US Presidential Contenders

[vonbach]

Sanders repeatedly referred to F.D.R. and claimed his policies are similar and face similar opposition from the “ruling class.”

FDR was probably the worst president we've ever had. His "new deal" had people starving to death.

“In other words, real freedom must include economic security,” said Sanders. “That was Roosevelt’s vision 70 years ago.

Yes and who is going to pay for it?

In better news
REUTERS 5 DAY ROLLING POLL:
[Sleezebag]: 38.8%...
CARSON: 14.7%...
RUBIO: 10.3%...
CRUZ: 7.1%... MORE...

[Rusty Edge]

Why Donald [Sleezebag] is impervious to fact-checking
 10 / 25 The Week Paul Waldman

-is-impervious-to-fact-checking/ar-AAfSEYX?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout]http://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/why-donald-[Sleezebag]-is-impervious-to-fact-checking/ar-AAfSEYX?li=BBnb7Kz&ocid=mailsignout

Well, it seems that this web page is highlight and copy resistant. It's a short op/ed piece, and it doesn't take long to read the article, and it's description of the way things normally work. Politicians pander, the media fact checks and reports, the politicians blush and reduce their rhetoric, potential voters factor that in.

[Sleezebag] has a different dynamic. His base would rather believe him. He is rewarded for defying the biased media.

........................

Actually, I happened to watch that episode of Meet the Press. First [Sleezebag] asserted that he witnessed Moslems in NJ celebrating 9/11. When confronted he changed his story to he saw it on TV, and backed that up with he has 100s of tweets from people who saw the same thing.

That was over 14 years ago. I figure it's possible that a number of people, including [Sleezebag],  may have been confused about the byline, perhaps confusing Jordan and Jersey.

If he really saw it on TV, a man of his resources should be able to prove it shortly. He has people looking into it.

So... we shall see.

[Yitzi]

That was over 14 years ago. I figure it's possible that a number of people, including [Sleezebag],  may have been confused about the byline, perhaps confusing Jordan and Jersey.

That seems the most likely.

Actually, if he had corrected it to Mid-east arabs, that would actually help his anti-immigration rhetoric.  "Our Muslims are decent and loyal Americans, but the foreign ones usually aren't, so we need to keep them out until they've been checked."

[vonbach]

The one tweet that Ann Coulter posted basically sums up the election.
This was just after the Paris slaughter.
"They can have the election if they like but [Sleezebag] just became president."

[Buster's Uncle]

McCain: Tea Party “appeals to the bad angels of our nature”
Meredith Shiner  Political correspondent  December 02, 2015



Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is surrounded by reporters as he arrives on Capitol Hill in Washington on Tuesday. (Photo: J. Scott Applewhite/AP)



Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., would not criticize current GOP presidential frontrunner Donald [Sleezebag] outright, no matter how hard reporters tried at a media breakfast here in Washington Wednesday. But he did warn that the tea party movement is in part fueled by appealing to “the bad angels of our nature” and that candidates who do not correct racist sentiments or untrue statements on the trail are “complicit” in propagating them.

Speaking at a breakfast hosted by the Christian Science Monitor, McCain said that much of the anti-establishment sentiment against Republicans from their conservative base is “justified” because those voters have not seen the sort of economic benefits they have expected to see since the crash of 2008. He noted that only “very wealthy people have done very well.” Yet he also offered several candid diagnoses of what he characterized as a darker side of the elements that have taken over the GOP and propelled non-politician candidates like [Sleezebag] or neurosurgeon Ben Carson to the top of the field.

“If you go back to 2010, when the tea party became a real factor at least in certain segments of the political landscape, it’s a reflection of frustration and anger that people feel,” McCain said. “A lot of that is bred by a poor economy, as far as its effect on average American citizens, and a lot of it is justified because they have not seen a betterment of their lives that they had hoped to expect.”

McCain, the 2008 GOP presidential nominee, then added a pretty serious addendum to that widely-accepted explanation of the tea party’s roots: “I think also – I probably shouldn’t say this – but some of this appeals to the bad angels of our nature rather than the better angels of our nature.”

When he was campaigning for president in 2008 , McCain caught flack from the conservative base — and even attendees at his own events — for defending now-President Barack Obama against charges from town hall attendees that the Democrat was Arab, un-American and a “terrorist.”

“He’s a decent family man [and] citizen that I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues, and that’s what this campaign’s all about. He’s not [an Arab],“ McCain said at the time.

When asked whether more Republican candidates in the 2016 race should follow his example and not let incendiary comments stand, McCain adamantly defended his approach in 2008 and urged others to adopt it. Those who do not correct wrong views are “complicit,” said McCain, and will ultimately lose, even if they win electorally.

“In my view, if you allow those things to be said –or not, in the case of beating up a protestor – and let that go unresponded to, you are complicit,” McCain said. “You have to do what’s right. No matter what the cost is, you have to do what’s right. Otherwise you will lose in the long run, even if you win, you lose, speaking as the loser. You just must have a level of political discourse.”

It’s not clear that those in the current crop of GOP contenders will heed his advice. But McCain’s comments provided a reminder of how far the Republican party has shifted since McCain last ran for president and how antiquated, at least for now, his take might seem to those in the movement that now dominates the GOP.

Even so, McCain — who faces Senate reelection in 2016 — spent much of the breakfast questioning Obama’s leadership and strategy in attacking the Islamic State in Syria. And he told reporters that he plans to vote this week in the Senate to repeal Obamacare, though he conceded “discomfort” with supporting a package that would roll back Medicaid expansion, which was implemented in Arizona by its governor and legislature.

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/mccain-tea-party-appeals-to-the-bad-angels-of-163046617.html

[vonbach]

http://dcgazette.com/donald-[Sleezebag]-right-this-video-report-shows-group-of-islamists-holding-a-pre-planned-911-celebration-on-a-rooftop/

Donald [Sleezebag] Right! This VIDEO Report Shows Group of Islamists Holding a Pre-Planned 9/11 Celebration on a Rooftop…
 Paris Swade 12/02/2015
28ShareTweetPinterest
Donald [Sleezebag] Right! This VIDEO Report Shows Group of Islamists Holding a Pre-Planned 9/11 Celebration on a Rooftop…
This video from September 16, 2001 shows a news broadcast by New York City affiliate WCBS-TV. It features a long-term reporter named Pablo Guzman. He is talking about the federal government investigating claims in a Jersey City apartment building that reports that residents had a rooftop celebration of the 9/11 attacks.

This video was posted on YouTube on Monday by “Citizen Video.”

I was watching CNN myself back then. [Sleezebag] was right.

[Rusty Edge]

The one tweet that Ann Coulter posted basically sums up the election.
This just after the Paris slaughter.
"They can have the election if they like but [Sleezebag] just became president."

I would dearly and truly love to believe that the next president will not be Hillary.

- But I've been disappointed before in presidential elections and premature predictions.

How many presidential electors are actually committed to [Sleezebag] so far? Too soon?
How many delegates does he have so far for the national convention? Too soon?
But he's really popular! More popular than Bush or Clinton, almost like Ross Perot was... practically inevitable.

[Buster's Uncle]

Oh!  But remember how popular the real George Bush was a year out in the wake of the First Oil Crusade?  No WAY that can go wrong...

[Rusty Edge]

http://dcgazette.com/donald-[Sleezebag]-right-this-video-report-shows-group-of-islamists-holding-a-pre-planned-911-celebration-on-a-rooftop/

Donald [Sleezebag] Right! This VIDEO Report Shows Group of Islamists Holding a Pre-Planned 9/11 Celebration on a Rooftop…
 Paris Swade 12/02/2015
28ShareTweetPinterest
Donald [Sleezebag] Right! This VIDEO Report Shows Group of Islamists Holding a Pre-Planned 9/11 Celebration on a Rooftop…
This video from September 16, 2001 shows a news broadcast by New York City affiliate WCBS-TV. It features a long-term reporter named Pablo Guzman. He is talking about the federal government investigating claims in a Jersey City apartment building that reports that residents had a rooftop celebration of the 9/11 attacks.

This video was posted on YouTube on Monday by “Citizen Video.”

I was watching CNN myself back then. [Sleezebag] was right.

I was working that day and limited to radio. I don't recall this story.

Well, there's quite a discrepancy between 8 and "thousands", but it sounds like he's merely exaggerating,  not making stuff up. Exaggeration is hardly a first for a politician on a stump.

I'd be chagrined whether I was [Sleezebag] or the Media, but I think the Media loses more credibility over this one.

[Unorthodox]

http://dcgazette.com/donald-[Sleezebag]-right-this-video-report-shows-group-of-islamists-holding-a-pre-planned-911-celebration-on-a-rooftop/

Donald [Sleezebag] Right! This VIDEO Report Shows Group of Islamists Holding a Pre-Planned 9/11 Celebration on a Rooftop…
 Paris Swade 12/02/2015
28ShareTweetPinterest
Donald [Sleezebag] Right! This VIDEO Report Shows Group of Islamists Holding a Pre-Planned 9/11 Celebration on a Rooftop…
This video from September 16, 2001 shows a news broadcast by New York City affiliate WCBS-TV. It features a long-term reporter named Pablo Guzman. He is talking about the federal government investigating claims in a Jersey City apartment building that reports that residents had a rooftop celebration of the 9/11 attacks.

This video was posted on YouTube on Monday by “Citizen Video.”

I was watching CNN myself back then. [Sleezebag] was right.

I was working that day and limited to radio. I don't recall this story.

Well, there's quite a discrepancy between 8 and "thousands", but it sounds like he's merely exaggerating,  not making stuff up. Exaggeration is hardly a first for a politician on a stump.

I'd be chagrined whether I was [Sleezebag] or the Media, but I think the Media loses more credibility over this one.

The report said the building was "swarming" with suspects, so I can even understand thinking it was a lot more than 8. 

However, that doesn't change the dangerous tone [Sleezebag] is striking that Muslims are patently bad.  Some Christians are looking lovely in the wake of the Planned Parenthood shooting as well. 

[Buster's Uncle]

The Bernie revolution: He’s not going anywhere
Andy Kroll for Yahoo News  December 03, 2015



Bernie Sanders speaking at George Mason University in October. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)



It’s a drizzly Wednesday evening in October and the presidential campaign has descended on a college campus in suburban Virginia. The line of students begins way out in the parking lot, a procession of flannel and hoodies and trendy rain boots winding up the stairs and through the doors of the campus rec center, snaking down polished hallways until reaching the gymnasium. Attendees scribble their names and email addresses on pledge cards and drop them in a box on the way in. Young volunteers in campaign T-shirts corral the unwieldy masses, and the late arrivals plead for a seat inside.

We’ve seen this hundreds of times before: The gymnasium filled to the rafters, the handwritten banners and the phalanx of TV cameras, the klieg lights aimed at center stage, the rock music blaring as the candidate makes his or her entrance. But the setting of tonight’s rally, George Mason University in Fairfax, Va., isn’t some hotbed of ivory tower liberalism on fire for the latest Democratic rock star. If anything, George Mason is known as a bastion of libertarianism and a magnet for major donations by right-leaning luminaries such as the billionaire industrialists Charles and David Koch. The headliner of tonight’s student town hall, the object of affection for all these college kids, isn’t quite whom you’d expect either: a rumpled, irascible democratic socialist from the state of Vermont named Bernie Sanders.

Take a look at him: Sen. Bernard Sanders, age 74, is not young, handsome or polished like Bill Clinton or Barack Obama were when they ran for president. He doesn’t care much for working rope lines or rah-rah chants. The closest thing he has to an official slogan is the legally required fine print on his website and campaign lit: “PAID FOR BY BERNIE 2016 (not the billionaires).”

His stump speeches steer clear of the typical campaign pabulum. No city-on-a-hill imagery. No spit-shined paeans to the “greatest country on earth.” Sanders prefers to rattle off one grim fact after another about the dire state of our union—2.2 million people incarcerated; $1 trillion in student debt; the vast gap between top 1 percent and everyone else. His transitions — “Now, there’s another issue I want to discuss” — send Ted Sorensen spinning in his grave. If Obama campaigned in poetry, then Sanders employs the prose of a Union Square pamphleteer telling anyone who’ll listen all the reasons why our country is going to pot.

And the college kids — they love it. At George Mason, they pump their fists and leap out of their seats and scream “I love you, Bernie!” They love him because he doesn’t sugarcoat it, doesn’t coddle them. As he rattles off the bad news, many students boo but others cheer; some cheer and boo. It’s almost as if they can’t help but applaud a candidate who has the nerve to give it to them straight.



Sanders greeting students after a town hall meeting at George Mason University. (Photo: Joshua Roberts/Reuters)


No matter the setting or the audience, Sanders’ fundamental message is the same: The political system is broken, corrupt. Passing this or that new policy won’t fix it. In the mold of populists past, Sanders wants to tear it all down and rebuild it anew.

***

When Sanders kicked off his presidential bid in May, his own allies were perplexed. He wouldn’t get within a mile of Hillary Clinton. Technically, he wasn’t even a member of the Democratic Party. (Sanders identifies as an Independent in the U.S. Senate.) But just as Donald [Sleezebag] improbably stole the limelight among the Republican faithful after entering the race in June, for the Democrats the summer of 2015 was the Summer of Bernie. He drew huge crowds everywhere he went — 10,000 in Madison, 20,000 in Boston, 27,500 in Los Angeles. His advance team stopped booking reception halls and started booking sports arenas. The people loved it. The numbers proved it. Feel the Bern.

In a span of months, Sanders erased Clinton’s double-digit lead in polls conducted of Iowa and New Hampshire voters. He announced in October that his campaign had raised $26 million in the previous three months — the same as Clinton, despite running a vastly leaner campaign and relying almost entirely on small-dollar donors. Several weeks later, Sanders told supporters that he’d received contributions from 750,000 individuals, a figure surpassing Barack Obama’s tally at the same point in his historic first presidential bid. And Sanders had gotten there more or less organically: For the first five months of his campaign, Sanders didn’t air a single TV ad. (Clinton’s campaign had aired more than 4,800 television ads through early October.)



Sanders greets supporters at a campaign rally outside the New Hampshire statehouse in November. (Photo: Brian Snyder/Reuters)


Sanders is now on the air in Iowa and New Hampshire, and while his polling numbers have started to level off, they climbed steadily from summer into fall.

There’s nothing new about insurgent candidacies emerging from what their supporters like to call “the Democratic wing of the Democratic party.” But in elections past — from George McGovern and Ted Kennedy to Bill Bradley and Howard Dean — they haven’t had much appeal beyond that well-educated, affluent demographic. What’s fueled Sanders’ rise and carried him past the point of vanity candidate is that he’s resonated with other voting blocs. White working-class voters  like his vocal opposition to the Trans-Pacific Partnership. Retirees perk up when he defends Social Security and Medicare while denouncing pharmaceutical companies and the price of prescription drugs. Students take note of his call for affordable education. “Bernie is the first candidate to be brutally honest in acknowledging the fact that it is time for the government to stop making money off of student debt,” said Sophia Ansari, a student speaker at Sanders’ George Mason event.

Sanders may not walk into Philadelphia next July as the next Democratic nominee, but he has attracted a broad enough base of support to make Clinton take him seriously. The Democratic debate in October was surely the first in recent memory to feature two candidates arguing over the definition of American capitalism. More important than Sanders’ chances of winning the nomination may be the underlying forces driving his unexpected rise. Who are the Berniacs and Sanderistas, as his fans are known, and what do they want? What’s so appealing to them about a grumpy, 74-year-old democratic socialist?



A Sanders supporter prepares a table at the Central Iowa Democrats Fall Barbecue in Ames, Iowa, last month. (Photo: Mark Kauzlarich/Reuters)


I spent several weeks following Sanders on the campaign trail and interviewing dozens of his supporters, Berniacs of all ages, races, ideologies and backgrounds. I met a man who had traveled from Finland to see Sanders in the flesh. I spoke to a family that had attended almost every single Sanders campaign event in the state of New Hampshire. I learned of a woman with terminal cancer who loved Sanders so much she’d decided to spend her final months volunteering for his campaign.

No two Berniacs are the same. Each discovered Sanders in his or her own way, and each has his or her own reasons for feeling the Bern. But what unites them is something larger, a deep rejection of a government that doesn’t tackle their everyday needs and problems. You hear a version of this on the Republican side, where [Sleezebag], for all his bullying and lies and vitriol, has tapped into a similar populist vein that cares more about offshoring American jobs, corporate mergers and too-big-to-fail banks than most of the rhetoric used by the current crop of presidential candidates. The Sanders-[Sleezebag] crossover is real: Out on the trail, I lost track of how many times Berniacs brought up [Sleezebag] as proof of something larger at play. One supporter I met in Nashua told me: “I’m kinda looking for a [Sleezebag] versus Sanders.”

***

To live in New Hampshire is to be spoiled when it comes to presidential politics. The state’s first-in-the-nation primary status means the candidates spend inordinate amounts of time and campaign money there, and its residents can rattle off all the times they’ve seen “Hillary” or “Jeb” or “Kasich.” A friend of mine who lives in New Hampshire talks about “collecting” candidates like a kid collects baseball cards.

For decades, Sanders has been as the congressman — and later the senator — next door; before that, he was the widely known mayor of Vermont’s biggest city. There’s a familiarity to the way the people talk about him, a recognition that figures into Sanders’ strong polling numbers in the state. (RealClearPolitics’ polling average shows Sanders tied with Clinton, factoring in a margin of error.) People I spoke to expressed some surprise that Sanders had decided to run, but they soon recognized that the Bernie running for president was the same Bernie they’ve known all these years.

I caught up with Sanders during a two-day swing through New Hampshire at a senior center in Manchester. Standing in the corner of a wood-floored multi-purpose room opposite a Bingo board, kitchen and plaque listing the names of residents who’d rolled 300s in the Wii Bowling League, Sanders focused heavily on the nitty-gritty details of Social Security, chained consumer price index (CPI), protecting Medicare and the exorbitant cost of prescription drugs in the U.S. compared to Canada and Germany — issues all too relevant to most of the roughly three dozen audience members in the room. A burly man named Rick Maynard rose to his feet and thanked Sanders for the time he’d spent in New Hampshire, well before his presidential run, working with citizen activists and keeping people updated on the latest happenings on Capitol Hill.



Bernie Sanders shortly after his surprise win as mayor of Burlington, Vt., in 1981. (Photo: Donna Light/AP)


I spoke with Maynard afterward. A 58-year-old unionist with the with International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers, Maynard is a burly fellow, with chest hair peeking out of his T-shirt and “BERNIE” buttons pinned to his hat. He told me he was one of two people in the state who brief state legislators on trade issues. “Fair trade, not free trade,” he stressed. He praised Sanders’ consistency on the issue over the years, including his opposition to the TPP agreement. “He’s saying the same thing, possibly a little bit better because he’s got a bit more experience at it, but it’s the same,” Maynard said. “He doesn’t put the finger up and figure whichever way the polls are going.”

As for Clinton, Maynard referred me to a CNN story that found 45 different instances in which Clinton, as secretary of state, had praised the TPP. (As a candidate, Clinton came out against it.) “She flip-flopped. She kinda swayed in the wind,” Maynard said. “My concerns with Hillary are I don’t trust her, really.”

I heard that sentiment a lot about Clinton. Sanders, by contrast, is held up as a model of consistency and authenticity. He’s been giving the same wonky speeches for 30 years, and now it’s paying off by proving that he cares. In a world of hypocrisy, he is anything but a hypocrite. Long-time political columnist Walter Shapiro, who profiled Sanders 30 years ago when he was mayor of Burlington, puts it well, telling me: “Bernie Sanders was an angry man in 1985, and grumpy. He’s the same guy today.”



Hillary Clinton greeting Iowans at Iowa State University in November. (Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)


The other theme that comes up at Sanders events is an appreciation of his granular focus on the rising costs of getting by in America today. In the parking lot before a press conference at a local union hall, a third-generation union member named Zack Smith, 35, brings up — of all things — Sanders’ effort to reduce debit card transaction fees. “It’s the average person’s issues he brings up,” Smith said. He dismissed the notion that reforming debit card fees — an issue most visibly championed by then comedian (and future senator) Al Franken in his satirical 1999 campaign book Why Not Me? — wasn’t a winning issue with voters. “It is a big deal,” he insisted. “Four dollars and 52 cents is the average transaction for an ATM. That is absolutely ridiculous. People take out $20 a lot of the time, and 20 percent of that goes to an ATM fee?”

At the Manchester senior center, an older married couple, Michael and Doris Manning, talked with me about Sanders’ ideas on issues that intimately affect retirees and senior citizens. The Mannings are both 66; Doris has gray-blonde hair and wore Jack-o-Lantern earrings, and Michael wore a T-shirt that read “The Snoring He-Beast.”

“Since we’ve been retired now and on Social Security ourselves,” Doris said, “we know what he’s talking about.”

“It used to be a problem we were going to have to deal with someday,” Michael said. “Well, someday is now. And we find ourselves in exactly the types of situations he was describing.”

Doris said she was prescribed a medication that would cost her $265 a month. She couldn’t afford it on her and Michael’s income, so she opted not to take it.

“Same thing with my shingles shot,” Michael said. “For some reason it falls into the wrong category of drug. It’s a class B or whatever. Because it’s not covered, it’s 200-something dollars out of pocket. OK, I’m just gonna take my chances and hope I’m one of the two in three that don’t get it.” He continued, “You have those difficult choices to make. That’s why we tend to support people who tend to support us.”

What was their reaction to Sanders deciding to run for president? I asked.



Sanders supporters during a campaign rally at Cleveland State University in Ohio. (Photo: Aaron Josefczyk/Reuters)


“I was surprised,” Michael Manning said. “I thought that his views were too inconsistent with the prevailing sentiments in Congress and that he’d didn’t stand a chance.” He went on, “But this campaign year with [Sleezebag] and all the other outsiders is going to prove me wrong across the board. I attribute that to a large extent because people are just disgusted with the prevailing views that are out there.”

“It’s nice to be wrong,” Doris chimed in.

“In this case,” Michael agreed, “it’s nice to be wrong.”

***

At the other end of the age spectrum, Sanders’ fandom among young people has given rise to an unlikely nickname for the senator: the “Betty White of American politics.” Yet his campaign is anything but old-school. Numerous alums of Barack Obama’s digital media team work for Sanders, mimicking and improving on Obama’s use of technology and social media to reach and enlist young people who increasingly spend their days online.

Nearly every Bernie fan under the age of 40 that I met said they’d first learned about Sanders online, from his campaign website or Facebook page or live-trolling on Twitter during the second GOP debate, or they kept tabs on his campaign via social media. “On social media, on Facebook,” said Nardos Assefa, a University of Virginia student I met outside the George Mason rally, “you see little snippets of videos that are shared from Bernie’s speeches because he’s funny, he says things that are important to people.” The videos her friends are constantly flagging could be anything from Sanders’ denunciation of the school-to-prison pipeline to his delightfully awkward appearance on Ellen DeGeneres’ show.

“When I scroll through my news feed,” Assefa told me, “it’s, like, Bernie. I don’t see any others.”

What they’re seeing on Facebook and Twitter and in their inboxes stands in many ways as a rebuke of Obama. The Obama brand, if you will, was historic, aspirational, feel-good: “hope” and “change you can believe in.” Sanders is the anti-brand. He’s the “normcore” candidate. He’s not cool, he’s earnest. And that earnestness is in part what draws today’s generation of young voters — who were in elementary school when Obama first ran for president — to the Sanders campaign. These are the late teens and 20-somethings who grew up on “Parks and Rec,” who watch Stephen Colbert. They’re not all about irony; for them, it’s OK to care.

And it’s OK to think bigger than you’ve been led to believe. After the town hall, I met a GMU sophomore named Faith Huddleston Anderson in a “Feel the Bern” T-shirt. In Sanders, Huddleston Anderson hears a politician stretching the limits of what she’d ever thought possible in the lives of people like herself. “Everything he said are things that I’ve thought in my head but never said out loud because it’s such an outrageous thought,” she said. “The idea of college being affordable is such a wild thought.”

She went on, “Us just having the idea in our head of free tuition feels a lot better to reach for than just reaching for, ‘Oh, we should get some reduced prices.’ I’ve always been told college shouldn’t be this expensive. But I’ve never heard anyone say it will not be.”

***

The host said to look for the house with the solar panels on the roof, but it was dark when I arrived and I couldn’t see much of anything, except for the fleet of cars lining the cul-de-sac in a pleasant neighborhood a half-hour’s drive north of Washington. It was the night of the much-anticipated first Democratic presidential debate. The Sanders campaign’s handy interactive map shows an impressive 4,000 watch parties around the country. I’ve chosen to watch the debate — and the debate-watchers — at the home of Hank Rappaport and Gina Angiola, both doctors and both dyed-in-the-wool liberals. Books by Greg Palast, Naomi Klein and Noam Chomsky line the shelves; I notice a handwritten note listing the channel numbers for Current TV and Jon Stewart.

The CNN online feed on Hank’s laptop in the basement keeps freezing (“Must be the DNC,” someone jokes), so a bunch of us relocate to Hank and Gina’s living room, plopping down on couches and folding chairs and the floor to watch on the big TV. People cheer and holler after each of Sanders’ turns to speak. They fall silent and sometimes jeer when Clinton talks. They’re unsure how to react when Sanders delivers the line of the night, telling Clinton that the “American people are sick and tired of hearing about your damn emails!” And unlike the pundits who fill the TV screen once the debate ends, they believe that Sanders won the debate hands down, despite a strong showing by Clinton.



Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders speak during the Democratic presidential debate on Oct. 13 in Las Vegas. (Photo: John Locher/AP)


Afterward, we sit around talking about Sanders and what drew the people in the room to his campaign. The attendees skew middle-aged and older, and several have worked for progressive causes and candidates for years. Michael Rubinstein says he’s worked his whole life as a volunteer and as a paid staffer lobbying and grassroots organizing for social justice issues. After a career in medicine, Gina Angiola, one of our hosts, organized for Howard Dean in 2003, was a precinct coordinator for a liberal Maryland state senator and ran the Montgomery County office of Rep. Donna Edwards (D-Md.). Angiola describes herself and the other Bernie supporters like her as “the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party.”

These are, in other words, the people you’d expect to support Sanders. They remember the wilderness of the Clinton years. They believe it was the Democratic Party insiders — not the candidate’s own flaws — that took down Howard Dean in 2004. They supported a single payer health care system as part of Obamacare. They have mixed feelings about Obama’s presidency, and they wished Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., had run for president. They are the bloc of Democratic voters that can’t stomach the establishment, and so they seek out and rally behind more liberal alternatives, anyone from George McGovern in 1972 to Howard Dean in 2004 to Obama or even Dennis Kucinich in 2008. And now Bernie.

Rubinstein, the social justice activist, said he dismissed Sanders initially, but felt drawn to the senator after reading about the huge crowds turning out for him this summer and seeing 100,000 people tune in for a digital town hall he hosted in July. Sanders, Rubinstein said, reminds him of the Howard Beale character in the movie Network. “He’s the guy who’s telling you to put your head out the window and say ‘we’re mad as hell and not taking it anymore,’” he said. “He’s tapped into this kind of anger.”

I asked Gina Angiola, the host, how she got turned onto Bernie, and she nods to her husband, Hank. Although Gina is the political junkie, in this case Hank found Bernie first, and suggested hosting one of the Sanders campaign’s telecasted town halls in July. Hank loves Sanders’ “fire and energy and anger,” and one line of Sanders’ sticks with him: “He said, ‘Obama’s great, but he did one major thing wrong: He built up a huge grassroots organization to get him elected, and on the day he took office he said, ‘Thank you all very much. I’ll take it from here.’”

Murmurs of agreement filled the living room. “That’s a fabulous line,” Gina said.

The thing is, it’s a line not wholly intended for the Democratic wing of the Democratic Party. The Michael Rubinsteins and Gina Angiolas of the world are already onboard with Sanders’ political revolution. It’s a line instead aimed at the masses of people out there — Democrats, independents, you name it — who feel the deep rejection of make-believe politics and dysfunctional government. People who feel the fear and anger that both Sanders and [Sleezebag] are tapping into, who want an antipolitician, a candidate above it all.

“The [Sleezebag] phenomenon and Bernie people are really sick of the political machinery in both parties,” Angiola told me when we spoke by phone a few days after the debate. “I think that the fact that [Sleezebag], Carson and Sanders are doing so well is a reflection of how disgusted people are with the political system. And they want people to talk straight. Stop mincing words.”

The clearest distillation of Sanders’ appeal came near the end of the first Democratic debate. “I believe that the power of corporate America, the power of Wall Street, the power of the drug companies, the power of the corporate media is so great,” he said, “that the only way we really transform America and do the things that the middle class and working class desperately need is through a political revolution, when millions of people begin to come together and stand up and say: Our government is going to work for all of us, not just a handful of billionaires.” In other words, Sanders wants power to challenge power, to challenge JPMorgan and Comcast and GlaxoSmithKline. His pitch is that he needs working people, the Berniacs and Sanderistas, to have any hope of making that a reality.





Of course, it’s easy to dismiss such talk — “Bernie, I don’t think the revolution’s going to come,” quipped former senator and then Democratic candidate Jim Webb — but it’s impossible to argue that Sanders isn’t tapping into something larger, a sentiment and an argument that may not decide who wins the Democratic nomination but could very well offer a glimpse at the future direction of the Democratic Party.

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/the-bernie-revolution-hes-not-going-anywhere-100050258.html

[Buster's Uncle]

Christie is getting his moment. The question is whether he can make it last.
Matt Bai  National Political Columnist  December 03, 2015



Back in college, when he was contemplating a career in public office, Chris Christie got some advice from a political science professor that he never forgot.

“He told me, ‘If you’re gonna run for public office, you’d better become a good listener,’” Christie told me this week. “‘The only way people follow you is if you listen to them. And a leader without followers is just a guy out for a walk.’”

By that standard, you could say that Christie’s presidential campaign, for most of this year anyway, has been a long stroll in the park. Damaged by the infamous bridge scandal in New Jersey, his approval ratings at home cratering, Christie hasn’t come near double digits in the polling from New Hampshire, where he’s spent more time this year than any other candidate.

For a guy who was once the party’s biggest draw and whose potential candidacy loomed over the rest of the Republican field in 2012, the biggest humiliation came just last month, when he found himself excluded from the main debate stage in Milwaukee, outpolled by the likes of Rand Paul and Mike Huckabee.

I asked Christie, as he sat across from me Tuesday in a conference room at Manchester’s Saint Anselm College, if he’d been surprised by his lack of success throughout the summer and early fall.

“Frustrated, more than anything else,” he said, nodding. “But you can’t let that frustration dominate you. Then you become someone who’s unhappy in this process. And I never wanted to be someone who would do this as an unhappy person. You know, I enjoy doing this. And enjoying it makes me better at it. When I’m enjoying myself, I’m better.

“It’s hard,” Christie admitted. “But you know what? What I kept saying to myself is ‘I know I’m good at this. So I’ve just got to be patient with myself.’ And part of having the early success that I did is that it runs counter to that. So you have to grow up.”

Christie could afford to reflect a little, this being his best week as a candidate, hands down. He was a changed man from the reeling governor I wrote about for my first Political World column almost two years ago, when he gave me his first interview after the Fort Lee bridge scandal erupted, and more sure-footed than the guy who’d sat with me in his kitchen on the eve of his first trip to New Hampshire last April.

Christie’s campaign got a perverse boost, at least in terms of media attention, from the terrorist attacks in Paris, which breathed new urgency into the intelligence and national security issues he likes to talk about as a former prosecutor. (This week’s mass shooting in San Bernardino seems likely to intensify the focus on domestic security, even absent a definitive link to any terrorist cell.) Then came the surprising and much-coveted endorsement of the New Hampshire Union Leader last weekend.

Meanwhile, Christie’s marathon town hall meetings, a hallmark of his best days as New Jersey’s governor, are starting to take on the feel of John McCain’s legendary performances in 2000, when the Arizona senator surged from nowhere to win the state by 18 points. Clips of Christie’s emotive riffs about his mother’s death, or about his fear that his wife might have been killed in the twin towers, have been going viral for weeks.

Of course, none of this has yet translated into any sustained rise in support. (A PPP poll out today shows Christie leaping into double digits in New Hampshire, the first indication that the Union Leader endorsement may have some influence.) And even Christie seemed to be wondering if he was finally about to break out, or if he was just taking his turn under the lights like everyone else.

Voters in New Hampshire have been rifling through non-[Sleezebag] candidates this year like promising finds on the clearance rack at Nordstrom. Jeb Bush, Scott Walker, Carly Fiorina, Ben Carson, John Kasich, and more recently Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, have all had their moments in the dressing-room mirror, and all have been returned to the “maybe” pile (except Walker, who became the campaign’s first “discard”).

The state’s most influential Republicans remain divided, and despite all the jitters about [Sleezebag], there’s been no lasting, perceptible shift toward one rival candidate or another.

Something’s definitely happening for Christie in New Hampshire right now. The question, in this strange election season, is what, exactly, that something is, and whether we’ll still be talking about it in a couple of weeks.

*****

The best way to think about the Republican primary contest right now, if you haven’t entirely given up trying to make sense of it already, is as the inverse, roughly, of what we saw in 2012.

At about this time four years ago, you will recall, the clear establishment candidate was Mitt Romney. But the Republican electorate had never really warmed to Romney, and after the tea party takeover of Congress in 2010, all the energy was with the grassroots ideologues who were determined to derail him with a candidate of their own.

The problem for the anti-establishment Republicans is that they were anti-establishment, and as such, they spent an awful lot of time and energy fighting viciously over who that candidate should be. By January, as the Iowa caucuses approached, Romney was topping out at the mid-30s in most polls, which made him eminently beatable, but the rest of the Republican electorate was almost evenly divided among Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum and Ron Paul.

In the end, Santorum played Romney to a draw in Iowa and got a huge boost, but it was Paul who came closest in New Hampshire, and then it was Gingrich who won outright in South Carolina. The insurgent candidates split their delegates, and Romney rolled to the nomination.

Turn that scenario inside out, and you could be looking at 2016. Now it’s [Sleezebag], the celebrity heir to the tea party insurgency, who’s consistently polling in the mid- to high 20s nationally — impressive for a populist outsider, far less so for a party frontrunner. Carson and Cruz, vying for support of the same disaffected factions, lag behind.

None of which would pose an insurmountable challenge for the governing wing of the party, at the end of the day, if it had an obvious standard-bearer. The problem is that in a field that has now narrowed to a mere 14 entrants, there are at least four — Rubio, Bush, Christie and Kasich — who can be considered serious establishment candidates.

In New Hampshire, where the governing wing will almost certainly have to make its stand, those four candidates have been bunched together (with Rubio slightly out in front), dividing among themselves all the local support and media attention a candidate needs to really separate himself.

Some analysts look at this situation and conclude that [Sleezebag] is almost certain to be the nominee, in the same way that Romney easily vanquished his divided rivals. But here’s what I think they’re missing: Generally speaking, establishments don’t behave the way tea parties do.

Eventually, the party loyalists who make up an establishment tend to come together and coalesce around a likely winner. That’s why we call them establishments.

So the race in New Hampshire right now is all about who can persuade the state’s mainstream electorate that he’s the guy who can unify the party and stop [Sleezebag]. That’s why Rubio is trotting out the endorsements of his fellow senators. That’s why Kasich is attacking [Sleezebag] and casting himself as the one candidate who has the brass to take on the bully.

And that’s why the Union Leader endorsement would seem to matter this year, even if newspaper endorsements generally are about as useful as the classifieds. Here’s the most influential conservative institution in the state giving its stamp of approval to Christie, at a moment when a lot of Republican voters are anxious for someone to emerge from the pack.



Chris Christie at a meeting this week in Manchester, N.H. (Photo: Jim Cole/AP)


Christie’s moment is a long time coming, and it says something about his political skill and sheer persistence. When he entered the race formally back in June, a lot of my colleagues in the media — and a lot of his colleagues in the party — had already written him off. All anyone remembered about Christie, at that point, was the bridge thing.

In the parlance of politics, his “favorables” were underwater, meaning that more people had a bad impression of Christie personally than a good one. Being well liked is kind of important in politics, unless your last name is [Sleezebag] or Clinton.

Undeterred, Christie set out to do what he does best, which is to reach voters on an emotional level. He’s hosted 36 town halls in New Hampshire since June, and while that hasn’t done much to lift the poll numbers most people look at, those numbers tell only part of the story.

By the middle of last month, according to a poll conducted by WBUR, Boston’s NPR station, Christie’s favorable rating in New Hampshire was up to 47 percent (from 39 percent in mid-September), while the number of people who retained an unfavorable impression of him had dropped from 39 percent to 33 percent. By contrast, during that same time, Bush and Kasich had seen their favorable numbers drop to the point where they were both underwater.

More remarkably, the latest PPP poll from New Hampshire now shows Christie with the highest favorability rating of any candidate. More than 60 percent of the state’s voters have a favorable impression of him, compared with 22 percent who don’t.

What this means to Christie is that, in New Hampshire at least, the bridge scandal no longer defines him.

“Listen, it will always be a part of my résumé,” he told me this week. “It will always be a part of my experience. I’m not happy about that, but it’s the fact. It happened on my watch. I’ve got to be accountable for it. On the other hand, it’s certainly nothing that’s front of mind anymore, and for a long time it was front of mind, for me and for others.”

What’s front of mind for Christie now, in the wake of the Paris attacks and perhaps San Bernardino too, is terrorism. At a town hall at a firehouse outside Concord Monday night, where by my rough estimate he drew more than 250 people, Christie spoke for 45 minutes before saying a single word about domestic policy.

What I realized, watching that performance, is that, in a strange way, the Paris attacks have unleashed Christie to do what comes most naturally to him, which is to tell a compelling story.

It’s not that he has any great plan for how to combat ISIS or safeguard American cities. What Christie does have is a personal story about his own family’s experience with terrorism and victims in his New Jersey neighborhood, about his years as a U.S. attorney and about a country that has, in his view, become complacent and irresolute.

“It’s the greatest strength I bring to the job, the history and the ability to make decisions in this realm without getting the high, hard one thrown by me,” Christie told me. “And I think a lot of presidents run the risk of that. And I just don’t think that I would on this, because I’ve been through so much of it before and heard and dealt with the lingo and the egos and all the rest.”

But he also agreed that the issue of terrorism is a prism through which voters can get to know him.

“I think that foreign policy is all about, at first blush, the personality of the people executing that foreign policy,” he said. “Kissinger said to me one time, ‘Foreign policy is all about courage and character. Everything else can be learned.’”

Part of the challenge for Christie here — and for other governing candidates in the race — is that voters this year just don’t seem to care very much about records or experience, or at least not yet. I mentioned to him a trend this year that has confounded me and many others: Governors, who generally made for the best candidates over the past half century or so, seem to be flailing this time around.

Nine current or former governors have been in the race on the Republican side. Of those, three — Walker, Rick Perry and Bobby Jindal — were the first to leave the Republican race. Not a single governor is polling in double digits.

Christie shook his head at me.

“The governors who have dropped out earned it,” he said, a little coldly. “They earned dropping out. Your performance matters. This stuff doesn’t happen by coincidence or by chance. The people still standing are the people who are the best at this.”

In fact, Christie has been making an overt case for executive experience, while throwing a few not-so-subtle punches at his opponents — notably Rubio. He tells audiences that “new is cool, new is shiny,” but in serious times you need a serious leader. He tells them that the last thing they need is a new president who sits down in the Oval Office on his first day and says, “Gee whiz.”

I wondered if that was entirely fair to Rubio, who is, after all, in federal office, and whom I’d consider part of the governing faction.

“Except he has no experience governing,” Christie shot back. “He’s had five years in the United States Senate, and for a good amount of that time he’s been running for president. So I don’t know.”

Was he saying that Rubio reminded him of a certain Democratic president?

“Yeah,” Christie said, expressionless. “Yes.”

Christie was more circumspect when it came to [Sleezebag], with whom he is trying to avoid the kind of full-on entanglement that hasn’t worked especially well for his rivals.

A few days earlier, after Christie had categorically rejected [Sleezebag]’s story about New Jersey Muslims celebrating on Sept. 11, [Sleezebag] fired off some nasty tweets about him. In one, I reminded Christie, [Sleezebag] had wondered: “How is Chris Christie running the state of New Jersey, which is deeply troubled, when he is spending all of his time in NH?”

Christie seemed to twitch just a bit, but his voice remained calm.

“Since he’s never been a governor,” Christie said, “I’d think he’d have no idea.”

*****

Christie is the kind of politician, more like a Bill Clinton than a Barack Obama, who loves the brinkmanship of politics and thinks deeply about the strategy. So, near the end of our conversation, I asked him to talk a bit about how he saw the race playing out from here, and, a little to my surprise, he obliged.

The way Christie sees it, there will be room for only four to six candidates to emerge intact from the voting in Iowa and New Hampshire. That means maybe two of the governors in the race will be able to move on from there.

At that point, “there will be a lot of congealing,” Christie said, borrowing a word I had used. He reminded me that only three of the 31 Republican governors had endorsed anyone to this point (two for Christie, one for Kasich), and suggested that they might play a pivotal role, after the early contests, in swinging the party behind an eventual nominee.

“The governors’ wing of the party has not yet asserted itself in any significant way,” he told me. “If they do, how will that affect the race?”

In New Hampshire, where his campaign is clearly on the line, Christie has a simple strategy: hang around. He says the data from past campaigns shows that as many as seven in 10 voters won’t make up their minds until the last two weeks.

For now, he just wants to be in the “top three” for most voters, which is a phrase New Hampshirites — born to their privilege as presidential winnowers — use a lot.

Don’t the low poll numbers discourage him?

“I don’t fret too much about that,” Christie said. “In the beginning I did. I would say, why aren’t we getting any traction? What am I missing? And then I finally concluded that I wasn’t missing anything. They’re not ready to decide!

“If next week some poll comes out,” he added, “and I haven’t gotten some big bump from the Union Leader endorsement or the other activist endorsements, it’s not like I’m going to go stick my head in the toilet, like, ‘What’s happening?’ I’m going to say, ‘OK, go back to New Hampshire next week and keep grinding it out.’”

Christie’s main advantage, it seems to me, is that he is, in some ways, more like [Sleezebag] than his rivals. Christie has governed, yes — with mixed results that we could argue about all day and into the night — but he is also a born entertainer.

What [Sleezebag] has discovered this year — or maybe what he helped the rest of us discover — is the disturbing nexus that now exists between campaigns and performance, between political theater and governing reality. Christie lives firmly on the reality side of that line, but he is more comfortable than any other serious politician in the field with the theatrical.

In his town halls, he has always been part candidate, part facilitator and part TV therapist, in a way that can seem spontaneous even when it’s been deliberately honed and contrived.

And this is probably why, at a moment when the other candidates who scream “experience!” seem somehow out of their time and element, Christie may yet be finding a way to make the message work.

“I’ve said this to people, and I’ll say it to you on the record,” Christie told me. “This is a game of ‘Survivor.’ You just don’t want to get voted off the island. That’s it. What you want is to continue to be in there and continue to be relevant and continue to speak.”

Christie is relevant, for as long as it lasts. We’ll know soon enough if the moment is leading him somewhere, or if he’s just a guy out for a walk.

https://www.yahoo.com/politics/christie-is-getting-his-moment-1313445610946614.html

[Rusty Edge]

Thanks for those articles, Buncle.

I'm not a Christie fan. While I respect his candor, I have issues with his outlook, as I do with most prosecutors. They tend to see things in an us vs. them kind of way, as opposed to putting the Constitution first.

Reaction to the current tragedy will likely favor tough guy Christie.

[Buster's Uncle]

Right.  -And as I've said before, he's The Pig for grownups, and I don't mean to insult him saying that; some key elements of the attitude and manners, only HE can usually back it up and knows what he's talking about.  If he can stick it out long enough, he ought to do a lot better than most when The Pig finds a pretext to take his toys and go home.

[Rusty Edge]

One thing in particular sticks with me from the Sanders article-

:Sanders’ sticks with him: “He said, ‘Obama’s great, but he did one major thing wrong: He built up a huge grassroots organization to get him elected, and on the day he took office he said, ‘Thank you all very much. I’ll take it from here.’”

While I would argue that Obama did more than one thing wrong, but that was clearly a wrong turn.

Clinton was able to go to the people when his own Congress thwarted him, but maybe that's the difference between a narcissist and an extroverted approval seeker.  My impression of [Sleezebag] is that he's an egotistical autocrat.