Why did this video not emerge in 2016?

[Otto Lidenbrock]

When Bernie Sanders was attacking Hillary Clinton for the Crime Bill. She was the First Lady. He was a congressman and voted for it.

This video contradicts the argument that he only voted for it because the Violence Against Women Act was in the bill.

Link to tweet

[mcar]

1. I was just coming on to post this

Why has it been hidden until now? Sen. Sanders is going to have to explain his contradictory claims - and his and his supporters vicious attacks on HRC. Who, BTW, was First Lady then so had no vote in the matter.

[Cha]

12. It doesn't look like "he hates it" to me..

wasn't there a bunch of talk about "he voted for it but he hates it"?

[Thekaspervote]

2. Thx for posting!!

[Gothmog]

3. Because there was no internet?

Seriously, sanders was a weak candidate, no one vetted him

Link to tweet

?s=20

[MineralMan]

5. Well, there was, but it was certainly not what it is today.

I launched my first website in 1995. It was a site for my little shareware software company.

[NewJeffCT]

19. Yes, I had been on AOL, Prodigy and Compuserve

for a few years by the time 1995 rolled around - on a 28K or 56K dial up modem

Granted, streaming video/audio at that speed would have cost an arm & a leg in time and money to download to view. Heck, I remember it took a while just to download a single picture.

[MineralMan]

21. Besides the two-line BBS that was running

in my office, I used GEnie and Compuserve mostly. Actually my first access to the Internet was through Compuserve's browser, and my very first website was created using Compuserve's WYSWYG web design app. I switched to Front Page and a normal host in 1996 or 97.

Through the late 1980s and into the 90s, I was online on BBSes and Compuserve. The Compuserve Politics Forum was the first place where I discussed politics online.

After 1986, I was writing articles for computer magazines, from Compute! and Computer Shopper to PC World, where I settled in for 12 years as a reviewer and columnist.

[NewJeffCT]

25. that's cool

I was in college in the late 80s, but I remember sending instant messages to co-workers through the company system where I was working as an intern in 1988/89... of course, it was all internal and you had to know the person's ID - I was (for example) T35JXK and if I wanted to text a person I knew, I would need their ID and you couldn't always guess at it

[MineralMan]

29. When Compuserve first connected itself to the Internet and let its user send

and receive emails, your email address was your Compuserve ID number plus @compuserve.com. The problem was that those ID numbers were in two parts, separated by a comma. My old Compuserve ID was 71571,222. Well, the Internet didn't like commas in email addresses. In fact, they were forbidden. So, my first public email address was [e-mail]. That no longer exists, so I can put it out in public. They replaced the comma with a period, but only for email. By that time, I was using a 56k modem to connect. A couple of years later, though, my wife and I had a cable TV internet connection installed in the office suite we rented. The cable company had just started making that available, and it was quite a novelty. They didn't make a router available, either. The cable modem had one ethernet socket. I had to buy a commercial ethernet router, which was $$$ in 1995.

Our little freelance writing office was the first business in town with one of the new Internet connections from the TV cable folks. They sent a team of technicians to install it, and it took several hours for them to figure out how to get it working. I had to help them bring the cable into the building, through an air vent in the roof. Once it was working, I pulled out my ethernet router. "What's that?" the technician asked. "A router, so we can connect multiple computers to the Internet." "Well, I don't know if that's allowed, really." I said, "Oh, it's allowed. You're providing the ethernet connection and I'm using it. See ya!" After they left, I ran ethernet cables to the four PCs we had in our office suite. We had to install ethernet adapter boards in each PC, too. We kept that connection busy. Before that, we had seven phone lines in our two office suite. Most were connected to modems. We shut down five of the phone line, which saved us enough money to pay for the cable connection.

At the time that cable connection cost $150/month, but that was cheaper than connecting to a T1 system someone had left behind in the phone closet. I found that when I was connecting our phone system to the punchdown board in that closet. I asked a phone company technician once who owned the T1 hardware. He said, "Nobody. A company that was in here just closed down and left. It's yours if you want it, I suppose." I almost used it, until I found out how much it would cost for the connection every month. As far as I know that hardware is still there in that phone closet.

[Cha]

36. Ha!

[George II]

4. And a year later, contrary to what Democrats were proposing, he wanted to make it STRONGER...

...with LONGER sentences, which would have resulted in MORE "mass incarceration"!

What was said the other day about people running like the internet doesn't exist?

[BlueMTexpat]

6. She wasn't even in the Senate at the time.

And yet, she was blamed for it.

[karynnj]

20. I think she is blamed just for her comments - not the bill

The question is whether she was influential or not. I think that she was - especially because she was a Yale educated lawyer. As others have said, her comments and the bill, were a product of the time. Remember that this was at a point where many cities were dealing with high crime levels. (Possibly fueled by the crack cocaine epidemic).

The bill included many Democratic ideas - community policing, police interacting with at risk youth thru things like basketball, the violence against women act. Importantly, it banned high capacity guns. The problem was that many of the trade offs - especially completely inflexible sentencing that created the rise in incarceration.

The problem that HRC had was that to say "she was not in the Senate" is that the same is true of SCHIP, children's health care. Her contribution on that was persuading Bill Clinton to include it in the budget and being a persuasive voice in its favor. It is not reasonable to say she had no influence on one and overwhelming influence on the other.

However, just as with Biden on this, I think that she believed that the bill as written was an improvement over not having it. The majority of the Congressional Black Conference and many Democratic Senators and Congressmen voted for it. Bill Clinton signed it .. and in 2016 apologized for its unintended consequences.

[Cha]

7. It's here NOW.

[dsc]

8. because for all the bull about how evil Hillary conspired to smear saint Bernie of Vermont

none of it was true.

[Cha]

11. Exactly.

[delisen]

26. Clinton camp did not attack. nt

[Demsrule86]

9. Sanders ran on it as late as 2006. I saw it in contemporaneous newspapers.

"Sanders called on the former president (Clinton) to apologize after the incident, which took place earlier this week at a Clinton campaign event in Philadelphia. Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta shot back at Sanders on Sunday, citing that the senator voted in favor of the bill.

"In 2006, he campaigned for the Senate saying, 'I’m tough on crime.' What was his evidence? I voted for the '94 crime bill,” Podesta said on ABC’s "This Week With George Stephanopoulos." "I think he’s airbrushing history."

[Scurrilous]

24. Airbrushing history is right.

[stopdiggin]

10. and while we're revisiting history

it would be useful to remember that a large majority of the country (including good portions of some minority communities) were still very much on board with the "tough on crime" narrative.

The point being, almost anybody that was involved in politics this far back ...

[betsuni]

13. K&R

[ehrnst]

15. The vetting continues. (nt)

[Drunken Irishman]

16. Because Hillary made a conscious effort to not go after Bernie in 2016...

Her campaign likely weighed the pros and cons that type of campaign and decided they could probably wrap up the nomination without alienating Bernie supporters. The problem is that Bernie and his supporters went hard after Clinton, all but calling her a racist, attacking her as a Wall Street sellout and essentially no different than any of the Republicans running. So, when the primary wrapped up, and Bernie attempted to put that genie back in the bottle, he couldn't do it.

It was too toxic.

[Prosper]

30. I see it as supporting the new President. Unfortunately he was still supporting

Bill Clinton when he voted for the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. The law that almost collapsed the US economy and is still hurting the economy today. Shows Sanders can be a compromising team player. Good post to

shows Sanders is not a closed minded ideologue .

[Hortensis]

17. I mentioned it a few times. Comes down to how

important truth is to people. Some sadly not at all, Lincoln's those "who can be fooled all the time."

[karynnj]

18. My guess is the Clinton team did have this - at minimum they had his voting record

I am sure that they hired someone to do opposition research and this is a mainstream station that covers Burlington. Note that people have gone after Biden on this bill - and like HRC - he has more African American support than anyone else.

I suspect that they did NOT go there because she was never in real danger of losing to him and they may have thought that going after someone who is seen - as Bernie was - as a genuine person who had no real chance of winning. She knew she had to win at least all the Democrats who supported Bernie.

It is valid to go after "bad" votes. However, Congressmen and Senators rarely get to vote on a bill that represents what they themselves would really want. I remember from 2004 that a former Kerry aide spoke of how almost all bills are "yes,but" or "no, but" bills. It is in their Senate speech where they can add the buts, but that will not change the vote count. I would add that if they are on the right committee or if they can push to make the bill closer to what they want. They can also try to get an amendment passed in the full House or Senate. However, they need to vote yes or no to the final version of the bill. I have always wondered whether if they get changes to make a bill better, if they might feel some pressure that they should then vote for the compromise.

In 2016, I think their main response was that Hillary Clinton had no official role in any legislation. However, on other issues, she took credit for being an influential voice in getting legislation passed. What hurt her in 2016, was that tape of things she said, that I don't remember concerning people in the 1990s when they were said, sounded terrible in 2016.

However, the population most affected, POC, stayed with HRC in the primaries - so the Clinton team might have seen using something like this as having more potential downside than benefits. It would not have erased Clinton's comments and could have kept the entire story of the crime bill in the media for a longer time. Her response was to put the comments in context and to speak of her then current opinion and to let the issue fade. As said, she got the POC vote in the primary.

In the general election, the % of African Americans who voted was down. Figure 2 includes a graph of the percent by race for various Presidential races . https://www.census.gov/newsroom/blogs/random-samplings/2017/05/voting_in_america.html From this, it can be seen that the percent for African Americans was down - not just related to 2008 and 2012 when Obama ran, but 2004 when Kerry ran. You could argue that in the Obama years it was Obama being on the ticket and that 2004 was either due to the outrage towards Bush or that many blacks respected Kerry, for his history. The numbers can not explain the reason, but they do show that African American turnout was lower.

I see no way that this would have been better had the Clinton campaign gone after Bernie on this. If anything, it could have led to less trust for Democrats (which Bernie isn't) overall.

[NewJeffCT]

23. I think lower African American turnout

can be explained by the massive voter suppression efforts by state level Republican parties and also by the voter suppression efforts by Cambridge Analytica online. While I'm sure most African Americans weren't fooled by Cambridge, they were only looking to get 1 or 2 black voters out of 100 to stay home or vote 3rd party and it's a huge success for them.

For example, in Florida, the African American population is 16.9% of the total population.

9.4 million votes were cast in Florida in 2016, so the African Americna total was around or, 1.588 million (probably a bit higher, since whites and African Americans vote in higher percentages than Latin and Asian American voters)

But, for simplicity, let's just say it was 1.588 million. Remember, people waitied in lines in Miami, Orlando and other cities for HOURS to vote.

1% of 1.588 million is 158,800

Trump "won" the state by about 113,000 votes.

Move the needle 1% and it swings from a 45,000 vote win for Clinton to a 113,000 vote win for Trump.

[karynnj]

27. Great points

This means two things. Most importantly, we need to fight suppression as people like Stacy Abrams are fighting to do and we need to find a better way to stop the success (even at that level) of the lies.

The lies depended on social media to spread them. If you were to model this, the model would be similar to the spread of a virus. Like these rumors that spread as an "infected" person shows them to others. With viruses, the goal of immunizing the population is to reduce the number of vulnerable subjects to limit the ability of the virus to spread. What we need is a "vaccine" that will reduce the people who believe the lies.

One possible way is to make as public and easy to understand as possible what happened in 2016. If it was possible to show for even one example how a story started, explained how it spread and had some estimate of how many people it reached. Then if they had a list of THOROUGHLY debunked stories that were spread in 2016. Last, they should have a way to quickly rebut new lies. All of this would follow the model that has been used by organizations like AARP in trying to educate seniors on the way to avoid being teh victim of fraud.

Relative to this thread - it likely supports that HRC's team made a good decision in not doing more to pursue Bernie on this.

[58Sunliner]

31. Exactly. You don't need much to throw an election. Especially with low voter turnout.

[Blue_true]

38. I live in Florida. I have been early voting since 2015.

What I see is a lot of Whites using early voting. I really don't see a representative percentage of Black voters when I have been voting. We have something like 11 days of early voting, including two Saturday's and one Sunday. Democratic voters needs to use early voting over mailing in votes or waiting for Election Day, and they need to check their registration early on so that any problems can be cleared up. When people get trapped in long lines on Election Day, votes get lost, they have to leave for something, or they just get tired of standing. Early voting takes me about 15-20 minutes. I am sure that the conspiracy theorist will answer that early votes can be hacked, the thing is, there has been no evidence of that, but there is plenty of mailin votes being challenged, getting lost, or in the 2018 governor and us senate races, tens of thousands of them being made invalid when they got held up past the legal postmark date because a MAGAT psycho was sending bombs through the mail - the democrat lost the governor's race by around 24,000 votes and the democrat lost the senate race by around 4,000 votes - the votes that got invalidated were from 65-95% democratic voting precincts.

[Scurrilous]

22. He hid 16 years of his life.

He hides lots of things.

He hid the true mother of his child. until 2016.

Look into his past. Between the time he crawled off the Stalinist kibbutz and the time he became mayor there is nothing.

Two short paragraphs in Encyclopedia Britannica.

Here is his resume for 16 years. It's a joke. No specifics. No company names save for one. His own. When he was self-employed.

https://splinternews.com/this-old-copy-of-bernie-sanders-resume-from-the-1980s-i-1793854662

[Act_of_Reparation]

35. Obviously a conspiracy.

[Tiggeroshii]

28. Funny how the tweet is entirely obfuscating what he actually said

If you watch the whole clip, he said nothing about more jails.

[Prosper]

32. Not going to hold anything against anybody for political support of president.

I was pedal to the metal supporting the Clinton’s and actually thought “super predators” was a meaningful synopsis.

[Jose Garcia]

33. Clinton's campaign used kids gloves on Sanders because

they didn't think that he could beat her and they didn't not want to alienate his supporters.

The book Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign, by Jonathan Allen and Amie Parnes goes into this in great detail.

[Blue_true]

37. Near the end he said what several of us on DU have said.

Politician in major cities were crying for help from Washington, the crime bill sought to addess the needs those politicians said that they had.

[Tarheel_Dem]

39. Oops! n/t