Tuesday evening Rachel Maddow had Bernie Sanders on her show. The video is embedded above. It's worth watching if you're trying to decide if he's the candidate you want to see go up against whichever garbage the GOP nominates for president. As you've probably seen, recent head-to-head match-ups show Bernie doing significantly better than Hillary against Trumpf, Cruz, Rubio, Jeb and any of the other plausible Republikanische contenders.
A PPP survey of New Hampshire registered voters this morning showed that although both Bernie and Hillary lead all the candidates from the Republican's pathetic deep bench, Bernie does significantly better than Hillary does. He is, easily, the more electable candidate. Hillary is ahead of Rubio by one point (44/43) and ahead of Fiorina by just one point (45/44) and ahead of both Jeb (43/41) and Dr. Ben (45/42) by two points each. Obviously she does best over the dual fascist threats posed by Herr Trumpf (47/41) and Cruz (47/39). But Bernie bests all of them by wider margins, demonstrating his proven ability to win over independents and mainstream conservatives who just will not vote for Hillary, not even to save the country from the fascist threat posed by Trumpf and Cruz.• Bernie 45% to Rubio 41%• Bernie 46% to Dr. Ben 41%• Bernie 48% to Fiorina 40%• Bernie 47% to Jeb 38%• Bernie 49% to Trumpf 40%• Bernie 48% to Cruz 38%It's worth mentioning that Bernie is the only candidate, from either party, with a positive favorability rating among the overall New Hampshire electorate-- 46/40. Trump has the highest unfavorables of any candidate (59%) but Cruz and Jeb also have terrible favorable/unfavorable ratios-- Jeb 28/55 and Cruz 30/49. Hillary is sorely lacking in this department as well-- 38/55.
But that isn't the beginning and the end of why progressives should be seriously considering Bernie instead of the far, far, far more establishment Hillary. Are you impressed that virtually every Democratic Member of Congress has endorsed Hillary, while just two-- Progressive Caucus co-chairs Raul Grijalva and Keith Ellison-- endorsed Bernie? One of The Hillary endorsers, Matt Cartwright, a solid progressive from eastern Pennsylvania, recently explained why these politicians-to-politician endorsements don't mean much, and might even hurt more than they help:
What matters is your message, and making sure you have the means to get it out there. Those kinds of endorsements worked 40 or 50 or 100 years ago; I think we are at a point now where a candidate's collecting endorsements of other politicians at best is a waste of time, and at worst is actually counterproductive. It's definitely a waste of time, because nowadays in high-profile races information on candidates is so readily and directly available that voters don't depend on party bosses and ward-heelers to tell them who to vote for. It can even be counterproductive, because the politicians bestowing their endorsements may in fact be individually or collectively despised. In my own experience with a hotly contested primary contest, I was a complete political neophyte in my first election; my opponent was a 20-year incumbent congressman. You could count my endorsements from elected officials and local party committees on one hand; my opponent's list of endorsements was gargantuan. I just focused on raising enough money to get my message out. Since I was able to do that, I did get my message out. Since the voters liked my message more than the other guy's, nobody paid any attention to all those other politicians' endorsements, and I won... by a lot.
First of all, if you want to help Bernie gets his message out, here's where you can do it. One prominent Democratic senator who stands out for not having endorsed Hillary, at least not yet, is Elizabeth Warren. Her endorsement would probably mean a lot more than those of a pack of party hacks who most people have never heard of or actively despise, from grotesquely corrupt and Wall Street-owned party boss Chuck Schumer to rot-gut conservatives who regularly vote with the GOP, like Joe Donnelly, Joe Manchin, Claire McCaskill and Heidi Heitkamp, the last of whom has voted with the Republicans and her allies at the NRA every time the Democrats have tried to pass a bill to keep assault weapons out of the hands of terrorists.Yesterday,writing at the Daily Beast, Eleanor Clift explained why Warren is keeping Hillary at arm's length. First of, she reminds us, that "before she became a senator Warren was quite critical of Clinton’s relationship with the financial industry. She also points out that Hillary will need her more if the Republicans actually go ahead and nominate the populist-on-the-right, Trumpf, to help bring clarity to how more mainstream populism differs from the fascist (per)version. What Clift doesn't mention is that the Clinton Machine has been so disgustingly aggressive in rounding up endorsements that they have turned off countless Democrats and that some of just given in and endorsed her to get rid of them.
The two women sat down together one-on-one last December, and Clinton subsequently met with economic experts that Warren recommended. Aides in both camps said they didn’t know of any additional contacts, and there is wariness on both sides of saying or doing something that might produce negative stories about their relationship.That’s probably because they don’t appear to have much of one, and a natural suspicion of one for the other manifests itself in their aides and supporters. A longtime Clinton backer who met with Warren recently on a foreign policy matter found her perfectly pleasant but not that well-informed, prompting him to brand her “a one-trick pony (consumer interests).”
But remember, Warren has endorsed plenty of crap candidates in the past, even worse than Hillary-- awful conservative Democrats like Michelle Nunn (GA), Alison Grimes (KY), Mary Landrieu (LA) and Natalie Tenant (WV) who were better than the Republican alternatives but... not much else.In her most recent book, A Fighting Chance Warren recounts an incident with then First Lady Hillary Clinton that I think had a tremendous impact on her at the time. Long before she decided to run for office, Warren, a Harvard professor at the time, never stopped fighting for a fair bankruptcy bill... but the banksters never have up either. Their financial self-interest wasn't dependent on fleeting partisan coalitions, elections, not even on deaths. They never give up, just like the GOP never gives up trying to destroy Social Security, Medicare, public education, the right for working people to organize and bargain collectively, the environment, and, ultimately, democracy itself-- all on behalf of the self-entitled multimillionaires and billionaires who claim their wealth gives them the right to run the country, in a kind of symbiotic partnership with the corrupt politicians they buy (on both sides of the aisle). Here's how Warren puts it in her book in terms of Hillary:
The banking industry bought everything; they even bought their own facts. The industry commissioned three different studies, each of which was touted as "independent." Each explained the urgent need to change the law-- exactly the way the banking industry wanted it changed. One particularly damaging result of these bogus studies was a claim that bankruptcy cost every hardworking, bill-paying American family a $550 "hidden tax." The number was entirely made up, fabricated out of thin air, but the press reported it as "fact" for years.This one hit me hard. I'd spent nearly twenty years sweating over every detail in a string of serious academic studies, agonizing over sample sizes and statistical significance to make certain that whatever I reported was exactly right. Now the banks just wrote a check, commissioned a friendly study, and purchased their own facts. They had their own press people distribute the facts and lobbyists hand the facts to congressional staffers. From the halls of Congress to the front pages of newspapers all over the country, these new "facts" became reality.This strategy-- and the cynicism behind it-- made me furious. It also scared me. If the facts about bankruptcy could be purchased, then who knew what they could claim next?...[T]he president [Bill Clinton] was under enormous pressure from the banks to sign the bill, but in the last days of his presidency, urged on by his wife, President Clinton stood strong with struggling families. With no public fanfare, he vetoed the industry's bill....The banks lost in 2000, but they didn't quit-- they just spent more money on lobbying and campaign contributions. Soon the banking industry was outspending everybody else-- tobacco, pharmaceuticals, even Big Oil. Credit card companies lined up to boost George W. Bush's presidential campaign.In 2001, the bill looked sure to pass Congress again, and now George W. Bush was in the White House, promising to sign it into law. The recent election kept the House in Republican control, and every single Republican was ready to support the bill. The Senate was evenly split between the two parties, but one of the bill's lead sponsors was Democratic powerhouse Joe Biden, and right behind him were plenty of Democrats offering to help... The baking industry had lost for a second time, but it came back once again, bringing even more money and more lobbyists. It was like fighting some kind of mythical creature-- cut off one head and two grow back.
Sooner or later, I have little doubt that Warren will-- for a combination of reasons-- endorse Hillary... unless, Bernie beats her in New Hampshire and Iowa. Again, you can help him do that here. It's a good investment in the country's future.
