Coop Scoop Newsletter #9: The Reversal of Fortune Edition

The Reversal of Fortune Edition

Issue #9
March 5-6 2020
Coopscoopnews@gmail.com

Preface to this edition: I am a Sanders supporter and donor and a lifelong democratic socialist with libertarian leanings. I do not, however, engage in agit-prop or self delusion. My biases and perspective are all out in the open to see and assess. My primary commitment is to the truth -- as the truth is always revolutionary. Even uncomfortable ones. If you are simply seeking reinforcement of your preconceptions and ideas, you are reading the wrong guy.

F.U.D.

The real epidemic sweeping America is not covid-19. That virus is small potatoes compared to the dreaded disease of FUD -- Fear. Uncertainty. And Doubt. We are now a full 5 years into this illness that primarily attacks Democrats and Liberals. The outstanding symptom of this triple threat is constant Extreme Fear-- that, in turn, can provoke disorientation, misdirection, self-doubt, excessive caution, confusion and abandonment of reason.

As I write this on Thursday evening, the candidate that I have supported (and will continue to support) has been hit with a devastating body blow and while he does have a chance of recovery (as a presidential candidate) the odds are heavily stacked against him. As of this writing, Joe Biden is about a 90% favorite to win the nomination. As I like to use poker examples, this equivalent in a game of Texas Hold-Em is you looking at your hole cards and finding a pair of ducks (2-2) while your one standing rival wakes up to pocket rockets (A-A). Not a great hand to play. We need a miracle flop of community cards, like one more deuce (a 2.5% chance).

Let's dispense first with the easy part -- the horse race. And then we will move on to what went wrong and finally what is to be done.

The final results from California are not fully tabulated but anyway you cut it, the best Sanders can hope for in the next few days is having roughly the same number of delegates as Biden, though more likely he will be around 100 behind him. With more than 1900 needed to win the nomination there is a temptation to say they are more or less tied. That, however, ignores the coming primaries, beginning next Tuesday with the two most important states being my new home of Washington and the more heavyweight swing state of Michigan.

Sanders won both in 2016. Washington was a caucus then but it will be a primary here on Tuesday so polling is unreliable. Sanders is clinging to a small lead and it is quite possible that Washington (part of the Left Coast) will still go his way, but no guarantee. Michigan is a different story. Sanders won it in 2016 but having led in polling till a week ago or so, Big Mo has boosted Biden into a 5-10 point lead.

Let me be crystal clear: if Sanders loses Michigan, barring any miracles in the weeks to follow, he is basically finished. The best that Berners can hope for in that case would be a volcanic meltdown of Biden during the March 15 one-on-one debate, There's a scary line up of states to follow including Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois and Florida (and several other states) and very few of them are friendly to Bernie. Indeed, it would not be a surprise if Biden beats Sanders in Florida with 60-65% of the vote. Bernie's only real path is to stage a massive victory in Michigan, regain his own momentum and upset Biden by big margins on Joe's home territories. Does that sound near impossible? Yes it does. That's why Sanders is only about a 1 in 10 favorite to win the nomination. He will be 1 in 100 if he loses Michigan.

So how did we wind up here? The Sanders campaign vastly underestimated the FEAR in which the Democratic electorate is immersed. Traumatic fear of Donald Trump. Revolutions, even mild mostly rhetorical ones of the sort promoted by the Sanders campaign, and for that matter "pre-revolutionary" situations only occur. -- by the measure of history-- under one of two conditions. Either at a time of accelerated rising expectations (the first 2 0r 3 years of the French Revolution) or when a regime collapses in the midst of or in the wake of war: Russia, Germany and Hungary at the end of WWI or Yugoslavia, China, and almost Greece and Italy after WWII.

Those conditions are hardly present in the U.S. Bernie has always been somewhat realistic about this, especially when asked by reporters how his revolution was going to come about. He would answer it WILL come when millions of young people and other angry or agitated strata flood the electorate and then you will see. I think it obvious at this juncture that was mostly wishful thinking. There has been no significant upsurge of that sort. The large increases in voter turnout did not help Sanders -- as they were primarily in reaction to a possible second term of Trump.

Turns out that Bernie is unelectable. Not because of Trump smears. But in great part because of the reticence of Democrats -- even those who admire him!

Sanders is very well liked by a big majority of Democratic primary voters and his policies, especially a broad interpretation of his Medicare For All proposal. But Bernie, and this goes for some of his more zealous supporters, spooked their possible constituency with talk of "revolution" -- a concept that most Americans have a lot of trouble understanding (thinking it's mostly about hot dogs and fireworks on July 4th if that). The campaign has also been way too narrow. All the post Super Tuesday reporting indicates the Sanders failed, and I do mean failed, in trying to reach out and build an electoral coalition that went beyond his very energized and significant "base" of which I am a part. He kept counting on millions to come out of the woodwork, which is great idea, but he totally ignored most of the actually existing Democratic universe.

Listening to Sanders interviewed last night, I was dismayed to hear from his lips that he never put in as much as perfunctory phone call to South Carolina's Jim Clyburn seeking a long shot endorsement. Ditto with Cory Booker and Kamala Harris and Andrew Yang. At least make the calls, Bernie! In fact, what we can put together in the past few days is that Sanders made virtually NO outreach to other sectors of the Democratic Party.

Further aggravating this omission, in the run-up to South Carolina, Sanders began openly attacking the "Democratic Establishment" and that sort of went over like Hitler's Bar Mitzvah. Don't get me wrong, I am not now nor have I ever been a member of the Democratic Party and for me it is a lot of fun to razz it. Then again, I have never run as a Democratic candidate for the President of the United States. Everybody knows that politics is all about addition not subtraction. I can affirm that the Sanders campaign has flunked Math 101.

Ron Brownstein, an establishment pundit with a very good record of analysis, has conducted his own pre-post-mortem on the campaign in the Atlantic and reminds us that Sanders never proved he really had much of a ceiling of more than around 35% inside the Democratic primary electorate:

"Sanders reached 33 percent or more of the vote in just five of the 14 states that voted, including his home state; beyond Vermont, he did not exceed 36 percent, his share in Colorado. Biden had a higher ceiling: He won at least 39 percent in seven states and roughly a third of the vote in three others. Stanley B. Greenberg, a veteran Democratic pollster, argued that Super Tuesday’s results establish Biden as the clear front-runner for the nomination at the convention in July."

Brownstein convincingly argues that Sanders' hostile attacks on the Party establishment served to alienate millions of Democratic voters who like (or liked) Bernie but could not grasp why he was spending so much time sniping at "their" party. It's a good point. Thinking that Sanders could somehow be chosen by a coalition that did not included at least some of the dreaded and alleged "centrists," "corporatists," and "neoliberals" was and is a pipe dream, at least in a two-party presidential system. This extreme polarization was heightened by the antics of some of his more gung ho (and headless) supporters who went on to social media and escalated the Us Versus Them mentality, best seen by the vitriolic attacks on Liz Warren (giving the media the whole Bernie Bros meme to hype).

Personally, I find Twitter to be a sewer populated by sewer dwellers and while I do voice sharp opinions frequently I never stoop to trashing anybody on Twitter (I find that to be low and cowardly). Sanders did repeatedly disavow those sort of Twitter attacks but not with enough vigor. He should have made a big public show by firing a couple of his digital folks, even as scapegoats. Then again Bernie himself was hardly disciplined in refraining from alienating potential allies. Writes Brownstein:

"The Super Tuesday exit polls showed Biden beating Sanders among self-identified Democrats by about 30 percentage points in both Virginia and North Carolina, about 25 points in Oklahoma, 20 points in Tennessee, and nearly 50 in Alabama. Sanders was more competitive among Democratic partisans in the New England states of Massachusetts and Maine. But the overall pattern was unmistakable.

His collapse among Democratic partisans came after recent full-throated attacks on “the Democratic establishment” in his rallies and media appearances. Sanders has often sounded more as if he believes he’s leading his movement in a hostile takeover of the party than a merger with it. (In his speech last night, he backed off only a half step, targeting his criticism at “the political establishment” rather than Democrats by name.) “It turns out that shitting all over the party you want to win the nomination of is a bad strategy,” said one Democratic pollster who is not affiliated with any campaign but requested anonymity to comment candidly on the race."

Writing in the Daily Beast, my former colleague from the Huffington Post, Sam Stein, makes a similar point, using Howard Dean as an example of someone who now regrets not strategically toning down his fiery message, that is making "the turn" as Dr. Dean put it; Writes Stein:

“I think the problem for him and others has been how to animate your base without sending the implicit message that you are not open to support or ideas from people outside your base,” said Rep. Dan Kildee (D-MI), who met with Sanders earlier in the cycle when the senator was trying to build support for his candidacy on Capitol Hill. “The only way a Democrat wins the White House is by being able to do that. This election cycle is different in one critical sense. I have heard more than I ever have before, people across the ideological spectrum are saying we have to beat Trump. I think any hint that ideology will be a more important principle than a winning strategy is problematic and I think it’s what has affected a lot of these folks.”

In interviews with campaign operatives and Democratic officials, the inability of Sanders to make “the turn”—as Dean put it—was cited repeatedly as the reason why his campaign faltered in the lead up to Super Tuesday. The campaign featured a surrogate who spoke openly about supporting a primary campaign against House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), they touted their refusal of financial help from former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in the general election, they put out tweets declaring their desire to take on the Democratic establishment alongside the Republican one, and they planned rallies in the home states of primary competitors Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA).

Some of this was born from ideological consistency, some of it from electoral opportunism, some of it just pure stubbornness. But the net result was a message to Democrats: get in line or get out of the way."

This critique of Sanders is hardly limited to mainstream pundits and journalists. Jeet Heer of The Nation, a clear Sanders sympathizer for a publication that endorsed Sanders (and where I am a contributing editor), makes a similar point. Heer believes that Bernie can still salvage his campaign if he and his supporters internalize the lessons learned in South Carolina and Super Tuesday (and is somewhat more optimistic than I am). Read Heer's piece here. It's worth it.

Heer also slaps down those like Marianne Williamson who posted (and then deleted) an absurd tweet that used the word "coup" four times to describe Sanders Super Tuesday loss. If you believe crap like that, you have no business being a serious activist or observer, The DNC could not organize a three car funeral and it is a not a secret club of elites. Its Superdelgates are made up principally of Democratic congress members and other elected officials, including Sanders, Warren, the Squad etc etc. Do the majority of them favor Biden? Why of course! They are DEMOCRATS. The accusations of conspiracies, coups, and "rigged" voting machines are not only asinine, but they radically subvert any notion of Sanders as someone who can unify the party and they smear the entire campaign as a kook fringe.

NOW WHAT?

I wish Sanders was in better shape but I cannot honestly say I am terribly surprised by his recent downturn. In passionate and friendly arguments I had with other pro Sanders friends before even Iowa, I affirmed that Sanders would be a way long shot as there was very little to no "democratic socialist" civic infrastructure beneath him (If Sanders were to die tomorrow who, in fact, would replace him?). We have no deep bench, I am not sure we have any bench whatsoever. Could Sanders even get a single cabinet member confirmed by a Republican Senate if he chose fellow democratic socialists?

His rise from relative obscurity in 2016 was nothing short of a miracle, one all progressives should cherish. After a century long drought of socialism being a legitimate American political force, it has been resurrected and gained surprising amounts of acceptance. In an earlier newsletter I called that campaign, the election of AOC, and Sanders 2020 campaign so far, "green shoots." We should celebrate these sprouts, water them, nurture them and hope they eventually grow into mighty oaks. That's a LONG and arduous process but it is the only way to properly understand what is happening and how to respond. I've known Bernie Sander personally for 30 years and have always admired him, and I still do. If you had told me as late as 2010 that he could get more than 5% of the vote in a Democratic Party primary I would have called you a nut case.

Times change and so does the electorate. As horrifying as Trump is and might be in a second term, we still have demographics and rising consciousness on our side. I will remind you that it took 100 years to enforce the 14th and 15th amendments giving blacks the vote. It took 40 years after Stonewall for gay marriage to be mainstreamed and legalized to the point where a presidential candidate was in a same sex marriage. It has taken decades to destigmatize something as innocuous as marijuana and that fight is not yet fully completed. There were NO SHORTCUTS to these generational battles. How naive is it to believe that our civic religion -- capitalism-- would be defeated or even seriously reformed in one or two presidential cycles? And without a broad, visible, militant social movement to bolster the candidate?

Unfortunately, we do not have a parliamentary system. If we did, Bernie might be the head of a social democratic party that this year might get 20% or so of the general election vote. Democrats would have no choice except, most likely, but to pact with them to form a majority government that would push our body politics into a much healthier state. And we would have the chance to much more quickly grow the socialist vote. and perhaps one day lead a new coalition government.

That is not, however, the system we live in and it is not going to change in our lifetime. Our goal MUST be to not put all of our passion, all of our energy, all of our hopes in any single presidential candidate. And let's get real. If Bernie somehow were elected, I see no way that ANY of his programs, not even Joe Biden's much more modest proposals would be anything except DOA so long as there are not 60 U.S. Senators to avoid blocking them. That is not in even remotely in the cards this cycle. Or the next.

Back in 2016, political scientist Cedric Johnson wrote of the Sanders campaign in Jacobin: "[Our goal] is not the election of a president but the transformation of the country into a place that is more egalitarian, just, and humane, a society where poverty is not possible and where real freedom is enjoyed by all… The kind of popular pressure we need to advance some of the best of Sanders's platform—free higher education, postal banking, public works, a single-payer health care system, stronger financial regulation, and so on—cannot be built in an election cycle."

This truth is quoted this week by my favorite political analyst, the wonderful Adolph Reed who remarks that we can now amend this quote to say even TWO election cycles are hardly enough. Says Reed: "As our opponents have made strikingly clear in recent weeks, to whatever extent it wasn't already, we won't and were never going to be able simply to elect our way into the kind of just society we need and deserve.

However, the South Carolina results, as well as those of several—e.g., Virginia, where Biden bested Sanders 53-23, and 53% of voters indicated preference for Medicare for All—of the Super Tuesday states, underscore the need to dig in and build on the potential the Sanders moment has provided us to take up the slow, unglamorous work of building organically rooted working-class politics around issues that connect directly with people's lives and concerns all over the United States."

We are going to need that movement, inspired by Sanders, no matter who is elected president this year. Whether it's Trump, Biden or Bernie, --+--

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