As Bernie Sander’s presidential campaign continues to push ahead, the candidate has also been drawing more scrutiny.
Here are several recent stories that caught my eye.
Boston Globe, “Bernie Sanders doesn’t get how politics works,” Michael A. Cohen.
I’m sorry, but that [Sanders view that money is the root evil in the political system] is a maddeningly simplistic — and wrong — explanation of how American politics works.
Take single-payer health care, which Sanders claims has been difficult to enact because of a corrupt campaign finance system that allows the “pharmaceutical industry” and private insurance companies to spend millions in “campaign contributions and lobbying.”
On the one hand, Sanders is right — those are powerful interests. But so are doctors and hospitals, who’d pay a huge price if single payer became law; so are Republicans, who fought tooth and nail to defeat Obamacare and would do the same for a single-payer plan; so are Democrats, who couldn’t even support a public option for Obamacare and are unlikely to support single payer; so are Americans, who may not be inclined to support another restructuring of the health care system — a few years after the last one. It’s not just about money; it’s also about a political system constructed and reinforced to block the kind of massive reform Sanders is advocating. Money is important, but it’s not even close to the whole story.
City Pulse, “The trouble with Bernie,” Mickey Hirten.
I followed him carefully when I was editor of the Burlington Free Press in Vermont. Sanders was the state’s sole congressman, lived in Burlington, and would periodically visit with the newspaper’s editors and publisher.
Considering that the Free Press’ editorial positions were very liberal, reflecting the nature of a very liberal Vermont community, one might think that meetings with Sanders were cordial, even celebratory.
They weren’t. Sanders was always full of himself: pious, self-righteous and utterly humorless. Burdened by the cross of his socialist crusade, he was a scold whose counter-culture moralizing appealed to the state’s liberal sensibilities as well as its conservatives, who embraced his gun ownership stance, his defense of individual rights, an antipathy toward big corporations and, generally speaking, his stick-it-to-them approach to politics.
Seven Days, “Anger Management: Sanders Fights for Employees, Except His Own,” Paul Heintz.
According to some who have worked closely with Sanders over the years, “grumpy grandpa” doesn’t even begin to describe it. They characterize the senator as rude, short-tempered and, occasionally, downright hostile. Though Sanders has spent much of his life fighting for working Vermonters, they say he mistreats the people working for him.
“As a supervisor, he was unbelievably abusive,” says one former campaign staffer, who claims to have endured frequent verbal assaults. The double standard was clear: “He did things that, if he found out that another supervisor was doing in a workplace, he would go after them. You can’t treat employees that way.”
Like several others quoted in this column, the campaign worker would speak only on the condition of anonymity, saying that to do otherwise would constitute “career suicide” in a small state such as Vermont. But others echoed the former employee’s story, saying the senator is prone to fits of anger.
The Intercept, “Dissent on Israel not permitted at Bernie Sanders Event,” Murtaza Hussain.
To a certain extent, the episode reflects an underlying tension between Sanders’ base of young progressives and his comparatively friendly posture toward Israel. A 2014 Pew Research Center poll found minority and millennial Democrats markedly more critical of Israeli military actions. At a town hall event last August, Sanders lost his temper with supporters who had interrupted him to question him about U.S. support for Israel, telling them to “shut up,” and attempting to change the subject to ISIS. During Israel’s 2014 military campaign against the Gaza Strip a plurality of Democrats described the action as “unjustified,” while Sanders was part of the unanimous Senate consent supporting Israel’s actions. He has continued to defend the “Protective Edge” operation as a legitimate act of self-defense, albeit one in which Israel “overreacted.”
The New Yorker, “Bernie Sanders and the Realists,” by John Cassidy.
In a debate where one of Sanders’s most important goals was to fire up his supporters in the early primary states, his was a good answer. However, if he wins Iowa and New Hampshire, it will no longer suffice. In seeking to make the transition from a popular protest candidate to one with a realistic—that word again—chance of winning the nomination, he will be forced to get more specific and to defend his policy proposals.
It’s also worth looking at the collection of stories by Seven Days, an alternative voice in Vermont, which has pulled together its coverage of Sanders over the years, as well as coverage of the current campaign.
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The current primary system has its critics who have devised alternatives. The general perception is that the earliest primary winners do not reflect the perspectives of most Americans. Nevertheless, these winning candidates are given a great political advantage by their early win. The “better” candidates – that is, candidates who might actually have wider appeal – may be getting weeded out early. The primary system was meant to be more inclusive than conventions, but it has its ways of being exclusive, especially by having Iowa and New Hampshire as the first states.
Here are six major proposals to reform the primary system.
http://www.npr.org/2016/01/26/463870736/no-way-to-pick-a-president-here-are-6-other-ways-to-do-it
1. Start with a new state instead of Iowa. (However, “Iowa’s smallness is in some ways a feature, not a bug, in that it allows less well funded candidates a fair shot.” Also, economically, Iowa is (or once was) in some ways the most representative state of all.)
2. Have a national primary. Everyone would vote all at once. (Unfortunately, this would make big money and name recognition even more important than it already is.)
3. Rotating regional primary. The plan provides that the individual state primaries (or caucuses) would be grouped into 4 regions, each region voting in a different month–either March, April, May or June. Individual states in a region would vote on or soon after the first Tuesday of their month, though not necessarily on the same day. The first year, the order would be determined by lottery, and subsequently rotate for each election. (Unfortunately, this would slant the elections toward the region that hosts the primaries first in each election cycle. Moreover, ambitious politicians would plan their lives decades in advance around the cycle of rotation.)
4. The Delaware Plan. The smallest states would vote first in primaries. (Unfortunately, smaller states tend to be more rural and white. Also, they are spread around the country, giving a boost to candidates who can afford to travel by air.)
5. The Ohio Plan. A hybrid of #3 and #4, with their virtues and flaws combined.
6. Graduated Random Presidential Primaries. Again, like #3, the smallest states would vote first, but with some randomness to add in the big states. (Ditto all the above virtues and problems.)
Let’s look at the first option, ditching Iowa as the first state in the primaries.
What other state should take its place? That is, in demographic terms, what particular state most approximately reflects the US as a whole?
Apparently it would be Illinois. This is based on factors like ethnic composition, education level, median age, median household income and religiosity. (Following Illinois is Kansas in 2nd place, Arizona in 3rd. Iowa comes in 16th, and New Hampshire 49th. Ouch.)
http://www.npr.org/2016/01/29/464250335/the-perfect-state-index-if-iowa-n-h-are-too-white-to-go-first-then-who
But should we be looking at demography? Or should we look at historical accuracy? The one state with the reputation for most consistently voting for the winning candidate has been Missouri. (Missouri is the mean population center of the US.) The other ‘bellwether’ states that most reliably picked the winners are Nevada, Ohio, New Mexico, Florida and Delaware. (Interestingly, New Hampshire does well in this regard; so does Guam.) A gambling man would take these states’ voting record into account before he looked at the demographic roots of why they voted the way they did.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellwether#States
Interestingly, there are a few counties that are also considered bellwethers, consistently voting for the winning candidate. These counties are found in Indiana, Ohio, Texas, New Mexico, Florida and New York.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellwether#Counties
How to reform the primary system? I am going to have a go at this….
First, one would assume that starting with a random arrangement of five of the six bellwether states – Missouri, Nevada, Ohio, New Mexico, Florida and Delaware – would be a better way to kick off the primary season than Iowa and New Hampshire (although I would exclude Florida, for reasons to be explained). There would be a lottery every four years to pick these bellwether states in random order.
Second, primary season would kick off on January 1st (a holiday), not in February. Every seven days or so, on Saturdays, another of the three bellwether states would hold a primary. So the second primary would be around January 8th, and the third on January 15th, fourth on the 22nd, fifth on the 29th. Around the 7th of February, the primary would take place in Florida. (Having primaries too close in succession or at the same time is an issue. It’s too expensive for many campaigners, and the whole point is to meet the candidates, especially outsiders. Something like ‘Super Tuesday’, this year on March 1st, when eleven states hold primaries simultaneously, would not be allowed.)
Third, the rest of the primary season would start off with the warmest states and move toward the colder states. Here is a map of the warmest states during Winter.
https://www.currentresults.com/Weather/US/average-state-temperatures-in-winter.php
Yes, Hawaii is even warmer than Florida. But flying to Hawaii would weed out candidates with limited budgets. So the idea is that the primaries would move westward from Florida, to Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Arizona (skipping New Mexico), and California. Then the primaries would swing eastward to Utah (skipping Nevada), Colorado, Kansas, etc., all the way to the Carolinas on the east coast, where things would move northward to Virginia and then west again. By the time the primaries reached Maine in June, the weather there would be rosy. This meandering path of the primary races would cut out the need for further extensive air travel and big budgets.
From today’s NY Times, six viewpoints of which states should vote first in the primaries:
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/02/08/which-states-should-vote-first-in-the-primaries?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-right-region®ion=opinion-c-col-right-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-right-region
The best perspective is probably by this political scientist, who does not advocate for any particular state. He argues that a lottery should determine the order in which states vote, as long as big states do not vote first.
http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2016/02/08/which-states-should-vote-first-in-the-primaries/no-big-state-should-be-first-every-primary-season
Randomly selecting the states of the first month of primary voting would take Iowa and New Hampshire’s looming presence out of the picture. But most states’ primary choices do not give an accurate indication of how Americans as a whole will vote, either. And the whole purpose of primaries is to place the candidates into some relation with broad political reality, to give the parties some idea of what is going on in the mind of the electorate (as opposed to the selection of one unpopular candidate sprung from the minds of party leaders at a convention). Only voting in so-called bellwether states could be expected do that.
Second, regional voting – with an entire region monopolizing an entire month of voting – sounds really grim, with the rest of the country alienated from the political process for months at a time. Transregional voting, which would move from one contiguous state to another, yet across regional lines, might be more engaging. However, to some degree it’s really the first month of voting that really gives stakeholder – party leaders, the press, donors, etc. – a basic idea of what Americans want (in 2016, the success of Trump and Sanders sent a shock wave throughout the political elite). So after the first month of February, most of these primaries are in some respects kind of a waste of time anyway, and regional elections would potentially be dangerous and distorting (e.g., the possibility of regional primaries in New England promoting socialists intellectuals who repulse most Americans, or long primaries in the southeast eliminating moderate Republicans).
It is interesting that the political scientist chose Virginia (where he is located) as an example of a big state. Virginia – dubbed the “mother of states” – was once much larger. (West Virginia, Ohio, Kentucky, Illinois, Indiana, Wisconsin and, even a part of Minnesota were all a part of the original Virginia territory.) This leads to another insight: That our thinking is stuck on this arbitrary, artificial entity that we refer to as a ‘state’.
Speaking of the arbitrariness of borders and the composition of states….
‘Texas’ can be understood as at least five different states. From the 2011 movie “Bernie”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JREkqCvLzSo
On the issue of population size of societies and the health and well-being of those societies, I have heard that a population of 5 million people is the maximum size for a wholesome, functioning society. Above 5 million persons, and social dysfunction and alienation set in, with all the familiar symptoms (divorce rates, drug and alcohol addiction, etc.). I assume that voter apathy also increases as societies grow too large.
Conversely, small societies have their own characteristic challenges, such as a lack of objectivity and perspective, a lack of professionalism and sophistication. For example, Iceland has a population of 323,000 people, and although it is a modern, educated and developed society, there is a certain dysfunction in the political system, in which the ideological conflicts that one finds in other societies are largely eclipsed by the personal feuds between rival politicians (it’s been this way for at least one thousand years). I am also assuming that voter apathy grows as society becomes too small, and politics and policy are obscured by personality and feudal loyalties (e.g., in rural areas of Hawaii, two-thirds of the population typically do not vote, and it has been this way since Statehood).
Therefore, another proposed innovation:
Primaries should be broken down into population chunks of no more than 5 million voters.
States with large populations would have multiple primaries (based on counties); for example, in Florida, a state with 20 million people, the primary would actually be four different primaries (beginning in Miami-Dade County at the southern tip of the state and gradually moving northward). California, a state with a population of 38 million, would have at least eight primaries (again, moving in succession from south to north). Texas has a population of 27 million, which would indeed be almost five different population chunks (although these voting blocks would not necessarily conform to the cultural configuration of the territory).
Conversely, very small states like Wyoming (population 500,000) would merge their primaries with other states to form a voting block of roughly 5 million people (or fewer). For example, Hawaii (pop. 1.4 M) could have its primary simultaneously with Oregon’s (4 M).
(Of course, this kind of reconfiguration of current voting blocs into a kind of proportional representation has implications for how the US Senate could be re-conceived. Wyoming and California each have two senators, but their respective populations differ by a ratio of 1 to 76. The Founding Fathers probably never foresaw this kind of development, and how it warps public policy, and tilts the national government toward small, rural, conservative states.)