It didn't take long...
Hey, it's a new day.
The obits are coming in for Bernie Sanders' campaign. This one here is worth the read, even though it hails from Rolling Stone.
Democratic voters tried to express these frustrations through the Sanders campaign, but the party leaders have been and probably will continue to be too dense to listen. Instead, they'll convince themselves that, as Hohmann's Post article put it, Hillary's latest victories mean any "pressure" they might have felt to change has now been "ameliorated."
The maddening thing about the Democrats is that they refuse to see how easy they could have it. If the party threw its weight behind a truly populist platform, if it stood behind unions and prosecuted Wall Street criminals and stopped taking giant gobs of cash from every crooked transnational bank and job-exporting manufacturer in the world, they would win every election season in a landslide.
This is especially the case now that the Republican Party has collapsed under the weight of its own nativist lunacy. It's exactly the moment when the Democrats should feel free to become a real party of ordinary working people.
But they won't do that, because they don't see what just happened this year as a message rising up from millions of voters.
Politicians are so used to viewing the electorate as a giant thing to be manipulated that no matter what happens at the ballot, they usually can only focus on the Washington-based characters they perceive to be pulling the strings. Through this lens, the uprising among Democratic voters this year wasn't an organic expression of mass disgust, but wholly the fault of Bernie Sanders, who within the Beltway is viewed as an oddball amateur and radical who jumped the line.
Nobody saw his campaign as an honest effort to restore power to voters, because nobody in the capital even knows what that is. In the rules of palace intrigue, Sanders only made sense as a kind of self-centered huckster who made a failed play for power. And the narrative will be that with him out of the picture, the crisis is over. No person, no problem.
Yep, it'll go by like it was on skates. The Democrats don't want to deal with this because dealing with it will turn the party inside out an if you're on the inside, it's always better to stay there. The way it is with most institutions is that the institutional culture is preserved at the expense of the mission statement. The Democratic Party is clearly exhibiting signs of a thoroughly ossified institution. It is going hand in hand with the Republicans who are also ossified to the point of immobility, and so cannot catch out a rogue insurgent candidate like Donald Trump. American democracy is deeply in the poo.
We're not exactly too behind in Australia if this year's Federal election is anything to go by.
Julia, Hillary, And The Things That Maybe Don't Matter Like Legitimacy
I mentioned Hillary's candidacy in relationship to Julia Gillard's prime ministership yesterday and had some more thoughts about all this. I'll be honest, I didn't think Julia Gillard really established her legitimacy with the electorate as evinced by the hung parliament of 2010- very much like how Malcolm Turnbull has failed to establish legitimacy for his government.
Generally speaking politicians and legitimacy is a funny thing. It's even harder in a democracy where leaders come to power on vote and not by the sword. Consider Machiavelli's take on legitimacy.
So who comes to mind as not having solved the legitimacy problem in a democracy? Kristina Keneally as NSW Premier was a fraught figure because she too always had the problem of legitimacy in the eyes of the public. I've been told by those who worked the Department of the Premier how on top of her brief Keneally was and how sharp she was in negotiations with Kevin Rudd (something which Kevin Rudd himself conceded), and even then I never warmed to the premier who got the nod on the back of failed Premiers and backroom deals. But then again Nathan Rees and Morris Iemma weren't exactly people who sparkled with legitimacy. That entire musical-Premier-chairs phase of the NSW Labor Government was strange and demented, infested as it was with Morbid Obeidity to boot. Yes Eddie Obeid had a marvellous way of subtracting from the sum total of legitimacy right across the board.
In that light, and while we're talking about female politicians I do want to say I liked Anna Bligh a lot. I wish she'd run for Federal office. I liked Joan Kirner - I think she got a raw deal. And going back a fair way, I liked Janine Haines; I was indifferent to Dr. Carmen Lawrence (I sure didn't dislike her but the Easton Affair was troubling); and well, Cheryl Kernot was great until she jumped ship to the ALP - again legitimacy was an issue there. The Anna Bligh thing was interesting because at the hight of the Brisbane flood waters, Anna Bligh looked so much more the states-person than the visiting PM, Julia Gillard. In fact it made Julia Gillard look so bad, it probably wasn't worth her while standing next to Bligh in the big press conference, which was surprising.
The point is, regardless of gender, it's important to look like you got your office fair and square and in the right way. You could be an utter dickhead like Campbell Newman, but at least you have to hand it to the dickhead that he stormed to office on an agenda that was voted in in a landslide. He was eminently despicable, but while he was in office, legitimacy wasn't an issue. It's deeply ironic, isn't it?
Which brings me back to Hillary Clinton who basically has a legitimacy issue not unlike the one Julia Gillard carried through her tenure as PM. Now that it's out in the open that the DNC manipulated the system to Hillary's advantage and did its best to bury Bernie Sanders, she's never going to escape the lack of legitimacy this 'win' gives her. Now, legitimacy is one of those iffy things where it's hard to pin it to a person or an office, but when the role is head of government, you sort of need that thing to beat over the heads of your opponents both domestic and foreign. Indeed, Barack Obama does an excellent job of wielding his legitimacy to beat up on the GOP.
Things worked out the way they did because clearly the Clintons own the Democratic Party and the party owes the Clintons too much not to give Hillary the nod. To that end it burnt its own constituents as well as the youth vote, condescending and patronising them as they disenfranchised them. Legitimacy is in short supply now. She might be the world's best candidate, but we've seen what happens to a head of government who struggles to establish legitimacy. To that end, it's just like the Rolling Stone article linked above says, the Democrats have poisoned themselves, just to deliver the nomination to Hillary Clinton. We'll see if the poison ends up killing them.
Wall Street And The Dems
Wall Street told Hillary Clinton that she couldn't pick Elizabeth Warren as her running mate.
We're not exactly too behind in Australia if this year's Federal election is anything to go by.
Julia, Hillary, And The Things That Maybe Don't Matter Like Legitimacy
I mentioned Hillary's candidacy in relationship to Julia Gillard's prime ministership yesterday and had some more thoughts about all this. I'll be honest, I didn't think Julia Gillard really established her legitimacy with the electorate as evinced by the hung parliament of 2010- very much like how Malcolm Turnbull has failed to establish legitimacy for his government.
Generally speaking politicians and legitimacy is a funny thing. It's even harder in a democracy where leaders come to power on vote and not by the sword. Consider Machiavelli's take on legitimacy.
So who comes to mind as not having solved the legitimacy problem in a democracy? Kristina Keneally as NSW Premier was a fraught figure because she too always had the problem of legitimacy in the eyes of the public. I've been told by those who worked the Department of the Premier how on top of her brief Keneally was and how sharp she was in negotiations with Kevin Rudd (something which Kevin Rudd himself conceded), and even then I never warmed to the premier who got the nod on the back of failed Premiers and backroom deals. But then again Nathan Rees and Morris Iemma weren't exactly people who sparkled with legitimacy. That entire musical-Premier-chairs phase of the NSW Labor Government was strange and demented, infested as it was with Morbid Obeidity to boot. Yes Eddie Obeid had a marvellous way of subtracting from the sum total of legitimacy right across the board.
In that light, and while we're talking about female politicians I do want to say I liked Anna Bligh a lot. I wish she'd run for Federal office. I liked Joan Kirner - I think she got a raw deal. And going back a fair way, I liked Janine Haines; I was indifferent to Dr. Carmen Lawrence (I sure didn't dislike her but the Easton Affair was troubling); and well, Cheryl Kernot was great until she jumped ship to the ALP - again legitimacy was an issue there. The Anna Bligh thing was interesting because at the hight of the Brisbane flood waters, Anna Bligh looked so much more the states-person than the visiting PM, Julia Gillard. In fact it made Julia Gillard look so bad, it probably wasn't worth her while standing next to Bligh in the big press conference, which was surprising.
The point is, regardless of gender, it's important to look like you got your office fair and square and in the right way. You could be an utter dickhead like Campbell Newman, but at least you have to hand it to the dickhead that he stormed to office on an agenda that was voted in in a landslide. He was eminently despicable, but while he was in office, legitimacy wasn't an issue. It's deeply ironic, isn't it?
Which brings me back to Hillary Clinton who basically has a legitimacy issue not unlike the one Julia Gillard carried through her tenure as PM. Now that it's out in the open that the DNC manipulated the system to Hillary's advantage and did its best to bury Bernie Sanders, she's never going to escape the lack of legitimacy this 'win' gives her. Now, legitimacy is one of those iffy things where it's hard to pin it to a person or an office, but when the role is head of government, you sort of need that thing to beat over the heads of your opponents both domestic and foreign. Indeed, Barack Obama does an excellent job of wielding his legitimacy to beat up on the GOP.
Things worked out the way they did because clearly the Clintons own the Democratic Party and the party owes the Clintons too much not to give Hillary the nod. To that end it burnt its own constituents as well as the youth vote, condescending and patronising them as they disenfranchised them. Legitimacy is in short supply now. She might be the world's best candidate, but we've seen what happens to a head of government who struggles to establish legitimacy. To that end, it's just like the Rolling Stone article linked above says, the Democrats have poisoned themselves, just to deliver the nomination to Hillary Clinton. We'll see if the poison ends up killing them.
Wall Street And The Dems
Wall Street told Hillary Clinton that she couldn't pick Elizabeth Warren as her running mate.
NEW YORK — Big Wall Street donors have a message for Hillary Clinton: Keep Elizabeth Warren off the ticket or risk losing millions of dollars in contributions.
In a dozen interviews, major Democratic donors in the financial services industry said they saw little chance that Clinton would pick the liberal firebrand as her vice presidential nominee. These donors despise Warren’s attacks on the financial industry.
But they also think her selection would be damaging to the economy. And they warned that if Clinton surprises them and taps Warren, big donations from the industry could vanish.
“If Clinton picked Warren, her whole base on Wall Street would leave her,” said one top Democratic donor who has helped raise millions for Clinton. “They would literally just say, ‘We have no qualms with you moving left, we understand all the things you’ve had to do because of Bernie Sanders, but if you are going there with Warren, we just can’t trust you, you’ve killed it.’”
Most big donors don’t want Warren on the ticket because she is the most accomplished anti-Wall Street populist in the Democratic Party. But many also think her presence would drive a potential Clinton administration too far to the left, poison relations with the private sector from the start and ultimately be damaging to the economy.And so it came to pass that Elizabeth Warren wasn't the VP nominee and running partner to Hillary Clinton. I'm sure it's some kind of pragmatism but this is the very kind of deal that browns off people from the Clintons. Then some person tells you it's because you're a misogynist. How can you be a misogynist if you want a woman to be a VP to go with the female POTUS candidate?!
More importantly, the fact that Hillary couldn't run it past Wall Street tells you just how much Wall Street has it all over the politicians. Wall Street got TARP and the bail out in 2008 because it was Wall Street. Did you get a bail out? No? See what I mean? Jokes aside, all this proves that there's too much money in US politics as well as outline the unlikelihood of Bernie anders getting up as the nominee. If people really want the political revolution, we're all going have to dig in a lot harder to dig out these banksters.
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