Blackcap Blog

Published at 17:08 on 18 March 2020

Just consider the basics of the current situation:

• He’s been consistently losing primary elections, even losing “must-win” ones such as Michigan and Washington.
• Even where he’s won recently (e.g. California), he’s done worse than expected.
• He debated Biden one-on-one, and Biden did a good job.
• The coronavirus crisis is making it unsafe to conduct in-person elections.
• It is not going to be possible to shift to all vote-by-mail elections on a notice short enough to complete most primaries.
• Sanders faces very long odds; Biden is virtually a shoo-in to win the nomination at this point.
• In past primaries, when a race has gotten to this stage, the obvious loser has traditionally conceded.

On the debate point, that was really the one reason why Sanders should have stayed in up until this point. We wouldn’t want to run a candidate sure to melt down in a one-on-one debate, and verbal skills have never exactly been Biden’s strong suit.

Now that Biden’s mettle has been tested, and we have a batch of post-debate primary results demonstrating that not only Yours Truly thinks Biden passed, that reason no longer exists. It’s time to concede, Bernie.

Published at 08:53 on 15 March 2020

At least in respect of how inconsistent the local response to this pandemic is, it is. Some states have closed all their schools and banned large public gatherings, other states have governors acting like COVID-19 is all some liberal hoax designed to make their orange god-king look bad:

Individuals in private positions of authority are in on the politically-motivated science denial, too: “In your more politically conservative regions, closing is not interpreted as caring for you. It’s interpreted as liberalism, or buying into the hype.”

Right-wing congresscritters are also guilty of spreading deadly misinformation.

In another way, it’s likely to be worse than 1918 this time. Then, localities that lived in denial of the threat posed by the Spanish Flu ended up bitterly regretting their denial, and sooner rather than later. I think that the deniers will still end up suffering the consequences of their denial.

But it gets worse: the reality-distortion bubble surrounding the political Right is so great that I think it more plausible the Right will consider the greater severity in right-leaning regions to be evidence that the Left deliberately created and spread the virus for purposes of harming their orange god-king and those who follow him. The denial is likely to serve, not as an object lesson in the existence of the denial and how harmful it is, but to reinforce the reality-distortion bubble which led to the denial itself.

Published at 11:20 on 12 March 2020

It was obvious by late February this was needed, it took his campaign weeks to realize it, but Biden has finally stepped up to the plate with a pretty damn good speech on the pandemic.

And he’s not planning to shut up about the issue any time soon. One feature of that speech is the creation by his campaign of a coronavirus team, effectively a shadow cabinet to the real one that’s dropping the ball so badly.

It is an indictment of the Sanders campaign that Biden beat them to it. (Sanders is planning on speaking on this issue a few hours later.) That’s truly tragic, and underscores just how bad a job Sanders has done at campaigning, as the general message of socialism is very pertinent in the current situation, which is by its very nature exposing the lie that we are all separate individuals best left to fend entirely for ourselves.

Those disappointed by Sanders’ collapse need to realize that said collapse is more due to a centrist that campaigns semi-competently outcompeting a progressive that campaigns incompetently than anything else. As painful as that may be to acknowledge, it means that things can be unilaterally done to make progressive ideas sell better to the voting public.

Published at 19:54 on 11 March 2020

Really, it’s not a “foreign virus,” it’s a global pandemic. That was just a xenophobic cheap shot.

The travel ban from Europe makes no sense whatsoever. It only covers flights from the European continent, so anyone can change planes at Heathrow or Gatwick and still fly from Europe to the USA. All that changes are more legs on the journey (and more chances for infection). Simply brilliant.

Even more ridiculous, American citizens in Europe are exempt from the ban. So Americans in Europe can run around, get infected, and fly back. People who live in Europe can’t come here. Worse yet, American travelers in Europe are doubtless doing more circulating, staying in hotel rooms that might have had an infected resident the night before, and so on, thus more likely to be infected than residents of Europe.

No wonder the markets in Europe are already tanking. Capitalists may like their fascist regimes, but they expect a minimal level of competence in them, and the orange clown has none of that.

Published at 18:25 on 10 March 2020

It’s shaping up to be a bad night for Sanders, given that it looks like he just lost Michigan. That was a state that Hillary really struggled with (and where Sanders did well) last time. If Sanders can’t do well in the Rust Belt, a region shafted for decades by Establishment Democrats like Biden, it’s close to game over for Sanders.

Close, but not quite. Biden has yet to be tested in a one-on-one debate, and given that verbal skills are one of Biden’s chief weaknesses, he needs to be. The next debate is scheduled for the 15th. If Biden at least holds his own in that debate, and goes on to continue winning primaries, then it will be time for Sanders to consider conceding.

At that point, Biden could really help put pressure on Sanders, by sending a signal that he realizes the Democratic Party is a big tent. This doesn’t mean adopting Sanders’ platform (Biden, not Sanders, will have won, after all), but it does mean emphasizing at least some progressive concerns, to a greater degree than he already has. Choosing a running mate or some cabinet posts could well suffice. This is something that moderates have had a great deal of difficulty acknowledging in the past, persistently trying to ignore or belittle those to their left. Witness Hillary Clinton’s tone deaf VP choice last election.

If, however, Biden then sends that signal, then it’s definitely time for Sanders to drop out. But only then.

Published at 09:09 on 6 March 2020

As I observed recently, we are not even remotely out of the woods yet.

To reiterate, Biden is a weak candidate:

1. He has speaking disabilities, which impair his debate performance.
2. He has many legislative skeletons in his closet.
3. His Ukraine dealings, while not apparently illegal, still are a liability, and point to a likely history of nepotism.

He’s currently in the lead, but it’s far from an insurmountable lead. More debates are coming; it would be political malpractice to allow Biden become the nominee without stress-testing him. Much like it has been acceptable to stress-test Sanders on how well he responds to red-baiting (poorly, so far), it is acceptable to stress-test Biden on his weak spots.

And what happens if Biden massively fails the stress test? There is only one possible beneficiary, and his name is Senator Bernard Sanders. This is the downside of the moderates’ strategy of having everyone except Biden drop out: there is now no longer any fallback moderate candidate in the event that Biden suffers a massive campaign failure.

There really wasn’t any logical process of vetting or evaluation in that consolidation; it all happened stochastically. Clyburn endorsed Biden, most likely on the basis of a long political friendship from when both were members of Congress. The endorsement proved extremely valuable to Biden in the South Carolina primary. Moderates were increasingly nervous about Sanders playing the role Trump played in the 2016 GOP primary, and jumped at the chance to consolidate around Biden.

This is not to fault the moderates for foolishly choosing a poor strategy. They basically had no choice; time was rapidly running out for them to consolidate. There was, in fact, simply nothing the moderates could have done to easily sew up the nomination. Enough of the party’s base has moved far enough leftward that any reasonably open and democratic process is now sure to give progressives a significant amount of power throughout that process.

Biden’s weakness as a candidate is such that he has never done well before on the presidential campaign trail. Until the past week, he had never won a so much as a single state, despite this being the third primary he’s competed in. It is entirely possible that Biden returns to his old form, and if that happens there is no longer a thing that the centrist wing can do to stop Sanders from becoming the nominee.

Published at 13:01 on 5 March 2020

Today, a full week after it became crystal-clear it had emerged as a major topical issue, the Sanders campaign is finally starting to bring coronavirus into its messaging. It’s this kind of obliviousness to the obvious that’s turned me off from the campaign from the start.

Mind you, I think it’s great that he’s getting an actual Left message (of sorts) out. It’s just that he’s not very good at campaigning, to the point that I strongly suspect he’d be a disaster in November.

Ironically, I would have been more likely to support him had he been doing worse in the polls, because while Sanders is not really a viable general-election candidate, he is a viable consciousness-raising one.

Published at 20:43 on 4 March 2020

Biden and Sanders

To belabor the obvious, Biden really cleaned up last night, doing significantly better than expected.

To belabor a point being sorely overlooked, Biden is still a weak candidate. Yes, even after his good day yesterday. He stutters, and he has a penchant for malapropisms. That’s not a serious mental defect (he’s still mentally fit and basically sane), but it’s definitely a campaigning defect. It makes him crappy at debating. People see the stammer and see his age and naturally assume senility. This could significantly hurt him.* Plus he has a lot of political skeletons in his closet (such as the Iraq War vote). So we are not out of the woods yet, and we won’t be until November. This is the case even if Biden is, contrary to current expectations, not the nominee; Sanders is also a weak candidate.

* Yes, that’s unfair. Life is not always fair. Biden should make his stutter (and his personal triumph over it, despite being in a field where public speaking is important) a recurring subject of his campaign ads, to keep this fact in the public mind.

Biden does seem to be a stronger candidate than either Hillary Clinton or Bernie Sanders; Biden’s margins of victory over Sanders yesterday were significantly better than Hillary’s in the states Hillary won, and Biden won states that Hillary lost. On the minus side, Biden is untested against Trump. Thankfully, Trump isn’t exactly the best verbal wordsmith, either, so the two should be approximately equally handicapped on the debate stage.

Warren

At this point, she’s an also-ran hoping to be a behind-the-scenes player. Unfortunately for her, she did so poorly last night that she may choose to drop out soon.

Her main achievement in the race was playing a key role in the destruction of Michael Bloomberg on the debate stage in Las Vegas. Bloomberg was an astoundingly weak candidate, and Warren did the party a huge service by helping take him out, particularly given that he was at one point on the verge of being coronated the “responsible” centrists’ candidate of choice.

It’s sort of a pity she seems less likely to play a role behind the scenes at the convention, since (absent being compelled do do the right thing) Biden is likely to fall for the idiocy of appointing a centrist as his VP, when tacking left and appointing a progressive would be the more pragmatic (i.e. the one likely to secure more votes) choice.

Coronavirus

First, all candidates are at risk. Trump, Biden, and Sanders are all elderly, a prime risk group for the disease. Worse, campaigning requires them to travel, and to be present in crowds, making close contact with thousands of other people each day. Political candidate is one of the highest-risk occupations for disease exposure that I can think of. It would not be a surprise if one or more candidates is hospitalized or even dies before the campaign completes.

Second, it presents political opportunities for both sides. Democrats can make political hay by pointing out how our lack of universal health care and universal sick leave makes the USA more vulnerable than it should be to pandemics, and how Trump’s lack of transparency is hurting the effort to fight the pandemic. Republicans can use the foreign origins of the disease to stoke the fires of racism and xenophobia.

Third, travel restrictions and other emergency measures almost certainly will impact the campaign to at least some degree. It is conceivable that they will be used for politically-motivated purposes, being ordered by the Trump regime to disrupt the opposition’s campaign. This should be evident if restrictions start being suspiciously timed with the Democrats flying high in the opinion polls more than they are with the incidence of infection reports. It is even conceivable that Trump will attempt to use states of emergency to postpone or cancel the election, or to indefinitely delay his departure from office should he lose the election.

Conclusion

Those celebrating the lead of an “electable” candidate in the primary must realize that we are not even remotely out of the woods yet.

Published at 19:51 on 3 March 2020

I’ve been pointing Sanders’ weak aspects out for well over a month, now. His poorer-than-expected showing tonight is therefore not a huge surprise.

Part of it has been a lousy turnout by younger voters. Again, that is not a surprise. Young people did not do a very good job of turning out this year in Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, or South Carolina either. By contrast, tonight older voters turned out in even greater numbers than usual, and voted for the grandpa’s favorite. This is many things, but a “conspiracy” to “steal” votes by the DNC it is not.

I will note that the states where Biden was most favored tend to be in the Eastern time zone, so the final results will probably be more mixed than the Biden blowout that’s currently being reported.

As I have pointed out before, it is far better for Sanders’ weakness as a candidate to manifest now, in the primaries, than for it to manifest when running against Trump. If Sanders crumbled under the relatively low-grade red-baiting he received in the past few weeks, he would have been reduced to a radioactive cinder by the barrage of it Trump would have aimed his way.

Being aware of Sanders’ faults results in an ultimately more hopeful outcome for those who dream of Left success via electoral politics: it suggests that a less-flawed progressive candidate might prove significantly more viable. If media bias or dark forces in the DNC can doom any leftist, then there is no hope for a leftist candidate. It is only if there are faults on our side we can address unilaterally that there is significant hope for improvement.

I say this as someone who, believe it or not, has always admired Sanders ever since he first won election to the House of Representatives in 1990. He’s done a tremendous amount of building visibility and awareness for Left politics. It will soon be time to move on.

Published at 11:40 on 3 March 2020

Nate Silver has run five scenarios of what might happen today, based on the best-available current polling data. Of particular interest are the following points:

• Three of the five show Biden emerging with a delegate lead (one shows Sanders with a delegate lead, and one basically shows a tie).
• Even the two scenarios in which Biden does not have a clear delegate lead, the sum total of delegates for moderate candidates exceeds that for the progressive candidates.

A few days ago, it looked like Sanders was set to have a big day today. Now, not so much.

The most likely outcome is a convention where nobody gets a majority of the delegates, and the superdelegates give the nomination to Biden, because he has a plurality. Bernie will, in other words, probably get what he’s been pleading for, but he will not be the beneficiary of it.