Sunday, June 05, 2016

The Children's Hour stretches on


Hillary Clinton scored a sweeping win in the U.S. Virgin Islands on Saturday, picking up all seven pledged delegates at stake as she inched tantalizingly close to the Democratic nomination.

She is now just 60 delegates short of the 2,383 needed to advance to the November general election.
...

The Virgin Islands is one of five U.S. territories that casts votes in primaries and caucuses to decide the nominee, even though those residents aren't eligible to vote in November. While its pool of delegates is small, the island chain took on more importance as Clinton gets closer to clinching the nomination.
Like the South, these delegates don't really count because reasons; which include "rigged," "corrupt," "Establishment," and "Wall Street."  On the plus side, Sen. Elizabeth Warren has started trolling Bernie Sanders:

“I’m a superdelegate and I don’t believe in superdelegates,” she told a Politico reporter Saturday at the Massachusetts State Democratic Convention in Lowell, Mass. "I don’t think superdelegates ought to sway the election.”

They shouldn't, in other words, do what Bernie wants them to do.   And a million "Sanders/Warren" bumper stickers just went up in a puff of smoke.  Obviously the corporatists of the Establishment got to her.  But Bernie still believes in a contested convention:

Speaking to reporters three days before the California primary, Sanders showed few signs of surrender, vowing to take his bid to the Philadelphia convention in July. He urged news organizations not to anoint Clinton as the presumptive nominee through a combination of pledged delegates and superdelegates.

"It is extremely unlikely that Secretary Clinton will have the requisite number of pledged delegates to claim victory on Tuesday night," Sanders said. "Now I have heard reports that Secretary Clinton has said it's all going to be over on Tuesday night. I have reports that the media, after the New Jersey results come in, are going to declare that it is all over. That simply is not accurate."
Actually, Clinton now needs only 60 pledged delegates to win the nomination (some, if not all, of which she may pick up today).  FiveThirtyEight.com says Clinton has a 92% chance of winning California.  With 475 delegates to allocate, I'm guessing she'll win at least more than 60.  And yes, you can take out the super delegates from the count if you want to, but it doesn't matter:  they aren't going to shift to Sanders.  They don't have any reason to.  As Sen. Professor Warren said, they shouldn't sway the election.  The people have spoken:  and Bernie lost.   Then again, maybe what Bernie means by "contested" is not what the rest of us mean:

Said [Sanders campaign manager Jeff] Weaver: "Given what he has said, I suspect there will certainly be a roll call vote at the convention."

Oh, you mean a bog-standard convention!*

*And I gotta say, on another topic:  is he serious?


"Sorry to disturb your brunch," Sanders said at Hamburger Mary's, taking the microphone during their "drag brunch" as disco lights swirled inside. "I just wanted to say that on Tuesday as you all know there is a very important Democratic primary here in California. And my hope is that everyone will stand up and make clear it is too late for establishment politics."

There's not much more "establishment" in American politics than the U.S. Senate or the Presidency, and neither office gives you unlimited power to challenge the "establishment" from the inside and foment "revolution." If it did, wouldn't Sanders have done that by now?  What's next, a promise to stick it to the Man?

4 comments:

  1. I have to wonder if Bernie Sanders wouldn't have bowed out, perhaps even graciously, if he had been beaten by Harry Clinton instead of Hillary Clinton. I am getting the nagging suspicion that it really bugs him and Weaver and Devine and Biggs that he's been beaten by a woman.

    It appears there is no stand on super delegates that Sanders won't take to deny he's lost, no principled stand he announced as the cross he'll go into battle under that he won't pitch aside.

    After having seen Eugene McCarthy, Ralph Nader and, now, Bernie Sanders, I think we've got a pattern here. And, if it were more important, there's what the Greens are doing.

    I hope she buries him in California and New Jersey so we can stop dealing with him. Even lots of his big supporters are fed up with him, from what I'm hearing and seeing. He's turned himself into a ridiculous figure with this campaign, at the cost of his alleged issues. If he had been more skilled at politics he could have negotiated something for those issues with Hillary Clinton but he doesn't have those kinds of political skills, obviously. I wonder if he ever did.

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  2. NPR reports this morning the Wisconsin state party has voted to ask for the elimination of super delegates at the convention, or that they vote proportionately to their state's vote/caucus. So, same thing, really.

    No comment on the rules change (like, whatever, man!), but maybe this is what Bernie means by a "contested convention"? Except that's a rules fight (about as arcane as can be imagined, and isn't it all about transparency, dude? I mean, if it doesn't fit on a bumper sticker, it's too complicated!), not a contest for the nomination.

    Unless Sanders thinks he can change the rules in the middle of the game because "revolution!"

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  3. The recent Rolling Stone interview with Senator Sanders was enlightening. One key part was on self reflection.

    " What has this campaign taught you about yourself? Has it changed you?
    [Swats at the air with disgust as if batting the words to the ground] Next question! "

    "You've been criticized – including in Rolling Stone – for not putting more specifics behind what the political revolution means as a form of governing .... What are the specifics about how I, personally, all by myself, do what nobody in American history has done? And I'm being criticized? Why don't you do it? Why doesn't the editor of Rolling Stone do it? Look. You know. With all due respect, that's an absurd question."

    " And that is this question of how you would break up the banks. You drew a lot of heat on this after the Daily News interview. I want to understand, what is your preferred policy mechanism for breaking up the banks?

    You can pass the legislation that I've introduced, which would require an act of Congress. [Editor's note: The "Too Big to Fail, Too Big to Exist" Act would, according to Sanders' summary of the bill, "require the breakup of JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, Bank of America and Morgan Stanley within one year of year of enactment".] (The 4 sentence plan he has promoted!)

    Senator Sanders has learned nothing, he is the lone person who can change America, and no plans are needed. Tomorrow this will be over, whether Senator Sanders accepts that or not. It won't be a contested convention just because he says so.

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  4. Wow. It's worse than I ever thought.

    Sanders is not a cranky old man. He's a buffoon. He really is the Donald Trump of the Democrats. I mean, that just....

    Wow.

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