The bovine, the myth, the legend… @Cowicide!!!
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You’re back!!!
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Yay, @cowicide!
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Interesting Storify here from Clay Shirky on Sanders’ campaign.
(I don’t know why people write essays on twitter, but there you go).
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I get this. I was just thinking yesterday: if every non-white ethnic group tilts democrat, and every non-christian religious group tilts democrat, and young people tilt democrat, and women tilt democrat… then old white christian men must be pretty damn republican.
One part of his analysis I don’t agree with, though, is that he mistakes red/blue states for conservative/non-conservative states. Florida may have gone Democrat in the last two elections, but that doesn’t say much about how conservative Florida Democrats are.
Barring a stunning result in New York I think Clinton is going to end up winning this. I’ll be really interested to see how low voter turnout can get in the general.
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I’m still kind of confused as to how criticizing Obama for not doing enough of the good things he has done and pointing out some of the bad things is a bad strategy. I think it’s valid, even though I’d still say he’s the best President of the US in my lifetime (probably - I could count Carter, just). What’s wrong with having high expectations of the candidate that’s supposed to represent your ‘side’?
As a total outsider, pasty-white liberal guy in a pasty-white liberal city, I look at how Sanders has gone about trying to get the vote from African-American voters and (after a definitely rocky start), he seemed to me to have been going about it in the right way. But clearly he didn’t. Or started from too far back, perhaps?
I want the candidate of the Dems to be popular across multiple demographics, I don’t want them to be the candidate of the white guys (and they never will be, ever again, so that’s good) - but I still don’t understand why Sanders’ message didn’t resonate as much as I hoped that it would. And I don’t understand how Clinton has maintained popularity to such an overwhelming extent when she’s not done much except say “I agree with Nick Barack”. I just think she’s a lousy candidate. She was rubbish in 2008, and I think she’s worse now. And hubby dearest is toxic.
You’re right about NY, and if it goes the way it appears to be going, I am going to be interested to see what happens to Green party support afterwards.
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At least according to lore, Hubby Clinton was popular among African-Americans in the South and Obama is “our second Black President.”
I don’t know. I personally have bought into Bernie’s campaign so much that I simply do not understand or empathize with any other positions. My brother is apparently a Hillary supporter, and I have old friends I respect who are too, and they are all progressives who, if you ask me, stand a lot more to gain from Bernie’s platform than Hillary’s, and I just don’t get it.
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but I still don’t understand why Sanders’ message didn’t resonate as much as I hoped that it would.
I think it’s because it was mostly ignored by what most people apparently still pay attention to, the corporate media, and downplayed and even ridiculed when it did get airtime. And then, many of those who did hear dismissed him early on as too idealistic, too radical for most voters. I now regret counting myself as among the latter.
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I think Clay Shirky goes a little too far putting thoughts in the heads of black Americans in that piece. Did Sanders do poorly among black Democrats because he criticized Obama? Was it because he was too class focused and not enough race focused? Was it because he just didn’t have any name recognition in some places? Was it because a black voters, on average, actually prefer Clinton’s position on issues (I know! Imagine!)?
It’s hard for me to understand why anybody wants to vote for Clinton. The best argument I’ve heard is “She’s not Republican!” But if a majority of black Americans think the country is going in the right direction, if 60% think their financial situation is improving rather than getting worse, then I get it. Clinton represents more of the same. If you don’t think the country is in a crisis, then more of the same is good.
I think a lot of us have seen this flowchart:
From:
https://twitter.com/christopherlay/status/713126487130378240/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc^tfw
It is weird for me to think that a majority of black Americans think the answer to “Is shit broken?” is “No,” But if that’s really how a majority felt, then that explains it.
Of course maybe that chart is just for white people. Maybe under “who did it” there are some alternative explanations that the chart just doesn’t take into account.
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White people?
I still wonder how Elizabeth Warren would have done if she’d run. She’d at least have removed the ‘vote for Clinton because she’s a woman’ aspect, and she doesn’t have the the ‘crotchety old uncle’ thing that Sanders has which puts some people off.
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One of the things Bernie addresses is the criminal justice system and its instutitionalized racism, and our tendency to send kids (disproportionatly by race) to prison rather than college. He seems more willing to take that on than Clinton does, or Obama for that matter. But maybe he didn’t get that message out strongly enough early on; maybe things like Erica Garner’s video for his campaign were too little and too late to have much sway, and the narrative about BLM protests at a couple of his early rallies was read as BLM protesting against him.
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You know that massive part of the country that votes for Republicans even though it’s literally against their own self-interest?
It’s like that, only with Hillary Clinton.
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Though this was also a part of Sanders’ problem with black voters. White Sanders supporters kept saying things like, “What’s wrong with black people, don’t they know Bernie is the best candidate for black people?” White people telling black people that white people know better than black people what is best for black people is a pretty surefire way to make black people distrustful of white people.
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Yep. White folks telling black folks that they don’t know what they’re doing, instead of listening to them if they’re willing to explain why they do what they do – that shit don’t help.
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Weak sauce.
Most of Shirky’s Storify premise is based upon one poll that doesn’t properly disclose its methodologies. How was the online poll initially promoted to the public for participation specifically? How did they verify the authenticity of the participants? In other words, Shirky is (yet again) stating quite a lot of stuff about black people as certain fact, when it’s actually mere conjecture based upon a single, rather amorphous, online poll with piss-poor transparency at best.
Stating uncertain conjecture as definite fact is a flakey patten with Shirky. For example, we should certainly be preparing Bernie’s post-mortem by now.
Whoops.
Michigan didn’t quite turn out that way. In reality, it was a win for Bernie. You’d think Clay would be humbled by that blunder and stop projecting his own mere conjecture as certain fact - Especially considering his “facts” are based upon polling with sketchy methodologies at best and he’s been caught with his pants down with the rest of the establishment punditry (including FiveThirtyEight).
As time (and Bernie’s campaign) goes on, this election is becoming quite embarrassing for the intelligentsia and establishment pundits (along with parrot message board commentators) who keep repeatedly foretelling Bernie’s early, inevitable doom only to be proven wrong time and time again.
Why are we still listening to these people? Their credibility has already been destroyed.
What ever happened to accountability and credibility? Shirky’s establishment pile-on naysaying is weak sauce.
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Welcome back!
Even though I know it’s wrong to feel this way, the #1 reason I want Sanders to win is just to rub it in the faces of the people who said he couldn’t win. I can just imagine the smug looks on their faces when Clinton eeks out a victory in elected delgates by less than 1% and they’ll be like, “See, we were saying it all along, Sanders had no chance.” I just want to slap those looks off. Pundits are the fad diet industry - they somehow succeed by being wrong every time.
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One of the things Bernie addresses is the criminal justice system and its instutitionalized racism,
and our tendency to send kids (disproportionatly by race) to prison rather than college.
The thing about this, though, is that a lot of people who aren’t white really can’t vote Republican because of the ridiculous racism of the Republicans. So the Democrats have to appeal to a wider ideological breadth and class breadth of minorities than they do of white people.
Because of that, this particular talking point has a tendency not to land as desired. I was talking to my cousin, and he told me about a campaign volunteer coming up to him and speaking directly to him, not the white dude with whom he was walking, about Bernie’s plan for prison reform. My cousin is interested in prison reform, because he’s an inner-city school teacher, but was still like 'WTF, did this kid think I just got out or something?" If the volunteer had walked up to my cousin’s mom and said that, he would have gotten an earful about how she doesn’t care about some little ‘rock slingers’ getting picked up, think of the children, etc. She’s very interested in this invitation from the Pope, though.
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I’m sure you can find some online examples here and there of Bernie supporters being too aggressive, but please attempt to keep that in perspective. For one thing, the corporate media blows isolated occurrences out of proportion.
In the real world, most white Sanders supporters I know (and have met offline in the real world at rallies, coffee shops, neighborhood meetings, etc.) listen very intently to what black folks have to say.
For example, they listen to Michelle Alexander.
http://www.thenation.com/article/hillary-clinton-does-not-deserve-black-peoples-votes/
I hope you don’t mind me suggesting that you give her a listen too if you haven’t already. Or, I suppose we could continue to nitpick a small minority of white folks that support Bernie Sanders and focus like a laser on that shit.
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It’s not my #1 reason, but it’s on the list. Of course in the aftermath of a Sanders win, they’ll either be in “nobody could have predicted this” mode, or will credit the GOP with some Xanatos Gambit brilliance deployed to stop both the upstart Trump and their hated enemy Hillary.
I have, many times, been told that the reason I support Sanders instead of Clinton is I’ve bought into the GOP’s apoplexy about her, without giving credit to the fact that I have found the Democratic party depressingly inadequate since I was old enough to think about it and have supported most of Sanders’ platform since at least the 90s.
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I do like this line from Isaac Chotiner’s article in Slate:
Clinton will surely move quickly and decisively to the right once she officially vanquishes Sanders, but the triumph of the Bernie insurgency is that to get back to the center now, she has so much farther to run.
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