tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-62963729235492143792024-03-04T22:58:40.433-08:00SOVERN NATIONPolitics and beyond with KCBS Political Reporter Doug SovernDoug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.comBlogger117125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-25297618792151263602024-02-03T10:51:00.000-08:002024-02-03T10:52:16.280-08:00<p><b>Your Super Bowl Par-Tay Playlist</b></p><p>This will drive a small but vocal segment of America inexplicably mad, but as a public service, we hereby present a playlist for your Super Bowl party—or in our case, our Super Bowl Par-Tay-Tay. With almost 300 songs to her credit, Taylor Swift has certainly written one to fit most any situation that arises in the game. So here ya go: whatever happens on the field, here's a song to cue up to meet the moment:</p><p>(As lifelong Green Bay Packers fans and shareholders, this would be a lot easier if Jordan Love had led our Pack to the Big Game. We'd just play "Love Story" over and over again. Sadly, that track is glaringly absent from this suggested soundtrack.)</p><p><b>Your team falls behind early? </b>Shake It Off</p><p><b>Game is scoreless?</b> Blank Space</p><p><b>Fight on the field?</b> Bad Blood</p><p><b>Fumble?</b> Mine</p><p><b>Intercept the ball?</b> You Belong With Me</p><p><b>Unsportsmanlike conduct?</b> Look What You Made Me Do</p><p><b>Coach goes ballistic over a bad call? </b>You Need To Calm Down </p><p><b>QB doesn't see a wide open receiver?</b> I Forgot That You Existed </p><p><b>100-yard kickoff return?</b> Untouchable </p><p><b>49ers score lots of points?</b> Gold Rush</p><p><b>Flagged for pass interference (Defensive back's version)?</b> Innocent </p><p><b>Flagged for pass interference (Receiver's version)? </b>You All Over Me</p><p><b>Flip in momentum? </b>Everything Has Changed </p><p><b>Pulling away in the lead? </b>Out of the Woods</p><p><b>Holding? </b>Invisible String </p><p><b>Score a touchdown? </b>Seven</p><p><b>Kelce scores a TD? </b>How You Get the Girl</p><p><b>TV shows Tay-Tay in the Kelce family box?</b> ME!</p><p><b>Get away with a penalty but on the next play you turn the ball over?</b> Karma </p><p><b>Roughing the Passer?</b> I Did Something Bad</p><p><b>Score the most TDs in the game? </b>The Man</p><p><b>Run away from all the tacklers?</b> Daylight </p><p><b>Man to man coverage?</b> You're On Your Own, Kid</p><p><b>Your Coach makes a genius play call?</b> Mastermind </p><p><b>Somehow escape a sure sack? </b>Safe and Sound</p><p><b>Get sacked by Nick Bosa?</b> I Knew You Were Trouble</p><p><b>Another fight between players?</b> Sparks Fly</p><p><b>Skycam shot of both teams lined up? </b>22</p><p><b>Awesome TD dance?</b> Style</p><p><b>Deliver a powerful tackle?</b> Fearless </p><p><b>Offense moves inside the 20? </b>Red</p><p><b>Kicker missed a long field goal? </b>This Is Me Trying</p><p><b>Offensive line keeps the QB from getting sacked? </b>Clean </p><p><b>One-sided, terrible game?</b> Is It Over Now</p><p><b>Game comes down to one last play? </b>'Tis The Damn Season</p><p><b>Your team loses?</b> Cruel Summer</p><p><b>Lose on a last second field goal?</b> Would've, Could've, Should've </p><p><b>Win a Super Bowl ring? </b>Bejeweled</p><p><b>Your team wins in a blowout? </b>Wildest Dreams </p><p><b>Celebrate too long after you win?</b> Champagne Problems </p><p><b>Chiefs win AGAIN??</b> The Last Great American Dynasty</p>Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-70617104392069562262021-08-22T21:35:00.001-07:002021-08-23T12:46:10.039-07:00Why You Shouldn’t Leave The Second Half Of Your Recall Ballot BlankCalifornia Governor Gavin Newsom has a simple message for his supporters: Just vote NO in the September 14 recall election. Don’t even bother voting for any of the 46 replacement candidates on the ballot. And many voters are doing just that, leaving the second part of the ballot blank. It’s a smart tactical approach for Newsom: reject the recall and don’t legitimize it by participating any further. It serves his interests well—but if you’re a California voter, it doesn’t serve yours. <div><br /></div><div>There is a real chance that Newsom will lose this election and be recalled. That remains unlikely, but it could happen. And if it does, perhaps as much as half the electorate will have abdicated its responsibility to help choose his successor, leaving that decision entirely in the hands of the people who want Newsom drummed out of office. </div><div><br /></div><div>Democrats and other Newsom supporters will howl and rail if Larry Elder, Kevin Faulconer, John Cox or some other Republican challenger takes Newsom’s job with a fraction of the support Newsom has. But by not helping to choose his possible successor, they are almost guaranteeing it will be someone they can’t stand. The governor could win 49.9% of the vote—perhaps nine million votes or so—and lose the recall. If only 50% of the voters bother making a choice on the ballot’s second question, someone like Elder could be elected with maybe one-third of those votes, or about three million. In other words, nine million Californians could vote to keep Newsom, and only three million could prefer Elder—and the conservative radio host would replace Newsom in office. In theory, if half the voters sit out half the election, one of the Republicans could win with even less than that, though public opinion polls suggest the top GOP candidate will probably pull about a third of the Republican vote. </div><div><br /></div><div>Rather than complain about such a scenario later, Newsom supporters have the power to prevent it, right now. After all, there aren’t just two dozen Republicans on the ballot. There are also nine Democrats, two Greens, a Libertarian, and ten candidates who list no party preference. Most of these folks are just that, regular folks (if you consider an adult entertainer, a cannabis policy advisor and a hairstylist “regular folks”). If instead of voting for no one, Newsom’s supporters coalesce around one of them, that person could win the replacement race in a landslide. Of course, Newsom won’t endorse any of them. He’s not going to muddy his message by repeating Cruz Bustamante’s disastrous “Vote no on the recall, but then vote for me” campaign of 2003. He’s not going to urge you to select Kevin “Meet Kevin” Paffrath, a real estate millionaire and YouTube personality who is a recall-supporting Democrat. He won’t tell you to support Joel Ventresca, a retired San Francisco airport analyst and progressive labor activist who’s run unsuccessfully for local offices, including Mayor of San Francisco. He’s not going to back Jacqueline McGowan, the aforementioned cannabis expert who is terrified that a Trump-loving Republican might capture Newsom’s seat. But that doesn’t mean that Californians who vote No on the recall itself shouldn’t make their voices heard just as loudly on the rest of the ballot, by voting for one of the 46 they find the most appealing (or least appalling). A winner from the non-GOP field might not have the preferred experience or knowledge, but could at least align ideologically with Newsom and not plunge the state into a year of legislative gridlock and hyperpartisan dysfunction (by the way, you can't just write in Newsom or Hillary Clinton or Steph Curry or your dog, either. A write-in vote for someone who's not a certified write-in candidate won't be counted. The Secretary of State will release a list of the qualified write-in contenders on September 3).</div><div><br /></div><div>I know that hundreds of thousands of Californians, maybe even millions, have already voted. I know that many of them deliberately skipped the second question. I get that Newsom wants everyone to Just Say No. If he does lose to someone with so few votes, he’ll be able to argue the whole election was a sham, fueling his campaign to reclaim the office in November 2022. But I take my sacred voting right extremely seriously. Until 2020, I always voted in person. In more than 40 years of voting, I have missed only one election (an unexpected runoff after a special election for a state Assembly seat that happened while I was climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro). This ballot asks us whether the governor should be recalled, and if he is, who should replace him. Surrendering your right to have a say on that second decision goes against the very point of the franchise. </div><div><br /></div><div>Democrats outnumber Republicans in California by almost two to one. If Newsom can motivate enough of them to turn out, he should rebuff the recall fairly easily. But if enough of them sit this out, or even vote to remove him, he could be in trouble. Then, Democrats who leave the replacement question blank may end up feeling like those who couldn’t bring themselves to vote for Hillary Clinton did when they awoke on November 4, 2016 to President-elect Trump. </div><div><br /></div><div>I’m not here to argue for or against Newsom. It’s not my place to tell you how to vote on the recall itself, or how I intend to. But sticking your head in the sand is not participating in your democracy. It’s letting someone else make the choice for you. I’m not about to do that, and neither should you.
</div>Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-9418762237665421142020-11-02T23:19:00.000-08:002020-11-02T23:19:20.207-08:00The Next President Of The United States...<div><i>Reading the last dregs of the 2020 tea leaves, late Monday night, November 2:</i></div><div><br /></div>My track record took a severe hit four years ago when, like so many supposedly intelligent and well-informed pundits, I predicted that<a href="http://sovernnation.blogspot.com/2016/11/madam-president.html" target="_blank"> Hillary Clinton</a> would defeat Donald Trump and win the presidency. Unlike most others, I did lay out a possible Trump path to victory, but I didn't think he would actually take it. I also missed on two U.S. Senate seats. Despite this stain on my reputation, I'm back to make a fool of myself in a public forum once again. Many of my peers gave up on making predictions after 2016, but it takes more than one badly blown call to retire my crystal ball.<div><br /></div><div>(Just to refresh your memory, I did bounce back and get both of this year's presidential nominees right, <a href="http://sovernnation.blogspot.com/2020/02/why-it-will-be-biden-vs-trump.html" target="_blank">correctly predicting</a> before the primaries that Joe Biden and Donald Trump would square off in November—and Biden was hardly the trendy pick. In fact, I've never missed on the Republican nominee, going 12-for-12, dating back to 1972. I'm 10-for-12 on picking the Democrat, but now I'm only 9-for-12 on calling the winner of the general election, a no-longer-so-robust batting average of .750. In baseball, that would make you a superstar, but in politics, it just makes you wrong.)</div><div><br /></div><div>So who's going to win tomorrow?</div><div><br /></div><div>Well, here's one scenario: the polls are off again, underestimating the strength of President Trump's support. His massive late rallies energize his base, he matches the record early turnout by Democrats with an overwhelming mobilization on Election Day, and he just barely hangs on to the key swing states of Florida, North Carolina and Ohio, while fending off the Blue Charge in Texas, Georgia, Arizona and Iowa. There does appear to be some polling momentum in the president's favor in Pennsylvania, and the campaigns know it, which is why we saw both tickets descend on the Keystone State again in the campaign's final hours. So let's say Biden locks up Wisconsin and Michigan, but loses his birth state of Pennsylvania, where enough rural white voters stick with Trump to give him a second term, with just 279 electoral votes, despite losing the popular vote to Biden again. Here's what that map would look like:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFRVBCi4WFpGoEunw2mLoE1ToD6RGJFrZPRZatcrr2MD1J62hN5oEY1FdlwAaEfIbkIe_9r5Q-NPHWPGCwk_act6drVm0ToO1UcTFj-A_HnzB6DNnZNB5CeRpoOFa_KBZuPnmQHK2F1sE4/s1511/fullsizeoutput_9806.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="958" data-original-width="1511" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgFRVBCi4WFpGoEunw2mLoE1ToD6RGJFrZPRZatcrr2MD1J62hN5oEY1FdlwAaEfIbkIe_9r5Q-NPHWPGCwk_act6drVm0ToO1UcTFj-A_HnzB6DNnZNB5CeRpoOFa_KBZuPnmQHK2F1sE4/s320/fullsizeoutput_9806.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;"><br /></span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><span style="text-align: left;">This is probably the best case scenario for the president. </span></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br /></div><div>But I see no way Trump wins the popular vote, despite the insistent predictions of the many ardent Trumpkins in my Twitter feed (as USC political scientist Bob Shrum told me today, "The Twitterverse is not the voting universe. The Twitterverse was not the voting universe in the Democratic primaries. If you followed Twitter, you would have thought Biden had no chance.")<div><br /></div><div>So Trump <i>could</i> make history again, becoming the only president to be impeached and win re-election, and the first to lose the popular vote twice but still win.</div><div><br /></div><div>That's not what the polls suggest will happen, though. And yes, I know: the public polls are crap, They were wrong in 2016 and they could be just as wrong again. But here's the thing: the polls would have to be more than <i>twice </i>as wrong to blow it in 2020. I mean, colossally off the mark, the worst since 1948, and maybe even worse than that.</div><div><br /></div><div>Let's examine that for a second. Four years ago, the average of the final, credible, reputable national polls gave Hillary Clinton a three to four point lead over Donald Trump. In fact, she won the popular vote by about two percent, which is pretty darn close. What she didn't do was carry Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania, because of apathy among Black and progressive Democrats, in particular. The failure of maybe 100,000 of them to vote across Milwaukee, Detroit and Philadelphia gave Trump razor-thin margins in those three states, and the presidency. The polls in those states overestimated her turnout and underestimated his, in some cases because of underweighting of the rural white voters who carried Trump to victory. But even if that happened again, even if the same polls were off by just as much, it wouldn't be enough for Trump to overtake Biden. <br /><div><br /></div><div>Biden's lead has shrunk a bit in the closing 48 hours of this race, but it's still in the 7-8 point range, nationally. If the polls are as wrong as last time, he still wins the popular vote by about five points. If they're wrong in the direction they were in 2012, when they didn't foresee the massive turnout for Barack Obama, he wins by ten or twelve. But as we know all too well from both 2000 and 2016, winning the national popular vote, even by millions of votes, doesn't guarantee you the keys to the White House (does the White House actually have keys? If it does, the Secret Service probably carries them for its occupant).</div><div><br /></div><div>So what will happen in the key swing states? Biden has narrow leads in many of them, but seems to be fading in Iowa, and Trump is closing the gap in Pennsylvania, Florida, Arizona and North Carolina. Biden could run the table and win them all, achieving an historic landslide no one thought possible in this highly polarized era. If he turns Texas and Georgia blue, and flips the states I just mentioned, and maybe Ohio too, he could even achieve a Reaganesque 400+ electoral votes. It would be an historic repudiation of a sitting president, and the country could look as blue as this:</div><div><br /></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd_PlYeJO6F4yXCxyhMFLlbkWxNJ_LsmyE-Y1nmAYAN8onro0S4Hp2mDKVZgRIuQOAnXcLD8wNyC_vf5MxUwlhcLfH-esWDfX21P3h_88aZF9JjuwecHsdxt5lqdcYNDeP_JQHaVUqacXY/s1496/fullsizeoutput_9809.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="964" data-original-width="1496" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhd_PlYeJO6F4yXCxyhMFLlbkWxNJ_LsmyE-Y1nmAYAN8onro0S4Hp2mDKVZgRIuQOAnXcLD8wNyC_vf5MxUwlhcLfH-esWDfX21P3h_88aZF9JjuwecHsdxt5lqdcYNDeP_JQHaVUqacXY/s320/fullsizeoutput_9809.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /><div><br /></div><div>But...no. I do think President Trump has played the closing days as well as he could after running a pretty dreadful campaign for months. The way his followers see it, he beat COVID19, he's on the stump around the clock, he's telling them what they want to hear, and that sure beats Joe Biden wearing a mask, stumbling through uninspired platitudes and holding "rallies" of a hundred socially distant people honking their car horns. I think Trump has tightened this race considerably, against all odds. So here's my bold prediction:</div><div><br /></div><div><b>POPULAR VOTE</b><br />Joe Biden 50.8%</div><div>Donald Trump 45.1%</div><div><br /></div><div>Those numbers could mean Biden beating Trump by almost <i>ten million</i> votes, far beyond Clinton's two million vote margin in 2016, when about 136 million Americans voted. This time, it looks like we will top 150 million and maybe even approach 160. At 150, that would mean Biden netting more than 76 million votes, to about 67 million for Trump. If Biden's margin is really this large, it is very difficult to imagine Trump still winning the Electoral College, and imagine the uproar if he does. </div><div><br /></div><div>But I don't think he will. I predict that Trump does hold serve in Florida, Texas, Georgia, Iowa and Ohio. But I think Biden upsets Trump in North Carolina, ekes out a win in Arizona, retakes Wisconsin and Michigan and scores a narrow win in Pennsylvania. That would give Biden 305 electoral votes, turning the tables on Trump's 2016 margin. That would look like this:</div><div><br /></div></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY88iPbQGTZrAT9FGB8QFCs6mo1SgKTBaX24fXjKYKuRmrluLK0uy05KtCaOIRL7F3alJwJAeDfAYM-6YT3xv_cw-cR6J7I5f8Ox2qJqRyw4l2jFdbET2Oo-fOIcipiccxi6MPMe28DPIK/s1508/fullsizeoutput_980b.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="974" data-original-width="1508" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgY88iPbQGTZrAT9FGB8QFCs6mo1SgKTBaX24fXjKYKuRmrluLK0uy05KtCaOIRL7F3alJwJAeDfAYM-6YT3xv_cw-cR6J7I5f8Ox2qJqRyw4l2jFdbET2Oo-fOIcipiccxi6MPMe28DPIK/s320/fullsizeoutput_980b.jpeg" width="320" /></a></div><br /></div><div>It's also conceivable that Biden wins Florida, which would get him to 334, or that he loses both Arizona and North Carolina and wins with just 279. In that case, Pennsylvania truly ends up being pivotal. But my final call is:</div><div><br /></div><div><b>ELECTORAL VOTE</b></div><div>Joe Biden 305</div><div>Donald Trump 233</div><div><br /></div><div>I could be wrong. I was four years ago. Unlike in past years, I have not been on the campaign trail since February, because of the coronavirus pandemic. It's much harder to tell what's going on from my home radio studio in Oakland than it is if I were out following the candidates, as in a normal year. But that's my best guess, and if 2020 has taught us anything, it's that you do what you can, accept what you get, and be grateful for another day.</div><div><br /></div><div>Oh, one more thing: the Democrats hold the House and retake the Senate. Democrats flip GOP Senate seats in Arizona, Colorado, North Carolina, Maine and one of the two seats in Georgia, and Steve Bullock pulls a surprise in Montana, while the Republicans reclaim Alabama, for a net Democratic gain of five, giving them a 52-48 edge in the new Senate. The GOP hangs on in one of the Georgia races, Iowa, South Carolina, Kentucky, Texas and Alaska.</div><div><br /></div><div>Tune in Tuesday night (or Wednesday morning, or maybe not until Friday!) and let's see how I, and more importantly, America, did.</div>Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-12703038094768231142020-07-06T07:48:00.002-07:002020-07-06T07:48:54.803-07:00July 4, 2020<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<i>I had the great honor and privilege of being asked to be this year's Patriotic Speaker at the 59th annual Claremont neighborhood July 4th Parade in Berkeley, California. Each year since 1961, hundreds of neighbors have gathered to celebrate Independence Day with a parade, patriotic songs, entertainment and a guest speaker. The assignment is to deliver a "patriotic and uplifting speech" on the meaning of the day. I found the challenge a little bit daunting, given recent events. This year, the entire celebration had to be virtual, with the parade canceled and the performances and speeches recorded and posted on YouTube instead. Here's what I chose to say.</i></div>
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Friends and neighbors, my fellow Americans,</div>
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Today, the United States of America is 244 years old. Like many double centenarians, she is showing her age. This year, it’s more than the usual aches and pains and creaky joints that come with being almost a quarter of a millennium old. No, at 244, America can no longer see. She can’t hear. She’s fallen and she can’t get up.</div>
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Luckily, this country was founded by resilient people. Many of them were racist, genocidal, puritanical zealots, yes, but no one can doubt their pluck and resolve. And over the course of those 200+ years, her genetic makeup has been improved by the arrival of so many others from all over the world, generations of people just as determined and self-reliant as those first settlers, but with a more enlightened and ennobled view of the world around them and the people in it.</div>
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So today, as America lights the candles on a cake that she no longer has enough teeth to eat, we are here, standing ready to help her back to her feet. She’s been knocked flat before. She was torn apart by a Civil War that nearly killed her. She’s endured financial panics and deadly pandemics. In my father’s time, she had to fight back against the double roundhouse punch of a dire Depression and the existential threat of Nazism. So I’m here to declare that America does have the gumption to not only survive 2020, but to be rejuvenated by it, to emerge a stronger, better nation.</div>
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There is no sugarcoating what we’ve been through these last four months. We’ve lost beloved family and dear friends and neighbors. Our very way of life has spun into confusion and chaos. We’ve all had to make extraordinary sacrifices for the greater good. And just as we settled into a new way of being in the world, that world was ripped apart again, by yet another senseless, inexplicable, horrifying illustration of how much America has yet to learn.</div>
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But look how we’ve responded. How many miles we’ve walked through this neighborhood. How many smiles we’ve shared with neighbors we hadn’t met before. How many new nooks and crannies and front yard idiosyncrasies and garden gnomes we’ve discovered that we’d never had the time to notice. How many helping hands we’ve extended to feed and nurture those in desperate, dire need. How bravely so many of us have placed ourselves in harm’s way to help our fellow citizens survive.</div>
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And how many of us have raised our voices to say, it is time that America gets cataract surgery, and a better hearing aid, so that she can, at long last, see, and hear, and <i>listen</i>, to the very people who helped make her what she is, and can transform her into a greater version of herself. We may never be able to right historic wrongs, but we can certainly make sure she treads a different path in the centuries to come. We can read her the words of the new prophets, written in chalk on the sidewalks of this neighborhood. So many of our ancestors came here to be free. Too many others had their freedom stolen and were forced to help an uncaring America fulfill her dreams, while it obliterated theirs. But today, we must move forward as one, not <i>ignoring </i>our divisions, pretending racism doesn’t exist, but learning from them, healing them and, someday, closing them for good.</div>
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At 244, let us hope America is ready, finally, to truly become the land of the free. These last months have proven, yet again, she is already the home of the brave.</div>
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Happy Birthday America. Let us help you to your feet.</div>
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Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-33397066102840236272020-06-07T13:25:00.000-07:002020-06-07T13:25:39.209-07:00A Show Of Weakness<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">The presidentially endorsed “law and order” approach to peaceful political protest that we saw too many times over the past two weeks often flouts the law and it certainly doesn’t keep order. A militaristic “show of force” against peaceful demonstrators is antagonistic and counterproductive, and that’s been proven over and over again throughout American history. I wouldn’t expect President Trump to understand that, since he’s new to this and seems to govern by ego, but American police departments have known for decades that it’s a mistake to attack unarmed, law-abiding citizens. But since the killing of George Floyd, we have seen unprecedented displays of unprovoked violence by law enforcement officers against civilians peacefully exercising their First Amendment rights, including members of the media. And we’ve seen, time and again, how firing tear gas, pepper spray, pepper balls and “non-lethal bullets” at crowds of protesters only escalates conflict and leads to greater damage, more injuries and less trust and support of law enforcement.</span></div>
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In Oakland I was stunned to witness the police reaction to the protests. It’s one thing to go after looters and vandals. They can, and should, be identified and apprehended. But they’re a tiny minority. The vast majority of people protesting George Floyd’s death are just, well, protesting. There’s nothing illegal about that. To the contrary, protest is one of the foundational principles of our country. There’s simply no reason for riot cops to declare a peaceful gathering of Americans, no matter how large or how disruptive it may be to traffic, an “illegal assembly” and then break it up by force. It doesn’t work. It makes people madder. It doesn’t prevent violence, it <i>causes</i> it. It triggers the very thing the police presence is supposed to deter.</div>
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Here’s an example: In the summer of 1997, a monthly bike ride through San Francisco devolved into confrontational chaos. For five years, on the last Friday of the month, “Critical Mass” had been bringing hundreds of riders to The City’s downtown, both as a celebration of cycling and a protest of how hostile and dangerous the streets were for bikers. In 1996 and ’97, the events grew larger, with cyclists numbering in the thousands, often blocking major thoroughfares and snarling rush hour traffic. The mayor at the time, Willie Brown, was determined not to let these renegade riders hijack his City. So he ordered the SFPD to enforce the traffic laws and crack down on the bikers. Riot cops set up lines. Bikers were “kettled” on the streets and arrested by the dozens. Clogged intersections became battlegrounds. Some bikers brawled with cops, others with angry commuters tired of stewing in their stranded cars. Bikes were destroyed, their riders hauled away. The evening commute was a mess, downtown a war zone.</div>
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Over months of covering these protests, often broadcasting from a bicycle, I observed that left to their own devices, the Critical Massers would block an intersection briefly, whoop and holler, declare victory, get back on their bikes and move on. Only when the police arrived and created conflict by drawing battle lines and ordering the bikers to disperse did the protesters stand their ground and go to war with the cops. The monthly showdowns were increasingly destructive and, for the City, expensive. Why not, I wondered, just facilitate the rides, as the police had done in the past? Stop traffic when the bikes show up, let the cyclists have their way for a few minutes, then escort them on their way? Follow them through town, halt cross traffic so no one gets hurt, but let them make their point without trying to arrest them. Cops could even ride along with them.</div>
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Frustrated by the ineffectiveness of their militarized approach, Mayor Brown and the cops eventually returned to those very tactics. Nothing else was working and they came to their own conclusion that they had to try something different. Of course, it was a success. What had been a tense monthly clash became a peaceful celebration, a festival on wheels that eventually attracted families and children and became a mainstream cultural event. The City stopped spending a fortune on overtime, downtown businesses and motorists no longer had their windows smashed and their property destroyed, and over time, the cyclists, and the City at large, won. The bicycle advocates became a powerful political force, and today San Francisco is one of the most bike-friendly cities in America, with hundreds of miles of bike lanes and more in the works (although debate rages on within the cycling community about the effectiveness of Critical Mass, and over the pace of improvements to the City’s cycling infrastructure).</div>
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The notion that de-escalation would be more successful than applying force was not new. <a href="http://davidschweingruber.com/docs/McPhail&al(1998).pdf" target="_blank">Countless studies and numerous government commissions</a> had already reached that same conclusion over decades of research.</div>
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Yet here we are, a generation later, and America’s urban police departments still see traffic-stopping political protest as an excuse for armed conflict. It’s not. It just doesn’t work. Knocking down disabled people, gassing women and children, punching media in the face, just antagonizes and alienates Americans, and reinforces the message of the demonstrations. Using unjustifiable violence against nonviolent people who are protesting unjustified violence proves the protesters right: “Look, the cops are using violence <i>again</i>, even though it’s completely unnecessary.” Go after looters, sure. Target those who are ransacking Target. When police are attacked, they need to defend themselves. But gassing a peaceful crowd <i>incites </i>vandalism and looting, and galvanizes their allies. Disarmament, engagement and opening a dialogue with protesters defuses tension and prevents the very trouble the cops fear.</div>
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In college I took a course on national security policy from <a href="https://www.cia.gov/news-information/featured-story-archive/2015-featured-story-archive/lyman-kirkpatrick.html" target="_blank">Lyman Kirkpatrick</a>, a legendary former high-ranking CIA official. He was a fascinating but intimidating figure. We assumed, my classmates and I, that he not only knew where the bodies were buried, he had buried some of them himself. The course included a unit on the appropriate use of force, and when it was preferable to diplomacy. To our surprise, Kirkpatrick’s lesson was that force is almost <i>never</i> called for, and it should <i>only</i> be used as an absolute last resort. Force, he taught us, is destabilizing and destructive, rarely achieves the desired aim, and in almost every instance, a better result can be obtained through dialogue and diplomacy. Citing his own experiences during World War II and as one of the original officers of what became the CIA, and later leading U.S. intelligence efforts in Asia and Cuba, he taught us that history is littered with costly and avoidable military mistakes. There are exceptions, of course; fighting and defeating Hitler, rather than appeasing him, was inarguably necessary, for example. But a trigger-happy commander in chief might well have ignited a thermonuclear world war during the Cuban Missile Crisis, rather than effect a peaceful result through de-escalation. A show of force, he argued, is almost always a show of <i>weakness</i>, of <i>fear</i>, rather than strength.<br /></div>
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Yes, the battles in our streets are on a much smaller scale, and don’t threaten humankind, but the same lessons apply. In the Bay Area, at least, none of the George Floyd protests turned into “riots” until the police lit the fuse. A few dozen opportunistic criminals stealing things from stores is not a riot. It’s a smash-and-grab crime spree. Thousands of panicking people fleeing clouds of toxic smoke, with some induced to turn and fight back, set fires, throw bottles and trash cans and debris at the cops, becomes a riot. And using gas during a respiratory pandemic, when numerous studies suggest it could help spread the coronavirus, is especially dangerous and foolish.</div>
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We ask a lot of our law enforcement officers. We expect them to be patient and tolerant, to know when their lives are really in potential jeopardy and when they’re not, to make life-or-death decisions in a split second and always get them right. It’s a really tough job, one most of us could not and are not willing to do. But it’s not too much to ask that they not show up at a picnic and turn it into a wildfire because someone in the crowd may have a pack of matches in his pocket. Especially when decades of experience and research have already shown that they, and we, are much better off when they just let the people have their say.</div>
Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-23378562905598204562020-06-01T00:42:00.000-07:002020-06-01T23:14:01.004-07:00Under Attack<div class="MsoNormal" style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12pt; margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">I got tear gassed Friday night while covering the George Floyd protest in downtown Oakland. It was the first time I’d been hit with gas by police since 2003 in San Francisco, during a demonstration against the second Persian Gulf War.</span></div>
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The police didn’t target me on Friday. I was in the middle of a crowd of demonstrators, doing my job, when officers fired gas canisters without warning. They’d been pelted with bottles and firecrackers and sworn at for more than an hour, and frankly, moments before, I had marveled at their restraint. But then came the flash bangs, and the gas, and I was unable to flee fast enough to escape the noxious cloud that overtook everyone, including quite a few members of the media. Elsewhere around the country, journalists have been targeted directly during this spasm of protest triggered by the police killing of Floyd after he was accused of passing a bogus $20 bill in Minneapolis. I have friends and colleagues who have been hit hard with rubber bullets, dragged to the ground and arrested, hauled off in handcuffs without explanation, despite displaying valid press credentials, carrying obvious equipment and cooperating with police officers who refuse to explain why they’re arresting journalists. Many are journalists of color, left to wonder whether it's their profession, or their skin, or some combination of the two, that drew fire.</div>
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We know we take chances out there. I’ve been doing this for more than 35 years. We calculate the risks and do whatever it takes to get the story/the shot/the sound, without putting our lives in <i>too</i> much danger. I’ve covered literally hundreds of demonstrations that turned chaotic and violent. During the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles in 1992, I was shot at by a looter and escaped by driving my rented subcompact through a gauntlet of burning buildings, the flames so intensely hot that I sped down the center stripe to keep the car from exploding. Once, a barricaded suspect fired at me while I covered a police standoff in the Bay Area, one bullet ricocheting off the pavement near my foot, another whistling past my ear. Covering countless demonstrations and wildfires, earthquakes and terrorist attacks, I’ve had too many close calls to count. Some would call me lucky. Others would be fair to call me a fool. Sometimes, as we check our VU meters to make sure we’re getting good audio of the whizzing bullets, or forget our surroundings while framing the shot of the cop with the riot gun, we somehow imagine we’re protected by an invisible force field, that as duly credentialed members of the Fourth Estate we are immune to the deadly forces cutting people down around us. Or maybe that’s just me.</div>
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Of course, we’re not. We’re just committed journalists, passionate about what we do. We believe we are necessary to a free and informed democracy. Our nation’s founders thought so too, enshrining our rights in the Constitution of the United States, and the courts have recognized and upheld those rights, time after time after time. But now, in this most perilous time when we are needed to bear witness and amplify voices more than ever before, those rights are not only in jeopardy, they seem to have evaporated. The media are held in contempt, not respect. The President of the United States openly derides us, calling us “Fake News” and “The Enemy of the People.” On Sunday, he tweeted that the “Lamestream Media” are “truly bad people with a sick agenda.” So it’s no surprise that so many people, including law enforcement officers and looters who use legitimate protest as cover for their crimes, see us as adversaries and targets, ignore our press passes and pleas, and knock us to the ground, both figuratively and literally. We diligently avoid interfering with the performance of the cops’ jobs, but some of them keep us from doing ours.</div>
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Even so, as <span style="background: white; color: #14171a;">targeted as journalists may feel right now, we still have enormous privilege compared with many, if not most, Americans. In my case, I’m a white man. I have press credentials, issued by the San Francisco Police Department and the State of California. I have my employer’s corporate attorneys to bail me out. If I get busted or hurt, it will be a “mistake” that brings a public apology. George Floyd couldn’t say the same. Nor could Eric Garner. Nor Michael Brown.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #14171a;">Friday night in Oakland, I tried to climb an onramp to cover protesters who had blocked Interstate 880. The entrance was blocked by police cars and crawling with heavily armed riot cops. They shouted for me to stop. Told me to turn around and go back. Shined a bright light in my face. From 30 or 40 feet away, I yelled “Media!” I shouted “I’m with KCBS, just trying to see what’s happening on the highway!” They barked, “Move back! Now!” I kept advancing. They tensed and stepped toward me. Some raised their guns. I was holding a three-foot long black pipe, part of a microphone stand I cannibalized at the start of the coronavirus pandemic so I could conduct socially distant interviews in the field. It dawned on me that it could easily be mistaken for a weapon. That they couldn’t hear my shouts over the hovering helicopter, the M80s and flash bang grenades going off down the block. That in the swirl of smoke just after nightfall, there was no way they could make out the press passes around my neck, the KCBS Radio logo on my vest, or even the CBS News emblazoned on my baseball cap. I stopped. I showed them my hands, hoping they didn’t think the mic stand in one of them was the barrel of a rifle. They kept their lights and weapons pointed at me as I slowly backed away, waved submissively, and then turned and walked as quickly as I could away from them. And all I could think was: Thank God I am white. </span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #14171a;">That’s the reality of life in America, 2020. Yes, we journalists have become targets too, and it’s not right. It’s not legal. It’s not good for the country. But when it was all over, when I had washed the teargas out of my eyes and filed my radio stories and tweeted my last video, I went home to my comfortable house and my wife and kids knowing that I could go out the next day, wearing my N95 mask, without feeling like a target simply because of the color of my skin. And thanks to my status as a journalist, I will continue to have a front row seat to history and a backstage pass to life. I may have to dodge a few more bullets, but only if I put myself in harm’s way to do my job. Not when I go to a store. Or for a jog. Or simply walk down the street. America has a responsibility to protect those of us who tell its stories, who reveal its truths, who keep its citizenry informed. We, in turn, have an awesome responsibility to speak the truth about that citizenry, about this nation. Our society endures these violent convulsions every few years and nothing ever changes. Buildings get torched, windows get smashed, people get hurt and angry and tired and sad. Eventually, emotions subside, broken glass gets swept up, and life returns to what we call normal. Which, for me, is a life of extraordinary privilege and opportunity, but for those who don’t look like me and have the protections and access that I do, is a daily stroll through fear and anxiety. Too often for them, an innocent outing or yes, sometimes, a petty crime, leads to an indefensible murder, an inexplicably horrible moment of inhumanity like the killing of George Floyd and too many more before him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #14171a;">And the sad, brutal truth is: Nothing. Will. Change. It never does. The racism won’t ever go away. How can it? Too many Americans don’t want it to. They don’t even believe it’s real.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #14171a;">Once, maybe a dozen years ago, during a similarly chaotic night of protest in Oakland, a police officer approached me and said, “I’ve been watching you all night. You move really fast. You never stand still, and you’re really quick. You’d be really hard to kill.” I wasn’t sure whether to thank her for the compliment, or express how unnerved I was that she had actually contemplated the difficulty of gunning me down.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="background: white; color: #14171a;">Yes, we journalists are targets now. We’re not used to it, and it’s wrong. But black and brown Americans are targets every day, and have been for centuries, and they are terribly used to it, and as we advocate for our own protection, let’s not get lost in our indignation and forget to tell the truth about that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-15243510431641025842020-02-24T00:22:00.001-08:002020-02-24T22:32:44.132-08:00Leaving Las Vegas<b>A few random observations and some key takeaways after spending four days in Las Vegas covering the Nevada Caucus, from Wednesday's Democratic Debate through the caucuses themselves on Saturday...</b><br />
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<i>(Caveat: I boldly predicted before the Iowa Caucus that Joe Biden will be the Democratic nominee, so I see no reason for you to believe I have any idea what I'm talking about.)</i></div>
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<b>NO SURPRISE: BERNIE SANDERS IS NOW THE FRONTRUNNER</b></div>
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It may surprise you to read that I'm not surprised by Bernie's momentum, since I said Biden would be the nominee. But we expected Sanders to win Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada. All the polling data suggested he would. The surprises haven't been at the top; they've been just below, where Pete Buttigieg has outperformed and Biden has underperformed. I <i>was</i> taken aback by the <i>size </i>of Sanders' Nevada victory. He built a formidable operation, especially among the Latino community, and he got a lot of first-time voters to caucus for him. With 88% counted, Sanders has 47% of the vote, Biden's a distant second at 21%, and Buttigieg placed third with about 14%. Sanders won the Latino vote in a landslide, beating Biden 53-16% (according to our CBS News Elections and Survey Unit, which conducted entrance polling across Nevada), and he won handily among younger voters and independents. He even matched Biden among moderates: Biden, Sanders and Buttigieg essentially split the middle-of-the-road vote, getting between 21 and 23% each. If Sanders can replicate that coalition—young first-time voters, Latinos and moderates—he can win in an awful lot of places.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Joe Biden working a union BBQ in Las Vegas. He was literally kissing babies.</td></tr>
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<b>BUT IT'S NOT OVER YET</b><br />
No, it isn't. Sanders is rolling now, with what would be unstoppable momentum for a Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Kerry or Al Gore. But he is not they (them are not he?). He is the most lefty potential nominee since George McGovern 48 years ago, and the moderate opposition remains fractured. As long as it is, Sanders will win the most states, and the most delegates. But will he amass a majority by June? And if he doesn't, will the rest band together to stop him on a second or third ballot at the convention? There is already mounting pressure on Biden, Buttigieg or Amy Klobuchar to drop out. None of them will, not before Super Tuesday (March 3). If one of them, or Mike Bloomberg, can emerge as the Not Bernie and coalesce the center and center-right (inasmuch as there is one) of the Democratic Party around them, it's still possible that consensus mainstream candidate could overtake Sanders. But time, and delegates, will run out, soon.<br />
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<b>BUT IF THEY DON'T, YES, BERNIE CAN WIN</b><br />
I know the conventional wisdom is that President Trump would crush Crazy Bernie in November. I'm here to say it ain't necessarily so. Galvanized 20-somethings, Latinos, women, a nice slice of moderates and Anyone But Trump voters would add up to a very large number of people in November. In 2016, about 13 million Latinos voted, up from 11 million in 2012. It's not unreasonable to project at least 15 million will vote in 2020, even more if Sanders were to pick a Latino running mate. Voters under 29 were the only age group to increase their turnout in 2016. Imagine the surge in their number if Sanders were the nominee (confession: I still do not get the obsession 20-somethings have with a white-haired, 78-year-old Jewish man with a thick Brooklyn accent. They adore his policies, but he still strikes me as a most improbable vehicle for their hopes and dreams). Believe it or not, there are many Americans who voted for Obama, but then backed Trump in 2016, and that same "He's something new and different" impulse would move many of them to Sanders this time. We could have three straight presidents completely unlike any who preceded them. Our latest CBS News poll—completed <i>before</i> Sanders won Nevada—has him beating Trump head-to-head, 47-44%, the best showing of any of the Democratic candidates. So don't assume that nominating Sanders clinches a second term for Trump.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Elizabeth Warren came to her Las Vegas HQ to thank volunteers the morning after her debate triumph</td></tr>
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<b><br />EARLY VOTING SUCKS</b><br />
That is, if you're Elizabeth Warren. I always vote on Election Day, because I want every last bit of information about the candidates before I cast my ballot. There are a lot of Nevadans—and Warren campaign staffers—who are kicking themselves right now, wishing Wednesday's debate had come a few days earlier, or that Nevada hadn't debuted early caucus voting this year. Warren crushed it in that debate, and it showed in her Caucus Day support. She lagged far behind in early voting, but fared much better on Saturday. She wound up in fourth place, with about ten percent, but if everyone had voted Saturday, she probably would have cracked the top three. She gets a chance to make another strong impression this Tuesday.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm01Q4r7ox_P7pJQL8Hj3Q-sFFfwQylpXnwC_tYnvQgeVAc835zh2bcPSrZ7cZDFltGIC5I-A8Zx2ZJpNf-07ZDj0rsCkjGdU6jkW3Jhu3FCidhdiSzV8HS4IcwleNHrDrjuSh3NAV3zB9/s1600/image0.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="768" data-original-width="1024" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjm01Q4r7ox_P7pJQL8Hj3Q-sFFfwQylpXnwC_tYnvQgeVAc835zh2bcPSrZ7cZDFltGIC5I-A8Zx2ZJpNf-07ZDj0rsCkjGdU6jkW3Jhu3FCidhdiSzV8HS4IcwleNHrDrjuSh3NAV3zB9/s320/image0.jpeg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Covering Elizabeth Warren in Las Vegas, as seen on Showtime's "The Circus"</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<b>TOM STEYER COULD COST JOE BIDEN SOUTH CAROLINA</b><br />
The San Francisco hedge fund billionaire outspent the field in Nevada, and he's doing so in South Carolina, too. A disproportionate number of my Lyft drivers in Las Vegas were women of color, and every single one of them told me they were voting for Steyer. He didn't do very well in Nevada, but he's poised to play spoiler in South Carolina. Our latest CBS News poll has him running a close third there, and in the last three months, he and Sanders have taken away half of Biden's support among African American South Carolinians. Steyer has invested a huge amount of time and money in the Palmetto State, much of it in black neighborhoods and media. He has just qualified for Tuesday's debate in South Carolina (you can hear it live on KCBS Radio). It's not likely he could actually win, but if he were not in the race, Biden would probably take the state easily, reviving his campaign. Because he is, Sanders has a real chance to win it instead, which would pretty much destroy Biden's hopes.<br />
<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis9RQTb8KVQAVIeUphyphenhyphen9sIX_yewFrxs6NDj7dWxt4k5TSq948sPDgBDQYrLtJj-4y-6FMYFOCkGBmGgKZqmMnAKESV36CKi_guC67sXRRmSAyW28VWltz0gaIjgk30lQiauCE9GyLS8HGA/s1600/IMG_2116.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEis9RQTb8KVQAVIeUphyphenhyphen9sIX_yewFrxs6NDj7dWxt4k5TSq948sPDgBDQYrLtJj-4y-6FMYFOCkGBmGgKZqmMnAKESV36CKi_guC67sXRRmSAyW28VWltz0gaIjgk30lQiauCE9GyLS8HGA/s320/IMG_2116.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Pete Buttigieg woos union members at a Mexican restaurant Friday night in Vegas</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
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<br /></div>
<b>LAST, BUT NOT LEAST...</b><br />
There's no more colorful place to cover a campaign then Las Vegas. It sure beats the snows of New Hampshire and Iowa. At the Bellagio caucus site, among the voters I interviewed: a rescue scuba diver for Cirque du Soleil's "O" show, a floral designer for the hotel (she's a horticulturist who's a member of the Teamsters!), several housekeepers and maintenance workers, a blackjack dealer and a cocktail waitress, all of them in their corresponding work attire. Sadly, no showgirls with fuchsia ostrich feathers on their heads, although I have seen that at past Nevada caucuses. In the days between the debate and the caucus, I raced around town to cover Trump supporters attending a presidential rally, and candidate appearances all around Vegas. Bernie had the biggest turnouts, by far, but Warren generated a lot of buzz after the debate. Biden's act seemed sleepy and worn. Buttigieg and Klobuchar focused on more rural areas, away from the more liberal Vegas core. The Strip was crackling with energy, with a heavyweight championship fight, a NASCAR race and the Caucus all happening on the same weekend. The Democratic circus has moved on now, leaving the glitz and glamour behind. Now it's on to South Carolina, and then to Super Tuesday, to see if Bernie-mentum can sustain its hot streak, or whether one of the moderates can pull an inside straight and keep the Democratic Party from going all-in on the Democratic Socialist from Vermont.<br />
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<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKeWZ42JLZBZSVUrPuj-kJ4YmuMsGt85cS_LtQ5e4wRobGYKv05-0HFwsgGu2uS3B9JHGdPoTq-W-ibDHkfDM8y980nUFPoznPSWjGRhm_jupsbFqUja8fbiP9LU7bmGQyBOXdZZQGVfr3/s1600/IMG_2134.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" data-original-height="1200" data-original-width="1600" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKeWZ42JLZBZSVUrPuj-kJ4YmuMsGt85cS_LtQ5e4wRobGYKv05-0HFwsgGu2uS3B9JHGdPoTq-W-ibDHkfDM8y980nUFPoznPSWjGRhm_jupsbFqUja8fbiP9LU7bmGQyBOXdZZQGVfr3/s320/IMG_2134.jpg" width="320" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;">Union housekeepers check in to vote in Saturday's Nevada Caucus at the Bellagio in Las Vegas</td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<i>Tune in Tuesday night February 25 at 5pm Pacific, 8pm Eastern for the next Democratic presidential primary debate, co-sponsored by CBS News and airing on KCBS Radio, KPIX 5 and your local CBS TV station.</i><br />
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Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-19827047060452793042020-02-02T23:11:00.002-08:002020-02-29T22:36:51.248-08:00Why it Will Be Biden Vs. TrumpYes, the Sovern Nation blog is back, mainly because I have a 44-year record to maintain of boldly (sometimes foolishly) predicting the eventual Democratic and Republican presidential nominees before the first caucus and primary ballots are cast.<br />
<br />
Although I've been scoffed at by Republican operatives who insist I'm too much of a Left Coast Snowflake to even find the pulse of GOP primary voters, let alone take it, I've actually never been wrong on the Republican side: I'm 11-for-11 picking the GOP standard-bearer, dating back to 1976. The Democrats have proven a bit trickier; I'm only 9-for-11 there. But that's not a bad <a href="http://sovernnation.blogspot.com/2016/02/trump-yes-trump-vs-clinton.html" target="_blank">track record</a>, given the volatile, unpredictable nature of modern American politics, especially in the Trump era.<br />
<br />
Which brings us to 2020. Here we sit, on the eve of the Iowa Caucus, and the Democratic race remains too close to call. There are still eleven (as of this writing; don't be surprised if the field is winnowed by the time the New Hampshire primary results come in on February 11) candidates in the running. There are four or five especially viable contenders who could conceivably lead the party into the general election against President Trump.<br />
<br />
So let's dispose of the easy call first: barring completely unforeseen circumstances like sudden death or alien invasion, Donald Trump will again be the nominee of the Republican Party. He will be acquitted of the impeachment charges against him this Wednesday, he will roll through the formalities of the GOP nomination process, and he will be a formidable, historically well-funded adversary in November.<br />
<br />
And whom will the Democrats nominate to oppose him?<br />
<br />
Let's go through the field and eliminate candidates, one by one:<br />
<br />
It won't be: Colorado Senator Michael Bennet, Hawaii Rep. Tulsi Gabbard, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, or businessman Andrew Yang (despite the fervent zeal of the #YangGang).<br />
<br />
Despite her common sense appeal in the Midwest, her s-l-o-w climb in the polls and her improving debate performances, it won't be Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar either. She may well place high enough in Iowa to survive, but it's hard to see where she breaks through after that.<br />
<br />
Despite his relentless, self-funded ad campaign, it won't be San Francisco billionaire Tom Steyer. His surprising rise in the polls in South Carolina and elsewhere won't last once the top tier contenders focus their energy on those states.<br />
<br />
That leaves five possible nominees: former Vice President Joe Biden, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, South Bend Mayor Pete Buttigieg, and former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg.<br />
<br />
The Iowa caucus is a bit of a toss-up, but Sanders seems poised to win both it and New Hampshire eight days later. It doesn't actually matter much who "wins" Iowa, because it's likely that Sanders, Biden, Buttigieg and Warren will all come away with delegates, and the spread among them is likely to be negligible. It'll be more about perceived momentum and exceeding or disappointing expectations, and what that means in terms of campaign contributions, media coverage and buzz in the days after Iowa. If Bernie's more motivated and passionate supporters turn out in greater numbers, he will take Iowa. If the pragmatists can sway the undecided with their caucus night arguments, Biden will probably eke out a narrow victory. If Klobuchar, Yang and other more moderate candidates fail to meet the requisite 15% support threshold to be viable at individual caucus sites, their voters may trot over to the Biden camp and push him over the top. Warren has a strong ground game and could still surprise. But no matter what, the top four contenders—and maybe Klobuchar, too—should emerge from Iowa with their hopes intact.<br />
<br />
Then comes New Hampshire, in Bernie's backyard, and it will be a shocker if he doesn't win there. Then Nevada, where there's been much less polling, but it appears to be a Biden-Sanders dogfight, though Sanders may be pulling away. Then South Carolina, where Biden's deep support among African American voters gives him a significant advantage, although if Sanders sweeps Iowa, New Hampshire and Nevada, his momentum may help him close the gap. Warren has built a deeper field operation in more states than most of the others, so even if she fails to win any of these early contests, she's likely to hang on through Super Tuesday and try to accrue delegates.<br />
<br />
Add this all up, and 2020 looks a lot like 2016: it's a battle (again) for the soul of the Democratic Party, between the progressive wing, eventually led once again by Bernie Sanders, and the moderate, centrist, Clinton-Obama wing, led this time by Joe Biden instead of Hillary Clinton. Sanders has an edge in that the progressive vote is split mostly between him and Warren, while the moderates are splintered among Biden, Buttigieg, Klobuchar, Yang, Bloomberg and Steyer. So as long as that's true, Sanders may become the perceived frontrunner, with all the momentum that brings.<br />
<br />
But once the field starts to narrow, the moderates are likely to coalesce around Biden. Even though Bloomberg is bankrolling a massive push in the Super Tuesday states, and racking up endorsements from big city mayors in places like California, it's hard to see him overtaking Biden, and even he admits that if his campaign falters, he will get in line behind Biden and spend whatever it takes to help him beat Trump. Sanders has a more fervent following, but as we've seen over and over again since 2016, it has its ceiling. Even combining the Sanders and Warren voters into one bloc probably isn't enough to beat Biden, if and when he's the last moderate standing.<br />
<br />
Biden's Achilles heel is that fewer of his supporters are rabidly pro-Joe. They just want to beat Trump, they feel comfortable enough with him, and they're desperately afraid that Sanders or Warren (or Buttigieg) will lose in November. So there's this perceived electability advantage for Biden, which may or may not be based on anything more real than polls, which is a pretty slim reed on which to hang hope. They're not that crazy about Uncle Joe, many think he's too old, too male and too white, and too given to missteps and malaprops, but they think he's their best, if not only, hope. He's the Obi-Wan Kenobi of the 2020 Democratic field.<br />
<br />
Sanders, meanwhile, has a zealous base of younger voters who believe he will upend the establishment like no one before him, but there don't seem to be as many Bernie true believers as there are we-must-stop-Trump-no-matter-what-and-Biden-is-our-best-bet voters. This primary electorate seems motivated by fear and anxiety, more than anything else. They are afraid the Democrats will blow it, and they are terrified of four more years of Trump.<br />
<br />
That's why I think, in the end, more Democrats will come home to Biden and play what they think is the safe hand, than will take a chance on an admitted "Democratic Socialist" who wants to do away with their private health insurance (anathema and a dealbreaker to many mainstream Democrats, which has cost Warren some support). The corporate core of the Democratic Party will go all out to keep Sanders from being their nominee, and the vanquished moderates will quickly fall in line behind Biden. It will be another long, protracted fight. It may well go all the way to the convention in Milwaukee in July. Sanders could well enter the DNC with more delegates than Biden, but I think Biden will end up at the top of the ticket (I wouldn't be at all surprised to see a Biden-Klobuchar ticket, even though a Biden-Kamala Harris pairing is trendier at the moment). Bernie could still pull this out. He could win decisively in both Iowa and New Hampshire, and carry that momentum into the ensuing states. He could win California, the biggest Super Tuesday prize, in a landslide. He could make his nomination seem inevitable—which I think would just drive the party's mainstream leadership into more of a panic, fueling an Oh-My-God-It's-George-McGovern-All-Over-Again angst. But the powers that be in the Democratic Party will stop at nothing to keep Bernie from topping their ticket, and those are powerful forces—a force that I think is with Joe Biden. By default, then, Biden, not Sanders, not Warren, not Buttigieg, not Bloomberg, will be the Democratic nominee and face President Trump in November.<br />
<br />
There you have it: Biden vs. Trump. Not exactly out on a limb. Possibly completely wrong. Feel free to check back in November and bombard me with ridicule when it's Warren vs. Pence.<br />
<br />Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-80386021000001081282017-03-09T08:57:00.001-08:002017-03-09T09:04:33.248-08:00As American As Apple PieYesterday (March 8, 2017) I had the high honor and privilege of delivering the keynote address as 1084 immigrants from 89 countries were sworn in as U.S. citizens at the Paramount Theater in Oakland. The local office of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services is so overwhelmed with applications for citizenship that it's holding these mass swearing-in events at least once a month, sometimes twice. The number of applications has doubled since Donald Trump became president. They've been asking me for years to be the guest speaker, since the days of the old INS. Something—breaking news, gridlocked traffic, once a flat tire—always conspired to keep me from doing it. Some of my media colleagues have had this honor, as have three members of President Obama's cabinet, and last month, California's Secretary of State. This time, finally, it was my turn. It was a powerful, emotional moment: watching each new citizen rise as his or her country of origin was called, hearing almost 1100 people swear allegiance to their new nation in unison, seeing the tears of joy, pride and yes, relief, stream down the faces of not only the new citizens but their family members as well.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiCJxpj6FAFeVQ_k5BJi4m_LoK6AwA4CBrWi3-9gh-ueOqvyhnXxu05iAIsjV4Phyphenhyphent_3JwGgLSP0ilodZeryQ7tyULh8jXXFknjVgFemDSTB-rL7dgEqulmImhXrWq7p4azTVb0pRxMwdG/s1600/IMG_1371.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiiCJxpj6FAFeVQ_k5BJi4m_LoK6AwA4CBrWi3-9gh-ueOqvyhnXxu05iAIsjV4Phyphenhyphent_3JwGgLSP0ilodZeryQ7tyULh8jXXFknjVgFemDSTB-rL7dgEqulmImhXrWq7p4azTVb0pRxMwdG/s320/IMG_1371.JPG" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
Many of them, and some of my friends and family, have asked for a copy of my remarks. The rules of the engagement are simple: keep it brief, no more than five minutes, and please refrain from overtly political comments. Given the current climate, and with a handful of federal immigration officials presiding, now members of the Trump administration, that assignment was, as you might expect, somewhat fraught with peril. Here is what I said:<br />
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Good
morning, my fellow Americans. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That
has a nice ring to it, doesn’t it? Take a moment. Close your eyes. See how it
feels inside as you say to yourself, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">I am
an American</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>America
began as a dream. A dream that came true for the very first immigrants to these
shores, and that has been coming true across the centuries since. You had the
same dream as Myles Standish, as Alexander Hamilton, as the mother of Donald
Trump, whether you had it in Taipei, Tel Aviv or Trinidad. Yes, the same dream
as Alexander Hamilton. Perhaps one day they’ll make a hiphop musical about <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">you</i>. Maybe you’ll create one of your
own. And if the election of our new president doesn’t prove that <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">any</i> notion, no matter how far-fetched,
can come to fruition in America, well, then, nothing does.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Today,
this morning, right now, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">your</i> dream
has come true.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>Most
Americans, believe it or not, never had that dream. They take being an American
for granted. They didn’t save up money for years, work so hard every day with
the hope that someday, if the stars align and the fates are willing, they <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">might</i> get to fulfill their deepest
desire and find a way across the oceans, and get to live where they wish to
live, and be who they wish to be, and lead a life they could only <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">imagine</i> for so long. They didn’t have to
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">study</i> to become an American. They
just opened their eyes and started crying, and boom, another baby citizen is
born. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>I
work in a newsroom full of well-educated, well-informed citizens. People who
are immersed every day in the gritty minutiae of politics and civic life. Once,
I gave them the test you had to take to become a citizen. You know how many of
them passed it? One. And she was originally from Canada, so she had taken it
before.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My
point is, you are incredible people. Brave, brilliant, special people, who
worked their tails off to make that dream come true.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My
mother is a first generation American. Her grandfather left a small town in
Russia, in 1911, somehow made his way to Liverpool, England, and crossed the
Atlantic on the Lusitania—a ship that was sunk by German torpedoes on a
subsequent crossing—and landed in Boston. He worked for ten long years to save
enough money to send for his wife and five children, after World War One. Ten
years without his kids. Ten years without their father! One of those children
grew up to be my grandmother. She was raised in a town so small that its name
translates to “junction of the dusty roads.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>My
father’s grandparents came here from, we believe, Latvia. My parents were not
only the first in their family to go to college; they were the first to get
beyond the eighth grade! Between them, they had six children, and raised four
stepchildren too, all of whom have gone on to </span><span style="font-family: "times new roman"; font-size: 11.0pt; line-height: 200%;">college—and</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";"> most to graduate school—and all have had
successful professional careers, and made lives for themselves, and most have
children of their own, and are proud, vital, contributing members of American
society.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>That
is how America was built. It is how we became the great nation we are—one man,
one woman, having a dream, and then working to make it come true. That is the
founding spirit of this society: anyone can do anything, anyone can <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">be</i> anything, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">if</i> they are willing to put in the sweat and grit and energy to make
it happen. Whether you want to open a corner store, or start a great company,
or teach little children, or be the very best employee or make the best <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pozole</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lumpia</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">siu mai</i> anyone
has ever tasted, in America, you can do it.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span><span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>(By the way, if you DO make the best <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">pozole</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">lumpia</i> or <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">siu mai</i>, please
come see me afterwards).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>You
have taken the first step. You are now as American as apple pie—which, by the
way, comes from England, and the Netherlands. You are as American as a hamburger—which
originated in Germany. You are as American as a slice of pizza—and I don’t
think I have to tell you which country invented that.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-family: "times new roman";"><span style="mso-tab-count: 1;"> </span>In
this time when some in this country talk of building walls to keep others out,
of barring some immigrants because of their religion, of closing off the
pathways to the dream you’ve just made come true, I can only invite them to
come stand where I am standing, look out across this theater, and see what I
see: the stuff dreams are made of. American stuff. The very fabric of the red,
white and blue we just saluted. I salute each and every one of you.
Congratulations to you all, and thank you, for making my country, the place where
I was so blessed to be born, even better and stronger, than<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> I</i> could ever dream.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br />Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com10tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-55913971788930357312016-11-11T01:09:00.001-08:002016-11-11T16:24:45.917-08:00Nobody Knows AnythingIt was legendary screenwriter William Goldman who said, famously, of Hollywood, "Nobody knows anything." Tuesday's Trumpquake suggests the same is true of America's punditocracy.<br />
<br />
Like most other supposedly keen political observers, I delivered the worst prediction of my long career when I wrote in this space that Hillary Clinton would be elected president. It was only the third time in a dozen tries that I've gotten a presidential election wrong, but if I were you, I'd never want to hear my opinion again. So you're excused from reading the rest of this blog, without prejudice or penalty.<br />
<br />
If you are still here, I do have a few thoughts. observations and nuggets of data (similar data were proven worthless Tuesday, so take these with a giant land mass of salt) to share.<br />
<br />
<b>HOW COULD THIS HAPPEN?</b><br />
<br />
That's a question I've been getting a lot, and one that I admit I've been asking myself, since I didn't predict it would. Trump's victory didn't take me by quite as great a surprise as it did others; I did predict almost a year ago that he would be the Republican nominee, provoking tremendous consternation and derision among many of my readers. But I also have believed for at least four years that Hillary Clinton was a prohibitive favorite to be our 45th president, and I didn't alter that assumption even in the face of mounting evidence to the contrary.<br />
<br />
It's been clear for a long time that much of the American electorate remains restless, angry, disenchanted. Yes, the economy is, empirically, a far sight better than it was when President Obama took office. Unemployment has fallen from almost ten percent to less than five. Instead of losing as many as 800,000 jobs a month, the country is creating as many as a quarter million. The U.S. economy is growing at about three percent a year, instead of plunging four percent, as it did in the spring of 2009. The Dow Jones average has tripled, meaning Americans with 401ks and other retirement and investment accounts have seen them more than recover from the Great Recession. But there are millions of people—no, <i>tens</i> of millions—who feel left behind by the recovery, whose paychecks are stagnant (or non-existent), who struggle to pay their bills and keep their credit card debt in check, who can't afford the still-rising cost of their health insurance premiums and their medications and their kids' education. They see factories close and jobs disappear and Mexican and Chinese and Somali and Puerto Rican immigrants arrive in their towns and they feel like they've lost their place in line, that someone else is stealing their shot at the American Dream, that they've been told to sit down, shut up, pay their taxes and take their lumps. They see the coastal elites with their app-driven lives and cars from the future and organic meal deliveries and wonder why everyone but them seems to be moving ahead. They live in places like Lycoming County, Pennsylvania and Manitowoc, Wisconsin and Hancock County, Ohio and Mariposa, California. The Democrats who live in these places voted for Bernie Sanders in the primary, not Hillary Clinton. And on Tuesday, most of the people who live there voted for Donald Trump.<br />
<br />
Most of them don't like Donald Trump. They don't admire his behavior. They don't think he's the kind of man who should occupy the Oval Office. But they don't think much of Hillary Clinton either. These are not people who vote party, or even policies. They vote personality. They're not sure what Trump's beliefs on most issues even are (is anyone?), but the ones they do know about, they probably don't share. It doesn't matter. They're dissatisfied. They want change. They've wanted change for years, decades even. They voted for Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, because he was new and different, and a more compelling personality than John McCain or Mitt Romney. They voted for George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004, because he was from Texas, not Washington, had some folksy charm and was more engaging than Al Gore or John Kerry. They voted for Bill Clinton before that, for similar reasons. And Ronald Reagan before him. And Jimmy Carter. You get the idea.<br />
<br />
I interviewed quite a few white folks who voted for—even <i>volunteered</i> for—Barack Obama, but this time, pulled the lever for Trump (or punched the hole, or filled in the arrow, or touched the screen). That is hard for liberal Democrats to comprehend. How could anyone—<i>anyone</i>—help elect the first black president, a man considered so progressive that his opponents slurred him as a socialist, and then turn around and vote for Donald Trump, a man who questioned Obama's legitimacy, aligned himself with white supremacists and called for a roundup of Muslim Americans and illegal immigrants?<br />
<br />
It's too easy for outsiders to dismiss these voters as crazy, racist, sexist, xenophobic, illiterate misogynists. You know, your standard basket of deplorables. But even Hillary Clinton recognized that many of them are not that at all. Some have college degrees. Some went to graduate school. Many are women. Some are people of color. What they share is a sense that things still aren't getting better, that the country is moving in the wrong direction, and the people in charge just don't get it.<br />
<br />
Even so, there weren't quite enough of them to elect someone as reprehensible as Donald Trump. That's not my characterization of him: the exit polls (if you still believe in any polls of any sort, which I'll get to below) reveal that 60% of the voters think Trump is not qualified to be president, and 63% say he doesn't have the right temperament for the job. Even a quarter of those who <i>voted</i> for Trump feel this way. So how in the world did he win? Because Hillary Clinton failed to inspire, and motivate, and mobilize, the voters everyone assumed she would turn out to win. I've seen some articles talking about the "Trump wave" that we journalists missed. There was no Trump wave, at least not nationally. Trump is going to end up with slightly more votes than Mitt Romney got in 2012, about 61 million or so. That's what we expected him to get. We anticipated an electorate of roughly 130 million people, and that it would take somewhere close to 65 million votes to win.<br />
<br />
What we did <i>not</i> expect—and no one on the Clinton team did either—was that Hillary would not even come close to getting as many votes as Barack Obama did. Obama won in 2008 with a record-shattering 69.5 million votes, more than seven million more than George W. Bush got four years before, when <i>he</i> set a new record. Obama's support fell in 2012, when he won with about 66 million votes, to Romney's 61 million. Clinton is on track to finish with somewhat more than 63 million this time. She should end up about 1.3% ahead of Trump in the national popular vote. We all thought there would be a massive turnout of women to elect the first female president, and a surge of Latinos to keep the wall-building Trump out of the White House. Neither materialized. The female share of the electorate actually <i>fell</i> one percent from 2012, and Clinton did only slightly better among them than Obama did. She outpolled Trump with women, 54-42%, while Obama beat Romney among women 55-44%. Only one percent more Latinos voted this time than did in 2012, and Trump did better among them than Romney did (Trump won 29% of the Latino vote vs. Romney's 27%). Clinton didn't come close to matching Obama's appeal to Latinos—Obama won 71% of Hispanic voters, to Clinton's 65%. White women actually preferred Trump, with 53% voting for him and only 43% voting for Hillary. We knew Trump would beat Clinton among whites overall, but he did it by a record-setting 58-37% margin. As expected, Clinton did not do as well with black voters as Obama did, but we thought she might make up that difference by attracting new Latino voters and widening the gender gap. It didn't happen.<br />
<br />
Another myth: Trump brought out many new voters, and also won over the middle-of-the-road folks. Nope. Only ten percent of the voters were first-timers. And, tending to be younger, they voted overwhelmingly for Clinton, 56-40%. And self-described moderates preferred Clinton, 52-41.<br />
<br />
So, she won the fence-straddlers in the middle, and she won the new voters, so why did she lose? Well, first of all—she didn't, at least not in the purest sense. Clinton won a plurality of the votes, and in fact, will have the widest margin of victory in the popular vote of anyone who didn't win the presidency since Samuel J. Tilden in the notorious disputed election of 1876 (I wrote a term paper on that one in college, if anyone is interested in digging that up). But she didn't meet turnout expectations in a few key places: Detroit, Philadelphia, Miami, Milwaukee. Even though she won in the cities, 59-35%, and Trump narrowly carried suburban America, he thumped Clinton in rural areas, 62-34. A relatively small number of white male Obama voters in those places I mentioned above gave Trump the narrowest of margins in three key states—Wisconsin, Michigan and Florida—and that gives him an Electoral College victory. At this hour's counting, Trump carries those three states by a <i>total </i>of 59,000 votes, or less than one percent. Toss in Pennsylvania, where Trump won by about one percent, and we're talking about less than one-tenth of one percent of the total votes cast Tuesday determining our next president. If Clinton had turned out literally another 0.1% of voters in the right cities, she'd have won those four states (technically, Michigan is still too close to call, with Trump ahead by less than 12,000 votes), which would have given her 303 electoral votes.<br />
<br />
So, as you can see, it's not that Trump won this election as much as Clinton lost it. For all her vaunted advantages in fundraising and ground game and party support, she couldn't overcome the perception among white voters in rural America that she's a dishonest, lying, corrupt part of an elite political establishment that doesn't care about them and takes them for granted, if it thinks about them at all, a perception driven home in the campaign's final ten days by Trump's relentless ads portraying her as exactly that, and by FBI Director James Comey's untimely (for Clinton) announcement that he was investigating additional emails that might incriminate her, which ultimately amounted to absolutely nothing. Voters didn't turn to Trump in massive numbers in the closing days. They simply turned away from Clinton, enough to deny her victory in a handful of battleground states (Trump did do significantly better than Romney in Michigan, Pennsylvania and Florida, but Clinton surpassed Obama's totals there, too, because the overall turnout hit record levels in those three states. In Wisconsin, Trump matched Romney's vote total, while Clinton fell about 200,000 short of Obama's).<br />
<br />
Although I do think it's risky to write off the Trump Voter as uneducated, Trump did score an historic edge among voters without a college degree. In 2008, Obama and Romney essentially split college graduates, and Obama won among those without their degrees. This time? Clinton won the educated voters, 52-43%, while Trump won the less educated ones, 52-44. And among white voters who didn't finish college, Trump won resoundingly, 67-28. Those are unprecedented gaps.<br />
<br />
So this election, like virtually every election without an incumbent president in recent times, was about Change. New. Promise. Different. When the first exit polling data came in Tuesday afternoon, what did voters say was the quality they were looking for most in their next president? "Can bring needed change." Uh-oh. Alarm bells went off at our KCBS Election Desk. That was not a good harbinger for Clinton. Two-thirds of the voters told the exit pollsters the country was on the wrong track. Yikes. That boded well for Trump. It wasn't until later that we got more data: A whopping 83% of those who said "bring needed change" was most important, cast their ballots for Trump. Even though Clinton won 66% of the people who said "has good judgment" was most important, and 90% of those who were looking for someone with "the right experience," there weren't as many of those voters in the mix. Which brings us to one final question...<br />
<br />
<b>HOW DID WE GET IT SO WRONG?</b><br />
<br />
Here, I posit the theory, supported by the monograph's worth of data I just laid on you, that we didn't, really. That's not a copout. I said Hillary would win the popular vote by more than five percent. I am an idiot. But the final polls all coalesced around a Clinton win by about 3 or 4%. I know when people hear, "Clinton will win by four percent" and she wins the popular vote by only one percent, they think, "Boy, the pollsters really blew it." But polling is rough science. Pollsters extrapolate results from small samples. Their sample sizes can be off. The way they weight the data they collect to reflect what they<i> think</i> the makeup of the electorate will be can be wrong. But even so, missing the final popular vote by 2 or 3 points is well within most polls' margin of error. A poll that says Clinton will win by three points means in fact, she could win by six, or it could be a tie, or the final tally could fall anywhere within that range. Which it did.<br />
<br />
So where the pollsters (and I) really did blow it was in the electoral vote. But again, as noted above, Trump won that by the slimmest of margins, by denying Clinton a fractional percentage of votes in states you can count on one hand (I suggest using the thumb for Michigan). And really, the only places the polls were off significantly were Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The final four polls in Florida had Clinton up two, Trump up three, and two were a tie. Trump won by about one percent, right in the middle of that spread. The polls in Wisconsin had Clinton up six to eight points, but no one bothered polling there in the last week of the campaign. The needle was already moving to Trump—or, more accurately, away from Clinton—but there was no one on hand to record it. The same was true in Michigan, where Clinton was consistently ahead by four or five points and it ended, essentially, in a tie. Perhaps in 2020, the pollsters will conduct more surveys, and later ones, in the key battleground states.<br />
<br />
The other way we blew it was by how we read the polls we did get. Most political pundits, and even most people within the Clinton and Trump campaigns, were pretty sure Hillary was going to win. All the data, until the Comey letter came out on October 28, said the race was over. My interactions with voters in Ohio convinced me Trump would win there, and the polling supported that. If I had seen consistent survey data showing Clinton ahead in Ohio, I would have reconsidered my conclusion. But I didn't. So I put the Buckeye State in Trump's column in my final prediction (I remain astounded by how many pundits said Clinton would win Ohio. There were literally zero data to support that). But the polls were steady for Clinton in Wisconsin, Michigan and Pennsylvania. There was no reason to suspect a Clinton collapse there. So when we looked at the final polls, both nationally and in swing states, we tended to believe the ones that supported what we already believed to be true: that she would win. This bias reinforced a flawed conclusion. We disregarded polls that deviated from our expectations. They must be outliers. They can't be right. Given a choice between surveys that bolstered our preconceptions and ones that challenged them, we embraced the former and scoffed at the latter. This wasn't because we <i>wanted</i> Clinton to win; it was because we thought she would. I didn't <i>want </i>Trump to win the Republican nomination, but I predicted he would because all the available data, and my own observations of voters, told me that he would. In this case, even though I had ample contact with Trump supporters, I didn't believe there were enough of them to overcome what I thought was the larger universe of Clinton voters, a universe that collapsed into a black hole for Democrats on Tuesday.<br />
<br />
I called three states wrong on Tuesday (four, if Michigan ends up a Trump state). I got two of the U.S. Senate races wrong. That's not bad, I suppose, but it falls far short of my usual standard, and bottom line, I PREDICTED THE PERSON WHO LOST WOULD WIN. Please allow me to hang my hat on this caveat that I included in Tuesday's prediction:<br />
<br />
<span style="background-color: #fbf4f3; font-family: "arial" , "tahoma" , "helvetica" , "freesans" , sans-serif;"><b><i>There could be a hidden pool of Trump voters who aren't showing up in the polls. There could be a Trump Effect, with respondents afraid to tell pollsters they're secretly planning to pull the lever for Donald. There could be a huuuge turnout of white men without college degrees who descend on polling places en masse to Make America Great Again.</i></b></span><br />
<br />
As things turned out, that's exactly what happened, and in just enough critical places where Clinton failed to make up the difference.<br />
<br />
Okay. That's a really long explanation of how Trump pulled off the biggest upset in modern political history, and how I missed seeing it coming. I underestimated the level of antipathy for Clinton, and I overestimated her ability to get her voters to the polls. The lesson for Democrats next time? Nominate someone who can run as an outsider, as a legitimate agent of change (a la Barack Obama or Bill Clinton), especially if President Trump (anybody used to saying that yet?) fails to deliver. The people who switched to him this time won't be patient with him for long. Certainly not as patient as you've been with me.<br />
<br />
<i>Final note regarding the exit polls: You'll notice I treat this data as if it were handed down on stone tablets. I am always amused by how we deride the pollsters for being so off the mark before an election, and then regurgitate the exit polling data as if it were stone cold fact. It isn't. It could be wrong too. But—there are some critical differences. Pre-election surveys are based on an estimate of what we think the electorate will look like, a best guess of who's likely to vote, and then a weighting to reflect the expected demographic breakdown. Exit polls are a measure of people who have actually voted. We don't have to guess how many Latina women over 50 will vote; we can count the ones standing in front of us coming out of the polling place. And the sample size is much larger. Instead of a survey of one or two thousand people on the phone, the National Election Pool (a data-sharing consortium of which CBS is a member) interviews more than 100,000 people, mostly in person. The response rate is much, much higher, and the margin of error much, much lower. People could still lie about how they voted, but they're less likely to do that in a face-to-face interview. This data is how we call the results in states long before the votes are counted. When the returns start to come in, if they hew closely to what the exit polling suggests they will be, we can deduce that the actual result will be what the polls say. If a state is very close, the polling data may not be enough, delaying a call. This is also how we knew something was amiss in the "butterfly ballot" counties in Florida in 2000. The exit polls said Al Gore had won Florida, because voters told the pollsters they'd voted for him, when in fact many of them had cast ballots for Pat Buchanan by mistake. So when their votes were counted, they weren't for Gore, confounding the exit poll data.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>
<i>There can still be weighting errors in these polls of course, and people who refuse to answer can throw things off, but in general, we believe the exit poll data to be fairly reliable. Of course, we thought Hillary Clinton would win Pennsylvania, too.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
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<br />Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-52065195322483527562016-11-08T10:59:00.001-08:002016-11-08T10:59:09.611-08:00Madam PresidentCould Donald Trump really be elected President of the United States today?<br />
Sure. Anything is possible.<br />
The Chicago Cubs could win three straight do-or-die games to capture their first World Series since the Roosevelt administration—and that's <i>Teddy</i> Roosevelt.<br />
The Director of the FBI could turn the presidential race on its head by announcing he's found hundreds of thousands of emails that <i>may </i>incriminate Hillary Clinton on the laptop of a narcissistic sex addict (no, not Trump)—and then, nine days later, pull an Emily Litella and say, "never mind."<br />
Russian hackers could penetrate America's voting machines and switch enough ballots in key swing state precincts to throw the presidency to The Donald.<br />
Okay, that last one hasn't happened—yet (as far as we know)—but barring something similarly outrageous and unforeseen, it seems almost certain that America will indeed elect its first female president by choosing Hillary Rodham Clinton to succeed Barack Obama.<br />
I've been making official presidential predictions since<a href="http://sovernnation.blogspot.com/2012/11/not-too-close-to-call.html" target="_blank"> 1972,</a> and it's time for my quadrennial crawl onto the limb of potential public humiliation (I think I've used that line, or a variant, every four years too). I have a great <a href="http://sovernnation.blogspot.com/2012/11/can-you-handle-truth.html" target="_blank">track record,</a> but as we all know, past performance is no guarantee of future results. So just because I've been right nine times out of eleven, and have never missed on predicting the eventual Republican nominee (yes, I picked Trump this year), and have an 80% success rate on the Democratic primary, and got every U.S. Senate race right last time, and nailed Obama's margin of victory in the popular vote, does not mean I'll get any of it right in 2016. This stuff gets harder, and weirder, every year.<br />
<br />
But, here goes:<br />
<br />
<b>POPULAR VOTE:</b><br />
Hillary Clinton 49.2%<br />
Donald Trump 43.8%<br />
Gary Johnson,<br />
Jill Stein, et al. 7%<br />
<br />
<b>ELECTORAL VOTE:</b><br />
Hillary Clinton 308<br />
Donald Trump 230<br />
<br />
<b>U.S. SENATE:</b><br />
Democrats 50 (including 2 independents who caucus with them)<br />
Republicans 50<br />
<br />
Here's my Electoral College map:<br />
<br />
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I believe Hillary Clinton will outperform the polls and do better in the popular vote than most of the forecasts suggest. If California's turnout is large enough, she might even exceed 50% (California alone supplied 60% of Barack Obama's margin of victory over Mitt Romney in 2012). I am not as bullish on her chances in a couple of key swing states, Ohio and North Carolina, as some other pundits seem to be, so while I do see her topping 300 in the Electoral College, I am not predicting as wide a margin there as you might see from some of my colleagues. She could hit 323. Her ceiling is as high as 352. But I don't think she gets there.<br />
<br />
She doesn't need to, of course. 270 is sufficient, and she'll have plenty to spare, even to withstand a few "faithless electors" when the Electoral College meets in December.<br />
<br />
There could be a hidden pool of Trump voters who aren't showing up in the polls. There could be a Trump Effect, with respondents afraid to tell pollsters they're secretly planning to pull the lever for Donald. There could be a huuuge turnout of white men without college degrees who descend on polling places en masse to Make America Great Again. But the early voting data, and the long lines of Latinos, in particular, voting in places like Florida, northern Virginia and Las Vegas, suggest the wind is at Clinton's back, not Trump's, and the momentum he was building since James Comey's October 28th announcement has faded, and reversed field.<br />
<br />
A couple of points on the swing states:<br />
<br />
<b>OHIO</b> - Trump has consistently led in the polls here. Only a couple—notably, Ipsos, which is an excellent polling firm—have had Clinton ahead, and just barely. Ohio is a reliable bellwether, voting for the presidential winner in every election since 1964. But the demographic changes altering vote patterns in other key states are not happening (yet) in the Buckeye State, which is now older and whiter than its Midwestern neighbors, and this could be the year it falls out of step with the rest of the nation. I spent some time in Ohio during this campaign and outside of Cleveland, it sure felt like Trump country to me. Obama carried the state twice, thanks to very large and late turnouts of African Americans. I don't see as many of those folks going to the polls for Clinton, and there probably aren't enough Latinos in Ohio to make up the difference. I could be wrong, of course, and Hillary could win here, but I think it's Trump's big prize on Election Night.<br />
<br />
<b>NORTH CAROLINA </b>- Another tossup state, where African Americans fueled an Obama victory in 2008. But Mitt Romney won it back for the GOP in 2012. Again, the black turnout will be down this time. Can Clinton's superior ground operation put her over the top? Maybe. But my gut tells me that Trump wins this one, too, and incumbent Republican Richard Burr holds off Democratic challenger Deborah Ross in the U.S. Senate race. This one is truly too close to call for me. Clinton could win it, but I'm giving it to Trump.<br />
<br />
<b>FLORIDA</b> - A massive surge of anti-Trump Latino voting has been happening in the Sunshine State the last few days. Early voting there shattered records. There could be enough votes for Trump in rural areas and the Panhandle to offset Clinton's big advantage in South Florida, but I think she ekes this one out.<br />
<br />
If I'm wrong on any states this time, it will be on one or more of those three. They're the ones in which I have the least confidence. I see Nevada safely in Clinton's column, Iowa going to Trump, Hillary taking New Hampshire, Virginia and Colorado, and Trump surprising many of the pundits and hanging on to Arizona (I could be wrong on that one, too).<br />
<br />
In the US Senate race, what once looked like a sure bet that Democrats would win a majority has faded into a tossup over the last fortnight as the presidential race tightened. Republicans have a 54-46 edge right now (including independents Angus King and Bernie Sanders, who caucus with the Democrats). So if Democrats gain four seats and Hillary Clinton is elected president, it'll be a 50-50 tie controlled by the Democrats (Vice President Tim Kaine would provide the tiebreaking vote). If Trump wins the presidency, Democrats need to net five seats for Senate control.<br />
<br />
Here's how I see the contested seats going:<br />
<br />
New Hampshire: Maggie Hassan (D) ousts incumbent Kelly Ayotte (R) Net: Dems +1<br />
North Carolina: Incumbent Richard Burr (R) hangs on against Deborah Ross (D) Net: Dems +1<br />
Pennsylvania: Katie McGinty (D) knocks off incumbent Pat Toomey (R) Net: Dems +2<br />
Illinois: Tammy Duckworth (D) thrashes incumbent Mark Kirk (R) Net: Dems +3<br />
Missouri: Incumbent Roy Blunt (R) fends off Jason Kander (D) Net: Dems +3<br />
Wisconsin: Russ Feingold (D) takes out incumbent Ron Johnson (R) Net: Dems +4<br />
Nevada: Catherine Cortez Masto (D) edges Joe Heck (R), holding the seat of retiring Harry Reid for the Democrats Net: Dems +4<br />
Indiana: Todd Young (R) edges Evan Bayh (D) to hold the seat of retiring Dan Coats for GOP Net: Dems +4<br />
Ohio: Incubent Rob Portman (R) beats Ted Strickland (D) Net: Dems +4<br />
<br />
So that gives us a 50-50 Senate, with Democrats in control by virtue of Tim Kaine being vice president. making Chuck Schumer of New York the new Senate Majority Leader.<br />
<br />
Ross could beat Burr; Kander could upset Blunt. Either of those would give the Democrats outright control. But Ayotte could also come back and hang on against Hassan, potentially giving the GOP a 51-49 edge.<br />
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In the House of Representatives, I believe Democrats will fall far short of the 30 seats they need to win to regain control and make Nancy Pelosi Speaker again. I see them flipping 14-18 seats, narrowing the Republican majority but leaving Paul Ryan as Speaker.<br />
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There you have it. Tune in this afternoon and tonight to see how wrong I was. And whether Trump or Clinton will be the new Leader of the Free World. Personally, I love Election Day. It's like Christmas morning for me. I can't wait to open our shiny new president.<br />
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Our live, wall-to-wall coverage of the election returns begins at 4pm Pacific on KCBS Radio (106.9 fm, 740 am, <a href="http://www.cbssf.com/" target="_blank">www.cbssf.com)</a> and will run until at least midnight Pacific. We will bring you national, state and local results, as well as reaction and analysis, live reports from all over the country and California. I will be tweeting like a maniac at @SovernNation, so be sure to follow me for rapid-fire results and in-between-radio-reports analysis, breaking news, and pithy nuggets. Then we'll be back at it starting at 6am Pacific for morning after recrimination and regret. See you there. And don't forget to vote!<br />
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<br />Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-38114715139505532312016-10-27T00:56:00.000-07:002016-10-27T00:56:09.880-07:00Tears Of A Clown"I think California is extremely winnable. I think that there's a real groundswell happening here in California. I've got a lot of little ticklers out there that are indicators to me just how significant our vote count could be here."<br />
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That's what Liz Ritchie, Northern California field operations director for Donald Trump's presidential campaign, told me Wednesday about her candidate's chances in the Golden State. Her apparent optimism belies all recent polling data, and the campaign's own activities in California. Hours after Ritchie's confident assertion, a new statewide survey by the Public Policy Institute of California showed Trump's support here cratering to an historic low. Just 28% of likely California voters say they'll vote (or already have voted) for Trump, versus 54% for Hillary Clinton. That means Trump may well deliver the worst performance of any major party presidential nominee in California history. When FDR was re-elected in 1936, he thumped Kansas Governor Alf Landon in the Golden State, 67-32%.<br />
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Despite Trump's early bluster about competing for California's mother lode of 55 electoral votes, and his frequent trips here over the late spring and summer to fundraise and campaign, this bluest of blue states has always been safely in Clinton's column. So much so that Clinton's campaign—and Trump's too—has turned California into a giant political gold mine from which to export resources into nine critical states that are still toss-ups. Clinton's Brooklyn brain trust has declared California its national call center. Literally tens of thousands of eager volunteers are staffing dozens of field offices up and down the state, using sophisticated online tools to contact and mobilize voters from Florida to Arizona, from New Hampshire to Nevada. During a visit to the new Oakland office, its director, Katie Hooper, told me that the Northern California volunteers alone are placing more than half a million calls a day. That Get Out The Vote operation will only intensify in the campaign's final days, climaxing with a 96-hour push leading up to the closing of the polls on November 8.<br />
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<i>Mind your time zones: a sign on the wall at Hillary Clinton's Oakland field office</i></div>
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Ritchie is running a similar operation for Trump. She claims "hundreds of thousands of volunteers" in California, and says if the national campaign would let her, she could unleash them as a Golden State ground force. "We were kind of gearing up for that, we got prepared for it. It's not like we couldn't do it." But her orders from New York are to send "strike teams" of Californians to Nevada and Arizona, to try to swing those states into Trump's column, and to utilize the same calling technology Clinton is using to reach likely Trump voters in other toss-up states and get them to the polls. "We're going after the battleground states because those are mandatory wins and we don't want to allow them to be neglected in any way." But, she says, "if it looks like we've got a leeway in our battleground states, I'm sure we'll implement" her plan to mobilize her California volunteers in their home state.</div>
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It's easy to say Ritchie is putting as brave a face as she can on a looming campaign failure of epic proportions. But she and Trump's other key operatives here—state director Tim Clark, campaign spokesman Jon Cordova—seem genuinely optimistic and enthusiastic about their chances. Do they not read polls? Do they not believe them? Are they in denial? </div>
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"We know what we're seeing on the ground," one Trump operative told me. "We have more volunteers than we can handle. There are Trump signs everywhere. He drew huge crowds here and he's still having huge rallies all across the country."</div>
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In the last few days, Trump's team has been invoking Harry Truman's upset comeback of 1948, when all the pundits said President Truman was doomed to defeat at the hands of New York Governor Thomas Dewey. But compared to 2016, the polls of 1948 might as well have been carved on stone tablets. Even giving Trump the most generous benefit of the doubt—conceding to him the battleground states where he's either slightly ahead, it's a dead heat, or his deficit is within the margin of polling error (Ohio, Iowa, North Carolina, Arizona, Nevada) and giving him Utah and all of Maine and Nebraska (which award some electoral votes by congressional district)—he still loses the Electoral College to Clinton, 304-234.</div>
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And if Clinton wins North Carolina, Arizona and Nevada, which polls suggest she may well do, to go along with expected victories in Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Colorado and all-important Florida, her margin of victory balloons to 336-202. If she manages to eke out Ohio and Maine too, it's a 358-180 bloodbath. If she confounds decades of history and upsets Trump in Texas and Utah, her electoral vote tally will top 400 (this is not likely, but it's at least as likely as Trump winning the White House by running the table in the swing states).</div>
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<i>President Harry S Truman exults in his surprise 1948 election, despite the </i></div>
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In the last two weeks, Team Trump has sent out at least three emails seeking more California volunteers to staff phone banks and make canvassing runs across the border to Nevada and Arizona. So Ritchie's comments may well be disingenuous. But even taken at face value, large crowds and a minority core of passionate supporters do not necessarily translate into victory at the polls. Just ask Bernie Sanders. When the circus comes to town, lots of people go see the show. That doesn't mean they all want to climb aboard the elephant. The tent seems ready to come crashing down on Donald Trump.</div>
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Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-53394647149377489252016-08-09T22:46:00.000-07:002016-08-09T22:46:12.945-07:00Trump's Electoral StenosisStenosis is an abnormal narrowing of a pathway in your body, often in your spinal column or neck. It can be a debilitating condition that leads to weakness and paralysis. Right now, we're witnessing a rare, self-induced case of campaign stenosis that is narrowing Donald Trump's path to the presidency so much that it's almost entirely closed off. And it's only early August.<br />
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Elections aren't typically won or lost in August, not before the presidential debates, unforeseen world events, an October Surprise, and who knows what else. But this is a most atypical election year (that's just in from the Keen Sense of the Obvious Bureau), one in which several major newspapers have already <a href="http://dailym.ai/2aFNiVQ" target="_blank">endorsed Hillary Clinton</a> over Donald Trump, one in which Trump got virtually no bounce from the Republican National Convention while Clinton got one from the DNC that is lasting well beyond what is normal, hardening from a bounce into a rock solid lead.<br />
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Consider this: in the last ten days, major national polls have shown Clinton beating Trump by ten, twelve, even<i> <a href="http://bit.ly/2aL4kxy" target="_blank">fifteen</a></i> points. Her average lead right now is around <a href="http://bit.ly/1foXXRS" target="_blank">eight points</a>. It's true that summer surveys are far from conclusive, and Trump could still (and probably will) narrow the gap considerably. But the last two presidents, Barack Obama and George W. Bush, never had leads remotely that large. In the last forty years, only Ronald Reagan in 1984 and Bill Clinton in 1992 and 1996 ever enjoyed polling leads this substantial at this point in a presidential campaign. Reagan went on to win by 18 points, and Clinton won both his races by comfortable margins.<br />
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Hillary Clinton, despite unfavorability ratings that would be the worst in history if not for the even worse ones of her even more despised opponent, is poised to win the presidency in a landslide. Yes, a landslide. Not because of those lopsided national polling numbers, but because she is pulling away in states that should be closely contested, and could even capture states the Democrats should have no reasonable hope of winning.<br />
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Here's how this election will turn out if Clinton wins the same states Obama did four years ago (interactive maps courtesy of <a href="http://www.270towin.com/" target="_blank">270towin.com,</a> where you can make your own):<br />
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So that means Clinton starts with a presumed Electoral College advantage of 332 to 206, if she just holds on to all 27 of Obama's blue states, and Trump wins all 24 red ones Mitt Romney carried (50 states, plus the District of Columbia).<br />
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Trump's hopes rest on taking away Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida, which would give him a 273-265 victory in the Electoral College. Or, if he carries Ohio and Florida but not Pennsylvania, perhaps making up for it by winning in Iowa, Virginia and Nevada, which would give him a 278-260 win and look like this:<br />
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Here's where Trump's electoral stenosis comes in. Recent polls in those battleground states show Clinton winning Pennsylvania by between 9 and 11 points. If not for its history, that would make it a Clinton shoo-in, not a swing state. She's beating Trump in Colorado by from 8 to 13 points, and in Virginia by 7 to 12. In fact, the Clinton campaign is shifting resources from those two states, so confident is it now of victory there. And the shift to Clinton goes on: WBUR has her beating Trump by 17 in New Hampshire. The last two polls in Michigan put Clinton up by 9 and 10. These are no longer battlegrounds; they are killing fields.<br />
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Ohio, Florida, Nevada, North Carolina and Iowa remain close, and could still go either way. But Clinton could lose all of those and still win 273-265 as long as she carries Pennsylvania, Virginia, Colorado and New Hampshire, where, we've just noted, she has commanding leads.<br />
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A more likely scenario, in fact, is that Clinton not only sweeps most, if not all, of the swing states, but pulls off upset victories in historically Republican states, conservative strongholds like Utah and Georgia, and purplish places like Arizona. Clinton should not be competitive in Utah and Georgia, and Arizona should be relatively safe for Trump. But this is Donald Trump we're talking about. He is loathed by many conservative Republicans in Utah and Colorado, in particular, and his anti-Muslim rhetoric repulses Mormons throughout the Intermountain West, while his anti-illegal immigration vitriol is galvanizing the Latino vote in Arizona. So Arizona, which no Democrat has won since Bill Clinton in 1996, is a dead heat. So is Georgia, where the two most recent polls <a href="http://bit.ly/1VQHI2Q" target="_blank">actually show Clinton ahead</a> - even though no Democrat has carried the Peach State since her husband in 1992. And Utah? Tougher to predict, thanks to a dearth of polling data, but Libertarian Gary Johnson is running strong there, and with Mormon conservative ex-CIA agent <a href="http://bit.ly/2azeeWK" target="_blank">Evan McMullin</a> entering the race as an independent wild card, a Clinton victory there over Trump in a splintered field is certainly not out of the question.<br />
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So, one last map: If Clinton were to run the table in the battlegrounds, and tip just a few typically red states into her column, the country would look like this:<br />
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That's 31 states for Clinton, only 20 for Trump, and a 380-158 Electoral College landslide, the biggest since George H.W. Bush swamped Michael Dukakis in 1988.<br />
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Of course, this election could also end in a 269-269 tie, if things broke just right, which could leave us with President Donald Trump and Vice President Tim Kaine - but that's a scenario to be explained in another column - and only if if Trump can somehow stop dealing body blows to his own candidacy.<br />
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<br />Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-20186324497510638732016-07-31T21:59:00.000-07:002016-07-31T21:59:11.450-07:00Why The Revolution Was Not TelevisedThe rumors crackled across the convention floor like a smoldering wildfire: "They're going to turn their backs on Hillary Clinton. They're going to walk out. They're going to throw toilet paper at her. <i>They're going to rush the stage.</i>"<br />
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"We can't let her speak. She should not be allowed to speak," one #BernieOrBust delegate told me the morning of Hillary Clinton's acceptance speech, refusing to accept the legitimacy of Clinton's nomination for president by the Democratic Party. He was part of a hardcore minority within the Bernie Sanders delegation to the Democratic National Convention that felt betrayed by its leader. "He promised us we'd fight at the convention. We came here expecting an open convention. Instead, he sold us out. He no longer has the moral authority to tell us what to do."<br />
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These delegates, perhaps two hundred out of Sanders' almost two thousand in Philadelphia, might have been surprised, even outraged, to learn that Bernie Sanders was actually working closely with Hillary Clinton in Philadelphia to keep them from derailing the convention.<br />
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Conversations with more than a dozen delegates, floor whips and officials from the Clinton campaign, the Sanders campaign and the Democratic National Committee reveal just how they did it.<br />
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Most importantly, the Clinton campaign, not convention organizers, controlled the floor of the DNC. The yellow-vested floor whips told Clinton delegates where to sit, what signs to hold, what chants and cheers to yell and when to yell them. They seated delegations strategically, at first trying to dilute the strength of the Sanders delegates by splitting them up, then by surrounding them and keeping them as far back from the stage as possible. As in Cleveland at the RNC, the California delegation was the largest, and the loudest. In Cleveland, the Californians were all Trump delegates, so the Golden State crew was seated near the stage, where they could present a united front on television and shout down any dissidents supporting Ted Cruz, or any other challenge to Donald Trump. That worked to a T, as the Californians relished their role and overwhelmed all opposition.<br />
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But in Philadelphia, the California delegation consisted of 330 Clinton delegates and 221 Sanders supporters. So instead of a choice spot on the floor, the Californians were exiled to Section 105, one level up, far stage right, in a corner. Clinton's delegates arrived early each day and reserved all the seats closest to the floor, sometimes filling them with non-delegates to force the Sanders team to the rear of the section, where they would not be seen on television and would be less likely to be heard.<br />
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Sanders merged his campaign operation with Clinton's. There were no Sanders whips on the floor. The floor captains wore headsets, receiving radio instructions from the "boiler room," where senior operatives from the combined campaigns told them how to thwart any insurrections by the Sanders diehards. They were given a list of the chants the Sanders delegates might use, in advance, and had a corresponding list of counter-chants. So when TV viewers heard loud chants of "Hillary" at seemingly random moments, it was to drown out chants of "No TPP" started by some of the California Sanders delegates. When they heard "USA" break out at inexplicable times—a chant heard more often in the past at Republican conventions than Democratic ones—it was to cover chants of "No More War" coming from Section 105. When Sanders delegates stood up with homemade signs denouncing Clinton, or tried to wave the "LIAR" signs they'd made from the "HILLARY" ones handed out in the hall, Clinton delegates stood up with giant banners, designed to look homemade, but really, stashed ahead of time by the campaign, like this one:<br />
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California Sanders delegates doctoring signs in protest</div>
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The Sanders delegates also claim the Clinton campaign or the DNC installed white noise machines above certain sections to drown out any anti-Clinton chanting.</div>
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In the end, Clinton won. Yes, some delegates walked out, some turned their backs, many chanted, but for the tens of millions watching at home and around the world, that revolution was not televised. The #NeverHillary Sanders folks who were sitting front and center, in the New York and Florida delegations, stood up and waved signs and chanted, but never rushed the stage, as the Secret Service had heard they might. They wouldn't have gotten anywhere near Hillary Clinton, but the sight of the party's nominee being hustled off the stage while security forces subdued on onslaught of delegates would have doomed any hope the Democrats had of presenting an image of unity to the nation.</div>
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The upstart Sanders renegades had whips of their own, instructing their members when to chant, how to assert themselves and demand seats that were supposed to be held only for delegates, distributing fluorescent yellow-green "Enough Is Enough" shirts to wear on the convention's final night. But there weren't enough of them committed to disrupting Clinton to overcome the cards stacked against them. I was on the convention floor interviewing Donna Brazile, named interim chair of the DNC after Debbie Wasserman Schultz's email-induced fall from grace, when Jeff Weaver, campaign manager for Bernie Sanders, happened by. "Excuse me," Brazile said, interrupting our interview. "There's my brother Jeff Weaver. I need to tell him how much I love him." Brazile proceeded to hug and laugh with Weaver, whisper in his ear and tell him how much she looked forward to working with him. It was more than just a public display of unity. While Sanders' most determined delegates felt betrayed and deceived by the Democratic National Committee, the man running their hero's campaign was already in cahoots with it. The Sanders brain trust turned over its intelligence on those resisting his endorsement of Clinton, so that Clinton's convention managers would know what to expect, and how to prepare. The combined operation even had spies within the rebel group.</div>
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DNC interim chair Donna Brazile with Sanders campaign boss Jeff Weaver on the convention floor</div>
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"This is like something out of 'House of Cards,'" one irate Sanders delegate from California told me. "These people are cheating. The whole system is rigged."</div>
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"They're roughing us up," another Sanders delegate, Henry Huerta of Los Angeles said. "They're shutting us out, trying to silence us."</div>
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"It's called politics," a California Clinton delegate responded. She asked me not to use her name. "This is how the game is played at this level. We're not doing anything they wouldn't do, if they knew how. They're just new to the sport. We're better at it than they are."</div>
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<br />Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-43990749967053716182016-07-24T21:51:00.000-07:002016-07-24T21:55:11.683-07:00Night And Day<div class="MsoNormal">
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Thoughts on what lies ahead</span></i></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Somewhere over Kansas<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">I’m winging my
way to the De</span><span style="font-family: "times new roman";">mocratic National Convention in Philadelphia, after covering the
Republicans’ confab in Cleveland last week (apologies for not blogging from the
RNC, but the California delegation’s distant accommodations in Sandusky, Ohio
added two hours of driving to my already overstuffed days and too-short nights there, and the need
for sleep trumped posting to the blog. I’ll make up for it with far too many
words here).<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">The RNC was the
most off-kilter political convention I’ve ever covered, marred by Melania
Trump’s plagiarized speech, the open political warfare on the floor between the
Ted Cruz delegates and the Donald Trump campaign, a bizarre and oddly
programmed hodgepodge of motley speakers, and finally, the longest acceptance
speech in American history, Trump’s 76-minute recitation of the doom and gloom
that, in his eyes, has rendered America no longer great.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Debbie Wasserman
Shultz, the Miami Congresswoman who chairs the Democratic National Committee, buzzed
about the periphery of the RNC like a mosquito waiting to suck blood and raise
welts. She talked to any and all comers about what a mess the convention was,
and how her party was unified in its fight against Trump’s divided GOP, even
ribbing her Republican counterpart, Reince Priebus, <a href="https://twitter.com/DWStweets/status/755135944412565504" target="_blank">reminding him via Twitter</a>
that she was in town and available to show him how to run a smoother operation.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Well, as I write
this, the Democrats are embroiled in pre-convention controversy of their own,
and it turns out it isn’t always sunny in Philadelphia, after all. Friday,
Wikileaks released thousands of <a href="http://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2016/07/detailed-list-findings-wikileaks-dnc-document-dump/" target="_blank">hacked DNC emails</a>—perhaps stolen by <a href="http://www.cnet.com/news/clinton-camp-accuses-russians-of-releasing-dnc-emails/" target="_blank">Russians</a>
trying to help Trump win the presidency, in return for policies more favorable
to the Kremlin—that include embarrassing evidence that Shultz and other party
higher-ups were indeed trying to sabotage the insurgent candidacy of Bernie
Sanders and ensure the nomination of Hillary Clinton (and Shultz trying to score <a href="http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/288928-leaked-email-shows-wasserman-schultz-wanted-7-tickets-to" target="_blank">tickets to “Hamilton” </a>- DNC communications chief Luis
Miranda is the father of Broadway wunderkind Lin-Manuel Miranda. It’s reassuring
to know that clout has its limits). As the leaked emails broke, the furious pro-Sanders
forces, armed with new proof that yes, the system is rigged, were fighting in
the Rules Committee to abolish superdelegates in future campaigns, to make it
easier for an outsider like Sanders to wrest the nomination from an anointed
insider, like Clinton. Sanders demanded that Shultz step down. So things were
unraveling for the Democrats on two fronts. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Just before my
flight took off came this bit of breaking news (what <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">would</i> I do without Twitter and my crackphone, I mean iPhone?):
<a href="http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.com/2016/07/24/democratic-party-chair-schultz-resignation/" target="_blank">Shultz announced that she will resign from the DNC</a>—as soon as this week’s
convention is over. She will still wield the gavel, opening and closing the
convention, though her presence may be diminished. Score another one for Sanders,
who sees her as his bête noire, who may have cost him the nomination and,
perhaps, the presidency. This development will surely overshadow everything
else on the convention’s opening day. Never mind your message, Senator,
Governor, Congressman, up-and-coming obscure state lawmaker—what do you think
about your party chair resigning under fire? How can you argue the Democrats are
unified? Will the 1900 or so Sanders delegates break this convention wide open
by feuding with the 2800 Clinton loyalists?<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">This will be my
seventh national party convention, and I’ve never seen the kind of
head-spinning, not-according-to-plan kerfuffles we got at the RNC—and now the
DNC promises more of the same.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">But there’s one
critical difference, and it comes from the top: the presidential nominees themselves,
and their closest rivals, and it’s instructive as to what kind of president
each might make.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Donald Trump ran
roughshod over the Cruz minority in Cleveland. To use his words, he “crushed
them.” His team kept its boots on their throats in the Rules Committee, refused
to allow a floor vote on the question of whether delegates should be released
from their commitment to support Trump on the first ballot, and turned back
every challenge from the Dump Trump brigade, without exception or compromise.
Meanwhile, John Kasich—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the Republican
governor of the swing state hosting the convention</i>—boycotted the whole
affair, Marco Rubio gave a perfunctory 85-second address via video from
Florida, and Ted Cruz, in a prime time speech, thumbed his nose at Trump and
his rabid delegates by refusing to endorse him and urging America to vote its
conscience. Bedlam broke out on the floor. I saw people crying and trembling,
so shaken they couldn’t speak. Seriously. The party was ripped asunder for all
to see. The schism was muted, momentarily, by the rousing reception the
conventioneers gave Trump’s marathon acceptance address, only to have the wound
gashed open again the very next morning by Trump himself, with a rambling
diatribe against Cruz. There will be no endorsements, no party unity, no
coalition to defeat Clinton.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">It appears the
Philadelphia Story could have a quite different ending. Rather than risk the
unruly disturbance of a floor vote on the superdelegates issue, Clinton’s team
is forming a “Unity Commission” with the Sanders supporters to study how to
reduce the role of superdelegates, and cut their number by two-thirds. That
defuses that tension. Instead of fighting to keep her job, the lightning rod
Shultz is stepping down, presumably at Clinton’s behest, or at the very least
with her acquiescence. Though many of his delegates remain livid, and may stage
protests of their own—there’s talk of turning their backs, or even walking out,
during Tim Kaine’s acceptance to register their disappointment that Hillary
didn’t choose a more progressive running mate, and you can count on some fiery
FeelTheBern-ing during the roll call vote of the states—Sanders himself remains
steadfastly in Clinton’s corner. He is not rescinding his endorsement of
Clinton for president and on Monday night will deliver it, with full-throated
enthusiasm, in his prime time convention address. His campaign says he will
make, in great and passionate detail, the case for defeating Donald Trump and
electing Hillary Clinton, and will tout the “most progressive platform in party
history”—which Clinton agreed to, in yet another mollifying move. In fact,
Hillary is doing everything she can to minimize the controversies, forge unity,
and turn each potential conflagration into a sing-along bonfire. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Can you imagine
Trump agreeing to a Unity Commission with his “crushed” rivals? Or any of the
top runners-up (especially Ted Cruz) urging the country to vote for him? I
didn’t think so.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">On Thursday
night, Hillary Clinton will strike a far different tone from Trump’s. Trump
didn’t give us Ronald Reagan “morning in America’ oratory. It was more like a
dark and stormy midnight. I expect Clinton will present a brighter, hopeful
vision of an America that has come a long way and, with her at the helm, will
rise even higher. She will try to inspire and elevate. She will talk about
breaking boundaries, shattering glass ceilings, and building bridges instead of
walls. She will tell us that Love Trumps Hate. She will try her hardest to seem
human and humane, to connect emotionally, to appeal to optimism and hope and
not just fear. In the last few days, Clinton has shown that she practices politics
as the art of compromise, not the art of the one-sided deal Trump seems to be
trying to sell America. The Democratic convention could still devolve into a
rip-roaring free-for-all (especially if many Bernie backers refuse to follow
their candidate’s lead), but something tells me the DNC and RNC will end up
being as different as night and day.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: Times, Times New Roman, serif;">Follow Doug’s convention tweets at
<a href="https://twitter.com/sovernnation" target="_blank">@SovernNation</a>. He reports live from the DNC in Philly twice each morning at
either 6:20, 7:30 or 8:30, and again at 4:20pm, 5:11pm, 6:11pm, 7:11pm and
8:11pm (all Pacific time) on KCBS Radio in San Francisco. Listen live at
106.9FM, 740AM, or <a href="http://cbssf.com/">CBSSF.com</a>, where you can also hear recorded reports and see
photos. Even more on the KCBS Facebook page!<o:p></o:p></span></i></div>
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Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-17995478608935038572016-02-20T23:46:00.000-08:002016-02-20T23:49:41.029-08:00Four-Lane PileupPolitical parties used to have wings. 2016 is the year they developed lanes.<br />
<br />
That's what happens when you have seventeen candidates seeking your presidential nomination, as the Republican Party did at the start of this campaign. It's pretty tough to crowd seventeen people onto two wings. Eventually, some might fall off, or even choose to jump. And a creature with seventeen wings, even a political party, is too terrifying even to consider.<br />
<br />
Hence, the advent of lanes, popularized by Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and his shrewd strategic team. Even if he doesn't win the presidency, or even the Republican nomination—and I still don't think he will—Cruz will go down in history as the guy who changed the way pundits talk about campaigns. The lane metaphor has become ubiquitous. It's the fallback catch phrase for the talking heads of the politigentsia (did I just coin that word?). When's the last time you caught anyone referring to the "right wing" of the GOP?<br />
<br />
The way Cruz saw it, there are four lanes in the grand new version of the Grand Old Party: the evangelical Christian lane, the Tea Party lane, the libertarian lane (read: the Ron Paul lane), and the moderate-establishment-old boy lane (read: the Bush-Romney-Bush lane). As a nakedly ambitious man unable to even pretend to conceal his Machiavellian ways behind a facade of niceties, Cruz was only too happy to articulate his four-lane construct to any and all observers as he launched his long-shot bid for the presidency. None of us took him too seriously, giving him barely any chance of breaking out of the pack ("way too conservative, unlikable, irritating, a niche candidate," we said). Four lanes, huh? Nice idea, Ted. Lovely. Good luck with that. Now go filibuster something and leave us alone.<br />
<br />
But Cruz, who has proven time and again to be an absolutely brilliant politician (you may not want him to be president, but he would make one hell of a campaign manager) who thinks many moves ahead of his adversaries (if running for president were chess, Cruz would be the Bobby Fischer of our time), had a plan. He would run from the Tea Party lane, as he did when he stunned establishment darling David Dewhurst to capture a U.S. Senate seat in Texas. But he would also court the hell out of the evangelical Christians (pardon my blasphemy), and also go after the Libertarians, whom Rand Paul was taking for granted. Cruz figured if he could consolidate those three lanes, he would be the last conservative standing, and the only viable alternative to whomever captured the moderate-establishment lane, presumably one of the Four Govs, Bush, Kasich, Christie or Walker.<br />
<br />
Cruz succeeded beyond anyone's wildest dreams except his own. Walker wilted early. Paul petered out. Christie and Bush are gone. The other red meat conservatives, Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee, were yesterday's news. Bobby Jindal couldn't get out of the starting gate. Rick Perry became a late night punchline. Ben Carson and Carly Fiorina each had their moment in the sun, only to fade into asterisk land (Carson seems to have invented his own lane: the extremely slow lane, in which all the drivers fall asleep at the wheel until they veer into the Bushes). He won the Iowa caucus by doing exactly what he'd planned: uniting the evangelical, libertarian and Tea Party lanes behind his candidacy and presenting himself as the only one worthy of taking on the unexpected Big Dog, Donald Trump.<br />
<br />
But he ran into a roadblock in New Hampshire, and now he's hit a speed bump in South Carolina, where he finished third, tailgating-close to Marco Rubio, but third nonetheless, in a state full of evangelicals Cruz had assumed he would win.<br />
<br />
As I wrote before Iowa voters went to their caucuses, this is a three-man race (it didn't just become one, as some are saying after South Carolina; it's been one for months). John Kasich still has illusions of emerging from the establishment lane, but he's reading road signs that simply aren't there. With Jeb! out of the running, the party establishment and moderate money men are much more likely to coaslesce around Rubio as their only hope to stop Trump. Carson is running on fumes (and seems like he's inhaling them, too) and will be the next to fade away. But the party leaders are clinging to the unrealistic notion that Donald Trump has a ceiling, and that as the other never-were contenders drop out, that not-Trump vote will distribute itself among the remaining challengers, namely Cruz and Rubio. Bush's people will split between Kasich and Rubio, until Kasich is gone, and then Rubio will overtake Trump, unless Cruz rallies the remaining conservatives to his cause by then, in which case he will.<br />
<br />
Here's the problem with that thinking, and the unexpected development even Cruz could not foresee: that is not what's happening. When Christie and Fiorina quit the race, Trump picked up as many of their supporters as anyone else did. With Bush gone, and when Carson follows, he's likely to do the same with theirs. The exit polls show Trump actually<b> beat</b> Cruz among evangelical voters in South Carolina, 33-27%. Yes, a plurality of the born-again Constitution-thumpers of the Palmetto State voted for the Antichrist Himself, Donald "New York Values" Trump. So if Trump has a ceiling, it may well be vaulted, and made of gilded marble. It is Trump, not Cruz, not Rubio, who is consolidating the various lanes of the Republican Party. He may not be in control of the party's moderate establishment, but the voters in that lane are all aboard the Trump Express. Trump won 34% of self-described moderate voters in South Carolina, with Rubio next at 23% and Kasich third with 21%. Cruz was a distant fifth among that group, at just seven percent. Trump won among voters who identify as conservative, too, beating Cruz by six points. He's pulling Tea Partiers, and he's attracting libertarians. South Carolina Republicans who are "angry" at the federal government voted overwhelmingly for Trump. So did those who are looking for a candidate who "tells it like it is" and "can bring needed change." The conventional wisdom that Trump is only pulling a third of the vote, so the other two-thirds will naturally coalesce around his last remaining opponent, is flawed. Many of those "other" supporters turn out to prefer Trump once their first choice falls by the wayside.<br />
<br />
So while some suddenly-unemployed Bush strategists and mainstream pundits and deep-pocketed donors wait for Trump to crater, and for the anyone-but-Donald vote to consolidate around Rubio, or Cruz, or even Kasich (wow, really?), Trump speeds ahead and leaves the others to eat his exhaust. It's hard to look at the primary calendar and see where Rubio picks up a much-needed primary win, even with the "Marcomentum" of his second-place finish in South Carolina (a state he vowed to take just a week ago). Cruz is likely to score some victories in some of the larger Southern Super Tuesday states (most notably, the largest of them all, his home state of Texas), but his long-range plan of using his Tea Party/evangelical base as a springboard to a March 1st primary romp no longer seems realistic. Trump has more of the evangelicals in his corner than even the man who built his entire candidacy around them. If Cruz can't win his own lanes in a state as conservative as South Carolina, and Rubio can't win a state he prioritized from the outset, even with the endorsements of its three most popular conservative officeholders, it's hard to see where they force Trump into a pit stop. It's far more likely they end up in the growing pileup behind him, nursing whiplash as they try to figure out how in the world he ran them all off the road.<br />
<br />
<br />Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-69474762709442181952016-02-01T01:26:00.000-08:002016-02-01T01:26:02.892-08:00Trump (Yes, Trump) Vs. ClintonIt's time for my quadrennial limb crawl, in which I predict the eventual Democratic and Republican presidential nominees before the first caucus or primary. This blog has been in mothballs for a while, but I've been doing this in one forum or another for 40 years now (!) so I feel obliged to shake off the rhetorical cobwebs and risk my reputation, such as it is, in public once again.<br />
<br />
There's no magic formula here, just a crunching of numbers and a survey of my gut, but somehow that recipe has served me well over the years. I'm 10-for-10 picking the GOP nominee, and 8-for-10 on the Democrats. You can read about my past performances <a href="http://sovernnation.blogspot.com/2008/01/into-great-wide-open.html">here</a>, but as always, they're no guarantee of future results.<br />
<br />
That said, I have never felt less certain about my picks than I do this year. American presidential elections have become progressively more surreal, volatile and unpredictable in the last dozen years—really, the last 24, going back to the 1992 Clinton/Bush/Perot race. What could possibly top the 2000 Bush-Gore circus? Well, how about a Trump-Sanders-Bloomberg showdown in November? Or a Trump-Clinton race in which Hillary gets indicted halfway through, and Joe Biden jumps in late as a substitute nominee? I'm not predicting either of those scenarios, but I'm not ruling them out either. Nothing—at all—would surprise me anymore.<br />
<br />
A year ago, I pegged Marco Rubio, Scott Walker and Jeb Bush as my top three in the GOP race, and I saw no way anyone else could crack that tier. Of course, that was before Donald Trump decided to run for president. Walker proved to be a feeble, feckless candidate who came off as provincial and not ready for the national stage (surprising, given his strong performance at the 2012 Republican National Convention). Bush has shown late flashes of feck in recent debates, but he too, has been an underwhelming milquetoast, making no convincing case for the nomination beyond name recognition, establishment backing and a big war chest. Rubio is the only one of these three who remains viable.<br />
<br />
Though the GOP field started with 17 candidates, and most of them are still running (for at least one more week, until after New Hampshire seals their campaign coffins), there are really only five legitimate contenders left: Trump, Ted Cruz, Rubio, Chris Christie and John Kasich. Those last two have pinned all their hope on New Hampshire (as has Bush) and if they don't finish in the top three there, are probably done. It's possible to construct a reasonably plausible scenario in which one of the more moderate governors does well enough in the Granite State to gain some momentum and the support of the others, and then surges on Super Tuesday to overtake Trump, Cruz and Rubio, but does anyone outside their campaigns really expect that to happen? No.<br />
<br />
Which means one of those last three is going to be the Republican nominee. Here's the path for each:<br />
<br />
<b>MARCO RUBIO: </b>Rubio is running an unconventional campaign. He has been patient and disciplined, eloquent and convincing in the debates, and well-versed on policy. Which is to say, an anomaly. He is not banking on winning either Iowa or New Hampshire—which is almost unheard of—instead pursuing what his strategists call their "3-2-1" plan. That calls for him to finish a strong third in Iowa, a strong second in New Hampshire, and a stunning first in South Carolina. From there, he consolidates conservatives and the stop-Trump GOP establishment and rolls to frontrunner status in the March 1 Super Tuesday states.<br />
<br />
The Iowa part is likely to happen. Rubio's riding some late momentum there and should finish third. New Hampshire is more problematic. He's running a distant fifth there, and a third place showing in Iowa may not be enough to help him overtake Bush, Kasich and Cruz, especially if Cruz wins Iowa. If Cruz doesn't, and starts to fade, it's possible that Rubio somehow climbs into second place. But Trump has a commanding lead in South Carolina, and it's tough to see everything breaking just right for Rubio to give him the win he will need at that point. If he doesn't win any of the early primaries, it's hard to see how he gets the nomination. His best hope is for Trump to knock out Cruz in Iowa, and then rally the party leaders around him as the anti-Donald candidate.<br />
<b><br /></b>
<b>TED CRUZ:</b> I never gave Cruz much of a chance. I thought he was another in a long line of delusional also-rans (see: Rick Perry, among many others). But Cruz, unlike Walker and Bush, for example, turns out to be a brilliant politician. This is one smart guy, with a shrewd tactical mind, an articulate and persuasive debating style, and prodigious fundraising abilities. Never mind that he also appears to be a pathological liar (latest whopper: pledging to "always tell you the truth" if he's elected president, something he hasn't come close to doing either on the Senate floor or the presidential campaign trail). He has worked his tail off wooing evangelical Christian voters in Iowa and South Carolina. He smartly recognized Trump's appeal early and refrained, until the closing days of what's become a two-man race in the Hawkeye State, from clashing with him, courting Trump supporters instead of alienating them. He's positioned himself as a more palatable and electable version of The Donald, heir to his anti-establishment outsider mantle if and when Trump flames out. He comes off as passionate and committed, and the people who find that appealing don't see the smarmy demagoguery that has left him without a single friend, on either side of the aisle, in the U.S. Senate (even his former mentor, George W. Bush, admitted recently "I just don't like the guy"). So yes, Cruz could still wrest the nomination from Trump's well-manicured hands. To do that, he needs to win in Iowa, and parlay that into a very strong second place finish in New Hampshire. That would make him, not Rubio, the most viable not-Trump candidate, and he could use that momentum to upset Trump in South Carolina. Beyond that, Cruz is well-positioned to run the table in the most important Super Tuesday states (under this scenario) and emerge as the likely nominee.<br />
<br />
Here are the problems for Cruz: He may have peaked too soon. He had a terrible final debate performance. Trump has taken his best punches, responded effectively and bounced back ahead in Iowa. He hasn't come close to denting Trump's huge leads in New Hampshire, South Carolina, or nationally. He spews fire on national security but much of what he says doesn't withstand closer scrutiny, and voters in Iowa and New Hampshire pay very, very close attention to detail. He is the conservative wing's best hope in years of nominating one of their own, but the pragmatic wing deems him too far right to win in November. So if he doesn't win Iowa, it may be the beginning of the end for him.<br />
<br />
Which is why, by process of elimination, I actually think <b>DONALD TRUMP</b> will be the one accepting the 2016 Republican nomination for president in Cleveland this July.<br />
<br />
Did I really just type those words? Apparently so. Do I really believe them? I'm trying really hard to convince myself.<br />
<br />
We won't know until Monday night whether Trump really has the ground game to match his bravado, money and strong poll numbers. Winning the Iowa caucus takes much more than jetting in, giving a loud speech, and throwing an ad blitz onto local TV. It takes detailed organization, staffers and volunteers across the state and a data-driven get-out-the-vote operation. It takes a nothing-for-granted and leave-no-stone-unturned attitude. Does Trump really have those things? It's hard to tell. He says he does—the best, the biggest, the greatest of anyone—but there's a H-U-G-E difference between getting someone in Iowa to tell a pollster they like you and getting them to stand up for you in their neighbor's living room on Caucus Night.<br />
<br />
But the final polls show Trump narrowly ahead of Cruz in Iowa. He is confident enough to already be on the stump in New Hampshire instead, where he's crushing Cruz by two or three to one. He seems likely to either win Iowa or come in a very close second, and then win New Hampshire, South Carolina and Nevada. If that happens, how does anyone stop him? The party leaders will reluctantly embrace him as their guy, most of the rest will drop out, and either Cruz or Rubio will soldier on to be the Rick Santorum (2012) or Mike Huckabee (2008) of 2016: the right wing standard-bearer who finishes a valiant second.<br />
<br />
Trump is a buffoon. He can't possibly be president, right? We all consider him reality TV entertainment, not a serious candidate. Hmm, people said the same things about Arnold Schwarzenegger (and Ronald Reagan, long before him) and look what happened to them. Never underestimate the American people's ability to fall in love with a charismatic, populist celebrity who taps into their anger and disenchantment and tricks them into thinking that somehow, he's one of them and has their best interests at heart. I can't believe P.T. Barnum never ran for president.<br />
<br />
If Trump does win both Iowa and New Hampshire, history says the nomination is his. No Republican has ever won both of these contests and not gone on to be the nominee. No Republican candidate has ever <b>lost </b>both of these states and still found a way to win the nomination.<br />
<br />
The same is not true on the Democratic side. In 1972, Edmund Muskie got more votes than any other Democrat in the Iowa caucus (he actually finished tied with "Uncommitted" with 36%) and won the New Hampshire primary. But he lost the nomination to George McGovern, who ran better than expected in both states and was declared the "winner" by the media, and rode that momentum to the nomination, knocking Muskie out in April.<br />
<br />
Twenty years later, Bill Clinton was barely a blip in Iowa, where native son Tom Harkin won the caucus in a landslide, and Clinton ran second in New Hampshire to another almost-native son (Paul Tsongas of neighboring Massachusetts), but that began Clinton's comeback, and he became the first candidate to win the nomination without winning either of the first two contests.<br />
<br />
Now, Bill's wife <b>HILLARY CLINTON</b> is trying, again, to follow her husband to the Oval Office (were you wondering how many words it would take me to get to the Democratic race?). And it says here, she will be the Democratic nominee.<br />
<br />
<b>BERNIE SANDERS:</b> Bernie is, in many ways, the Trump of the left. He's tapped into the same voter disenchantment that we've seen in so many recent elections (seriously, this "outsider" stuff goes all the way back to the post-Watergate race of 1976. Carter and Reagan both won as outsiders who were going to fix Washington. So, to some extent, did Clinton in '92 and even W in 2000, and certainly Obama did in '08. Newsflash: None of them fixed Washington). The difference with Sanders is that, as a Socialist, he may actually mean what he says. That doesn't mean he can convince Congress to do any of it, but it's more likely that he has the courage of his convictions. He's built an impressive coalition of younger voters, progressives, some labor unions, the oh-please-not-Hillary Democrats, and those who were disappointed by Obama and pining for someone like Elizabeth Warren. Sanders is, much like Obama in 2008, a vehicle for the hopes and dreams of Democrats and independents yearning for something new and different. He's built a surprisingly strong organization, copying much of Obama's playbook, and mounting a much more serious than expected challenge to Hillary's presumed supremacy. She's in a fight, and she knows it.<br />
<br />
Could this rumpled Jewish Socialist from Brooklyn really win the Democratic nomination? Sure, it's possible. He might edge Clinton in Iowa, and he's likely to win big in New Hampshire, next door to his adopted home of Vermont. If Clinton is indicted for her email transgressions, she could falter even more, and by then Sanders could have positioned himself as the only rightful successor.<br />
<br />
But Clinton has a powerful and deep organization that goes way beyond college kids in Iowa and New Hampshire. She has a more sophisticated operation than Sanders does in South Carolina, Nevada and the Super Tuesday states. She will be able to draw upon greater union strength and minority support in the succeeding states. Though Sanders has been reaching out to African American and Latino voters and insists he can appeal to them, it remains to be seen if that's true, and Clinton is the more likely heir to that significant segment of the Obama coalition. This nomination fight may hinge on the question of electability, and that's a tough one for many Democrats to answer. The assumption is that Clinton is more likely to win in November, but some polls actually show Sanders running stronger versus Trump than Hillary does. Don't discount how many Americans truly detest Hillary Clinton, and how close the race could be in November if she's the nominee. On the other hand, the GOP ad machine is salivating at the prospect of having an actual Socialist to run against instead of someone they just paint as one, and don't underestimate how savagely the Republicans could go after Sanders if he's their opponent.<br />
<br />
If Hillary hangs on and wins in Iowa, even if she loses New Hampshire, she is likely to crush Sanders in South Carolina and Nevada. Sanders will run best in states that allow independents to cross over and vote in the Democratic primary (which they can do in New Hampshire). But some pretty big states—Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey—don't allow that. California, which does allow unaffiliated voters to cast Democratic ballots, may be instructive. The most recent Field Poll shows Clinton leading Sanders among California Democrats by about twenty points, but Sanders beating Hillary among the independents by roughly the same margin. That suggests that when the decision is left up to party regulars, Democrats are likely to prefer Clinton. In a protracted battle for the nomination, that could be a significant, perhaps decisive, advantage for Hillary, who has also already locked up the support of most party leaders and superdelegates. None of this makes her edge insurmountable, or guarantees her the nomination, especially if unforeseen events (or foreseen ones, like a possible federal indictment) intervene. But add it all up and it makes Clinton the most likely Democratic nominee, which is why I am officially predicting a <b>TRUMP VS. CLINTON</b> general election.<br />
<br />
Which is why you should rush to your favorite bookie and immediately bet the house on RUBIO VS SANDERS.<br />
<br />
I think that's the longest blog post in American history. More like a wonky monograph, really. If you read this far, you deserve a prize, and you probably deserve a better president than any of the ones we're likely to get.<br />
<br />
<i>Tune in to KCBS (106.9FM, 740AM, cbssf.com) for complete coverage and analysis of the Iowa Caucus Monday Feb 1, and the New Hampshire Primary Tuesday February 9.</i><br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-61090437721054115052014-08-19T13:48:00.000-07:002014-08-19T13:48:01.067-07:00Riding With Robin<div class="MsoNormal">
Biking with Robin Williams was like taking a spin class at
the old Holy City Zoo. Every time I rode alongside him, he matched our tempo with
manic, mile-a-minute shtick, a running comedic commentary on everything from
the spandexed rear of the rider in front of him to the French obsession with
Lance Armstrong’s doping. I interviewed Williams maybe ten times over the
years, and rode with him at least five, in the Bay Area and Los Angeles;
Austin, Texas; and even at the Tour de France, where we both cycled as ardent
fans before Armstrong and the other pros took the course. After Williams’
suicide last week, I dug through my archives and, while I still can’t find the
photos I know we took during some of those rides, I did find old recordings of
some of his in-the-saddle routines, some captured while we were riding, others
taped during rest stops or by the side of the road, watching the peloton rush
past us.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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In the company of a radio reporter, even one clad in lycra,
Williams was always on, almost incapable of biking in silence. He knew people
expected him to make them laugh, and he was determined to deliver. And that he
did, in frenetic, hilarious, often self-deprecating fashion, his mind racing
even faster than his thickly muscled legs to churn out a stream of comic
consciousness.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
“Look at the lovely Miss Dee, what a derriere,” he said
during one Texas ride as we caught the wheel of the woman riding in front of us.
“To draft behind Dee is a gift. I would say this is like swimming behind
Jennifer Lopez.”<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>He joked about
the smoothly-shaved legs of the professional riders in the peloton. “In my
case, it would take a weedwhacker. I’m a Chia pet. The moment I shaved, it
would start to grow again. It would be a frightening thing. Forget US Postal,
I’m going to be sponsored by Poulan Weed-Eater.” Asked how much he enjoyed
biking with the obviously much faster Armstrong, Williams quipped “it’s the
best two seconds of my day.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
For years, when he lived in San Francisco’s Seacliff
neighborhood, the comic icon and Oscar-winning actor rode five days a week, a
thirty-mile loop over the Golden Gate Bridge to Marin and back. Williams would
joke that he wasn’t built for distance; after 30 miles, he’d poop out. But he
was strong for those first thirty, able to keep the jokes coming even as he
pumped out the miles. He had a stable of about fifty bikes, and employed a bike
wrangler to maintain them. I never saw him ride the same one twice, and he was
always fantasizing about the Pinarello or Colnago frame he would buy next. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
It was tough to keep up with Williams, and I don’t just mean
on the bike. His mind would boomerang from one joke to the next, flashing like
lightning from one pop culture reference to another. If some of the gags went
over your head, were lost on your not-as-nimble mind, that was okay, as long as
that stitch in your side was from laughing so hard that you couldn’t keep the
cadence up. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Williams was close with Armstrong, helping the cycling
champion raise money for his cancer foundation. They bonded over biking, and
Williams would visit Armstrong in France during the Tour every year and also
appear at his annual Ride for the Roses bash in Austin, where the comedian’s
bike-themed performances became a highlight. Once, he did a bawdy, ten-minute
riff on Armstrong’s testicular cancer, joking that after the cancer survivor’s
success, every rider in Europe was having one cut off to improve aerodynamism.
He spoofed Armstrong’s main rivals, trotting out his arsenal of foreign
accents. He joked about the Texan’s friendship with fellow Lone Star icon
George W. Bush. “I had a telegram for you Lance, from President Bush, but
they’re still correcting the spelling.” Like many of us, he refused to believe
Armstrong was doping. He defended Armstrong’s insistence that he had only used
EPO and other doping products as part of his cancer therapy.</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
From the first time I met him, Williams struck me as deeply
insecure, someone with a pathological need to entertain, using humor to deflect
and defend and protect his own fragile psyche. It’s an all too common trait among
comedians. But Robin was also an unusually sweet and generous man, with a warm
heart and a kind soul. He would talk sincerely and passionately about the
“extraordinary people” he met through cycling, and included Armstrong in that
group. He said of the cancer survivors he met, “it humbles me in a great way.
It’s a good humbling, unlike when Lance kicks my ass on the bike. Hey, I hung
with Lance a little longer today. He waited a full four seconds before he
decided to actually ride. He dropped me with a fierce breakaway.”</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
You could sense the sadness inside Williams, the tears of
the clown masked by the rush he got from making other people happy. In the end,
he leaves us all so sad, because he couldn’t find a way to do the same for
himself, even on his bike.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-38344118584777126182012-11-12T01:34:00.000-08:002012-11-12T01:41:10.752-08:00Can You Handle the Truth?"We're not going to let our campaign be dictated by fact-checkers."<br />
<i> -Mitt Romney's pollster, Neil Newhouse, during the Republican National Convention</i><br />
<br />
As things turned out last Tuesday, that was the fatal flaw in Mitt Romney's campaign for the presidency: a refusal to accept, or even acknowledge, basic truths. It shouldn't be a huge surprise that a party whose leaders resist the science of climate change and evolution isn't big on math, either. The Romney campaign played fast and loose with the facts all summer and fall, but there's no truth-in-advertising law for politicians. Society can debate whose scientific theories are more valid, and candidates can squabble over whose ads are more mendacious. But once the ballots are cast and counted, one side's guess about the makeup of the electorate is going to be proven right and the other wrong. In 2012, the assumptions made by most of the public pollsters, and those working for the Obama campaign - the ones that drew so much scorn and ridicule from the GOP and Romney's own polling team - turned out to be dead on, and Romney's, dead wrong.<br />
<br />
I wrote on Election Eve that this race reminded me very much of 2004, when President Bush squeaked out a narrow re-election win over John Kerry. Bush beat Kerry in the popular vote that year, 50.7% to 48.3%. As I write this, with some ballots still to be counted, President Obama has 50.5% of the popular vote, to Romney's 47.9%. That's awfully close to what happened in 2004 (it's also the closest I've ever been to nailing my final prediction, which was Obama 50.2 to Romney 47.9).<br />
<br />
Throughout the campaign, Romney operatives, and some pollsters, insisted there was no way the broad coalition of young voters, African Americans, Latinos and inspired independents that propelled Barack Obama to history in 2008 was going to turn out for him this time. Too much disappointment and disenchantment on the left, they said; the bloom is off the rose. Romney will benefit from an enthusiasm gap; the electorate will be more like the one Bush got in '04. They shredded polls that projected a Democratic turnout advantage of five, six, seven points (Democrats outnumbered Republicans by seven points in the '08 election). What they failed to grasp - despite many, many polls suggesting this - was that Republican voters were even less enthusiastic about their nominee than Democrats were about President Obama. Consistently, Romney supporters told the pollsters they were voting<i> against</i> the president more than they were voting <i>for </i>the GOP nominee. Obama voters, meanwhile, were overwhelmingly casting ballots<i> for</i> his re-election, not <i>against</i> Romney. The steady parade of "Anyone But Romney" Republican frontrunners during the primaries should have been enough of a warning sign for Romney and his strategists. But, blinders on, the Romney team ignored all of that data, or insisted it was wrong, preferring instead to shoot out constant emails about huge, excited crowds at rallies and the proliferation of Romney-Ryan yard signs. As I noted last week, crowd count is not a reliable predictor of success on Election Day. A majority of voters simply didn't trust Romney, and they didn't feel he connected with them on a real level. The lack of credibility, authenticity and embrace of reality permeated his campaign and doomed it from the start.<br />
<br />
I took much of the GOP's ostensible optimism and confidence in the campaign's closing days as so much bluster. Surely, they had to see what the rest of us did: that all signs pointed to the president's re-election. There was simply no denying the data, and the sense of momentum for Mr. Obama that accelerated after Hurricane Sandy. But no, their post-election comments reveal that the Romney team really didn't see defeat coming at all. On Election Day, the youth turnout didn't go down - it went up, one percentage point from 2008. The African American vote didn't decline - it increased, especially in Ohio, where it went from 11% of the electorate in '08 to 15% this year. The Republican effort to make voting more difficult backfired, motivating minority voters in particular to stand in line for hours to cast their ballots for the president. And an enormous Latino tide, with 71% of those voters preferring Barack Obama, simply swept Mitt Romney's erroneous assumptions away, and with them, his shot at the presidency. In fact, of the major ethnic groups, only the white vote declined. Democrats made up 38% of the electorate this time around, and Republicans 32%, with independents and others constituting the rest: in other words, exactly the six-point advantage many of those GOP-derided polls assumed.<br />
<br />
I took some heat on Twitter for suggesting that the Gallup and Rasmussen polls were using flawed methodology. "It's pretty obvious you just like the polls that show Obama is winning," one critic tweeted. No, I like the ones whose methods make sense, and to me that seemed to be IBD/TIPP and Reuters/Ipsos. I was slightly suspect of Public Policy Polling, a firm that works for Democratic campaigns, because their surveys seemed to overstate Obama's support and looked like slight outliers. As we review the polls now, it was PPP, IBD/TIPP and Reuters/Ipsos who were most accurate. Rasmussen skewed way to the Republican side, as it often does, and Gallup simply blew it, by assuming a much whiter electorate and excluding too many actual voters with its "likely voter" screen. Gallup has been around since 1947 and is America's best-known pollster by far, but I will no longer consider them reliable until I see them get a major election right again (they were among the least accurate in 2008, too).<br />
<br />
I also am not a fan of the Real Clear Politics average, and I hope the outcome of this election illustrates why. RCP's final average gave President Obama a 0.7% lead. He won by 2.6%, subject to slight revision. That's a fairly significant miss. You can't simply add the 53% reported by a live poll of 2000 people with landlines and cellphones to the 49% from a poll of 300 people by robocall and call it an "average" of 51%, which is what RCP does (in this example, the true average of those two polls would be 52.5%, and their differing methodologies would render even that result suspect). I hope lazy media outlets stop reporting that "average" as some sort of useful and informative number.<br />
<br />
I am curious to see if the Republican Party reverts to denial within a few months of absorbing this defeat. The demographic trends can't be ignored: take a look at California if you want to see the future of the national GOP if it makes the mistake of doing so. The Republican Party teeters on the brink of irrelevancy in the Golden State, where Democrats hold every statewide office and two-thirds of the legislature. Mitt Romney won only 38% of the presidential vote. Latinos and young voters here are overwhelmingly Democratic. The national GOP leaders can't be that blind. But will they react cynically - showcasing Marco Rubio, Ted Cruz and Susana Martinez while still hewing to the social conservative line - or will they moderate their views, compromise on immigration reform and taxes and give up the ghost on things like repealing Roe v. Wade and banning same sex marriage? It's hard to imagine John Boehner and company moving very far to the middle, for very long.<br />
<br />
One thing is certain: the 2016 primaries will be fascinating. 2008 was the first wide-open race, with no incumbent president or vice president running for either party's nomination, since 1928. Now we'll have a second one, just eight years later, assuming Joe Biden doesn't take a third shot at running for president (he will be 73, and delusional if he thinks he can win). On the Democratic side, it should be Hillary Clinton versus the field (Andrew Cuomo, Martin O'Malley, maybe Elizabeth Warren?), with a huge and deep potential field for the Republicans, led by Rubio, Paul Ryan, Chris Christie, Bobby Jindal, Scott Walker, Rick Santorum and maybe Nikki Haley, Bob McDonnell, Rand Paul and a few others, too. That's an extremely conservative bunch, with Christie the most able to position himself as a centrist. Most of those Republican candidates are likely to run as right wing purists and point to Romney's defeat as a reason why. That could easily mean an even more lopsided Democratic victory four years from now.<br />
<br />
A few interesting nuggets from this election:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li>Mitt Romney lost Massachusetts by 23 points, the worst home state defeat ever for a governor (or former governor) running for president. The old record was 20 points, set by Ohio Governor James Cox in 1920, but he lost to a fellow Ohioan, Senator Warren Harding, so neither had the home field advantage. The worst previous home state loss to someone from a different state was only eight points, by Kansas Governor Alf Landon to FDR (of New York) in 1936, so Romney really shattered this one.</li>
<li>Obama won all four "new" states (NY, NJ, NH and NM) while Romney won all the North, South and West ones (NC, SC, ND, SD and WV).</li>
<li>Obama swept all the swing states and won all the battleground states except North Carolina.</li>
<li>Mitt Romney not only lost his home state (MA), he also lost his birth state (Michigan) and the other two states in which he owns homes, New Hampshire and California. He did win Utah, by a larger margin than any other state (48 points) but he no longer owns a residence there.</li>
<li>The states that were thought to be among the closest really weren't. Obama won both Iowa and Wisconsin by almost six points, Colorado and Pennsylvania by more than five, Nevada by almost seven, Michigan by almost ten. Only Ohio (Obama by 2), Virginia (Obama by 3), Florida (Obama by 1) and North Carolina (Romney by 2) were close.</li>
<li>This is only the second time in history that three consecutive presidents have been elected to two terms. The first time was Thomas Jefferson, James Madison and James Monroe, from 1800-1820. This time it's Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, from 1992-present. Perhaps that says something about the power of incumbency in the era of television advertising and unlimited campaign spending.</li>
<li>Barack Obama is only the third president in history to be re-elected with fewer electoral votes than he won the first time around (Woodrow Wilson in 1916; FDR in both 1940 and 1944).</li>
<li>Obama is only the third Democrat to win more than 50% of the popular vote twice (Andrew Jackson and FDR are the others. The other three two-term Democratic presidents, Grover Cleveland, Woodrow Wilson and Bill Clinton, never hit 50% in any of their victories).</li>
<li>New Hampshire is the first state ever to elect women to every major office (Governor, both U.S. Senators and both of its Congressional seats).</li>
<li>Hawaii is sending Congress its first Hindu member ever (Tulsi Gabbard, a Democratic woman originally from American Samoa) and will also give the Senate its first Asian-American woman and first Buddhist ever, in the person of Mazie Hirono.</li>
<li>There will be 20 women in the U.S. Senate, a record, including the first lesbian (Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin).</li>
<li>There will be seven gay members of Congress, enough to have an actual caucus.</li>
<li>See, this is how I spend my time, looking up stuff like this so you don't have to.</li>
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One final statistic: for the 9th time in 11 tries, I predicted the winner of the presidential election correctly. I got 49 states right this time, my best showing ever. As noted above, I nailed Romney's popular vote and I'm only 0.3% off on Obama's, although those numbers could still change. That's actually better than Nate Silver, for all you 538 junkies (I am proudly one). He can have the glory, I just like to be right. Facts can be fun, and good for you too, a lesson the Romney campaign would have done well to learn at the start of this campaign.</div>
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<br />Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com18tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-57488050246625155702012-11-05T16:08:00.000-08:002012-11-05T16:08:38.177-08:00Not Too Close To Call<i>The Sovern Nation politics blog has been dormant for months, a victim of my Twitter addiction and the time-consuming demands of my radio work. I am reviving it today to make my quadrennial presidential election prediction, because 140 characters simply won't do. I'll check back in after the election with some analysis and post mortem, too. </i><br />
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Forty years ago, I went to see a presidential candidate in person for the first time. It was Senator George McGovern, at one of his final campaign rallies, in New Jersey. McGovern's oratory was overshadowed by the eloquence of the man who introduced him, the young Massachusetts Senator Ted Kennedy. But the crowd was huge, the atmosphere electric, the excitement level unlike anything I'd ever experienced. I was only 11, and it was the first presidential election in which I was fully engaged. I'm sure many in that enormous throng came away thinking their man might actually upset the incumbent. Polling was a less exact science then, and far less incessant. A few days later I borrowed one of my dad's yellow legal pads, compiled all the information I could gather, and made my first-ever election prediction: Nixon would win. Sorry George (may he rest in peace).<br />
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As it turned out, that was not a tough call, even for an 11-year-old. President Nixon was re-elected in what was, at the time, the largest electoral landslide in history (he beat McGovern 61%-38%, and won 520 electoral votes to McGovern's 17*, an Electoral College wipe-out exceeded only by Ronald Reagan's 525-13 win a dozen years later). <br />
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In 2012, margins like that seem almost inconceivable. Voters in California and Alabama agreeing on who should be president? Democrats voting overwhelmingly for the Republican? Republicans embracing a candidate from the other party? The country is so polarized today, it's hard to imagine an election <i>not</i> being close anymore. Since 1988, no presidential candidate has won the popular vote by more than eight and a half points, although we have seen landslide-level results in the Electoral College (Bush beat Dukakis 426-111; Clinton beat Dole 379-159).<br />
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When this election cycle began, it seemed like it might mirror Bill Clinton's 1996 re-election; now, after flirting briefly with 2000-level unpredictability, it looks more to me like 2004, when a not especially popular incumbent overcame some structural disadvantages to eke out a second term over a sometimes awkward challenger from Massachusetts, thanks to a narrow victory in Ohio (does that sound familiar enough?).<br />
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This election remains a tough one to get exactly right. Starting with that 1972 Nixon victory, I am eight out of ten in my general election predictions (George W. Bush confounded me twice; in 2000, I called the popular vote for Bush but the Electoral College for Gore, a crazy split I had never predicted before, but of course I got it backwards). In 1976, I started predicting the major party nominees before the first primary or caucus. I am ten out of ten picking the Republican nominee, and eight of ten predicting the Democrat. So that's a total of 26 predictions right out of 30, a success rate of 86.7%. In the 2008 election, the final Gallup Poll predicted Barack Obama would win by 13 points. The last CBS News/New York Times projected a nine-point Obama victory. I said Obama would win by six, 52.5-46.5%. Obama wound up with 52.9%, but McCain only had 45.7%, so I was off by a total of 1.2%. I picked 47 of the 51 states (and DC) right, but I missed on four large swing states that I thought were closer, so I was way off on the Electoral College (I predicted Obama would win 291-247 but the final numbers were 365-173). So take my educated guess with whatever size grain of salt seems appropriate.<br />
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There is a near-constant stream of predictive data to absorb these days. My inbox is stuffed daily with new polls from public firms, private ones, the campaigns themselves. Nate Silver crunches the numbers for all to see (and takes undue heat for it from scoffing Republicans, while grateful Democrats - this year, at least - bow toward his laptop) at his <a href="http://nyti.ms/UcMzfM">indispensable 538 blog</a>. There are more websites, blogs and poll trackers than any sentient being could possibly consume. I know people on both sides who are guilty of selection bias, cherry-picking the polls they like the best while dismissing the others as biased, flawed, rendered moot by laughable methodology.<br />
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To which I say: take a deep breath and step back. Look at the big picture. The consensus of the national popular vote polling is that this race is a dead heat. Every poll is either tied, or shows a narrow lead (mostly for Obama at this point) that is within the margin of error. That means the outcome could be anywhere from Romney winning by six to Obama winning by six, and few of these surveys will have been "wrong." The most useful information they provide is that there seems to be a late trend towards President Obama, which began when Hurricane Sandy struck and accelerated in the final 48 hours of the campaign.<br />
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Trends like that tend to be instructive. But as we all know, Americans don't actually elect their presidents - they choose electors from each state, who do that for them. And a review of the state-by-state data shows a narrow, but probably sufficient, edge for President Obama. I am not a disciple of the Real Clear Politics "polling average," which simply adds together different kinds of polls with vastly diverse methodologies and averages their results, which strikes me as silly. RCP also omits about as many legitimate polls as it includes. I cast a wider net for polling data, and the ones I read have consistently told me, for most of this campaign, that President Obama is likely to carry a majority of the battleground states.<br />
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Probability is about what <i>could</i> happen versus what <i>should</i> happen. Could there be an unexpectedly high Republican turnout in the suburbs of Philadelphia that hands Pennsylvania to Mitt Romney? Absolutely. Could Ohio independents and undecideds break as a bloc for Romney on Election Day and deprive the president of those 18 precious electoral votes? Sure. Could the Romney ground game be superior in Iowa, springing a Hawkeye State surprise that puts Mitt over the top? No question. The Green Bay Packers and New York Giants had no business winning the last two Super Bowls. They barely even made the playoffs at all. The St. Louis Cardinals and San Francisco Giants were long shots to win the last two World Series. Oddsmakers said none of those teams was likely to win - but they all did. So saying President Obama will probably win is not saying that Mitt Romney definitely won't. But the preponderance of the available information tells me the president <i>should</i> win.<br />
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Now I don't base my predictions solely on polling and other empirical data. I've traveled to a dozen states this campaign cycle, including the critical swing states of New Hampshire, Nevada, Florida and North Carolina. I interview voters, cover campaign events, talk with the candidates. I meet with local pollsters and pundits, quiz the undecided and try to get a sense of the public mood. Then I combine my own reporting with all those numbers on my computer, add a dash of gut hunch, and spit out a prediction. It's not entirely scientific, but it almost always works.<br />
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(I will also add that although I covered him in person many, many times, George W. Bush is the only president, or major presidential candidate, since 1976 that I have never actually "met" or interviewed. Maybe that lack of contact was the missing ingredient that led me astray in predicting his two elections).<br />
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There is a nagging spot in my gut that tells me Romney is going to win. President Obama's embarrassingly poor performance in the first debate turned the election in Romney's direction. Subsequent events - the next two debates, improving economic numbers, Hurricane Sandy - have turned it back. But there's been an unquestionable tightening in the Midwestern states in particular, and I would not be that surprised if Romney were to win Ohio, after all, and with it, the White House. As I said though, my predictions aren't based just on gut feelings, or on the polls, but on a combination of factors. And after I push the "stir" button on my political blender, here is what I come out with (the <b>swing states </b>in bold type):<br />
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President Obama will win California, Connecticut, Delaware, District of Columbia, Hawaii, Illinois, <b>Iowa,</b> Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, <b>Nevada, New Hampshire,</b> New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, <b>Ohio,</b> Oregon, <b>Pennsylvania,</b> Rhode Island, Vermont, <b>Virginia</b>, Washington and <b>Wisconsin</b>, for a total of <b>294</b> electoral votes.<br />
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Mitt Romney will win Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, <b>Colorado</b>,<b> Florida,</b> Georgia, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, Montana, Nebraska, <b>North Carolina</b>, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming for a total of <b>244 </b>electoral votes.<br />
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In order of most likely for Obama to most likely for Romney, I rank the swing states this way: Nevada, Wisconsin, Iowa, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Ohio, Virginia, Colorado, Florida, North Carolina. If there is real momentum for the president, he could pick up Florida and Colorado, giving him as many as 332 electoral votes. If the pendulum swings the other way, Romney could take Virginia, leaving the president at 281. If it swings far enough for him to capture Ohio too, then obviously Romney will win, 275-263. But I don't think that will happen. I'm sticking with my 294-244 prediction.<br />
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On the popular vote, I keep reminding those people who say President Obama has to get to 50% or he loses, that he doesn't. These two are probably playing for 98% of the vote. There are more, and stronger than usual, third, fourth and fifth party candidates on the ballots in most states, who will probably combine to take about two percent of the vote. So the winner probably only needs 49% plus one. I think President Obama will top 50% anyway. My official prediction is:<br />
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Barack Obama 50.2%<br />
Mitt Romney 47.9%<br />
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Remember, it can take a month before we have the final, final numbers. In 2008, Barack Obama's margin of victory increased a full point, from six to seven, during four weeks of ballot counting. And if Ohio or Iowa or Florida is especially close, we could be left hanging for a few days - or longer - on that electoral vote count.<br />
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It could be a long, late Election Night. I will be tweeting like a gatling gun at @SovernNation, and reporting live on KCBS 740AM/106.9FM in San Francisco, and will also be checking in as part of the CBS Radio News network coverage. Please tune in for constant returns, reaction and analysis. Be sure to vote, and see you tomorrow....<br />
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<i>*Yes, sharp-eyed readers, 520 + 17 only = 537. The 538th electoral vote that year went to the Libertarian candidate, John Hospers, a pal of Ayn Rand's. A "faithless elector" who was pledged to Nixon cast his ballot for Hospers instead when the Electoral College met in Decembe</i>r.<br />
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<br />Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-12625950653362328142012-03-19T00:17:00.001-07:002012-03-19T00:17:00.624-07:00"Romney Has No Aloha"Mitt Romney can afford to buy his own private island. He doesn't have to. He already owns all the islands under U.S. control, or at least the Republican neighborhoods on them. He swamped Rick "You Puerto Ricans should all learn English" Santorum in yesterday's Puerto Rico primary, adding the Isle of Enchantment to his archipelago of victories in Guam, the Virgin Islands, the Northern Marianas, American Samoa and Hawaii. At this rate, he's a cinch to carry Manhattan and might even win Madagascar. Romney should root for Texas or Louisiana to float off into the Gulf of Mexico so that he can finally pick up a win in the true South.<br />
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Romney isn't the darling of the islands because of his tropical flair or his hula moves. He's winning America's most remote territories thanks to superior organization and financial strength. He and Ron Paul are the only Republicans who truly have 50-state campaigns, or, more accurately, 56. It's no coincidence that they're the only GOP candidates who have run before. They've learned from past experience and they've built transcontinental operations, unlike Rick Santorum and Newt Gingrich, who are living state-to-state, cobbling together teams only as they survive long enough to need them. <br />
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In Maui last week, it was clear that Ron Paul was the people's choice. Hawaii's first-ever Republican presidential caucus coincided with a "Day of Liberation" declared by the "Reinstated Hawaiian Government" movement, which seeks to restore Hawaii's monarchy and its independence as a sovereign island nation (perhaps Puerto Rico can replace it as the 50th state once everyone in San Juan learns English to Senator Santorum's liking). Monarchists paraded around Maui, honking their horns and waving Hawaiian flags. Then many of them trooped into their local caucus meeting and voted for Paul (others didn't vote at all, refusing to participate in legitimizing the federal government). <br />
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The local Paul campaign wooed supporters with free tours of the nearby lava caves. Romney's team countered with free samples from an organic mango farm. But the Republican frontrunner had more than fruit slices up his sleeve. He'd long ago locked up the support of the local party apparatus and Hawaii's GOP establishment. He ran a sophisticated get-out-the-vote campaign on heavily populated Oahu, especially around the Brigham Young University campus on the North Shore. He sent his son Matt to rally supporters on the eve of the caucus. <br />
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Romney eked out a victory on Maui, edging Paul by just nine votes. Paul beat him by 22 votes to take the Big Island, Hawaii. Statewide, Santorum was running a surprisingly strong second, probably buoyed by his wins in Alabama and Mississippi a few hours earlier (the results there reached the islands just as Hawaiian Republicans were heading to their caucuses), until the ballots were counted in Honolulu and in that Mormon cluster to the north.<br />
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Romney won an astounding 92% of the votes on Oahu's North Shore, enough to pull away from the field and win the state caucus by 20 points. Paul finished a distant third overall, bitterly disappointing his Maui brigade. The victory guaranteed Romney at least nine and probably 12 of Hawaii's 20 delegates, padding his already 2-to-1 delegate advantage over Santorum, and more than offsetting his narrow losses to Santorum in the two Southern states (Romney also won all of American Samoa's delegates that night). Yes, Santorum won the evening's headlines thanks to his Deep South sweep, but Romney knows convention delegates are the name of the game, and he went home with the most.<br />
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Still, the enthusiasm gap plagues Romney, even in places where he wins. Two Hawaiians who caucused for Paul described him as a "true patriot" and "a man who knows who he is and stays true to himself." When I asked what they thought of Romney, one made a face and shook his head in disgust. The other put it bluntly: "Romney has no aloha," he told me. "No soul. There is no spirit inside him." I pointed out that most Hawaiians must disagree, because Romney wound up with more than twice as many votes as their man. "No," said the Paul voter. "They know he has no aloha. They vote for him because they go along with what the party tells them to do, or because they think he can beat Obama and Ron Paul can't. But he can't beat Obama. Obama has a lot of aloha, way too much for Romney."<br />
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Even though he won this caucus, Romney can say "aloha" to his chances of winning Hawaii in November, just as he would say "adios" to Puerto Rico if that island's voters were allowed to cast ballots in the general election. Both lean heavily to the Democrats (native son Obama carried Hawaii with 72% of the vote in 2008). But right now Romney's only goal is to do whatever it takes to win the Republican nomination. That means amassing 1144 delegates by the time the primaries come to an end in one of his adopted home states, Utah, in June. The way he sees it, he doesn't need aloha, or soul, or the force, or whatever you want to call it. He only needs numbers. He's veering far to the right to try to get them, dangerously far, and he'll have to stay there at least through August to keep the nomination from slipping away, leaving him precious little time to sprint back to the middle to lure independents from Obama in the fall. History hasn't been kind to candidates who value organizational strength over a passionate message, who rely on money and party clout to beat back an ideologically purer primary challenger. Just ask Gerald Ford in 1976, or Fritz Mondale in 1984. Or even Jimmy Carter in 1980 and Bob Dole in 1996.<br />
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There are no more islands on the Republican primary calendar (well, except Rhode Island, which isn't one). To clinch the nomination, Romney's going to have to find his footing on terra firma, and stop Santorum head-to-head in states where they're both actually competing. He'll need to overcome conservative passion for his rivals in the heart of the mainland, in Illinois and Indiana, Wisconsin and New York, and especially Texas and California. He'll try to win there the same way he won in Hawaii: with a finely tuned organizational machine and strong turnout in the urban centers. It's probably too late for him to learn the hula.Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-58004704872293889412012-01-04T01:19:00.000-08:002012-01-04T01:32:16.963-08:00The Race Is OnI'm not sure which overtime nail-biter was more riveting: Monday's Stanford-Oklahoma State thriller in the Fiesta Bowl, or Tuesday's crazy, razor-close Iowa Republican caucus. For Cardinal fans, the football game was certainly more heartbreaking. For supporters of all but two of the Republican candidates, Iowa was.<br />
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This kind of real human drama is what can make both politics and sports so compelling. Since primaries and caucuses became a regular feature of presidential campaigns, starting in Oregon in 1910 and really catching on for good in 1936, there simply has never been one like the Hawkeye Cauci we just witnessed. In the wee hours, CNN actually roused the two ladies in Clinton County whose sleepy, shaky vote tabulations, <a href="http://bit.ly/zWzRk1">worked out live on the telephone,</a> determined the outcome (and they immediately started trending on Twitter).<br />
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In case you went to bed before the final numbers came in, here they are:<br />
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Mitt Romney 25% (30,015 votes)<br />
Rick Santorum 25% (30,007 votes)<br />
Ron Paul 21% <br />
Newt Gingrich 13%<br />
Rick Perry 10%<br />
Michele Bachmann 5%<br />
Jon Huntsman 1% <br />
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Yes, folks, Romney won by eight votes. That is simply unprecedented in the history of American elections. Bush beating Gore by 537 votes in Florida in 2000? A veritable landslide. The Iowa result shatters the previous record for narrowest victory in a primary or caucus, held by South Dakota Governor Warren Green, who won his home state Republican primary in 1936 by 257 votes over Idaho Senator William Borah (they both lost the GOP nomination, though, to Alf Landon, who went on to crushing defeat at the hands of FDR).<br />
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The stunner here isn't just the closeness of this caucus, but which two Republicans came out on top. A month ago, this was a battle between Newt Gingrich and Ron Paul for the conservative soul of the Iowa GOP. Mitt Romney didn't intend to contest the caucus that intensely, not with social conservatives dominating the Iowa Republican Party and a sure victory awaiting him in New Hampshire. Rick Santorum was an asterisk in the polls. But with the collapse of first Herman Cain, then Michele Bachmann, then Rick Perry, Romney sensed an opening and began to pour resources into the state. Meanwhile, Santorum was plugging away, biding his time, staying true to himself and hoping the conservatives would eventually come to him. They did. Now both the Massachusetts moderate and the Pennsylvania conservative can lay claim to outperforming expectations and emerging from Iowa as the only true contenders for the nomination.<br />
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As I wrote Monday, Santorum is still a long shot, even with his out-of-nowhere surge in Iowa. Most American voters will react the way my wife did when she saw him on TV last night: "Rick who?" When they Google Santorum, the first thing they'll find will be the <a href="http://spreadingsantorum.com/">derogatory definition </a>that's haunted him ever since his <a href="http://bit.ly/dIDfyO">notorious comments about homosexuality</a> in 2003. He has little money and no ground organization in the states ahead, most critically Florida. He'll get massive media attention now, and certainly an infusion of donations and volunteers, especially from those abandoning the Perry, Bachmann and Gingrich campaigns. He can consolidate the anti-Romney conservatives and present himself as the only viable alternative. He and Paul will gang up on Romney in this weekend's New Hampshire debates, while Gingrich spews venom at the frontrunner and becomes the bomb-throwing attack dog he swore he wouldn't be. But Santorum has to ramp up in a hurry, and while the party establishment rallies around Romney, the Pennsylvanian will feel the heat of Romney's Super PAC, which will educate Republican voters about some of his more extreme positions, arguing they make him unelectable in November, and he probably won't have the resources or campaign infrastructure to respond effectively.<br />
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Romney, in the meantime, is on the verge of becoming the only non-incumbent presidential candidate ever to sweep both the Iowa caucus and the New Hampshire primary. It just hasn't happened before, and it's likely to give him powerful momentum heading into the Southern states, where he has trailed Gingrich in the polls (Romney's 25% is the lowest in history for an Iowa caucus winner, but he benefits from a perfect storm: first, a fractured field of conservatives who split the Iowa right wing, leaving the moderates to him, and next, a primary state in which he happens to be a virtual favorite son, thanks to his vacation home there and his familiarity as governor of neighboring Massachusetts). Santorum will try to take Newt's spot at the top in South Carolina and Florida, but it'll be a tall order, especially in the less conservative Sunshine State. <br />
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None of this means Romney coasts from here. Ron Paul and his fanatic base will stick around for a while. The Iowa outcome underscores that conservatives just can't stomach the wishy-washy Romney, whom many see as a robotic opportunist. Voters are clearly moved by Santorum's sincerity, by his emotional, populist appeal, by his air of authenticity. He's a smart guy and a terrific campaigner. His "victory" speech last night (delivered while Romney was pulling ahead of him for good) may have been the best I've seen so far this campaign season. It was heartfelt and real, and if that's his introduction for many voters, it will serve him well. Meanwhile, Romney stumbled awkwardly through his basic stump speech, his laugh lines falling flat like some bad Catskills comedian. The contrast between the Teleprompted Romney and the off-the-cuff Santorum will be even more stark in the days ahead.<br />
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Romney needs to break through the 25% ceiling that's kept him from pulling away from the flawed field of conservatives trying to chase him down. Electability is his trump card, and he's banking that, outside Iowa, more Republican voters prioritize beating President Obama over sticking with their core convictions. It's a cynical calculation but I think it's a winning play for Romney. He'll also be helped by a return to the focus on jobs and the economy, which weren't the central issues in Iowa, where the economy is relatively strong. The argument that Romney is the turnaround artist the country needs will resonate much more in the states to come.<br />
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Whatever lies ahead, this campaign is off to a much more rousing start than anyone anticipated, and the fun, and drama, are just beginning.Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-13185154208258109682012-01-02T13:40:00.000-08:002012-01-02T13:40:28.779-08:00Chasing ShadowsFor 36 years now (my God, how could I possibly be this old?) I have been predicting the major party presidential nominees before the caucuses and primaries begin. Through some inexplicable confluence of luck, gut hunches (or maybe that was just something I ate) and complex planetary alignment, I'm 9-for-9 picking the GOP nominee. I'm only 7-for-9 on the Democrats - and I've got a two-race losing streak (yeah yeah, still living down that Howard Dean pick in '04 and smarting from that Hillary guess last time).<br />
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Past results are no guarantee of future success. The more "expert" I supposedly become, the less I seem to know - although I did <a href="http://sovernnation.blogspot.com/2008/01/into-great-wide-open.html">predict John McCain's nomination </a>while the rest of the punditocracy was still planning Rudy Giuliani's inauguration, so some of my fading instincts remain intact.<br />
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At any rate, it is the eve of the 2012 Iowa Caucus, which means it's time to resurrect the blog just in time to crawl out on a very shaky limb and make my quadrennial prognostications, whether I want to or not.<br />
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This time, the Democrats are easy. Despite those mystifying robocalls touting Hillary Clinton as a replacement candidate for Barack Obama, I will boldly and confidently predict that President Obama will win the Democratic primaries and be nominated for a second term. There. Snapped that losing streak on the donkey side (and I don't buy that Clinton-and-Biden-job swap rumor for a second, either. Sorry, <a href="http://dailycaller.com/2011/12/29/robert-reich-obama-hillary-2012/">Robert Reich</a>, your trial balloon has just been popped).<br />
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As for the Republicans...well, the last 12 months might as well have never happened. A year ago, Mitt Romney was the frontrunner and the nominee apparent, and I've seen nothing to change that calculus. The most conservative GOP voters still don't trust him. Most of the evangelicals will never support him. But I still don't see a viable alternative for the Republican Party. Each of the more conservative candidates has taken a turn as the Not Romney, and each has faded as fast as he or she has risen. I'm puzzled by why it's taken this long for Rick Santorum to get his chance, and perhaps since his surge is coming last, he can actually parlay it into an Iowa caucus victory and a sustained spell as the Anyone But Romney candidate. Santorum's always been the longest of long shots - ultra-conservative, he couldn't even get re-elected in Pennsylvania so how could he win the presidency? - but he comes across as smart, sincere and committed. No one can question his conservative principles or his knowledge of the issues, which you'd think would endear him to the voters who matter most in an Iowa GOP caucus. Through every spasm of excitement about Trump, Perry, Bachmann, Cain, I wondered why Santorum wasn't catching fire with the right, and if he ever would. Finally, he is, and just in time for him to emerge from Iowa, improbably, in the top tier.<br />
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But even if Santorum or Ron Paul wins in Iowa tomorrow, it won't be enough to deny Mitt Romney the nomination. Neither of them can broaden his appeal beyond the party's right wing, and neither can plausibly move enough to the middle to defeat President Obama in November. The Republicans remain torn in the way that the out party always is: when the Democrats aren't in control, there's a fight between its liberal wing and the pragmatists who want to nominate a centrist who can win the White House (read: Bill Clinton). When the GOP is on the outs, it squabbles between the conservative purists and the nominate-an-electable-moderate crowd. In California, the conservatives consistently outnumber the pragmatists, which is why the Republican Party here is sliding towards irrelevance. The conservatives dominate the process in Iowa, too. But the national GOP establishment desperately wants to deny Obama a second term, so it is rallying around Romney now, trying to consolidate his support and present his nomination as inevitable. It probably is.<br />
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Romney, Paul and Santorum will all declare victory of sorts in Iowa, no matter who wins the most votes (or the most delegates, which won't be decided until much later in Iowa's nominating process). Either Newt Gingrich, Rick Perry or Michele Bachmann probably will too - whichever of them runs fourth will pronounce him/herself this cycle's "comeback kid" and live, briefly, to fight on in New Hampshire and South Carolina. But the rest will be mortally wounded and will bow out, followed soon enough by Jon Huntsman after he gets blasted back to Utah by Romney in the New Hampshire primary.<br />
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That will leave Romney as the mainstream establishment frontrunner, and Paul and Santorum to slug it out for the conservative mantle. When the campaign shifts to Florida at the end of the month, Romney's superior organization and financial firepower will win that state's winner-take-all retail TV ad war, and he will win again in Nevada a month from now to essentially end the race. The campaign to actually clinch the nomination will slog on, now that the GOP has changed its rules so that most states award delegates proportionally, but it will become a formality, and the Obama-Romney general election sniping will begin in earnest by Groundhog Day.<br />
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Which is apropos, since Mitt Romney has been looking over his shoulder at the shape-shifting shadow of "the conservative candidate" for more than a year now. Within a month, the sun will be shining brightly enough on his candidacy to spring him forward, into a fall fight with President Obama.<br />
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<i>Tune to KCBS (740AM/106.9FM/cbssf.com) for returns from Iowa, with attendant analysis, and from New Hampshire next week. I will be blogging on a regular basis again now that 2012 is here and my <a href="http://www.tweetheartnovel.com/">Twitter novel</a> is in the rear view mirror.</i>Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-39361234771598283852011-09-08T00:53:00.000-07:002011-09-08T00:53:52.721-07:00The Folding TentSome quick notes after watching tonight's Republican presidential debate at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley...<br />
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There may be eight people running - and another one, Sarah Palin, still mulling a campaign - but this has quickly shrunk to a two-person race. It's Romney v. Perry, pure and simple. The other six candidates on that stage are no longer relevant and have zero chance of winning the Republican nomination.<br />
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Mitt Romney turned in another solid performance, as he usually does. He remains the smoothest and most polished of the GOP candidates. He's well-versed on the issues, quick on his feet and tough to rattle, although when the questions turn to topics with which he's less comfortable he has a bad habit of looking like he just ate some bad fish.<br />
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Rick Perry made a decent debut on the national stage, but between his deep-set eyes and that haircut he looks like a shady land agent trying to sell you a dry hole in West Texas. After a strong start jabbing Romney on job creation, Perry faded badly and was downright inarticulate at times. More than once, I found myself wondering what in the world he was trying to say during his stumbling non-answers to some of the questions. I do give him props (or, as Perry pronounced it, "propes") for standing up for HPV vaccinations for young girls, a program that's anathema to the conservatives he's courting. Perry firmly, and correctly, pointed out that HPV causes cervical cancer and that the vaccine prevents it. End of argument. Lance Armstrong has tremendous political influence in Texas and counts Governor Perry among the strong supporters of his anti-cancer platform there. It's a rare case where Perry embraces clear science over political ideology.<br />
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Jon Huntsman comes off as the most reasonable, sensible adult on the stage - which means he's doomed. He'd make a decent independent candidate but has no hope of winning a Republican primary. He's clearly pinning all his hopes on New Hampshire, where independents can vote in the GOP primary, but he isn't nearly conservative enough to carry this candidacy much further.<br />
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Michele Bachmann's reign as Flavor of the Month is over. She was a summer fling for Republican voters but the romance is done. The bigger her hair gets, the smaller her poll numbers. Perry sucks all the wind out of her sails. Watch her fade as Tea Party voters shift to the Texas governor.<br />
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Ron Paul's act has worn terribly thin. He's not as sharp as he was four years ago, and his anti-government rants have lost their fresh appeal. But now that the Republican Party will start awarding delegates proportionally, Paul may finally have something to show for his diehard following. If he can win 10 or 12 percent in some of the early states, he'll hang around for a while and build a small bloc of support.<br />
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Newt Gingrich - are you kidding? When does he come to his senses and end the delusion that is his campaign?<br />
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Herman Cain's "9-9-9" tax plan started to sound like an infomercial. If we embrace his flat tax proposal, do we get a free pizza or maybe some garlic knots?<br />
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Finally, with nothing to lose, Rick Santorum actually comes across as an authentic, sincere voice. His defense of welfare reform was impassioned, compassionate and impressive. He was clear and thoughtful on immigration and the economy, too. But he's not electable, can't raise enough money and his natural constituency has already abandoned him for conservatives with more buzz, like Perry.<br />
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Bottom line: Perry lost some of his luster and Romney showed he's not about to shrink from the challenge of a long, drawn-out fight. He's a proven fundraiser and, despite the polls showing Perry pulling way ahead, must still be considered a co-frontrunner. Perry got the chance to back down from declaring Social Security a "Ponzi scheme" but instead repeated it and called the entitlement program a "monstrous lie." Those words will scare the moderates and independents Perry would need to win a general election, but more immediately they will worry the conservatives who want to nominate someone who can beat President Obama. Perry's trying to seize the right-wing mantle to win the nomination, but many of his positions - dismantle Social Security, the scientists are wrong about climate change, evolution is just another theory - are radical enough to make him unelectable, and that could convince Republican primary voters to come back to Romney as their best bet to recapture the White House.<br />
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Ronald Reagan remains the paragon of modern conservatism, but he believed in the "big tent" GOP, deficit spending and amnesty for illegal immigrants. If he'd actually been on this stage debating, instead of just appearing as a romanticized icon in a gauzy NBC tribute, he would have been ridiculed as some sort of weak-willed liberal. The challenge for this field is to be authentically conservative enough to placate the Tea Party and engage the evangelicals without alienating independents and sacrificing electability.<br />
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It's only September. They've got five more months, and countless more debates, to get it right before anyone even starts voting.Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-6296372923549214379.post-28818633125139036462011-08-05T00:48:00.000-07:002011-08-05T00:48:28.764-07:00Meet the New Bums, Same As the Old BumsJudging from our latest <a href="http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-503544_162-20088388-503544.html">CBS News-New York Times Poll</a>, it looks like 2012 is shaping up to be the fourth consecutive anti-incumbent national election - with voters in their most foul mood yet.<br />
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The question is, which bums will they decide to toss out this time? And will it make any difference, or will the electorate be even angrier in 2014?<br />
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2006 was an historically bad year for incumbents: Democrats seized control of both houses of Congress from the Republicans, who for the first time in their history failed to defeat any sitting Democrats. Two years later, with President Bush's Republican Party branded "toxic," the Democrats completed their sweep, expanding their House and Senate majorities and electing Barack Obama president.<br />
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But voters quickly grew disenchanted with Mr. Obama and disappointed at the Democrats' failure to reinvigorate the economy. The anti-incumbency tide washed back on the Democrats in 2010, as they lost the House to the GOP and only narrowly clung to control of the Senate. Emboldened Republicans set their sights on reclaiming both the Senate and the White House in 2012.<br />
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Ah, but the pendulum of voter disenchantment swings heavily in all directions, and now it is taking steady aim at the head of Speaker John Boehner.<br />
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The new survey shows voter disapproval of Congress at an all-time high, a record 82%. Only 14% approve of the Congressional performance. Boehner bears the brunt of voter anger: 57% disapprove of him while a meager 30% think he's doing a good job. A record 84% are dissatisfied or angry with Washington. Even during the Reagan Revolution of 1980 and the Contract With America uprising of 1994, we didn't see voters seething like this.<br />
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That gives each party an opportunity for gain next year, but it also leaves both vulnerable to crushing defeat. The Democrats could wrest the House, and the Speakership, back from Boehner. But they could also lose their slim Senate majority to the Republicans, in which case 2012 would give us the Capitol Hill version of a house swap. That would leave things essentially unchanged, with each party controlling one house of Congress, which recent events have shown is hardly a scenario for constructive compromise.<br />
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President Obama is sailing surprisingly sanguinely above the chaos. Forty-eight percent approve of his performance, 47% don't. Forty-seven percent trust him more to handle the economy, while 33% have more faith in the Republicans. Right now Mr. Obama probably remains a narrow favorite for re-election, especially since his opponent seems likely to be either Mitt Romney or Michele Bachmann (or possibly Texas Governor Rick Perry), any of whom will be a deeply flawed national candidate.<br />
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If the economy remains in a rut, and voter antipathy intensifies, one of those Republicans could oust Mr. Obama. The GOP could seize the Senate and maybe even hold on to the House. But right now these numbers point to serious trouble for Speaker Boehner and the Republicans, and a narrow escape for the president, especially if the economy finally finds its footing. <br />
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No matter what happens next year - and that election is still a l-o-n-g way off - it's hard to imagine the outcome effecting profound change in the way Washington works. Which means whichever party emerges on top will be feeling the voters' wrath again by the middle of 2013, as this cycle's challengers become the next one's incumbents, and the people get ready to toss the newly elected bums onto the growing pile of old ones.Doug Sovernhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/08282369357166949141noreply@blogger.com1