Chris Cillizza Makes Me Want To Gargle Bleach

I am not a fan of Chris Cillizza. He wrote one of the worst books I have ever read about politics (and I’ve read quite a few); I once called him out on Twitter and his response was basically “I write a blog.” Some time later, he blocked me. Of course, my opinion of Cillizza is meaningless - he has (for reasons unclear to me) become a successful journalist, first, at the Washington Post and was recently poached by CNN where he gets paid what I assume is a healthy mid six-figure salary to write columns like this:

But that is the reality of all political campaigns. Stuff happens. Good luck and bad breaks occur. Circumstances totally out of a candidate’s control often decide — or heavily influence — how voters make up their minds. Here’s one example: Clinton’s private email server had absolutely nothing to do with the email hack via WikiLeaks. But the two issues — both of which dealt with email — got conflated as one issue in the minds of lots and lots of voters. And there as nothing Clinton could do about it.

The truth of the matter is this: Hillary Clinton’s name was at the top of the campaign and signed on the checks her staff received. It was her decision to set up a private email server and exclusively use it for her communications as secretary of state — the first person in her position to do that.

Cillizza then goes on at some length about all of Hillary’s failings as a candidate. But here is the thing - saying “stuff happens” as a way to minimize … pick your poison (1) Jim Comey going against DOJ protocols and sending a letter to Congress 11 days before the election based on incomplete information; (2) a foreign nation’s overt attempts to influence our election via cyber espionage; and/or (3) the Trump campaign’s (possible) collaboration with those efforts is disingenuous at best and dishonest at worst - there is no corollary, no modern historical precedent to compare these actions to. This is not a “bad break” like a good (or bad) unemployment number a few days before the election, these were intentional acts be persons (and a country) to tilt the election.

Which brings me to the second point and the one that really grinds my gears. Cillizza correctly notes that Hillary’s use of a personal email server and the WikiLeaks hack had nothing to do with each other but then he says they “got conflated as one issue in the minds of lots and lots of people.” This is the classic media dodge that omits its role in putting that idea in the minds of voters. I am not sure why “the media” is so reluctant to acknowledge its role in making both the email server and WikiLeaks bigger stories than they should have, but the idea that this conflation took place magically, without any doing by people like Cillizza is a blatant lie. 

And even if you accept that the email server was a legitimate topic for the media to cover, the extent of the coverage far outstripped the importance of it - no charges were filed, the State Department’s Inspector General acknowledged she did not violate State Department protocol and, by the way, more than 90 other senior level officials utilized private email accounts (including Colin Powell and senior aides to Condoleezza Rice). The perception that the email server story showed Hillary to be untrustworthy was a media creation, not one based on the facts of the matter. As for WikiLeaks, on this account the media’s refusal to admit its role in disseminating information they knew to be stolen by the Russians and (likely) being published to harm Clinton is both baffling and shameless. The stolen email were published in earnest right after the final debate and continued on right up to Comey's letter to Congress. The idea these things did not harm Hillary have been debunked by people like Nate Silver and are not "stuff" that candidates have ever had to deal with before. 

Any losing campaign for President is flawed - but so is every winning campaign. Perfection rarely (if ever) happens, but Cillizza’s dismissiveness of the forces that aligned against Clinton as mere “stuff happens” and his failure to acknowledge the media’s role in getting voters to think “Clinton + email = scandal” is the real scandal.

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And do read Cillizza’s full column and draw your own opinions. It can be found here:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/06/01/politics/hillary-clinton-2016/index.html

Hillary & The Supreme Court

With a possible Clinton landslide in the offing and control of the Senate within reach, Democrats are already speculating about appointments to the U.S. Supreme Court. This chatter grew stronger when Senator John McCain mused that Senate Republicans may try to block any nominee Clinton selects, an unprecedented attempt at obstruction that would effectively neuter one of the three branches of government.

But before people muse on the possibility of a second Warren Court, we need to keep a few things in mind. Even if the Democrats retake control of the Senate and even if they eliminated the filibuster rule for Supreme Court nominees, politics may still come into play.

First, it is possible that the Senate may take up the nomination of Judge Merrick Garland before Clinton is inaugurated. Of course, the chief judge of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals is eminently qualified and should have been confirmed months ago, but regardless, if he does get a hearing and vote, that may well be the one and only vacancy filled before the 2018 mid-term election, in which case, all the sturm und drang will be rendered moot.

But let us speculate that one or more justices decide to hang up their robes. Justice Ginsburg is 83, Justice Kennedy is 80, and Justice Breyer is 78. And let us further speculate that Senate Majority Leader Schumer does away with the filibuster rule, so now a nominee need only get 51 votes (or 50 + a putative Vice President Kaine) to be appointed.

While the Senate may go Democratic next month, it is unlikely that the Dems will have more than say, 53 seats (and that would be a huge success). That is a very narrow margin to get a nominee through. Moreover, several Democrats, such as Heidi Heitkamp, Joe Manchin, Joe Donnelly, and Jon Tester are all up for re-election in 2018. If Republicans vote in lockstep against a Clinton nominee, these Democrats will be forced to take a tough vote if the nominee is more “liberal” or “progressive” than the average mid-term voter in a state like North Dakota, West Virginia, Indiana, or Montana.

This will put President Clinton in a tough spot. She may have the chance to change the make-up of the Supreme Court for 15-20 years, but at the expense of asking vulnerable Senate Democrats to vote in a way that could increase the chances the Republicans take over the Senate in 2018 or, run the risk of an embarrassing rejection of a nominee at the hands of her own party. Of course, this would be less of a concern if we did not live in such a partisan time and Supreme Court nominees typically received some (if not a lot of) bi-partisan support. But if President Obama’s experience is a guide, President Clinton will not be able to rely on such courtesy.

This conundrum presents one of the subtler forms of check and balance in our system and may result in more centrist nominees. My hope is that should Secretary Clinton be elected, she will pick well-qualified, but left-leaning judges (as is her right) and Democrats will see the bigger picture while realizing they will have to do all they can to save those endangered Senators the next time around. Of course, one person who would be hard to reject is a certain former constitutional law professor and Harvard Law graduate who will be looking for a new gig come January 20^th, 2017.

Hillary's Walk of Shame

As the long slog of election season comes to a close and Hillary Clinton gets ever closer to achieving something never before done in politics, instead of taking a victory lap or even getting a moment to savor her anticipated triumph, she is being dragged through the gutter by Donald Trump and shamed by a mainstream media pre-programmed to dislike her. For reasons unclear to me, Hillary is being subjected to something akin to Cersei’s “walk of shame” at the hands of the High Sparrow. But contra Cersei, whose crime was fornication, Hillary is being humiliated for the temerity of running for President and her punishment is being forced to expose her campaign’s inner workings to the public.

Trump’s shaming has been as bald-faced as it is reprehensible. Tagging Hillary as “crooked” seems quaint now that he brought women who accused her husband of sexual misconduct to a debate, stalked her onstage, and has accused her of everything from being on drugs to lacking the stamina for the job, mocked her physical appearance and threatened to imprison her. And just when you thought he could go no lower, he has now begun ranting about a rigged election that is setting up a situation where millions may simply not accept a Clinton win.

While Trump’s actions are predictable, the media pile on has been equally embarrassing. Has a candidate for high office ever had the inner workings of their office so thoroughly exposed? Reporters practically “Mean Girl”-ed Hillary’s State Department email, culling through thousands of missives to find such plums as what shows the Secretary wanted DVR’d while ignoring an ocean of substantive policy work she engaged in during her time in Foggy Bottom. We are now living through a second round of email shaming with the selective leaking of email from her campaign chairman, John Podesta. Putting aside the fact that we do not even know if these communications have been tampered with, the supposed scandal of these email is really just the 101s of politics – managing the competing interests of groups that support you, cultivating relationships, and assessing the pros and cons of various policy positions.

Hardly the stuff of controversy, but no Presidential candidate has ever had so much information about their internal process so publicly exposed. Indeed, I hazard to guess that the same behind-the-scenes machinations would be found if anyone stole and leaked email from any candidate running for national office, but because it is Hillary, the media narrative gets reinforced that she is somehow duplicitous or scheming, that her actions are in some way nefarious or two-faced. The media can now pick apart the after-action report on an early campaign visit to a Chipotle in Ohio but cannot be bothered to report on a major policy initiative she announced on decreasing poverty in the heat of Trump’s carpet bombing of her.

It is sad, really. What should be a final sprint to the finish line of election day that is filled with equal parts exhilaration and trepidation will instead by a sort of Bataan Death March of gloom and doom, fearing some suspicious email leak even as Trump conditions his most rabid supporters to deny a Clinton victory as some rigged conspiracy between her and the media. Instead of celebrating the accomplishment of electing the first woman President, she is being publicly humiliated and debased, her opponent denying her the fair victory she will win and the media teeing up stories that she will lack a mandate and would have lost but for the uniquely noxious opponent she beat.

Such an outcome is an insult to her millions of supporters, the campaign team that worked tirelessly to elect her, and to Hillary herself. But instead of complaining (and lord knows if she did, she would never hear the end of it from the mainstream media) or shaking her fist at the indignity of her singular accomplishment being minimized and delegitimized, this former First Lady will follow the advice of the current one – when they go low, we go high.

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Donald Trump - Political Suicide Bomber

Last night, Donald Trump strapped on a political suicide vest and pulled the trigger in front of 80 million people on television. There was no glory in Trump’s despicable acts last night. What he did was live out the fantasy of every right-wing conspiracist who has spent the last quarter century with an unremitting hatred for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Trump gave voice to every ugly rumor, innuendo, and debunked theory trafficked in the underbelly of the Internet, on conservative talk radio, and the echo chamber of Fox News. He put the human manifestations of every lurid belief about Bill Clinton in the audience and slashed Hillary Clinton as “the devil,” a woman who had “hatred in her heart” and would be in jail if he were elected (that last one elicited a lusty applause from the audience). 

Trump went after Bill and Hillary Clinton viciously, personally, and often falsely, but that will matter little to people who have been fed a steady diet of Clinton conspiracies for the last 25 years. If you believe that the Clintons ran drugs in Arkansas, faked Vince Foster’s suicide, or sold cattle futures for huge profits there is a direct through line to believing Hillary deleted incriminating emails off her private server, handed out favors to Clinton Foundation donors, and would be in prison but for the good graces of an FBI Director who served as the number two official in the George W. Bush Justice Department.

Trump’s dissection was done with a butcher’s knife not a scalpel, but it mattered little. He stalked the stage ominously and audibly sucked in air as he leveled one false claim after the other, the politics of personal destruction fed to him by his top campaign officials who have made their careers smearing the Clintons and their work. What little he shared in the policy arena was non-sensical. Merely removing barriers to health insurers will magically replace Obamacare, his tax policy won’t blow a massive long-term hole in the deficit (not to mention what it will do to our debt), and beating ISIS will merely require bombing the shit out of them. 

It is tired pablum uttered by someone who knows little about the issues but a lot about how to foment discontent. Trump’s actions will not win him votes but I fear it will harden opposition to Clinton if she becomes President in a way that will make the Tea Party revolt against Obama look mild in comparison. Trump is creating a lynch mob of such radicalism that no Republican will risk running afoul of it for fear of losing their precious seat in Congress. James Carville famously said that “politics ain’t beanbag,” but you would hope it is not whatever we saw on stage in St. Louis either.

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Three Weeks That Might Have Cost Hillary The Presidency

If Donald Trump wins the Presidency, we will likely look back at the roughly three week period between late August and September 11th as the reason why. As you will see, a confluence of bad reporting and tactical decisions by both candidates conspired to change a race that was heading in the direction of a Clinton landslide to a coin toss proposition.

The weeks following both parties’ conventions were not good to Donald Trump. His was a four-day spectacle of oddballs and charlatans and party officials conspicuous by their absence. Her’s was a murderer’s row of validators along with ordinary Americans who testified to Hillary’s compassion, hard work, and decency. What had been a neck-and-neck race before the two conventions quickly turned in Hillary’s favor and she opened large leads in national polls and battleground states while edging within the margin of error in reliably red states like Arizona and Georgia. On August 19th, Trump’s campaign chairman was pushed out after revelations about millions in off book payments he received from the pro-Putin former President of Ukraine became public and in his place Trump promoted a pollster named Kellyanne Conway to campaign manager and the editor of the alt-right website Breitbart.com, Steve Bannon, as his campaign “CEO.” This was the second major shake up of Trump’s campaign in just a few months. His chances of winning the Presidency hovered in the 10-15 percent range on Nate Silver’s fivethirtyeight.com website.

But then the worm started to turn. On August 23th, the Associated Press published a “bombshell” report about the number of donors to the Clinton Foundation who were able to get meetings with Hillary Clinton while she was Secretary of State. Never mind that the headline was slanted, the data cherry picked, and some of those donors included Nobel laureate Muhammad Yunus and U2 singer Bono, this story dominated cable news for days. When emails showed Clinton Foundation staffer Doug Band trying to get various “favors” from the State Department (all of which were denied), the story crystallized - somehow a Foundation getting HIV drugs to poor people in Africa, clean water to Haitians and myriad other philanthropic efforts was being portrayed as some sort of sleazy pay-to-play machine for rich people trying to curry favor with the federal government. 

It would take members of the media a week or more to unwind and fact check these salacious headlines (the AP’s false tweet touting the story was quietly deleted some two weeks later), including one that had to do with Band trying to expedite diplomatic passports for Foundation staffers trying to travel with President Clinton to North Korea to help extricate two Americans being held there. But the damage was already done. Hillary’s schedule was fundraiser-heavy and while she was doing some public events and one-on-one interviews, as the wave of Foundation stories was cresting, reporters started ginning up stories about how long it had been since she had a “formal” press conference. At the exact time the media horde was doubling down on stories that “raised questions” about Hillary’s conduct in public life, she and her team chose not to aggressively knock down the stories. This would prove to be a big mistake.

On the Friday before Labor Day, the FBI released dozens of pages of notes on their interview with Mrs. Clinton regarding her email server. This continued with their highly irregular actions with regard to this investigation that began with a public statement by FBI Director Comey just before the Fourth of July holiday that Clinton would not be prosecuted, but criticizing her actions. Of course, typical procedure is that people who are not indicted for crimes are not publicly excoriated by the FBI, much less have the notes of their interview released publicly, but hey, Hillary, am I right? Another predictable round of media hand wringing ensued and again, she and her team were not nearly as aggressive as they should have been in response. 

The capstone to this was the one-two punch of Hillary calling half of Trump’s supporters a “basket of deplorables” followed two days later by her getting dehydrated and having to be helped to her vehicle at a 9/11 ceremony, resulting in her disclosure that she had been diagnosed with pneumonia a few days earlier. More “questions were raised” about her secretiveness and her alleged “insult” of Trump supporters (never mind that it was arguably a factual statement but at worst a poor choice of words - “half” as opposed to “some” or “many”). The pneumonia story in particular was too perfect for reporters - it reinforced their belief that she is too secretive (because she did not disclose the illness) and the cell phone video of her wobbling was replayed incessantly on cable news channels. 

While all this was happening, Trump was quietly (for him) retooling his message. Luckily for him, a credulous press corps was ready to throw his insults to a Gold Star family, John McCain, Judge Gonzalo Curiel, all Mexicans, all non-American Muslims, and of course, his birtherism down the memory hole because he decided to do some African-American “outreach” in a largely white suburb of Milwaukee. Trump then made a last-minute visit to Mexico City where because he did not throw up on his shoes at a brief media availability with Mexican President Pena Nieto, the press deemed a success (even “Presidential.”) The “basket of deplorables” comment gave Trump the opportunity to feign outrage at an insult to his supporters and after questioning Hillary’s health in the preceding weeks, the video footage of her stumbling into her motorcade needed no embellishment. 

While there was some investigative reporting being done about Trump and his business dealings, the coverage was dwarfed by the tsunami of coverage given to the Clinton Foundation, the FBI notes, and Hillary coming down with pneumonia. To take the most glaring example, while there was no proof the Clinton Foundation engaged in any illegal (or even unethical) conduct, the Trump Foundation was found to have violated federal law by giving $25,000 to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi - they even paid a fine! But for some reason, this very apparent act of influence peddling (Bondi’s office dropped an investigation into Trump University several days after the donation was received) was not given nearly the attention paid to the Clinton Foundation, where no quid or quo was even remotely shown. Similarly, Trump continued getting a pass on releasing his tax returns, his health records, or information on his Foundation even as the media portrayed Clinton, who had released 40 years of tax returns, the names of all donors to the Clinton Foundation, had 30,000 emails made public, and released detailed medical information, as the one with the transparency problem. 

How did all of this end up impacting the race? Bigly, as Trump might say. On August 25th, Clinton was leading Trump nationally by amounts ranging from four points (right-leaning Rasmussen) to seven points (Reuters-Ipsos) to ten points (Quinnipiac). Six days later, Hillary’s lead had been cut to one in the Reuters poll and the following day, Rasmussen had Trump ahead by one. On August 29th, Nate Silver gave Trump a 19 percent chance of winning. Today, Trump is a slight underdog at 40 percent. In state polls, Trump has gone from high single digit deficits in places like Florida and Ohio to small single digit leads and he has solidified his standing in those red states that just a month ago appeared to be slipping from his grasp.

The after action report of this time period will be interesting. Much of the hysterical reporting on the Clinton Foundation ended up being much ado about nothing, but it allowed the media to reinforce its preferred narrative - that Hillary is untrustworthy, even though she did nothing wrong. They “Swift Boated” a charitable organization and Hillary erred in the same way John Kerry did when the same thing happened to him in 2004 - she did not respond. Of course, in his case, the attacks were coming from the Republicans. Hillary got done by the very media that is supposed to objectively report on the candidates. At the same time, Trump’s mouth was (mostly) under control and because he continues to refuse to release any information about his business dealings, reporters are left to public records requests to try and piece together how he operates. 

These are not small points, particularly because many in the media refuse to take ownership for their part in normalizing Trump, failing to hold him to the same standard they do Clinton (some reporters do not even bother pretending the two candidates are held to the same standard - they readily admit the two are not), or admitting they do much to drive certain stereotypes that are not actually based in fact. This would not be a big deal but for the fact this is happening in a situation where we are picking the person who will take on the most important job in the world.

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Hillary Clinton Is Not The Lesser Of Two Evils

Of the most frustrating caricatures of Hillary Clinton, the idea that progressives should vote for her simply because she is the “lesser of two evils” is among the most disappointing (and inaccurate). The vast right-wing conspiracy has effectively portrayed her as Machiavelli in heels for more than 25 years, but anyone who has been watching, really watching the Democratic National Convention, much less taken the time to look into the work Hillary has done on behalf of others for the past 40 years, should know better.

During the DNC, I have been particularly struck by the testimonials provided by Anastasia Somoza and Ryan Moore, two Americans with disabilities. Each spoke of meeting Hillary as children and at events that many politicians simply use as photo ops to make them look good. But not Hillary. She befriended these young people whose struggles are far greater than most of us can imagine, not because it helped her politically, but because she cared. Hillary’s work to pass legislation to help children secure health care, traveling to poor areas to fight housing discrimination, and tireless advocacy for women’s rights are foursquare with progressive ideals that many of us share. 

Hillary does not have her husband’s natural political gifts or President Obama’s unparalleled ability to lift people through his words, but instead of lauding her for the strengths she possesses – of inclusion, collaboration, and yes, listening – the media focus invariably lands on the skills she does not have, not the ones she does. Make no mistake, this has been an editorial decision that dates back decades to when she had the temerity to defend her right to have a career and not be a homemaker and has carried on from one generation of reporters to the next, who lean into the idea that she is an insular paranoid distrusted by Americans. 

That she now has to “reintroduce” herself to a populace the media claims does not know the “real” Hillary is an indictment of their choices from 1991 to the present. Her biography has been out there for any reporter interested in learning it. Her speeches as First Lady show a woman who was well ahead of her time in advocating for causes that are now considered mainstream. Her time as Secretary of State is now chronicled in the release of more than 30,000 emails that show her granular level concern for everything from delivering clean water to tiny African villages to getting an Illinois small business’s gefilte fish delivered to Israel. 

For the media to portray a vote for Hillary as some sort of hold-your-nose moment for Democrats, Sanders supporters or anyone else insults her decades-long commitment to others. She is a hard-working woman who has spent the better part of her adult life advocating on behalf of many whose voices are rarely heard in our democracy. That her work has often been behind the scenes and she has not tried to brag about her accomplishments shows a humility and selflessness journalists claim they want in politicians but penalize them for showing. The person she is running against is a know-nothing charlatan who has spent much of his adult life using others for his personal gain. There are clear differences between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump, but the lesser of two evils is not one of them.

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Trump Had A Terrible Convention And It Won't Matter

If you are a Republican hoping the Trump for President campaign would get its shit together, your just-concluded convention must have left you wanting. The week started with Trump’s campaign chairman dissing the Governor of Ohio and ended with the candidate reviving conspiracy theories about Ted Cruz’s father being involved in the JFK assassination. In between, Trump’s wife was accused of plagiarism, Ben Carson suggested Hillary Clinton consulted with Lucifer, and Antonio Sabato, Jr. called the President a Muslim. Through it all, the animating emotion was rage, the favored chant a full-throated “LOCK HER UP” in reference to Hillary Clinton, egged on and abetted by prominent Republicans like Chris Christie and Rudy Giuliani.

Once upon a time, Republicans leavened their fear-mongering with a patina of sunny optimism. Homages to lower taxes, less regulation, and a strong military could be relied upon to make their message go down smoothly. Reagan’s “Morning in America” and George H.W. Bush’s “Thousand Points of Light” have descended into Trump’s paranoid imagery of a country fraying at the seams. 

From the inner cities in the 1960s to the Soviet Union in the 1980s and terrorists in the 2000s, there was always some “other” to fear, but that has curdled into a sense of white grievance that now vilifies immigrants, people protesting police shootings, and of course, the twin evils of maybe-not-born-in-America Barack Obama and she-belongs-in-prison Hillary Clinton. Trump’s ranting acceptance speech - clocking in at 75 minutes, had the feel of a tinpot dictator, not a serious candidate for elective office, much less the highest one in the land. 

So why doesn’t any of this matter? It is really quite simple. Any Republican running for President starts off with 102 electoral votes from states they have won in the past six elections, 56 from states they have won five of the last six elections, and about 40% of the vote. The GOP has suffered four major landslide defeats in the last six elections, yet only George H.W. Bush failed to cross that minimum threshold and that was because Ross Perot, a third-party candidate, got 19% of the vote. Bob Dole (also hindered by Perot’s presence), John McCain, and Mitt Romney were all crushed, but they received 41%, 46%, and 47% respectively, of the popular vote. 

Trump’s problem is that securing the other 10% necessary to win the Presidency is both hard and expensive and he has not shown an inclination to do the work or raise and spend the money necessary to win. He is woefully ill-informed about the basics of governing, has no use for the analytics and get-out-the-vote effort that is needed on Election Day and is late to the game in fundraising. The Republican National Convention exposed the amateur-hour level of his organization and major donors are not opening their wallets as they have in previous years. Instead, he is relying on Twitter and appearing on cable TV to make up for his unwillingness (or inability) to generate the money needed to run a legitimate campaign for President. 

But again, none of this really matters because the race will be close simply because the electorate is not what it was in 1964, 1972, or even 1984 when huge swaths of one party’s voters abandoned ship and voted the other way. In 2008, the conditions for a Democratic landslide were about as favorable as they will ever be: the economy was in free fall, we were involved in two unpopular wars, and George W. Bush’s favorability rating hovered in the 20s. And even with that, McCain still scratched out 173 electoral votes and 46% of the vote. It was not a close race, but it was not the 49 state landslide that both Nixon and Reagan won or LBJ’s 44 state romp. 

What we will get for the next 100 days or so is an odd, mutually beneficial arrangement. Trump will pretend he is running an actual campaign for President even though he has none of the basic building blocks to do so and the press will pretend he has a serious chance of winning because to do otherwise would both expose his fraud, drain the contest of any suspense and destroy ratings. Enjoy!

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Hillary & Her Damn Emails

The collective media narrative is that FBI Director James Comey did severe political damage to Hillary Clinton in his public statements explaining why he and his investigators unanimously recommended against pursuing charges against the former Secretary of State. According to the media, his public statement on July 5^th contradicted a number of Mrs. Clinton’s claims and he then provided hours of testimony on Capitol Hill two days later which made her look even worse.

The confluence of politics and the law is a tricky one - optics matter more in the former, facts in the latter. But what the media owes the public is accuracy and conflating Comey’s statements with the idea that Mrs. Clinton’s actions reinforce the belief she is untrustworthy is an editorial decision divorced from the facts in this case. Members of the media like to hide behind the idea that they are simply reporting on what polling or interviews with the public tell them, but this excuses their own responsibility for shaping that narrative.

Comey’s most sensational claim was that classified emails – that were classified at the time they were sent of received – were found on Clinton’s email server. This seemed to contradict Mrs. Clinton’s statement that she neither sent nor received classified email. Here is what Comey said:

From the group of 30,000 e-mails returned to the State Department, 110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received. Eight of those chains contained information that was Top Secret at the time they were sent; 36 chains contained Secret information at the time; and eight contained Confidential information, which is the lowest level of classification …

Separately, it is important to say something about the marking of classified information. Only a very small number of the e-mails containing classified information bore markings indicating the presence of classified information. But even if information is not marked “classified” in an e-mail, participants who know or should know that the subject matter is classified are still obligated to protect it.

Seems pretty scandalous right? But Comey was being a bit of a slippery lawyer. The “very small number” of email that were marked classified at the time turned out to be three – yes, three. Not three thousand, or three hundred, or even thirty, but three. In other words, one one-hundredth of one percent (.01%) of the roughly 30,000 email the FBI reviewed were marked as classified. It was not until two days later at Comey’s Congressional hearing, that we learned the rest of the story:

In short, contrary to State Department policy, which connotes an email’s classification in the header, here, the markings were buried somewhere in the email strings where they could have easily been missed. More importantly, it turned out these three email were improperly marked – a fact shared by the State Department within hours of Comey’s press conference.

So, none of the three email Comey mentioned in his press conference turned out to be classified. But what about the 110 emails that were classified at the time, of which eight were top secret? Again, the colloquy is helpful. None of those email bore markings showing they were classified. In other words, the State Department did not think these email were classified at the time, it was the FBI’s call after-the-fact. As Comey conceded, absent some notation in the heading of an email that the subject matter is classified, the recipient of the email could reasonably conclude it was not classified.

In any event, those eight email (out of 30,000) that were top secret? Seven had to do with drone strikes in countries where their leaders demand plausible deniability yet everyone knows attacks occur (e.g., Pakistan and Yemen). The other email was a run-of-the-mill description of a conversation with the President of Malawi. Yes, Malawi, a country few people even know exists and even fewer could find on a map.

In sum, the “small number” of email that bore classified markings were all in error and none of the other 110 email had markings. Of the eight (out of 30,000) supposedly “top secret” email, seven were on a subject widely reported on but kept secret solely to protect our allies and the eighth had notes on a conversation with a leader of a country no one has even heard of.

The other Comey statement getting a lot of attention is this one:

Secretary Clinton used several different servers and administrators of those servers during her four years at the State Department, and used numerous mobile devices to view and send e-mail on that personal domain. 

This comment seems to contradict one by Secretary Clinton that she used only one device. But here’s the thing. Comey never explained what he meant by “numerous devices.” Apple now has a program that lets you upgrade your iPhone every year. Are you using “multiple devices” when you go from the iPhone 6 to the iPhone 7? It may be that Comey and Clinton are both telling the truth in that she perceived swapping out her phones as using “one device” and he interprets that same action as using “numerous devices.” Is this really grounds for a perjury investigation?

This was bad enough, but Comey layered his own opinions (a real no no for an investigator and something, as a former U.S. Attorney, he should know better than doing) and speculation. There were two particularly egregious examples:

Given that combination of factors, we assess it is possible that hostile actors gained access to Secretary Clinton’s personal e-mail account.

Here, he engages in rank speculation without any factual support, a cardinal sin that any first-year law student would know not to do.

Although we did not find clear evidence that Secretary Clinton or her colleagues intended to violate laws governing the handling of classified information, there is evidence that they were extremely careless in their handling of very sensitive, highly classified information.

This little nugget ended up being one of Comey’s most quoted lines, but aside from suffering from the same opinion testimony any good prosecutor would know to avoid, taken together with the context of the rest of his statement, it is also untrue. As Comey would later admit, none of the email he considered classified were designated as such at the time and without the markings, a person could infer they were not confidential. So how is it that Secretary Clinton was “extremely careless” when less than 1% of her email were classified (not that she would have known that, as per Comey’s own statement!) and the three (out of 30,000) that had markings turned out not be classified at all. It does not make sense and it also supports Hillary’s statement that she neither received nor sent classified information – the documents Comey said were classified at the time either bore no markings to show that they were or had markings, but turned out not be classified at all.

For Comey, this whole episode is a perfect illustration of why prosecutors typically do not make statements when charges are not filed. We are all entitled to the presumption of innocence and that right is even greater when a criminal investigation concludes without evidence sufficient to charge us with a crime. When a prosecutor decides instead to inject his own opinion it denigrates an innocent person’s reputation for reasons that have nothing to do with a legal determination of their guilt or innocence.

For reporters, this is another in a long litany of examples this campaign season where they went with the sizzle instead of the steak. All of the information I wrote about above was readily available to them if they were doing their jobs and putting this type of context into their stories. Instead, as is more and more common these days, they skipped right past the facts and ran right for the political angle that reinforced their preferred narrative.

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Bernie Goes Bust

While his colleagues in the Senate were dominating the news cycle with a poignant and powerful filibuster in support of strong gun control measures, Bernie Sanders was holed up in Vermont, polishing remarks he delivered to supporters on Thursday night. The speech itself was familiar. A greatest hits of Bernie’s preferred policy positions and a call to arms for his people to get involved in the political process at every level of government. But for a guy who boasted of his online fundraising prowess and unexpected success during the primaries, his 23-minute speech landed with a thud. Although more than one million people registered for the online stream, at its peak, a mere 218,000 people viewed it and cable news quickly cut away as it became clear he was giving a glorified stump speech lacking a concession to Hillary Clinton.

The past few weeks have been unkind to the 74-year old democratic socialist. After camping out in California for weeks on end in the hope of winning that state’s primary, he got stomped, book ending a day that began with a 30-point blowout in New Jersey and the media’s designation of Clinton as the party’s presumptive nominee. Since then, Sanders has been further marginalized. A meeting with President Obama was quickly overshadowed by the President, Vice President, and Senator Warren’s endorsement of Clinton. As the nation reeled over the mass murder in Orlando, Sanders chose that time to issue his set of demands to the Democrats, including the removal of DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Instead of supporting his “fellow” Democrats during the aforementioned filibuster, Sanders skipped it. And through it all, he has refused to concede even as the few supporters he had in Congress abandoned ship.

All of these events would have been enough to shrink whatever leverage Sanders had before his crushing loss in California, but Donald Trump’s implosion has worsened his situation. As Trump has become unmoored – lashing out at a federal judge, claiming the President was somehow complicit in the Orlando attack, accusing soldiers of theft in Iraq – and polling shows a consolidation of Democratic support for Clinton and a steady erosion of Republican support for Trump, it is becoming clear that Sanders’s blessing is not nearly as important as it looked to be just a few weeks ago. Clinton now has a posse that includes a fired up (and very popular) Barack Obama, working class hero Joe Biden, progressive champion Elizabeth Warren, her husband (and still-popular ex-President) Bill Clinton, and whoever she selects as her running mate to eviscerate Trump and rally Democrats, Independents and sane Republicans. Bernie’s support would be helpful, but no longer appears necessary.

Sanders played a weak hand hoping to maximize his return, but he pushed too hard. Instead of quitting while he was ahead, he went all in and lost. Voting ended in California 10 days ago (no mention of Bernie’s 60 point loss in Washington, D.C. earlier this week is needed) and Sanders has shown no sign of getting with the program. He could have giving a gracious concession speech, pledged his full support to Clinton and called on his voters to do the same, all of which would have enhanced his standing in the party. But he did nothing of the sort.

This is telling. For whatever lip service Sanders pays to being a Democrat, his actions tell a much different story. He has now spoken publicly, and with meaningful media attention, three times without so much as gracious and heartfelt congratulations to Clinton or an acknowledgment that the campaign is over. On the most important topic of the day, when his voice could have added weight to Senator Chris Murphy’s filibuster, Sanders was AWOL. What we have seen instead is a refusal to admit defeat, a self-righteousness bordering on narcissism, and a delusional belief that a guy who registered as a Democrat for political expediency now thinks he can tell his newfound party what to do.

When Sanders does not get all he wants, or is denied things he thinks he is owed, do not be surprised when he takes his toys and goes home, which is fine by me. His allegiance to the party was only as strong as his potential to win the nomination. With that gone, and with his endorsers abandoning him, I fully expect Sanders to revert back to being an independent – which is what he has been in his heart the whole time.

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Hillary's Veepstakes

Now that Hillary has wrapped up the Democratic nomination for President, all eyes are turning toward who she will pick to run with her. The candidate herself has been circumspect about the kind of person she is looking for with one important caveat - that the person she picks will be qualified to be President if anything happens to her. While this may sound like typical political pablum, this might be called the “Palin Bar” because the erstwhile Alaska Governor failed to clear that basic threshold. So, with that said, let’s look at the contenders: 

The Progressive Wet Dream

The name on everyone’s lips right now is Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren. She is a firebrand who has shown a real zeal for attacking Donald Trump, a hero to the progressive left who was calling out the big banks for years, came up with what would become the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, and would join what would be the first-ever all-female Presidential ticket. These are not small things and, in its way, would emphasize a strength Clinton already has while checking the progressive box the media thinks Hillary needs to mollify the Sanders wing of the party. With that said, I do not think she will get the nod because most Democrats will “come home” to Clinton without her needing to spend political capital on her VP selection and the wonky succession rules if Clinton/Warren did win is a gamble Democrats may not want to take (though I do love the idea of John Kerry going back to the Senate in the special election that would be called within 160 days of Warren’s notice of resignation). 

Vice President White Guy

There is a strain of thought that Hillary should just grab a moderate white guy to stick on the ticket and help cut her deficit with male voters. Both Virginia Senators, Tim Kaine and Mark Warner, hurdle the Palin Bar as former Governors of the Commonwealth and Senators of some standing (Warner is also an independently wealthy former businessman and Kaine was the chair of the Democratic National Committee). They also hail from a swing state that if Hillary can lock down, would make Trump’s already improbable path to victory that much narrower. Either of these guys is a safe option though unlikely to set progressive hearts on fire. 

The Next Generation

If Hillary is looking for sizzle, New Jersey’s junior Senator Cory Booker or former Mayor of San Antonio and current Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development Julian Castro are both tempting options. Either would appeal to a constituency that Hillary will need in November (Booker is African-American, Castro is Hispanic-American), both are incredibly telegenic and charismatic and both are in their 40s, which would give a nice generational boost to the ticket. But here is the thing, Castro will be 42 in November and Booker will be 47 and each has only been on the national stage for less than four years. While I have no doubt both are smarter than Sarah Palin (both went to Stanford, Booker has a law degree from Yale and was a Rhodes Scholar; Castro has a law degree from Harvard) neither has spent enough time under the hot lights. 

Bernie Lite

Anyone who thinks Hillary will pick Bernie Sanders as her running mate has spent too much time sampling legalized weed in Colorado. Instead, attention has focused on Ohio Senator Sherrod Brown. Brown would be a sop to progressives and comes from another swing state that while not essential to Hillary’s electoral college map, would, like Virginia, limit Trump’s paths to victory if she did win it. Brown is also experienced, having served in Congress since 1993 and in the Senate since 2007. One downside? Vice President Brown’s successor would be chosen by Republican Governor John Kasich, who is under no obligation to fill the seat with another Democrat. This may be subtraction by addition when every vote in the Senate will be needed in 2017. 

The Sisterhood

There are two female Senators, Missouri’s Claire McCaskill and Minnesota’s Amy Klobuchar, who have also garnered attention.  Klobuchar in particular has strong progressive credentials but also had a stellar record as the District Attorney of the largest county in Minnesota. McCaskill has won statewide races in a place where Democrats do not do well and each is excellent on the mic. On the other hand, if Clinton wants to put a well-qualified woman on the ticket, why not pick Warren?

The Finalists

For my money, Clinton’s choice will come down to California Congressman Xavier Beccera and former Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick. Beccera is Chair of the House Democratic Caucus (4th in the leadership structure) and has served in Congress for more than 20 years. He would be very helpful in moving legislation and would be the first Hispanic-American Vice President. He is also a progressive, which would help corral Sanders’s voters. Patrick has deep ties to the Clintons from his time as head of the Department of Justice’s Civil Rights Division in the 1990s and he was a two-term Governor. He also has experience in the corporate world (which might work against him in today’s Democratic Party) and delivered one of the stand-out speeches at the 2012 Democratic National Convention. The national stage would not be too big for either of these men, they both add balance and value, pass the Palin Bar and would energize key Democratic constituencies. While I think a compelling case can be made for either man, Patrick’s history with the Clintons, his great oratorical chops, and governing experience give him the advantage. 

My prediction: Clinton/Patrick 2016. 

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Media Fail: California Edition

In a primary season littered with bad journalism, the California primary may take the cake. To recap: Bernie Sanders basically moved to the Golden State, campaigned there non-stop, received his typical fawning coverage based on campaign rallies he held almost exclusively on college campuses, benefitted from hours of TV time where pundits suggested he could win the state, and STILL lost to Hillary Clinton by 13 points. The morning after the election, you would barely know that the media had spent the preceding three weeks hyping his prospects or that he lost in a landslide.

Although awful, the media fail is of a piece with how they have covered the Clinton/Sanders primary race. Clinton fought Sanders with one hand tied behind her back while he swung away with both fists. Other than her (accurate) attacks on Sanders’s position on gun manufacturer liability, the Clinton team spent little time on negative campaigning against him; her Super PAC literally spent no money going after Sanders. Meanwhile, he dug in with gusto against her until the final day of the campaign.

The conventional wisdom was that Clinton supporters were not as enthusiastic as Sanders supporters. Not only was that demonstrably false, but in the place enthusiasm actually matters – the polling booth – her final margin of victory will end up being close to 4 million votes, a massive victory. That Hillary won 8 of the last 11 primaries and caucuses and 14 of the last 20 would suggest she has plenty of momentum and enthusiasm, but most of the coverage leading into California speculated about how damaging a loss there would be. When the media could not find any equivalency in delegates or votes, they tried to lean on “states won” – as if the Utah caucus was the same as prevailing in Pennsylvania, Florida or Texas – but even there, the Sanders team came up woefully short.

The kid gloves Sanders was treated with by Clinton were largely shared by a media horde that consistently drooled over his rallies but did little probing of his actual policies. What little negative press he received was of his own making – an awful editorial board meeting with the New York Daily News and his claim that Clinton was unqualified to be President – stemmed from his own lack of preparedness and tin ear. Meanwhile, in the run up to both the New York and California primaries, his campaign received oceans of positive coverage based on the size of his crowds, but when he lost each, there was little after action reporting on why that excitement did not translate into wins.

Bernie’s appeal was always based more on myth than fact. Of the 10 most populous states in the nation, Sanders only won one, and by less than two percent (Michigan). Clinton beat Sanders by more than 100,000 votes 15 times, while Sanders only bested Clinton by that margin once. Clinton’s domination was so complete there were some counties where she outpolled Sanders by a greater margin than entire states he won. In New Jersey, her margin of victory in Essex County (47,622 votes) was greater than Sanders’s victory margins in all but four states (one of which was Vermont).

But for all of this, Bernie Sanders is still getting the softball treatment. The editorial board of the New York Times thinks Hillary has to convince Bernie’s supporters she did not cheat to win and everyone in the press corps is in agreement that he deserves a wide berth to nurse his wounds even as he stubbornly claims he will soldier on, notwithstanding the clear defeat he suffered. It is fitting that the media is giving him one last parting gift – on a night when he could have shown statesmanship by conceding to Clinton, urging his supporters to vote for her, or even simply acknowledging the historic nature of her being the first woman to clinch a major party’s nomination for President, he was defiant and refused to shush his supporters who booed her name, not that you will hear much about this in the press, they are too busy hand wringing over the additional concessions that must be made to soothe his wounded ego. 

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Everything You Wanted To Know About Hillary’s Email That The Media Refuses To Tell You

Official Washington loves few things more than a heavily annotated investigative report and it is even better when there is a political slant to it. The recently released report by the Office of the Inspector General (OIG) at the Department of State meets both criteria. At 83 pages, it appears to have heft (even though the report itself is only 42 pages, the rest is an appendix of old memos and guidance documents) and its tsk-tsking of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server fits with the media’s narrative that she is untrustworthy. 

The breathless reporting portrayed Clinton as a rogue actor, flagrantly violating the law while dissembling in her after-the-fact excuses. But if you read the report and ignore the political spin, you find a much more nuanced story. For example, a former Secretary of State connected a private laptop to a private Internet connection to conduct government business and never attempted to store or retrieve the emails sent that way, but that person was Colin Powell, not Hillary Clinton. The archiving rule at the center of one of the two complaints against Clinton could have been levied at dozens of other people who failed to print out every email they sent or received and store the paper copies (the so-called “print and file” system.)  

For all the sturm und drang, the OIG criticizes Secretary Clinton for two things - first, for failing to comply with the ridiculous “print and file” archiving requirement that OIG itself admits few people follow; and second, conducting government business on private email connected to a personal server. What the report reveals however, (and what was unreported in the press) is that Secretary Clinton was hardly alone in these supposed “violations.” The IG notes that nearly 90 senior aides to Secretaries Powell and Rice used personal email. (IG report at 20). Secretary Powell himself not only used a personal email account, he connected a private laptop to the Internet through a “private” connection in his office, sidestepping the State Department’s portal (which was itself a violation of State Department rules). (IG report at 3, 21, 31). And when contacted by the IG during the pendency of their investigation, Powell, along with aides to Rice, ignored the IG’s entreaties to determine whether the email they sent via personal email could be retrieved. (IG report at 21-23). 

The IG concluded that “Secretary Powell did not comply with Department policies that were implemented in accordance with the Federal Records Act.” (IG report at 22). The IG made the same finding with regard to Secretary Clinton with one important caveat: her submission of 55,000 pages of emails “mitigated her failure to properly preserve emails …” (IG report at 23, emphasis added). Powell not only failed to comply at the time, but snubbed a request from the Department that he contact his ISP to determine if his records were retrievable. (IG report at 22). Even so, the “file and print” requirement is only followed “sporadically.” The Department’s internal guidelines contain “no explicit penalties for lack of compliance” and the Department “has never proposed discipline against an employee [for failing to comply.]” (IG report at 14). 

Ironically, had Hillary done as those 90 staffers and Secretary Powell had done and simply used a personal email account instead of her own server, it is unlikely any of her records could be retrieved. Instead, the State Department (and ultimately the world) got to pour through 55,000 pages of email, the vast majority of which was the boring work of government with some cherry picked threads of gossip and other click bait ephemera the media loves to focus on. Conversely, email Powell and his and Rice’s aides sent while we were at war in two countries and attacked on September 11th, 2001 are lost to history. 

So, on the first point - failing to properly archive her records, no one has ever been punished for not following the rules and Hillary complied after the fact. But what about the dreaded private server? Well, the server is really a red herring. The issue here is corresponding over a system without proper security features - whether that is done using a gmail account or your own private server is incidental. But here’s the thing: not only was using personal email not prohibited when Clinton was Secretary, it still is not prohibited. While the federal record keeping law was amended in 2014, it did not prohibit the use of private email for official purposes, it simply required that a person who did so copy her official email account or forward a copy of the email to that account within 20 days. (IG report at 9). And the Department’s most recent guidance, issued in 2015, says that the use of personal email is “discouraged” except “in very limited circumstances.” The Department does not articulate what those circumstances might be. (IG report at 32). 

Oddly, the conclusory nature of the IG’s findings (and those most heavily reported by the media) contain no substantiation. For a report with an average of four footnotes per page, the determination that Secretary Clinton had “an obligation” to discuss her email use is simply stated as fact without citing to any internal guidance, regulation or law. It is curious that such a finding was made, particularly since the report itself acknowledges that personal email use was not then and is not now, prohibited. 

Surely, if Secretary Clinton ran afoul of Department guidelines, so too did the 90 staff members who worked for Secretaries Powell and Rice, along with what I have to assume are many other anonymous employees in a Department of thousands who probably use their personal email accounts from time to time. And the concern over the security of Clinton’s server is a fortiori for servers run by Google, Microsoft, and ISPs that are targets of daily hacking attempts. And it is not like government servers are bastions of security. The Office of Personnel Management was hacked last year, resulting in the theft of more than 10 million social security numbers of current and former federal employees dating back to 2000.

If you want to point a finger, look at the records management at the State Department - it is a total shit show. Some archived email cannot be retrieved because much of it is corrupted, password protected or contains no information (IG report at 15), the integrated archiving system did not come online until this year (IG report at 15), and the Department broke its own rules by failing to archive the email of 50 top political appointees (IG report at 16). Even if the Department wanted to determine the frequency or volume of personal email use by its employees, it “currently lacks the resources” to do so. (IG report at 19).

This is another tempest in a teapot that ignored context such as the fact that close to 100 former senior officials were also known to have used private email and that many senior officials under prior Secretaries of State (and Secretary Powell himself) ignored requests to turn over their records. The archiving rule Clinton supposedly violated was also violated by Secretary Powell, is without sanction and has never been used to discipline anyone. Unlike Secretary Powell, Secretary Clinton complied with this rule after the fact. Hardly the crime of the century, but an easy way for a media hell bent on reinforcing its preferred narrative that Hillary thinks the rules do not apply to her.

If you want to read the report for yourself, it can be found here:

https://oig.state.gov/system/files/esp-16-03.pdf

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Twenty Days To California

Hillary Clinton must wonder what she needs to do to make Bernie Sanders go away. Sweeps in various “super” Tuesdays stretched her pledged delegate lead to a point that made it mathematically impossible for Sanders to catch her. Yet, there he is, leveraging the media’s need to fill TV hours and column inches  to soldier on. After all, there is no shortage of college campuses and idealistic young people to make it seem like he still has a chance. And so, even if she need not win any more primaries between now and June 14th, when the District of Columbia has the final say, a loss in California on June 7th to Sanders would not look good. To the Beltway media, the dreaded “optics” of such a defeat would simply feed into the narrative that she is a weak general election candidate whose political host body (the Democratic Party) is rejecting her. 

I am sure the Clinton team would prefer not to spend any additional money locking up a nomination it thinks it has already won; however, allow me to offer a modest proposal. Instead of treating the next three weeks as an unnecessary epilogue to a primary contest that the Clinton team thinks is already over, look at this time as an unexpected opportunity to launch her general election campaign early. 

A month ago, everyone assumed attention would be focused on the Republicans, who were careening toward a contested convention and the possibility of a third-party challenger. Instead, opposition to Donald Trump folded and the race ended early. Because of this, Trump is likely to go dark as he focuses on catching up in fundraising, campaign infrastructure, and convention planning. For all his bluster, his campaign schedule even during the heat of the race was light - rarely doing more than one or two events a day - and now that he’s locked up the nomination, the idea of spending money on unnecessary rallies when so much needs to be done is unlikely. 

So with the media’s attention focused on California (and to a lesser extent New Jersey), the Clinton team should embrace this chance to dominate media coverage. Take the next twenty days to test drive her general election campaign themes, define her (and Trump) with the knowledge that she will generate an inordinate amount of national (and local) coverage simply because space needs to be filled -  so fill that space, with her message, with images of rallies and events with the diverse coalition that propelled President Obama to victory and interviews that give her a platform to speak with passion and fluency about how she will lead this country.

The return on investment from cross-country wins in New Jersey and California will not only snuff out the final embers of the Sanders insurgency, but springboard her into the fall campaign. 

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Should We Care What Bernie Wants?

With wins in four of five states that made up the “Acela” (or I-95) Primary on Tuesday night, Hillary Clinton is on the verge of history – the first woman to secure the nomination of a major political party for President of the United States. Of course, this singular achievement is already being poo pooed by the press, who are either mourning the loss of what ratings come from portraying a contest that was never that close as competitive or simply reflecting their decades-long antipathy toward the former First Lady. Either way, attention has quickly shifted to a narrative framed on her need to acquiesce to still-unknown demands that may be made of her by Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders to secure his endorsement and, in theory, the support of his followers. 

It is particularly presumptuous of Sanders to make demands considering he himself has only been a member of the party (sort of) for less than a year and acknowledged running as a Democrat purely for political expediency. But that aside, I am not sure what he could ask for that is not already in the neighborhood of what he seeks. On many of the issues of importance to him - Wall Street reform, taxation, college education, and others – Secretary Clinton has put forth proposals that are broadly in line with his thinking with the added benefit of being substantive and workable, not an idealistic fantasy where Republicans in Congress would somehow kowtow to the whims of a Democratic Socialist in the White House. 

That he would not get Secretary Clinton to adopt his ideas chapter and verse is no sin and should not be a requirement to secure his blessing. He lost, which means his views were considered and rejected; he does not get a second bite at the apple at the threat of taking his toys and going home. And Sanders may want to rethink any requests about the nominating process. The delegate apportionment rules that he bemoans have actually benefitted him, keeping him in the race by granting him delegates in large states he lost badly (see, New York, Pennsylvania, Florida, Texas, Virginia) while providing oceans of positive media coverage for wins in low turnout caucuses in places like Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, and Alaska that did little to move the needle in his delegate deficit. Sanders has gained a lot of mileage out of his victories even though of the ten states with the smallest turn out, he prevailed in all ten and his percentage of pledged delegates slightly outpaces the percentage of the total vote he has received. 

Even if Sanders asked that the number of super delegates be reduced or eliminated altogether, it would not help his cause because Secretary Clinton has also won a majority of the pledged delegates. Naturally, Sanders would like a system tailor-made to benefit him that would allow independents to vote in Democratic primaries (I do not get this – why would non-members of a political party be allowed to have a say in who Democrats (or Republicans for that matter) choose to lead their party?), reduce or eliminate super delegates and maybe increase the prominence of caucuses, but you only get to make the rules if you win the game. The truth is, for all the media sturm und drang, Clinton has held a consistent lead of between 10 and 20 percentage points in the total vote against Sanders since the primary season started in earnest.  

Indeed, if Sanders is truly interested in helping to advance his agenda, he would be best served by helping down-ballot Democrats flip the House and take control of the Senate, but he has been resistant to supporting “the party” until very recently and even then, his efforts on behalf of other Democrats has been limited to some fundraising letters and a passing nod to a handful of candidates. Mobilizing his volunteers and fundraising, helping to recruit progressives at the federal, state, and local level, and working with party leaders to little “d” democratize the way the party raises money will have a far more salutary benefit than arguing over a plank in the party platform that nobody is going to read anyway. 

Of course, this is not to say that Mrs. Clinton should not be gracious, but saying that is superfluous. Her campaign has run almost no negative advertising against Sanders and while the Secretary has thrown some sharp rhetorical elbows, they have been well within the rules for political campaigns. She has taken pains to publicly congratulate Sanders on his wins and extended an olive branch to his supporters in her victories. There are always going to be dead enders, people who, no matter how hard you try to appease, will not go gently into that good night. And so I say that Hillary should waste no time trying to mollify the Susan Sarandons, Rosario Dawsons and Shaun Kings of the world. They are much happier in their ideological purity than the belief that cementing the gains made under Presidents Clinton and Obama is more important than the risk of Donald J. Trump taking up residence at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. For the overwhelming majority of Democrats and independents who voted for Bernie Sanders, logic and reason will prevail. 

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