, as of today, all results of telephone polls are officially null and void, and here's the evidence leading me to this final judgment:
1) This morning I saw this Time headline online, "Johnny Carson Reigns as America’s Favorite Late-Night Host, Poll Finds," which seemed a little strange since he's been off the air for 23 years and a large percentage of the adult population able to stay up past 11:30 at night has never seen Johnny host The Tonight Show. Yet he had almost twice as much support as his closest competitors, 'None' and David Letterman. As suspected, this was a telephone poll of 2,105 Americans conducted by Quinnipiac and the only fact it proved is that the only people who are regularly answering calls from unidentified numbers are people over 65. I'm only surprised Jack Paar and Steve Allen didn't beat Letterman too.
2) The clincher came later in the morning when I read this AFP headline: "George W. Bush More Popular than Obama: Poll." This CNN/ORC poll was conducted by telephone from May 29 to 31 on a representative sample of 1,025 Americans who were dumb or old enough to answer calls from strangers. The pollsters claim a margin of error of 3%, which makes Dubya's 52%-49% "victory" over Obama a tie, but I'm leaning toward a margin of error of infinity.
Not only have telephone polls lost their utility and credibility; they've even lost what little ability they had to divert attention from cat videos.
Yesterday afternoon, Senator Bernie Sanders kicked off his campaign for the 2016 Democratic Presidential nomination with the following speech in Burlington, Vermont. When I got home from work I watched all of ABC World News Tonight and the PBS Newshour and it was not even mentioned on either show. I guess I shouldn't be surprised by ABC finding more worth in stories about Jeopardy and how to save money on your cell phone bill, but I expect more from PBS.
Here's Bernie's whole policy-heavy speech with Lake Champlain in the background:
I recently downgraded my cable, so I no longer get MSNBC where I assume this speech did get at least a nod. However, it won't help if MSNBC is the only channel covering Bernie's campaign. He is a much more serious candidate than at least 8 or 9 GOP candidates who are given more mainstream air time. His support will come from the bottom up, and not from corporate and billionaire supporters. One thing we know for sure: attendance in Burlington was not mandatory yesterday (unlike Ted Cruz's very-well-publicized kickoff at Jerry Falwell University).
Not only is it one of my major yearly observances, #PynchonInPublic Day, for which I'm re-reading Gravity's Rainbow on the MetroNorth train to and from work in honor of Thomas Pynchon's 78th birthday, but it's the 70th anniversary of VE Day -- May 8, 1945 -- the day on which Keith Jarrett was born in Allentown, Pennsylvania. I'll listen toThe Köln Concert to celebrate later tonight, but here he is with Gary Peacock and Jack DeJohnette playing "Autumn Leaves."
But we can't expect Carly Fiorina to understand technology can we?
Unfortunately, Carly Fiorina hasn't been effectively Santorumed yet. CarlyFiorina.org isn't showing up as the top search result for Carly Fiorina on this first day of her campaign, and it won't unless her name is repeatedly linked to it.
According to the results of free non-scientific online tests, TBL found that he was "Existentialist", "Communist", and "A Grammar God," i.e., if he were a short wall-eyed Frenchman rather than a 6'3" blond American, he would be constantly mistaken for Jean-Paul Sartre!
