October 1, 2015

The Atlantic: Bernie Sanders Closes in on Hillary Clinton

The Atlantic: Bernie Sanders Closes in on Hillary Clinton

Sanders’s success in gathering small-dollar donations speaks to the grassroots movement he has built on the campaign trail. On Wednesday night, he reached 1 million online contributions, outpacing President Obama’s 2008 campaign, which didn’t reach that mark until February of that year.

Clinton’s campaign has touted the number of small donations her camp received, but she’s also had success holding big-dollar fundraisers—a method the Sanders’s campaign has not pursued.

The two camps are also spending money at vastly different rates. In the second quarter, Clinton’s operating expenditures stood at $18.2 million compared to Sanders’s $2.9 million. As Sanders has built a national campaign infrastructure, though, his own expenditures have increased to an estimated $15 million this quarter, giving him a net gain of $11 million.

Super PACs supportive of Hillary Clinton have already banked tens of millions. Sanders’s grassroots campaign may yet prove his Achilles heel.

October 1, 2015

HuffPo: Martin O'Malley Proposes Overhaul Of Campaign Finance System

HuffPo: Martin O'Malley Proposes Overhaul Of Campaign Finance System

As the two leading candidates for the Democratic presidential nomination released their eye-popping fundraising totals for the last three months, former Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley worked instead on Thursday to illustrate how broken the campaign finance system is by releasing a plan to reform it.

O'Malley's plan includes passing a constitutional amendment overturning the Supreme Court's 2010 Citizens United decision that opened the door to unlimited spending by corporations and unions in elections. It would also overhaul the gridlocked and largely ineffectual Federal Election Commission, crack down on coordination between candidates and their super PACs and fight for greater disclosure of political donations.

"This week marks the end of another campaign fundraising quarter," O'Malley said in a statement. "I’m not naïve: Campaign resources are important. But the staggering figures required to run for the highest office in the land aren’t as much a sign of muscle as they are an indication of just how broken our democracy is."

The plan would also direct the overlapping agencies that regulate elections to require publicly traded companies to disclose political spending to their shareholders, promote the passage of the DISCLOSE Act and establish publicly financed congressional elections.

October 1, 2015

WaPo: Hillary Clinton’s support among blacks plunges in a new poll

WaPo: Hillary Clinton’s support among blacks plunges in a new poll

Over the course of the still-awfully young Democratic primary season, one demographic split has been repeated over and over again: Non-whites have consistently been more supportive of Hillary Clinton than whites.

That's one reason that Bernie Sanders's strength in Iowa and New Hampshire isn't as worrisome as it might otherwise be for Clinton backers; in states with less-heavily white populations -- a.k.a. most of the rest of the country -- Clinton should conceivably do better.

A new poll from Suffolk University and USA Today, though, suggests a big shift among African Americans that could undermine that confidence. We have to note up front that this is one poll, with large margins of error on black responses. That said, the shift is surprising.

Since the last Suffolk poll in July, the overall race has tightened. Clinton still leads, but by less than she used to. Now notice how big the drop among black Democrats is on the chart below.

Since the last Suffolk poll in July, the overall race has tightened. Clinton still leads, but by less than she used to. Now notice how big the drop among black Democrats is on the chart below.




Part of the shift in support for Clinton might be due to the decline in her net favorability among blacks. Opinions of Clinton have dropped among all Democrats as we've seen before. Among blacks, the decline has been greater -- and the increase in favorable views of Sanders has been stark.




It's also important to note that this new poll doesn't show much change in support for the top three Democrats over other recent polls. Clinton's been at or a bit above 40 percent for a while, while Sanders has been in the mid-20s.

October 1, 2015

The Atlantic: Why Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Like Talking About Criminal Justice

The Atlantic: Why Bernie Sanders Doesn’t Like Talking About Criminal Justice

“Bernie took the approach that cops were ‘labor,’ not the enemy, their demands should be listened to, and they deserved higher pay,” says Huck Gutman, his former chief of staff and longtime friend. “He promised to open negotiations with them and generally to keep coming back around to income and the economy.”

“You talk about criminal justice, and Bernie Sanders is not the name you would think of,” says Virginia Sloan, founder and president of the Constitution Project and former counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, when Sanders was a representative. “He voted reliably [with other liberals] on those issues, but he wasn’t out front on crime and the police and prisons, because his focus was always economic inequality.”

Sanders’s voting record has indeed been consistent. He was one of the few white members of Congress to vote against ending Pell Grants for prisoners, and he opposed President Bill Clinton’s 1994 Crime Bill in no uncertain terms. More recently, he has supported the Smarter Sentencing Act and the Second Chance Act, which would reduce prison sentences for low-level offenders and help them reenter society, respectively.

But Sanders’s “it’s the economy, stupid” approach to criminal justice may not be salient nationally, in 2015, the way it was among white Vermonters three decades ago. Reforming police and prisons has become a winning issue, not only among Democrats but also some economically conservative Republicans.

He now speaks of the “four types of violence waged against black and brown Americans”—not only the economic, but also the physical, political, and legal. In late August and early September, he actively consulted with stakeholders in criminal-justice reform, trying to learn as much as he could. He “asked us questions like, ‘How are private prisons defined?’; ‘What's a halfway house?’; and ‘Tell us how to lower rates on phone calls to inmates,’” says Alex Friedmann, the managing editor of Prison Legal News and associate director of the Human Rights Defense Center, and one of the experts consulted.

Sanders learned that his own state has a special relationship with private prisons.

Sanders’s month of study has culminated in a piece of legislation, just introduced, that would abolish private prisons for federal prisoners and encourage states to do the same. To deal with the potential overflow of federal prisoners, the bill would also reinstate the federal parole system, which was discontinued by Congress in 1984.

Matthew Valerio, Vermont’s Defender General, says that for 15 years he has worked closely with both Leahy and Burlington’s representative in the House, Peter Welch, often meeting with them in their Washington offices to discuss justice-system funding.

“But I’ve known Bernie since he was mayor of Burlington,” says Valerio, “and he has never once spoken to me about criminal justice.”

This is a fair assessment of Mr. Sanders. I've been listening to him on the radio for a decade, and it's clear that he's made economic justice the trust of his career. I don't think you could ask him the time of day without it turning into a conversation about how working people are taking it on the chin in America and about how we need to change our disastrous trade polices. It's why we love him and why he's so good at staying on the issues.

While it's not to say that Mr. Sanders has been disinterested in racial justice or criminal justice, it is a fair criticism that economic justice has been his overwhelming focus and that he's had a difficult time speaking of racial justice without intertwining it with economic justice.

This is why I think Black Lives Matter interrupting Mr. Sanders is perhaps the best thing to happen to him and his campaign. Since the interruption in Portland, he's made racial justice a distinct and "parallel" issue:

Bernie Sanders’ Campaign Adds Young Black Woman As New Public Face

“One of my suggestions, he took it and ran with it on Meet the Press, is that racial inequality and economic inequality are parallel issues,” she said. “I you know, economic equality is an issue. It’s something we need to address. But for some people it doesn’t matter how much money you make, it doesn’t matter where you went to school, it doesn’t matter what your parents do. It doesn’t matter that Sandra Bland had a job and was on her way to teach for her alma mater. It doesn’t matter. None of that matters.”

Bernie Sanders took to the advice, Symone Sanders said. She also confronted him with one of the criticisms he faced earlier in the summer, when Black Lives Matter activists rejected his statements about his past civil rights movement work.

(Tip of the hat to Number23 for the citation)

Sanders meets with Black Lives Matter activists

“In the end, I think he got it,” McKesson tweeted.

McKesson, who also has met with officials from Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton’s campaign, lauded Sanders for his “candor” and “willingness to be pushed” on his policy and approach. He said he and others also asked Sanders to address police abuse of civil asset forfeiture and said he anticipates Sanders will address that issue in his platform.

McKesson wrote that there were moments during the meeting where they didn’t agree.

“Importantly, he was willing to be pushed and he was,” tweeted McKesson, founder and co-editor of the Ferguson Protestor Newsletter.

Mr. Sanders is not a perfect candidate and this hasn't been his strongest issue. That said, I think he's taken the right message from Black Lives Matter and articulated a strong distinction between economic and racial justice. He may not be articulating the issue with the clarity and urgency that Elizabeth Warren did, but he's moving in that direction and I hope that's where he'll end up before the campaign is over.

October 1, 2015

Kali Nicole Gross: Black women are Obama’s most loyal voters — and his most ignored constituency

Kali Nicole Gross: Black women are Obama’s most loyal voters — and his most ignored constituency

President Obama’s recent speech at the Congressional Black Caucus dinner called attention to the unique issues impacting black women. He acknowledged the onerous income disparities (making 64 cents for every dollar white men make), the debilitating sexual-abuse-to-prison pipeline (which turns victimized girls into convicts) and the disproportionate incarceration rate (black women are imprisoned at nearly three times the rate of white women).

Obama’s words were a welcome change for a president who has largely ignored black women’s struggles. But while Obama has finally drawn attention to our concerns, he offered no policies to address them. Instead, he has treated issues affecting black men as synonymous with those affecting the entire black community. Last year, for instance, Obama launched the My Brother’s Keeper initiative, which dedicates federal dollars exclusively to assist at-risk black and Latino boys. In announcing the program, he said, “By almost every measure, the group that is facing some of the most severe challenges in the 21st century in this country are boys and young men of color.”

It’s a particularly troubling oversight given that black women have been Obama’s most loyal supporters at the ballot box. They accounted for 60 percent of all black voters in 2008 and supported Obama to the tune of 96 percent. In 2012, 98 percent of black women under 30 voted for Obama, compared to 80 percent of young black men.

African American women have benefited least from the economic recovery despite being among the most affected by recession. The foreclosure crisis hit them especially hard; black female borrowers were 256 percent more likely to receive a risky subprime loan than white men. And that’s not a result of their income status: Black women in upper income brackets are five times more likely than white men to have high-cost mortgages. Never mind that roughly one quarter of all black and Latino borrowers have lost their homes to foreclosure, with black women disproportionately represented among them.

Black women’s disadvantages start in childhood. Black children are more likely to be suspended from school than white children for the same behaviors, but that racial discrimination affects girls more than boys. While black boys are suspended three times more often than white boys, black girls are suspended six times more frequently than white girls. Black girls are now the fastest growing population in the juvenile justice system.

It’s time for black women to reexamine their commitment to the Democratic Party. Perhaps we need to follow the former Democratic U.S. representative from Georgia, Cynthia McKinney, who turned to the Green Party because the “white, rich Democratic boys club wanted me to stay in the back of the bus.” The other Green Party presidential candidate, Jill Stein, is also worth considering. Stein has be vocal about ending police brutality and mass incarceration and expanding women’s rights and access to education. Moreover, her “Power to the People Plan” comes a lot closer to directly addressing black women’s needs than other candidates’, particularly her call for single-payer public health insurance for all and a $15 per hour federal minimum wage.

We should demand that every candidate speak directly to black women’s issues and provide a blueprint for how they will address our needs. The issues that affect us – income equality, police brutality, criminal justice, racial profiling, domestic violence, reproductive justice, affordable housing and access to quality education – often affect black men or white women as well, but rarely in the same way or as severely. We need a president who not only understands that, but addresses it.

Ignoring a major constituency is politically unwise. Ignoring injustice is immoral.

October 1, 2015

The Hill: Economists rush to defense of Cadillac tax

The Hill: Economists rush to defense of Cadillac tax

Dozens of economists and health experts from both sides of the aisle are coming to the defense of ObamaCare’s embattled Cadillac tax.

The 101 experts argue, in a letter distributed by the liberal Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, that the tax on high-cost health plans will slow the rise of healthcare costs, because employers don’t have enough incentive now to limit the sort of plans they offer.

The letter comes after Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Rodham Clinton endorsed scrapping the Cadillac tax, a position that is popular among organized labor. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), another Democratic candidate, also opposes the tax, and Republicans have long sought to repeal it.

The letter’s signers noted that they “hold widely varying views on other provisions of the Affordable Care Act, and we recognize that measures other than the Cadillac tax could have been used to restrict the open-ended health insurance tax break.”

“But, we unite in urging Congress to take no action to weaken, delay, or reduce the Cadillac tax until and unless it enacts an alternative tax change that would more effectively curtail cost growth,” they added.

Clinton, Sanders and other opponents of the Cadillac tax from the left have made it clear that they would find ways to plug the deficit hole — estimated to be $91 billion over a decade — that would come from repealing the tax. Republicans aren’t as worried about finding offsets; they've long been interested in dismantling the Affordable Care Act entirely.

October 1, 2015

Rebecca Traister: A Hot Mess for Hillary

Rebecca Traister: A Hot Mess for Hillary

Elle
Rebecca Traister

A Hot Mess for Hillary
Why I'm always on her side, even when I can't stand her.

I was in Washington, DC, where I'd traveled, with my 10-week-old baby, to attend the thirtieth-anniversary convention of EMILY's List, the group dedicated to electing Democratic pro-choice women. It was a gathering of the most powerful and, in many cases, most thrilling women in American politics. The day ahead was to be packed with panels and interviews and would end with a speech by the woman everyone knew—had always known, it sometimes seems—was about to make another grab at history, Hillary Clinton.

But when I'd woken in the middle of the night to nurse, I'd blearily checked my phone and spotted a breaking story: As secretary of state, Clinton seemed to have flouted federal regulations by using her personal e-mail for work. Oh Jesus, that's so Hillary, I thought with something like the exasperated affection I feel for my obstreperous toddler. Except that Hillary is not my toddler.

She's a woman who's trying to do something that no woman has done in the history of the United States: get elected president. She was, in those pre-Bernie days, seemingly the only plausible Democratic front-runner. It is not an exaggeration to say that the future—of the Supreme Court, of voting rights, of reproductive health care—hinges on the outcome of her candidacy.

I woke the next morning with that stomachache, dreading a day spent in the company of impressive, inspiring women whose hopes were pinned once again on this imperfect vessel. But soon, the next wave of news had hit: The federal rule against using personal e-mail had been set after HRC left the State Department.

Now, instead of shaking an imaginary fist at Clinton, I was shaking one at the media's relentless kneecapping of the woman running for president, and this was before I knew that the email story would be flogged―​harder than any other actual aspect of her campaign for presidency―​for the next six months ... and counting. Why can't you hold her to the same standards you hold "regular" candidates to? I roared in my head. Or maybe I was roaring it out loud. A colleague was shushing me—a panel was about to start, and I was kind of yelling.

Welcome to Decision 2016, where the stakes are high, the Democratic front-runner is female, and those of us who care about women's representation, the country's future, and the candidate on whom it's all riding are stuck on the roller coaster from hell.

If there's no crying in baseball, then there's definitely not supposed to be crying in politics. Just ask Edmund Muskie, whose tearful speech (he blamed melting snow running down his face) in 1972 on behalf of his wife got him ejected from that year's presidential contest. Or Gloria Steinem, who furiously wept while speaking to reporter Nora Ephron during the 1972 Democratic convention, in reference to the men who led her party: "They won't take us seriously…. I'm just tired of being screwed, and being screwed by my friends."

In 2008, I started the election season as a critic of Hillary Clinton, a fan of Barack Obama, and a supporter of John Edwards. But by the end of Clinton's historic drive toward nomination, the gendered rhetoric used against her—as well as the way so many men in my own party diminished the value of electing a female president—had radicalized me. Like Steinem 36 years before, I'd grown tired of not being taken seriously, of being screwed over by my friends. I loved Obama and voted for him enthusiastically, but I took Clinton's defeat hard.

Hillary Clinton herself is also really important to me. Not just because I've written a book about her. But because, in her role as a cultural and political lightning rod—a figure who's served as a stand-in for the ways her generation of disruptive women changed the world for my generation—she has bookmarked my adult life.

Let me be honest: I've spent much time over the past seven years silently pleading with the gods of electoral politics, with the imaginary Elizabeth Warren in my head, and maybe also with whoever makes older people decide they'd like to retire and hang out with their grandkids, that Clinton would decide not to do this again.

But the truth is that it often seems that Hillary can't win for losing. Last spring and summer, when there was rampant speculation over the state secrets she might have imperiled, a tranche of her correspondence was made public, revealing that in fact she'd sent a lot of messages about trying to fix her fax machine as well as one asking for an iced tea. Instead of reporting relief that no security breaches were apparent, one New York Times writer sniffed that "the banality of some of the e-mails is striking given her stature as one of the world's most prominent figures."

Reading that bit of analysis over breakfast this summer while on vacation with my family, I realized that the words on the page were getting blurry. I felt like my head was going to pop off. Now she's too boring?! I was screaming inside my head.

For each of Hillary's shortcomings, there will be American shortcomings to match. There will be sexism, veiled and direct, from the right and the left. Democratic women will feel screwed by their friends all over again, as I did in August when I saw a poll showing Clinton ahead of her Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders by a mere 6 points with the party's men and 44 points with its women: a 38-percentage-point gender gap that seemed to speak volumes about how much men on the left care about women's leadership.

Anyway. Yes, there will be enormous animosity, directed at her and at those who support her. She'll make errors; we'll make errors. She will disappoint in ways that will make her adherents shake their heads sadly; then she'll be pilloried so harshly that even some of her critics will suck in their breath at the level of hostility.

And lots of us—including those who love her, those who hate her, and those like me who both love and hate her but mostly have spent far too much of our lives thinking about her—will feel all this acutely. Because we'll know that the reception she receives will not just be about her. It will be about us.

October 1, 2015

Poll: Hillary Clinton still leads Sanders and Biden, but by less

USA Today: Poll: Hillary Clinton still leads Sanders and Biden, but by less

Hillary Clinton continues to lead the Democratic field in a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University Poll, but she no longer commands the support of a majority of Democrats as Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Vice President Biden gain ground.

Clinton is backed by 41% of likely Democratic primary voters, a double-digit drop since the USA TODAY poll taken two months ago, and Sanders is supported by 23%, a jump. Biden is the choice of 20% even though he hasn't announced whether he will jump in the race.

Clinton remains the clear front-runner for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, leading Sanders by 18 percentage points and Biden by 21. But her challenges also are clear. In July, for instance, her favorable-unfavorable rating was narrowly negative, at 43%-47%. Now that gap has grown to 12 points, at 39%-51%.

In contrast, Sanders has a 37%-33% favorable-unfavorable rating, and Biden's favorable rating is a healthy 51%-35%.

Asked for a single word that describes each contender, the most frequent response for Clinton was "liar/dishonest," followed by "untrustworthy/fake." For Sanders, the most frequent response was "socialist" and the second most frequent "favorable/good." For Biden, the top response was "favorable/like," followed by "honest/honorable," although the top five answers for him also included "idiot/joke" and "fun/character/goofy."

October 1, 2015

Slate: Hillary Clinton Has a Lot to Worry About Right Now

Slate: Hillary Clinton Has a Lot to Worry About Right Now

By Josh Voorhees

Hillary Clinton’s campaign continues to fight the past (her private email account) and the future (a potential Joe Biden run), but the latest quarterly fundraising deadline brought a reminder that she shouldn’t forget about the present: Bernie Sanders.

The Vermont senator on Thursday reported raising roughly $26 million—$2 million of which came in the final day—during the past three months. That total was only $2 million less than the $28 million haul that Clinton’s camp reported bringing in over the same period.

According to his team, Sanders has now received more than 1.3 million donations from roughly 650,000 different individuals since joining the presidential race. That, according to the Washington Post, means Sanders crossed the 1 million contributions mark faster than Barack Obama did in either of his campaigns.

... Sanders’ surprising quarter will cause plenty of anxiety inside Hillary-land, and raise plenty of questions outside of it. A major part the argument the Clinton-backing Democratic establishment used to dismiss Bernie at the start of this year was the belief that he wouldn’t be able to raise the kind of money needed to compete in the general election. That argument won’t disappear after one strong quarter, but it certainly looks a whole lot weaker now that we know Sanders went nearly dollar for dollar with the Democratic front-runner this past summer. Making that familiar Beltway logic even more awkward for Hillary: Obama managed to do something similar in the summer of 2007 on his way to besting Clinton for the 2008 nomination.

Clinton’s camp will brush off its drop in fundraising as the result of the dog days of summer, but it’s also clear that it doesn’t want to talk about one likely contributing factor: Joe Biden and the constant chatter about his late entry into the Democratic field.

Hillary, then, is stuck campaigning on multiple fronts: past, present, and future. Bernie, meanwhile, can keep forging straight ahead.

October 1, 2015

WaPo: October looks crucial for Hillary Clinton

WaPo: October looks crucial for Hillary Clinton

Already, Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders is drawing far larger and more enthusiastic crowds and sapping Clinton’s shaky support on the far left. Biden’s entry could compound Clinton’s difficulties in consolidating the remainder of the Democratic base — as well as her claim to being the most experienced candidate.

The month began with sobering news. Clinton raised barely more in political donations over the summer than Sanders, her stronger-than-expected challenger, despite a formidable campaign organization and the mantle of national front-runner. The figures released late Wednesday add to the reality that Clinton is running behind or even with Sanders in the latest polls from Iowa and New Hampshire — even though the campaign has invested heavily in time and money in those first two primary-season contests.

Additionally, Clinton’s favorability ratings have sunk to near their lowest point ever, amid a controversy that has boiled for months over her decision not to use a government e-mail account while she was secretary of state and rely instead on a private account and server.

Sanders raked in $26 million in the third quarter, despite a smaller and less expensive fund-raising operation. Moreover, he did it with an explosion of small contributions, a measure of the enthusiasm he is generating among rank-and-file Democrats.

In an effort to put the e-mail issue behind her, Clinton has embarked in recent weeks on what her campaign acknowledges is an effort to present herself as more warm, open and accessible.

Clinton aides say that they have studied Sanders’s past debates, and note that he is forceful and skillful at sparring.

Sanders has avoided any personal criticism of Clinton, and his advisers say that will not change during the debate. Democratic campaign veterans predict that none of her opponents is likely to bring up the e-mail controversy before a Democratic audience, for fear of looking like they are echoing the attack lines of the Republicans.

Eight years later, it appears that Sanders is the closest thing to a candidate who can generate that kind of electricity. The Iowa dinner will be an early indication of what Clinton has to offer in response — and what lessons she learned from her 2008 defeat.