April 20, 2016

Single White Men Can't Deliver Bernie Sanders Victory Against Hillary In New York

April 20, 2016/ Anne Enke

Brooklyn Native Bernie Sanders Lost His Childhood Block To Hillary Clinton In NY Primary New York Daily News

Now this adds insult to injury. In New York one can check how your block voted in yesterday's primary. Bernie Sanders lost his childhood block 56%-38% to Madame Secy Hillary Clinton. Bernie lost Brooklyn in total by a larger margin 60%-40%.

Brooklyn support for Clinton was particularly heavy in Rogby-Remsen Village (79%), East Flatbush-Farragut (77%) and Brookville area (76%). Sanders backers turned out in Greenpoint, where the Vermont senator locked down 64% of the vote — his best showing in any city neighborhood. He was also popular in Dyker Heights (56%) and Bushwick North (54%).

New York douses the Bern by Jonathan Capahart The Washington Post

According to the exit polls, Sanders won 67 percent of voters age 18 to 29. Clinton won all the others. Sanders eked out a 51 percent to 49 percent win over Clinton for the white vote. But Clinton won 75 percent of the African American vote and 63 percent of the Hispanic vote. 79 percent of Black woman supported Clinton. With the exception of the 50-50 split with Sanders of voters who have attended “some college,” Clinton won all education brackets. Those with a high school diploma or less (70 percent), a college degree (53 percent) and postgraduate degrees (56 percent) all went for Clinton.

Now for the unexpected part: Clinton evenly split the votes of those identifying as “liberal.” I thought for sure beforehand that result would have been more lopsided in favor of Sanders. Despite Sanders’s economic message geared toward the 99 percent, Clinton won all income groups. Her highest support (59 percent) was among those voters earning less than $30,000. Although Sanders did win 57 percent of the vote from those who said “income inequality” was the “most important issue”, Clinton won 59 percent of the vote of those who said the economy and jobs were their “most important issue.”

Surprise New York Democrats Like the Democratic Party by Joan Walsh The Nation

Many New York Democrats do not appreciate the Sanders campaign’s attacks on their party, writes Joan Walsh. And they really don’t like his supporters’ disruptions at Clinton rallies, now that the author has been to a total of five Clinton events in Brooklyn.

Washington Heights, and the Bronx in the last few weeks, and I can say conclusively: The biggest applause lines always have to do with Sanders’s recent status as a Democrat, and Clinton’s long history with the party. At all of these events, Clinton surrounded herself with local Democratic leaders, while Sanders has generally been promoted at his much larger New York rallies by a combination of grassroots activists and celebrities, not by local elected officials. To lefties convinced that such folks are corrupt post-Tammany hacks, this is no doubt a selling point for Sanders. But for ordinary people who consider themselves Democrats—and I’ve met a multiracial throng of avid Democrats who are home health workers, nannies, bus drivers, teachers, waiters, social workers, and museum administrators at Clinton rallies—it is part of why he will lose on Tuesday, and perhaps lose big.

At a rally at Co-op City in the Bronx last week, Assemblyman Michael Benedetto riled up the crowd for Clinton by noting, “Only one of them is a Democrat,” to cheers. Bronx City Councilman Andy King kept up the theme. “We don’t want any BS here,” (also, only in New York have I heard people mock Sanders by his initials.) “It’s good to be Democrats, and it’s good to be for Hillary.” Bronx Borough President Ruben Diaz Jr. derided the Sanders supporters who rallied in the Bronx earlier this month carrying “The Bronx is berning” signs—a tone deaf play on the infamous 1978 World Series, when the New York Yankees played against a backdrop of arson and urban despair. It is not a punch line to Bronx residents. “The Bronx will not feel the Bern” on Tuesday, he predicted. “In fact, the Bronx hasn’t been burning for decades.”

In New York We Don't Need No BS

Supporters of Bernie love rallies. Supporters of Hillary love to vote. The meme above says it all. But Bernie supporters like to get in our faces. Walsh sets the stage.

At a rally in Washington Heights on Sunday, Clinton supporters mixed it up with Sanders backers who came to disrupt what was billed as a “block party” to get out the vote in this heavily Latino neighborhood. Clinton surprised the crowd with a short unscheduled performance, at which she briefly danced to Latin music with State Senator Adriano Espaillat, thrilling the audience (though haters would predictably hate online later.) Meanwhile, a young white woman carrying a “Unidos Con Bernie” sign pushed through the crowd, jostling the older Latinas who were crushing the stage to get closer to Clinton, chanting at them, bewilderingly, “Shame, shame, shame.” It was not a good look.

After Clinton left, and her supporters dissipated in her wake, the Sanders backers got noisier—and they got a lot of clap-back from black and Latino neighborhood Democrats who stood around to challenge their views.

“I’ve never, ever seen this in a Democratic primary,” Megan McLaughlin said, with a lot of irritation. The black Democrat is the retired head of the Federation of Protestant Welfare Agencies and a lifelong advocate for poor children of color. “I mean, one Democrat’s supporters, showing up, disrupting another Democrat’s rally? Is there no respect? You go to your candidate’s rallies, and I’ll go to mine. It’s unacceptable.”

When a 16-year-old named Justin, holding a Bernie sign, shows up, he explains that he's not a Sanders supporter but he “hates” Hillary Clinton. Alice Dear, who ran the African Development Bank under President Bill Clinton, joins the conversation, trying to reason with him. Why did he “hate” Clinton? “It’s a lot of misconceptions in our community about the Clintons,” he told them. “I ask my mother all the time: ‘Why do you support her?’ And she says: ‘Because she’s a woman, and because Bill did well for us.’ But that’s just lies.”

McLaughlin asks him: “Do you know her record on healthcare? Or on immigration? I’m an immigrant!” A young (but older than Justin) female Sanders supporter with a “Bernie para presidente” T-shirt joins the circle and is screaming at Dear and McLaughlin. “Hillary didn’t just vote for the Iraq war—she promoted it state to state for George W. Bush! She traveled around the country to sell it!” Dear tells her that isn’t true—or at least, no one has ever reported that news. The young Sanders supporter knows better. Pointing her finger in the older woman’s face, she yells Walsh writes:

“It is true! George Bush has given her credit for that! She spread the hate, because of September 11!” she yells at a higher pitch. “She is not qualified to be commander in chief!” Like the woman who roamed the crowd earlier crying “Shame,” this Sanders supporter was strangely overwrought, seeming near tears. “Bring it down now, bring it down,” Dear told the young woman, who walked away in rage before I could get her name, saying she would vote for Jill Stein. “There’s another party out there,” she warned the older Democrats.

A calmer Cesar Andrade, Sanders’s Washington Heights organizer, moves in to take up the woman’s argument. “Do you really think Hillary will push for universal healthcare?” he asks the two women, only a little condescendingly.

“Do you realize she has pushed for it her entire career?” Dear shot back.

The two Democratic women asked Andrade, a medical student who used to work enrolling immigrants in the ACA, if he will support Clinton if Sanders loses. “I’m still thinking about it,” he told them. “I don’ t know. If I vote for Hillary, I am turning against all my values. She was a Goldwater Girl!”

Indeed she was -- at age 16. Me, too. I was a Rockefeller Republican once. Walsh summarizes:

I felt I’d seen a microcosm of the New York Clinton-Sanders race in 30 minutes: On one side stood progressive female Democrats, black, white and Latina, all of them over 40 (at least). They were well versed in Clinton’s résumé, from her work at the Children’s Defense Fund in the 1970s through her unsuccessful healthcare-reform fight in the ’90s, through her career as senator and secretary of state, and her two runs for president. All of the women expressed reservations about one or another of Clinton’s stands. “I’d prefer she was more of a pacifist,” Alice Dear told me. “I know she hasn’t been out front on the fight for $15,” Ritter admitted. “But I also know about the eight pieces of minimum-wage legislation she introduced as senator. This is how things go.” All were passionate believers in Clinton’s pragmatic progressive incrementalism. On the Sanders side, his young supporters hated Clinton with a bewildering intensity. Their outreach to the Clinton folks consisted of trying to convince them that she is evil, rather than promoting Sanders. (To be fair, I have met many Sanders supporters who are motivated by belief in his positive, radical vision. I just did not meet any of them in Washington Heights on Sunday afternoon.)

The perceived sexism of Sanders and his supporters also rankled the women there. “He called her ‘unqualified,’” McLaughlin seethed. “As women, we know, we are never qualified.” The comment about “corporate whores” didn’t sit well either. “I’m going to work my butt off for her, it’s time for a woman,” Ritter’s friend Susan Fuller, a lawyer, told me. “The true revolution won’t happen until women hold the levers of power.”

Lucky for those of us in Hillary's camp, her voters came through big time on Tuesday. But this false narrative especially about Hillary Clinton alleged promotion of the Iraq war is deeply disturbing.

Hillary Supporters Come Out of Shadows

A Lot of Hillary Clinton's New York Supporters Kept Quiet About Their Allegiances Slate

Brooklyn mom Michelle Goldberg was astounded by Clinton's big win in New York State . . . amd on her own street and the street one block over when Hillary won like 75% of the vote.

Goldberg has been living in what she though was Bernieland, so exhausted with being hassled about her support of Hillary from total stranger mansplainers hassling her in the park, that Michelle decided not to dress her baby daughter in her Hillary onesie for trips outside the house to the park. Her baby became a metaphorical flat tire whose mom needed fixing.

For so many Hillary supporters in this campaign -- and especially women -- supporting our candidate has become an underground, clandestine activity. I am bunkered down in one of those clandestine groups, which has brought great relief to my own psyche as a strong Hillary advocate. Even there, on two occasions, the Bernie Bros burst forth after reading our both genders posts and highly intelligent comments and discussion to set us straight. It's kind of creepy to think of the BernieBros lurking in your secret group, ready to mount their mansplaining podium when the moment seemed right-on.

As Goldberg gives voice to a distorted reality of support that even the Sanders campaign has bought into -- so deeply that they now argue they are entitled to the Democratic nomination, even if Hillary leads heavily in earned delegates and the popular vote by millions. Bernie deserves a coronation, they argue -- which is a pretty distorted mind warp from where this fight started.

Give Michelle Goldberg a read. As angry as all those young millennial women got over Gloria's suggestion that they were being impacted by the Bernie men around them, I'm not so sure that she wasn't just a little bit right. ~ Anne

Want to Change the System, Trump and Sanders Supporters? Learn How It Works First. The Daily Beast

Civic participation is one of the most important responsibilities of being an American. I’m old enough to remember when being selected to lead yourhomeroom class in the daily Pledge of Allegiance was a source of great pride. As kids, with our hands over our hearts, shoulders squared, we’d recite those venerable words, “…and to the republic, for which is stands…” with purpose. Unfortunately, the moral imperative of being a good steward of this great nation and understanding what it takes to preserve life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, is an afterthought for many, if any thought at all.

Without question, the insurgent candidacies of Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have jolted many Americans out of their normal political malaise. Bringing more citizens into the political fold is a good thing. But, what many of them are now realizing is that it takes more than just rolling out of bed to rage against the machine at big political rallies to select the next leader of the free world.

How Facebook Could Tilt the 2016 Election The Atlantic

Mark Zuckerberg holds an internal question-and-answer session for Facebook employees at the end of every week. The company typically circulates a poll internally asking what concerns he should address at these gatherings. On March 4, as one of these polls circulated among workers, many employees voted to ask him: “What responsibility does Facebook have to help prevent President Trump in 2017?”

This survey’s existence was first reported by Gizmodo. Facebook hasn’t yet commented on whether Zuckerberg addressed this question or had a response.

“Voting is a core value of democracy and we believe that supporting civic participation is an important contribution we can make to the community,” said a Facebook spokesman in response to the report. “We as a company are neutral—we have not and will not use our products in a way that attempts to influence howpeople vote.”

The world’s largest social network says it doesn't have the power to avert a Trump presidency—but could it? In its story on the survey question, Gizmodo offers up the possibility that the company could gradually wipe pro-Trump stories from its feed. In fact Facebook could suffocate a campaign that has run on free media attention.

“Facebook wouldn’t have to disclose it was doing this, and would be protected by the First Amendment,” writes Michael Nunez, a Gizmodo editor.

Hillary Clinton Headlines April 20, 2016

Clinton Campaign Moving Past New York to Gear Up for General Election Bloomberg Politics

Clinton campaign Chief: 'No question Women to be on VP List CNN

Hillary's Army of Women Conquers New York, Occupies the Democratic Party The Daily Beast

What Sanders supporters accidentally reveal in their crusade against closed primaries New Republic

Sanders Is Angry About Closed Primaries. He's Wrong. Bloomberg View

Bernie's Failed Revolution Politico

Bernie faces Southern revolt Politico

Bernie Sanders's Undemocratic Plan to Win the Primary Vanity Fair

How Bernie lost New York Politico

April 17, 2016

Hillary Clinton Up Close & Personal | Hillary Tightens Grip on New York

April 17, 2016/ Anne Enke

Hillary Clinton 2016: The Mystery of the Two Hillarys Politico

Watching her on those two different stages, the contrast between the two Hillarys was stunning. Up close, it felt like The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. From the start of her first trip as secretary of state in February 2009, I was struck by how different she seemed from the presidential candidate she had been only several months before. Clinton was relaxed, at ease with the press and radiating charisma in front of crowds. In Indonesia, thousands of people crammed into a Jakarta slum, all wanting to touch her or catch a glimpse as she greeted new mothers at a maternal health clinic. A member of her American security detail joked privately that if she’d gotten this kind of reception at home, the U.S. election might have turned out differently. When I asked a couple of bystanders why they’d waited hours for a glimpse of a U.S. Cabinet secretary, they looked at me as if I were a moron: “She’s the most famous and powerful woman in the world. Who wouldn’t want to see her?”

She also played the crowds like a natural. I still chuckle at a moment in her second overseas town hall that same trip when a young woman at Ewha Womans University in Seoul asked breathlessly: “I have a question related to love … How did you know your husband was … ” The end of her question was at first inaudible, and for a split second, the American reporters and aides held their breath, wondering at the implication. But the student had asked how Clinton knew her husband was the right one for her, and Clinton exclaimed with a girlish laugh that she felt “more like an advice columnist than like the secretary of state today.” She then launched into an impromptu meditation on love, describing her husband as her best friend and their marriage as “an endless conversation.” She quoted a close friend who told her at the end of her life, “I’ve loved and been loved, and all the rest is background music.” The Korean students cheered her answer, and I was struck that it felt so much more personal and revelatory than almost any moment in Clinton’s campaign.

Will HIllary Rock It On A Big East Coast Run? Ask Us April 20

Clinton tightens grip on New York Politico

Bernie Sanders is losing ground in New York, although personal observations have the race tightening. The Clinton camp has Hillary winning with allies attributing Sanders’ inability to move the dial here so far in the state — even after Bernie's alleged momentum-building primary and caucus victories — for several reasons. They include the Clintons’ deep ties to their adopted New York state; her strong backing from progressive leaders across New York; a closed primary system that does not allow independents or voters registered to the Green or other minor parties to vote; and Sanders’ consistent inability to break through with communities of color. The Vermont senator’s own missteps and miscalculation with New York's powerful media have compounded his predicament."

Most voters are impressed by the depth of the New York Daily News interviews, which Jane Sanders called "an inquisition". What can we say. Inquiring New York minds expect candidates to be articulate on the issues and aren't so easily swept away with emotion. New Yorkers are notably more pragmatic, expecting both vision and a plan to achieve it.

Hillary Clinton Gets Most Negative and Least Positive Media Coverage

Study: Hillary Clinton, not Donald Trump, gets the most negative media coverage VOX

Crimson Hexagon, a social media software analytics company based in Boston released a new analysis of hundreds of thousands of 2016 presidential campaignonline stories published since January 2015.

Not only did Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton receive the most negative coverage, but also the fewest positive stories. Consider that in the case of Hillary Clinton, the headlines have gone on for decades.