Tag Archives: Democratic Party

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The Strange Establishment Backlash Against Bernie Sanders

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English: 2009 Black Tie Dinner Distribution - ...
English: 2009 Black Tie Dinner Distribution – Human Rights Campaign Foundation (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

“I have friends and supporters in the Human Rights [Campaign], in Planned Parenthood,” Democratic presidential aspirant Bernie Sanders told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on January 19.  “But you know what, Hillary Clinton has been around there for a very, very long time and some of these groups are part of the establishment.”

The comment in reply to Maddow’s query as to his feelings about those groups endorsing Clinton’s campaign rather than his own, produced an immediate and bizarre backlash from both Clinton and the groups in question. “Really Senator Sanders?” tweeted Clinton. “How can you say that groups like @PPact and @HRC are part of the ‘establishment’ you’re taking on?”

Well, let us count the ways.

Planned Parenthood is a “non-profit” business with a history going back nearly a century, which has for decades kept its lips firmly latched on the US government’s corporate welfare teat to the tune of half a billion dollars a year. It keeps that money flowing with intensive, ongoing lobbying and litigation to ensure that a plurality of American politicians support its goals and guarantee its revenues. It’s as much a part of the American political establishment as any investment bank or old-money K Street lobbying shop.

The Human Rights Campaign is a more interesting case — and more obviously “establishment” than even Planned Parenthood. It’s younger (founded in 1980) and poorer (only about $40 million in annual revenues), but historically, it’s been purely a partisan establishment political project. HRC’s job, for 30-odd years, was to cajole LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) voters into pulling the lever for Democrats instead of for Libertarians, Greens and other political candidates who actually supported LGBT rights. And it did a pretty good job as PR flack. The Democrats nearly monopolized the LGBT vote without ever having to actually earn that vote.

Here’s a good indicator of just how “establishment” the Human Rights Campaign is:  Bernie Sanders publicly supported gay rights at least as early as 1983. Hillary Clinton finally stopped publicly opposing same-sex marriage three years ago, once the end of the fight was clearly in view. HRC isn’t supporting its better ally in its stated cause.  It’s supporting the Democrat it expects to win — the “establishment” Democrat — because only winners get to dispense the favors HRC feels it has earned.

The notion that Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Campaign are anything but “establishment” through and through doesn’t pass the laugh test.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Election 2016: Busted Ain’t Such a Bad Thing

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Let me alert you to three facts:

Fact #1: Donald Trump has a ceiling of support among Republican primary voters.

Fact #2:  While it’s hard to tell exactly how high that ceiling is, it’s almost certainly short of an absolute majority in any state.

Fact #3: The Republican National Committee’s 2016 rules require state and territorial Republican parties holding primaries and caucuses prior to March 15, 2016 — that’s 29 of them — to allocate delegates proportionally rather than in “winner take all” schemes.

Assuming Trump remains in the race for his party’s presidential nomination, he will almost certainly arrive at the GOP national convention without enough delegates to win on the first ballot. Which means the Republican Party faces the prospect of a busted (party poo-bahs prefer the term “brokered”) convention.

Party establishments generally view that prospect with horror, and who can blame them? In 1924, the Democratic National Convention voted 103 times before coming up with a nominee.  The parties have massaged their convention rules over the decades to turn the end phase of their nomination processes into convivial coronations. The last true major party “brokered convention” happened to the Democrats in 1952, although the GOP came close in 1976.

But while busted conventions almost certainly bode ill for parties in the short term — that is, the particular election cycles in which they take place — they’re actually a great thing for both the parties and the public in the long term.

When George Wallace, whom I’m otherwise no fan of, asserted in 1968 that “there’s not a dime’s worth of difference between the Republicans and Democrats,” he was uttering a truism that has only become more true in the 48 years since.

Over time, the Republicans and Democrats have come to take for granted their ability to stack up constituencies and, whether those constituencies consider themselves well-represented or not, get the vote out to win elections. After all, where else do those constituencies — of particular interest to me, civil libertarian Democrats and economic libertarian Republicans — have to go?

It’s about time American political parties started having real debates again instead of just stacking hostage constituencies and handing out favors to the people who can deliver those constituencies.

And hey, no time like the present. Since the Republicans seem determined to lose the 2016 presidential election anyway, why not turn that loss into an opportunity?

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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Spoiled Rotten: Who Owns Your Vote?

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There’s a word that sets my teeth on edge, bubbling up among the commentariat every other year as election campaigns heat up. In this cycle I’m starting to hear it earlier than usual, mainly because prominent candidates — first Donald Trump, now Jim Webb — are rumored to be considering independent bids for the presidency.

Since the word is out there early, signifying a bad idea, I’m coming out early to combat that bad idea.

The word I’m referring to is “spoiler.”

You’ve heard the arguments, I’m sure: If everyone in Florida who voted for Ralph Nader in 2000 had voted for Al Gore instead, we wouldn’t have ended up with George W. Bush (as a side note, if everyone who had voted for Harry Browne in 2000 in New Mexico had voted for Dubya instead, Florida wouldn’t have mattered).

“A vote for the Libertarian is a vote for the Democrat.” “A vote for the Green is a vote for the Republican.” “A vote for anyone but the candidate I support is a vote for the candidate I fear.”

Horseapples.

First of all, let’s get one thing straight: Your vote is yours and yours alone. It doesn’t belong to a candidate until you cast it for that candidate, and you don’t owe it to any candidate until he or she has — in your opinion and your opinion only — EARNED it. You have no obligation whatsoever to vote for someone else’s hypothetical “lesser evil” instead of for your own carefully considered greater good.

Secondly, the “spoiler” phenomenon is largely a myth. As a partisan Libertarian, I often hear the claim that people who vote Libertarian would instead vote Republican if they didn’t have a Libertarian option. That’s sometimes true, but decades of exit polling says that Libertarians “take votes from” Democrats in about the same ratio as “from” Republicans on average, and sometimes more so (for example, in the 2013 election for governor of Virginia, Libertarian Robert Sarvis’s voters said, by a two to one margin, that their second choice was Democrat Terry McAuliffe, not Republican Ken Cuccinelli).

Finally, even if “spoiling” is a real phenomenon, so what? If the candidate who wanted your vote didn’t get it, maybe that candidate should have worked harder to deserve it. If there’s any chance to bring one or both of the major parties around to the views of third party voters, that chance is represented by the “spoiler” factor: “What do we have to do to get back that 3%  we lost by last time?”

As you watch the 2016 campaigns unfold, keep these three things in mind. Vote your own priorities and let the chips fall where they may.

Thomas L. Knapp is director and senior news analyst at the William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism (thegarrisoncenter.org). He lives and works in north central Florida.

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