SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
To donate by check, phone, or other method, see our More Ways to Give page.
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton all but tied in the Iowa Caucuses Monday night. (Photos: Andrew Harrer/Bloomberg/Getty, Win McNamee/Getty)
Here's where the spin begins.
Ordinarily you would think math would settle the issue of who won or did not win an election, but that's not the country we live in. The spin started months ago, and will continue forever. Barack Obama didn't win 2012: That RINO Romney surrendered it to him. And he didn't win 2008: The media didn't vet him, and George W. Bush's big-government conservatism handed half the country over while the New Black Panther Party and ACORN stole the rest.
Even now some buzz-cut Nixon die-hard gasping his last breath in a hospice named Shady Palms Death Quonset is probably still raging against the Daley machine for delivering 1960 to Kennedy. Or against that ghostwritten Profiles in Courage. Or Kennedy's father's money. Or the media, who televised that famous debate.
So naturally for the rest of the week we will learn that nobody who lost actually lost, and that all the winners are frauds. Campaign strategists have to justify where all that money went, and those in the media who prognosticate into lifelong panel-show sinecures have to course-correct reality when it gets in the way of a good story. And as for the candidates -- if we absolutely must drag them into this -- they have to persuade voters and donors that they haven't wasted their time, energy and money.
First up was the perpetual load billed as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who emerged at his headquarters to announce, "So this is the moment they said would never happen." Well, no. He was polling in third place, and that's where he finished. Apparently that's enough for victory.
"For months, for months they told us we had no chance. For months they told us because we offer too much optimism in a time of anger, we had no chance. For months they told us because we didn't have the right endorsements or the right political connections, we had no chance.... But tonight, tonight here in Iowa, the people of this great state have sent a very clear message."
Once again, he came in third, which is where the Real Clear Politics average has had him ever since Ben Carson's numbers started nosediving around mid-December.
What Rubio was really saying -- through the perpetual vocal quaver of alternately traumatized patriotic horror or beatific patriotic awe he has sported during every public speech since 2010 -- was that he needed to repudiate the Cruz/Trump argument that this was a two-man race and prove that a third person was involved. But, "I showed 'em all by coming in third!" isn't much of a sales pitch.
Not that the PR wing of the Republican Party hasn't been making it. Fox News spent the evening pumping up Rubio's surging numbers in a recent Quinnipiac poll to prove that the ethnic telegenic candidate situated firmly between the establishment and the Tea Party wing is just as prime for an "inevitable" breakout as he has been every week since around August 4, when Donald Trump started eating his (and everyone else's) lunch.
The Rubio team's calculus is that, once other "establishment lane" candidates drop out, either humiliated by Iowa or New Hampshire, all the reasonable conservatives who hate black people, Muslims and Latino immigrants but who don't want to go full neofascist will get on the bandwagon. And that's a fine argument, but it's nothing close to inevitable. People enjoy backing winners (there's a reason why so many people still hold betting stubs for Secretariat at the Belmont), so why trade up for Rubio when you can go higher and pick one of the other two guys?
Chamber of Commerce types have no reason not to like Trump, apart from "electability," which is just as much a problem with a Rubio campaign that thinks "take a second job with Uber" is a solution to income inequality, is just as hardline anti-immigrant, and sounds increasingly determined to go full neocon by peppering speeches with casual calls to start conflicts with roughly two billion people. As for the culture-war types, why not pick Cruz? He and Rubio keep sounding the same War on Christianity notes, and if anything the ferocious pettiness of their attacks amounts to two guys trying not to sound identical. The only concrete way that Rubio proves an alternative to either of the frontrunners depends not on policy but on whether voters already personally hate those frontrunners.
Meanwhile, if overnight media Twitter is any indicator, the "Donald Trump Is a Loser" narrative is already in full swing. It's fine; it's funny, and needling anyone who overreacts to negativity as much as Trump does is a great pastime. There's just no way to argue that this is any more inevitable than Rubio's ascendance.
The argument goes something like this: Donald Trump says he will win all the time, so if he loses once, nobody will vote for him now, and they'll all like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. It kind of makes sense, and that would be a great line of reasoning in a party that didn't make so little sense that it made Donald Trump its frontrunner for five months, despite the horrible things he says and all the ways in which he's repeatedly displayed a supposedly fatal heterodoxy.
You can find counterarguments without trying too hard. For one thing, Trump has been running a national-media campaign, which is a disadvantage in caucus states like Iowa, where he only dedicated serious attention for the last couple weeks. Meanwhile, Cruz flung everything at Iowa for months on end and still won by only 4.4 points, which might not mean much in light of Trump's absence of a ground game. Trump currently holds a large lead in New Hampshire, where his style of campaign and the easier voting process can pay off, and then we move to South Carolina, where he has a 16-point lead. And while it's late to start an operation from scratch, who's to say he doesn't throw a bunch of money at the problem and make a more serious get-out-the-vote effort now that he's been beaten once?
All of this is excellent spin. Wonderful, fantastic spin. Beautiful, luxurious spin. Trump has a spin guy, he's very very good.
But if you want maximal spin, just raw, thick tar spin, look to the Democratic Party and a legion of electability-policing flunkies.
What Bernie Sanders did Monday night was incredible. Until very recently, even a good showing would have sufficed to confirm his candidacy's seriousness, and any characterization of his loss as critical merely demonstrates how rapidly the goalposts can be moved when narratives need to be upheld.
At the start of last May, he was 54 points behind in Iowa to Hillary Clinton, a frontrunner with the most open path to the eventual nomination in primary history. Sanders is a cranky old Jewish man from a tiny state and proudly considers himself a socialist, which in the rarified air of Beltway Centrism and in the swamp-gas of an America that still thinks the Cold War can be lost at any moment is somehow a more revolting word than "pederast."
With the exception of a few pro-Biden holdouts, almost the entirety of the Democratic Party establishment and the big money lined up behind his opponent, including veteran organizers and advisors. The Democratic Party chair scheduled a tiny number of debates on broadcast evenings so hostile to reaching a mass audience that their only purpose must have been minimizing exposing the electorate to any names that aren't Hillary Clinton's. Against this apparatus, Sanders decided to refuse to use super PAC money.
Meanwhile, every dead-eyed hack angling for a gig taking "Socks II" for walkies in the new Clinton administration has responded to Sanders' rising popularity with the Clinton-endorsement equivalent of Marge Simpson holding up her excised frontal lobe in a jar and groaning, "It's bliiiiiiiiiiiissssss."
You have Ezra Klein really taking it to some bozo named Ezra Klein over Sanders' health care plan. Along with assists from The Atlantic and The New Republic, Salon has gone balls-to-the-wall stupid peddling a mythic creature named the Bernie Bro whose existence is about as well documented as Prester John's.
The most substantial claim is that Bernie Sanders has some fans on the Internet who are assholes. Which puts him in exclusive company with literally everything. The same thinkfluencers who argue that Bernie Sanders needs to take personal responsibility for people he's never met being rude to journalists on the Internet (who are already berated and ridiculed by fans of everything else) are also filling column inches by doing the human-dignity equivalent of reaching a whole arm through a buzzing garbage disposal to latch onto yet another slime-slicked take festering in the U-bend and explaining why Hillary Clinton does not need to explain anything further. She doesn't need to justify that Iraq War vote again, or the destabilization of Libya, or that desire to go hog wild in Syria, or that 1990s support for welfare reform that hit women hardest, or those 1990s tough-on-crime policies she endorsed along with private prisons, or those speaking fees at Goldman Sachs or that opposition to reinstating Glass-Steagall.
Against this habitual sycophancy, you have a 24-hour news and legacy media structure that has consistently pushed the "conventional wisdom says that a socialist like Bernie Sanders can't win" line to hammer home the message that Bernie Sanders can't win underneath a veneer of objectivity. It's not advocacy, after all, if you're only saying what everybody thinks. Even if your job is literally to help shape how everybody thinks.
Against all that, Bernie Sanders fighting Clinton to an essential draw in a state in which his opponent held a huge advantage in terms of local political operators and influencers is nothing short of extraordinary. Which, combined with Sanders' 18-point lead in New Hampshire, means it's time to crank up the RPMs on the spin cycle fast enough to rip apart space-time.
You will hear that Sanders can't win South Carolina because black voters love Hillary Clinton, without the qualifier that black voters largely don't know who Bernie Sanders is. You will hear the Clinton team again attack universal health care from the right, scaremongering about taxes while ignoring the savings people would enjoy from no longer paying health insurance premiums. You will hear Chelsea Clinton or some other mouthpiece again claim that Bernie Sanders -- the guy who wants to give Medicare to everybody -- is going to take away everybody's health care.
You will see Clinton wrap herself in the mantle of Obama's legacy not only to appeal to black voters but to obfuscate her record with that community. Embracing Obama obscures her support for her husband's welfare reform and tough-on-crime policies that harmed that community. It obscures that his first presidential bid is remembered for a "Sister Souljah moment" that amounted to a repudiation of Jesse Jackson, literally sitting next to him on the dais, and a reassurance of the white audience "right there in [that] room" that they were good white people. And it helps to wipe the memory of Bill embarrassing himself in front of the black community in 2008 while Hillary herself challenged Barack Obama's electability because white people wouldn't vote for him.
This isn't just another leg in the 44-year-old Democratic-hack sprint away from McGovern suddenly made more frantic by Bernie Sanders' visage haunting them from the left, like George returned to life to remind them of their sins. This is a long low road stretching toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, un-illuminated by any purpose greater than the tautological -- that we use electability to win elections, that we win elections by being electable, that we cannot fail to be victorious, that we must be victorious for we cannot fail.
This is the dim path where a career pro-gay-rights feminist looms as a misogynist and an enemy to identity politics because some people with egg avatars sent some tweets. Where a candidate who personally earned millions in speeches and whose campaigns were significantly funded by Wall Street firms that nearly broke the world is equivalent to the candidate whose whole campaign opposes them because, apparently, he took money from a nurses' union. Where a legitimate candidate of the working class will be hammered over and over in an authenticity battle with a campaign that weekly releases some "How do you do, fellow kids?" embarrassment and whose Instagram manager is a woman with her own HBO series. Where the real progressive candidate has already pledged not to raise any middle-class taxes and once called people on welfare deadbeats.
This is the claustrophobic world of small meaning that is born when everyone knows the only idea you have to aspire to is the reaffirmation that the Republicans are worse. It's the logic that says that nothing we do to each other in this room -- that nothing we do anywhere -- matters when we know there's a monster behind the door. It is a mean and interminable partnership with nihilism that will get much worse before it gets better, and no one will blame you if you fill your pockets with rocks and walk into the sea.
Donald Trump’s attacks on democracy, justice, and a free press are escalating — putting everything we stand for at risk. We believe a better world is possible, but we can’t get there without your support. Common Dreams stands apart. We answer only to you — our readers, activists, and changemakers — not to billionaires or corporations. Our independence allows us to cover the vital stories that others won’t, spotlighting movements for peace, equality, and human rights. Right now, our work faces unprecedented challenges. Misinformation is spreading, journalists are under attack, and financial pressures are mounting. As a reader-supported, nonprofit newsroom, your support is crucial to keep this journalism alive. Whatever you can give — $10, $25, or $100 — helps us stay strong and responsive when the world needs us most. Together, we’ll continue to build the independent, courageous journalism our movement relies on. Thank you for being part of this community. |
Here's where the spin begins.
Ordinarily you would think math would settle the issue of who won or did not win an election, but that's not the country we live in. The spin started months ago, and will continue forever. Barack Obama didn't win 2012: That RINO Romney surrendered it to him. And he didn't win 2008: The media didn't vet him, and George W. Bush's big-government conservatism handed half the country over while the New Black Panther Party and ACORN stole the rest.
Even now some buzz-cut Nixon die-hard gasping his last breath in a hospice named Shady Palms Death Quonset is probably still raging against the Daley machine for delivering 1960 to Kennedy. Or against that ghostwritten Profiles in Courage. Or Kennedy's father's money. Or the media, who televised that famous debate.
So naturally for the rest of the week we will learn that nobody who lost actually lost, and that all the winners are frauds. Campaign strategists have to justify where all that money went, and those in the media who prognosticate into lifelong panel-show sinecures have to course-correct reality when it gets in the way of a good story. And as for the candidates -- if we absolutely must drag them into this -- they have to persuade voters and donors that they haven't wasted their time, energy and money.
First up was the perpetual load billed as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who emerged at his headquarters to announce, "So this is the moment they said would never happen." Well, no. He was polling in third place, and that's where he finished. Apparently that's enough for victory.
"For months, for months they told us we had no chance. For months they told us because we offer too much optimism in a time of anger, we had no chance. For months they told us because we didn't have the right endorsements or the right political connections, we had no chance.... But tonight, tonight here in Iowa, the people of this great state have sent a very clear message."
Once again, he came in third, which is where the Real Clear Politics average has had him ever since Ben Carson's numbers started nosediving around mid-December.
What Rubio was really saying -- through the perpetual vocal quaver of alternately traumatized patriotic horror or beatific patriotic awe he has sported during every public speech since 2010 -- was that he needed to repudiate the Cruz/Trump argument that this was a two-man race and prove that a third person was involved. But, "I showed 'em all by coming in third!" isn't much of a sales pitch.
Not that the PR wing of the Republican Party hasn't been making it. Fox News spent the evening pumping up Rubio's surging numbers in a recent Quinnipiac poll to prove that the ethnic telegenic candidate situated firmly between the establishment and the Tea Party wing is just as prime for an "inevitable" breakout as he has been every week since around August 4, when Donald Trump started eating his (and everyone else's) lunch.
The Rubio team's calculus is that, once other "establishment lane" candidates drop out, either humiliated by Iowa or New Hampshire, all the reasonable conservatives who hate black people, Muslims and Latino immigrants but who don't want to go full neofascist will get on the bandwagon. And that's a fine argument, but it's nothing close to inevitable. People enjoy backing winners (there's a reason why so many people still hold betting stubs for Secretariat at the Belmont), so why trade up for Rubio when you can go higher and pick one of the other two guys?
Chamber of Commerce types have no reason not to like Trump, apart from "electability," which is just as much a problem with a Rubio campaign that thinks "take a second job with Uber" is a solution to income inequality, is just as hardline anti-immigrant, and sounds increasingly determined to go full neocon by peppering speeches with casual calls to start conflicts with roughly two billion people. As for the culture-war types, why not pick Cruz? He and Rubio keep sounding the same War on Christianity notes, and if anything the ferocious pettiness of their attacks amounts to two guys trying not to sound identical. The only concrete way that Rubio proves an alternative to either of the frontrunners depends not on policy but on whether voters already personally hate those frontrunners.
Meanwhile, if overnight media Twitter is any indicator, the "Donald Trump Is a Loser" narrative is already in full swing. It's fine; it's funny, and needling anyone who overreacts to negativity as much as Trump does is a great pastime. There's just no way to argue that this is any more inevitable than Rubio's ascendance.
The argument goes something like this: Donald Trump says he will win all the time, so if he loses once, nobody will vote for him now, and they'll all like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. It kind of makes sense, and that would be a great line of reasoning in a party that didn't make so little sense that it made Donald Trump its frontrunner for five months, despite the horrible things he says and all the ways in which he's repeatedly displayed a supposedly fatal heterodoxy.
You can find counterarguments without trying too hard. For one thing, Trump has been running a national-media campaign, which is a disadvantage in caucus states like Iowa, where he only dedicated serious attention for the last couple weeks. Meanwhile, Cruz flung everything at Iowa for months on end and still won by only 4.4 points, which might not mean much in light of Trump's absence of a ground game. Trump currently holds a large lead in New Hampshire, where his style of campaign and the easier voting process can pay off, and then we move to South Carolina, where he has a 16-point lead. And while it's late to start an operation from scratch, who's to say he doesn't throw a bunch of money at the problem and make a more serious get-out-the-vote effort now that he's been beaten once?
All of this is excellent spin. Wonderful, fantastic spin. Beautiful, luxurious spin. Trump has a spin guy, he's very very good.
But if you want maximal spin, just raw, thick tar spin, look to the Democratic Party and a legion of electability-policing flunkies.
What Bernie Sanders did Monday night was incredible. Until very recently, even a good showing would have sufficed to confirm his candidacy's seriousness, and any characterization of his loss as critical merely demonstrates how rapidly the goalposts can be moved when narratives need to be upheld.
At the start of last May, he was 54 points behind in Iowa to Hillary Clinton, a frontrunner with the most open path to the eventual nomination in primary history. Sanders is a cranky old Jewish man from a tiny state and proudly considers himself a socialist, which in the rarified air of Beltway Centrism and in the swamp-gas of an America that still thinks the Cold War can be lost at any moment is somehow a more revolting word than "pederast."
With the exception of a few pro-Biden holdouts, almost the entirety of the Democratic Party establishment and the big money lined up behind his opponent, including veteran organizers and advisors. The Democratic Party chair scheduled a tiny number of debates on broadcast evenings so hostile to reaching a mass audience that their only purpose must have been minimizing exposing the electorate to any names that aren't Hillary Clinton's. Against this apparatus, Sanders decided to refuse to use super PAC money.
Meanwhile, every dead-eyed hack angling for a gig taking "Socks II" for walkies in the new Clinton administration has responded to Sanders' rising popularity with the Clinton-endorsement equivalent of Marge Simpson holding up her excised frontal lobe in a jar and groaning, "It's bliiiiiiiiiiiissssss."
You have Ezra Klein really taking it to some bozo named Ezra Klein over Sanders' health care plan. Along with assists from The Atlantic and The New Republic, Salon has gone balls-to-the-wall stupid peddling a mythic creature named the Bernie Bro whose existence is about as well documented as Prester John's.
The most substantial claim is that Bernie Sanders has some fans on the Internet who are assholes. Which puts him in exclusive company with literally everything. The same thinkfluencers who argue that Bernie Sanders needs to take personal responsibility for people he's never met being rude to journalists on the Internet (who are already berated and ridiculed by fans of everything else) are also filling column inches by doing the human-dignity equivalent of reaching a whole arm through a buzzing garbage disposal to latch onto yet another slime-slicked take festering in the U-bend and explaining why Hillary Clinton does not need to explain anything further. She doesn't need to justify that Iraq War vote again, or the destabilization of Libya, or that desire to go hog wild in Syria, or that 1990s support for welfare reform that hit women hardest, or those 1990s tough-on-crime policies she endorsed along with private prisons, or those speaking fees at Goldman Sachs or that opposition to reinstating Glass-Steagall.
Against this habitual sycophancy, you have a 24-hour news and legacy media structure that has consistently pushed the "conventional wisdom says that a socialist like Bernie Sanders can't win" line to hammer home the message that Bernie Sanders can't win underneath a veneer of objectivity. It's not advocacy, after all, if you're only saying what everybody thinks. Even if your job is literally to help shape how everybody thinks.
Against all that, Bernie Sanders fighting Clinton to an essential draw in a state in which his opponent held a huge advantage in terms of local political operators and influencers is nothing short of extraordinary. Which, combined with Sanders' 18-point lead in New Hampshire, means it's time to crank up the RPMs on the spin cycle fast enough to rip apart space-time.
You will hear that Sanders can't win South Carolina because black voters love Hillary Clinton, without the qualifier that black voters largely don't know who Bernie Sanders is. You will hear the Clinton team again attack universal health care from the right, scaremongering about taxes while ignoring the savings people would enjoy from no longer paying health insurance premiums. You will hear Chelsea Clinton or some other mouthpiece again claim that Bernie Sanders -- the guy who wants to give Medicare to everybody -- is going to take away everybody's health care.
You will see Clinton wrap herself in the mantle of Obama's legacy not only to appeal to black voters but to obfuscate her record with that community. Embracing Obama obscures her support for her husband's welfare reform and tough-on-crime policies that harmed that community. It obscures that his first presidential bid is remembered for a "Sister Souljah moment" that amounted to a repudiation of Jesse Jackson, literally sitting next to him on the dais, and a reassurance of the white audience "right there in [that] room" that they were good white people. And it helps to wipe the memory of Bill embarrassing himself in front of the black community in 2008 while Hillary herself challenged Barack Obama's electability because white people wouldn't vote for him.
This isn't just another leg in the 44-year-old Democratic-hack sprint away from McGovern suddenly made more frantic by Bernie Sanders' visage haunting them from the left, like George returned to life to remind them of their sins. This is a long low road stretching toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, un-illuminated by any purpose greater than the tautological -- that we use electability to win elections, that we win elections by being electable, that we cannot fail to be victorious, that we must be victorious for we cannot fail.
This is the dim path where a career pro-gay-rights feminist looms as a misogynist and an enemy to identity politics because some people with egg avatars sent some tweets. Where a candidate who personally earned millions in speeches and whose campaigns were significantly funded by Wall Street firms that nearly broke the world is equivalent to the candidate whose whole campaign opposes them because, apparently, he took money from a nurses' union. Where a legitimate candidate of the working class will be hammered over and over in an authenticity battle with a campaign that weekly releases some "How do you do, fellow kids?" embarrassment and whose Instagram manager is a woman with her own HBO series. Where the real progressive candidate has already pledged not to raise any middle-class taxes and once called people on welfare deadbeats.
This is the claustrophobic world of small meaning that is born when everyone knows the only idea you have to aspire to is the reaffirmation that the Republicans are worse. It's the logic that says that nothing we do to each other in this room -- that nothing we do anywhere -- matters when we know there's a monster behind the door. It is a mean and interminable partnership with nihilism that will get much worse before it gets better, and no one will blame you if you fill your pockets with rocks and walk into the sea.
Here's where the spin begins.
Ordinarily you would think math would settle the issue of who won or did not win an election, but that's not the country we live in. The spin started months ago, and will continue forever. Barack Obama didn't win 2012: That RINO Romney surrendered it to him. And he didn't win 2008: The media didn't vet him, and George W. Bush's big-government conservatism handed half the country over while the New Black Panther Party and ACORN stole the rest.
Even now some buzz-cut Nixon die-hard gasping his last breath in a hospice named Shady Palms Death Quonset is probably still raging against the Daley machine for delivering 1960 to Kennedy. Or against that ghostwritten Profiles in Courage. Or Kennedy's father's money. Or the media, who televised that famous debate.
So naturally for the rest of the week we will learn that nobody who lost actually lost, and that all the winners are frauds. Campaign strategists have to justify where all that money went, and those in the media who prognosticate into lifelong panel-show sinecures have to course-correct reality when it gets in the way of a good story. And as for the candidates -- if we absolutely must drag them into this -- they have to persuade voters and donors that they haven't wasted their time, energy and money.
First up was the perpetual load billed as Florida Sen. Marco Rubio, who emerged at his headquarters to announce, "So this is the moment they said would never happen." Well, no. He was polling in third place, and that's where he finished. Apparently that's enough for victory.
"For months, for months they told us we had no chance. For months they told us because we offer too much optimism in a time of anger, we had no chance. For months they told us because we didn't have the right endorsements or the right political connections, we had no chance.... But tonight, tonight here in Iowa, the people of this great state have sent a very clear message."
Once again, he came in third, which is where the Real Clear Politics average has had him ever since Ben Carson's numbers started nosediving around mid-December.
What Rubio was really saying -- through the perpetual vocal quaver of alternately traumatized patriotic horror or beatific patriotic awe he has sported during every public speech since 2010 -- was that he needed to repudiate the Cruz/Trump argument that this was a two-man race and prove that a third person was involved. But, "I showed 'em all by coming in third!" isn't much of a sales pitch.
Not that the PR wing of the Republican Party hasn't been making it. Fox News spent the evening pumping up Rubio's surging numbers in a recent Quinnipiac poll to prove that the ethnic telegenic candidate situated firmly between the establishment and the Tea Party wing is just as prime for an "inevitable" breakout as he has been every week since around August 4, when Donald Trump started eating his (and everyone else's) lunch.
The Rubio team's calculus is that, once other "establishment lane" candidates drop out, either humiliated by Iowa or New Hampshire, all the reasonable conservatives who hate black people, Muslims and Latino immigrants but who don't want to go full neofascist will get on the bandwagon. And that's a fine argument, but it's nothing close to inevitable. People enjoy backing winners (there's a reason why so many people still hold betting stubs for Secretariat at the Belmont), so why trade up for Rubio when you can go higher and pick one of the other two guys?
Chamber of Commerce types have no reason not to like Trump, apart from "electability," which is just as much a problem with a Rubio campaign that thinks "take a second job with Uber" is a solution to income inequality, is just as hardline anti-immigrant, and sounds increasingly determined to go full neocon by peppering speeches with casual calls to start conflicts with roughly two billion people. As for the culture-war types, why not pick Cruz? He and Rubio keep sounding the same War on Christianity notes, and if anything the ferocious pettiness of their attacks amounts to two guys trying not to sound identical. The only concrete way that Rubio proves an alternative to either of the frontrunners depends not on policy but on whether voters already personally hate those frontrunners.
Meanwhile, if overnight media Twitter is any indicator, the "Donald Trump Is a Loser" narrative is already in full swing. It's fine; it's funny, and needling anyone who overreacts to negativity as much as Trump does is a great pastime. There's just no way to argue that this is any more inevitable than Rubio's ascendance.
The argument goes something like this: Donald Trump says he will win all the time, so if he loses once, nobody will vote for him now, and they'll all like Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. It kind of makes sense, and that would be a great line of reasoning in a party that didn't make so little sense that it made Donald Trump its frontrunner for five months, despite the horrible things he says and all the ways in which he's repeatedly displayed a supposedly fatal heterodoxy.
You can find counterarguments without trying too hard. For one thing, Trump has been running a national-media campaign, which is a disadvantage in caucus states like Iowa, where he only dedicated serious attention for the last couple weeks. Meanwhile, Cruz flung everything at Iowa for months on end and still won by only 4.4 points, which might not mean much in light of Trump's absence of a ground game. Trump currently holds a large lead in New Hampshire, where his style of campaign and the easier voting process can pay off, and then we move to South Carolina, where he has a 16-point lead. And while it's late to start an operation from scratch, who's to say he doesn't throw a bunch of money at the problem and make a more serious get-out-the-vote effort now that he's been beaten once?
All of this is excellent spin. Wonderful, fantastic spin. Beautiful, luxurious spin. Trump has a spin guy, he's very very good.
But if you want maximal spin, just raw, thick tar spin, look to the Democratic Party and a legion of electability-policing flunkies.
What Bernie Sanders did Monday night was incredible. Until very recently, even a good showing would have sufficed to confirm his candidacy's seriousness, and any characterization of his loss as critical merely demonstrates how rapidly the goalposts can be moved when narratives need to be upheld.
At the start of last May, he was 54 points behind in Iowa to Hillary Clinton, a frontrunner with the most open path to the eventual nomination in primary history. Sanders is a cranky old Jewish man from a tiny state and proudly considers himself a socialist, which in the rarified air of Beltway Centrism and in the swamp-gas of an America that still thinks the Cold War can be lost at any moment is somehow a more revolting word than "pederast."
With the exception of a few pro-Biden holdouts, almost the entirety of the Democratic Party establishment and the big money lined up behind his opponent, including veteran organizers and advisors. The Democratic Party chair scheduled a tiny number of debates on broadcast evenings so hostile to reaching a mass audience that their only purpose must have been minimizing exposing the electorate to any names that aren't Hillary Clinton's. Against this apparatus, Sanders decided to refuse to use super PAC money.
Meanwhile, every dead-eyed hack angling for a gig taking "Socks II" for walkies in the new Clinton administration has responded to Sanders' rising popularity with the Clinton-endorsement equivalent of Marge Simpson holding up her excised frontal lobe in a jar and groaning, "It's bliiiiiiiiiiiissssss."
You have Ezra Klein really taking it to some bozo named Ezra Klein over Sanders' health care plan. Along with assists from The Atlantic and The New Republic, Salon has gone balls-to-the-wall stupid peddling a mythic creature named the Bernie Bro whose existence is about as well documented as Prester John's.
The most substantial claim is that Bernie Sanders has some fans on the Internet who are assholes. Which puts him in exclusive company with literally everything. The same thinkfluencers who argue that Bernie Sanders needs to take personal responsibility for people he's never met being rude to journalists on the Internet (who are already berated and ridiculed by fans of everything else) are also filling column inches by doing the human-dignity equivalent of reaching a whole arm through a buzzing garbage disposal to latch onto yet another slime-slicked take festering in the U-bend and explaining why Hillary Clinton does not need to explain anything further. She doesn't need to justify that Iraq War vote again, or the destabilization of Libya, or that desire to go hog wild in Syria, or that 1990s support for welfare reform that hit women hardest, or those 1990s tough-on-crime policies she endorsed along with private prisons, or those speaking fees at Goldman Sachs or that opposition to reinstating Glass-Steagall.
Against this habitual sycophancy, you have a 24-hour news and legacy media structure that has consistently pushed the "conventional wisdom says that a socialist like Bernie Sanders can't win" line to hammer home the message that Bernie Sanders can't win underneath a veneer of objectivity. It's not advocacy, after all, if you're only saying what everybody thinks. Even if your job is literally to help shape how everybody thinks.
Against all that, Bernie Sanders fighting Clinton to an essential draw in a state in which his opponent held a huge advantage in terms of local political operators and influencers is nothing short of extraordinary. Which, combined with Sanders' 18-point lead in New Hampshire, means it's time to crank up the RPMs on the spin cycle fast enough to rip apart space-time.
You will hear that Sanders can't win South Carolina because black voters love Hillary Clinton, without the qualifier that black voters largely don't know who Bernie Sanders is. You will hear the Clinton team again attack universal health care from the right, scaremongering about taxes while ignoring the savings people would enjoy from no longer paying health insurance premiums. You will hear Chelsea Clinton or some other mouthpiece again claim that Bernie Sanders -- the guy who wants to give Medicare to everybody -- is going to take away everybody's health care.
You will see Clinton wrap herself in the mantle of Obama's legacy not only to appeal to black voters but to obfuscate her record with that community. Embracing Obama obscures her support for her husband's welfare reform and tough-on-crime policies that harmed that community. It obscures that his first presidential bid is remembered for a "Sister Souljah moment" that amounted to a repudiation of Jesse Jackson, literally sitting next to him on the dais, and a reassurance of the white audience "right there in [that] room" that they were good white people. And it helps to wipe the memory of Bill embarrassing himself in front of the black community in 2008 while Hillary herself challenged Barack Obama's electability because white people wouldn't vote for him.
This isn't just another leg in the 44-year-old Democratic-hack sprint away from McGovern suddenly made more frantic by Bernie Sanders' visage haunting them from the left, like George returned to life to remind them of their sins. This is a long low road stretching toward 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, un-illuminated by any purpose greater than the tautological -- that we use electability to win elections, that we win elections by being electable, that we cannot fail to be victorious, that we must be victorious for we cannot fail.
This is the dim path where a career pro-gay-rights feminist looms as a misogynist and an enemy to identity politics because some people with egg avatars sent some tweets. Where a candidate who personally earned millions in speeches and whose campaigns were significantly funded by Wall Street firms that nearly broke the world is equivalent to the candidate whose whole campaign opposes them because, apparently, he took money from a nurses' union. Where a legitimate candidate of the working class will be hammered over and over in an authenticity battle with a campaign that weekly releases some "How do you do, fellow kids?" embarrassment and whose Instagram manager is a woman with her own HBO series. Where the real progressive candidate has already pledged not to raise any middle-class taxes and once called people on welfare deadbeats.
This is the claustrophobic world of small meaning that is born when everyone knows the only idea you have to aspire to is the reaffirmation that the Republicans are worse. It's the logic that says that nothing we do to each other in this room -- that nothing we do anywhere -- matters when we know there's a monster behind the door. It is a mean and interminable partnership with nihilism that will get much worse before it gets better, and no one will blame you if you fill your pockets with rocks and walk into the sea.
"Mr. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is making it impossible for us to regulate these life-threatening emissions," one activist said.
As smoke from Canadian wildfires triggered an air quality alert for New York City and Long Island on Sunday, activists with Climate Defiance disrupted a speech by Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Lee Zeldin in the Hamptons.
The disruption came four days after reports emerged that Zeldin's EPA was set to repeal the 2009 "endangerment finding" that greenhouse gas emissions "threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations." It is this finding that has given the EPA the authority to regulate climate emissions under the Clean Air Act.
"We are in a climate crisis largely caused by the burning of fossil fuels," the first activist to disrupt the speech said, according to video footage shared by Climate Defiance. "And Mr. Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, is making it impossible for us to regulate these life-threatening emissions."
Zeldin's speech took place at the Global Breakfast Forum, held at The Hamptons Synagogue.
"What are you going to say to your children when the Hamptons are underwater?"
Several of the young Jewish activists who disrupted the speech referenced their faith.
"The Torah commands us to be stewards of the Earth, not the oil industry," one activist said.
The audience largely responded with boos and jeers, and one attacked two of the activists with a chair, according to Climate Defiance video footage.
However, the Climate Defiance activists emphasized that Zeldin and the pro-fossil fuel Trump administration were the forces that would ultimately disrupt life and community in the Hamptons.
"History is going to remember you as a monster," one yelled out to Zeldin.
Another said: "Lee Zeldin, you have taken half of a million dollars from fossil fuels. What are you going to say to your children when the Hamptons are underwater?"
The disrupters also referenced Project 2025 and the broader Trump administration. According to the Project 2025 Tracker, Zeldin's EPA has achieved 57% of the Heritage Foundation road map's objectives.
"Lee Zeldin is carrying out the plans of Project 2025 and fossil fuels to a T," one said. "Your orange overlord does not care about any of you. All of you will be suffering from the rising seas and the worsening climate crisis."
A member of Extinction Rebellion NYC, who assisted with the protest, said in a statement: "Heritage has long been helmed by fossil fuel interests like Koch Industries, which has done some of the heaviest lifting to make sure nothing is done on climate change in the U.S. The majority of these wishes have been executed by Zeldin himself, and through Trump, who asked for $1 billion from oil companies in a dinner at Mar-a-Lago during his campaign. His Big, Beautiful Bill is a wish list directly penned in Project 2025. And when we hit 4°C of warming this century, we will know the true cost of these deadly practices."
Protesters also referenced the repeal of the endangerment finding, climate-fueled extreme weather events like Hurricane Sandy, and the smoke pollution clouding the region as Zeldin spoke.
"There is smoke in the air for another summer," one said. "This is only going to get worse and worse."
Both New York City Emergency Management and the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation issued Air Quality Health Advisories through 11:59 pm Eastern Time on Sunday as smoke poured into the region from Canadian wildfires. Air quality was listed as "unhealthy for sensitive groups," and at 11:00 am Eastern Time on Sunday, New York City had the eighth worst air quality of any city on Earth.
The smoke recalled the thick orange haze that blanketed New York and other parts of the Northeast during the record-breaking Canadian wildfire season of 2023. The climate crisis makes wildfires more frequent and extreme.
"There is nothing humane or tactical about letting a trickle of aid in after a man-made famine has started while continuing to bomb starving men, women, and children, even in so-called safe zones," one advocate said.
The Israeli military began instituting tactical pauses in its assault on certain sections of Gaza on Sunday, as part of a plan to allow what Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described as "minimal humanitarian supplies" to enter the besieged enclave.
Several humanitarian organizations and political leaders described the Israeli approach as vastly insufficient at best and a dangerous distraction at worst, as Palestinians in Gaza continue to die of starvation that experts say has been deliberately imposed on them by the U.S.-backed Israeli military.
"Deadly airdrops and a trickle of trucks won't undo months of engineered starvation in Gaza," Bushra Khalidi, Oxfam policy lead for the Occupied Palestinian territory, said in a statement on Sunday. "What's needed is the immediate opening of all crossings for full, unhindered, and safe aid delivery across all of Gaza and a permanent cease-fire. Anything less risks being little more than a tactical gesture."
Israel announced a plan to institute a daily 10-hour "tactical pause" in fighting from 10:00 am to 8:00 pm local time in the populated Gaza localities of Gaza City, Deir al-Balah, and Muwasi, as The Associated Press explained.
"These actions are not pauses—they are part of an ongoing genocide that the world must act to stop."
However, on Sunday—the first day of the supposed pause—Israeli attacks killed a total of 62 people, Al Jazeera reported, including 34 who were seeking humanitarian relief. Another six people died of hunger, bringing the total death toll from starvation and malnutrition to 133, including 87 children, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
"The Israeli government's so-called 'tactical pauses' are a cruel and transparent farce," said Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) national deputy director Edward Ahmed Mitchell in a statement on Sunday. "There is nothing humane or tactical about letting a trickle of aid in after a man-made famine has started while continuing to bomb starving men, women, and children, even in so-called safe zones. These actions are not pauses—they are part of an ongoing genocide that the world must act to stop."
British Foreign Secretary David Lammy, meanwhile, called the pause "essential, but long overdue."
"This announcement alone cannot alleviate the needs of those desperately suffering in Gaza," Lammy said, as The Guardian reported. "We need a cease-fire that can end the war, for hostages to be released, and aid to enter Gaza by land unhindered."
The United Nations' World Food Program posted on social media that it welcomed the news of the pause, as well as the creation of more humanitarian corridors for aid, and that it had enough food supplies either in or en route to the area to feed the entire population of Gaza for nearly three months.
"A man-made hunger can only be addressed by political will."
Since the border crossings opened on May 27 following nearly three months of total siege, WFP has only been able to bring in 22,000 tons of food aid, about a third of the over 62,000 tons of food aid needed to feed the population of Gaza each month.
While it welcomed the pause, WFP did add that "an agreed cease-fire is the only way for humanitarian assistance to reach the entire civilian population in Gaza with critical food supplies in a consistent, predictable, orderly, and safe manner—wherever they are across the Gaza Strip."
Joe English, emergency communications specialist for UNICEF, emphasized that the limited pauses proposed by Israel were not the ideal conditions for treating serious malnutrition.
"This is a short turnaround in terms of the notice that we have, and so we cannot work miracles," English told CNN.
English explained that, while UNICEF can treat malnutrition, children who are malnourished require a course of treatments over an extended period of time in order to fully recover, something only truly possible with a cease-fire, which would allow the U.N. to reestablish the 400 aid distribution points it had set up across Gaza before the last cease-fire ended in March.
"We have to be able to reach people and also to reach people where they are," he said. "We can't be expecting people to continue to traverse many miles, often on foot, through militarized areas, to get access to aid."
In addition to bringing in food aid through trucks, Israel, Jordan, and the United Arab Emirates all began air-dropping aid over the weekend. However, this method has been widely criticized by humanitarian experts as ineffective and even dangerous.
"The planes are insulting for us. We are a people who deserve dignity."
"Airdrops will not reverse the deepening starvation. They are expensive, inefficient, and can even kill starving civilians. It is a distraction and screensmoke," U.N. Relief and Works Agency for Palestinian Refugees in the Near East Commissioner-General Philippe Lazzarini wrote on social media on Saturday.
"A man-made hunger can only be addressed by political will. Lift the siege, open the gates, and guarantee safe movements and dignified access to people in need," Lazzarini wrote.
Palestinians in Gaza also complained about the air drops.
"From 6:00 am until now we didn't eat or drink. We didn't get aid from the trucks. After that, they said that planes will airdrop aid, so we waited for that as well," Massad Ghaban told Reuters. "The planes are insulting for us. We are a people who deserve dignity."
In a reminder of what is at stake in effectively delivering aid to Gaza, the World Health Organization (WHO) warned on Sunday that "malnutrition is on a dangerous trajectory in the Gaza Strip, marked by a spike in deaths in July."
WHO continued:
Of 74 malnutrition-related deaths in 2025, 63 occurred in July—including 24 children under 5, a child over 5, and 38 adults. Most of these people were declared dead on arrival at health facilities or died shortly after, their bodies showing clear signs of severe wasting. The crisis remains entirely preventable. Deliberate blocking and delay of large-scale food, health, and humanitarian aid has cost many lives.
WHO said that the search for lifesaving aid was itself deadly: "Families are being forced to risk their lives for a handful of food, often under dangerous and chaotic conditions. Since 27 May, more than 1,060 people have been killed and 7,200 injured while trying to access food."
Israeli solders have reported that they had been ordered to fire on Palestinian civilians seeking aid.
In the face of Israel's atrocities, CAIR's Mitchell called for decisive action: "No more statements. Our government, Western nations, and Arab Muslim nations must act immediately to end the genocide, allow unfettered humanitarian aid into Gaza, secure the release of all captives and political prisoners, and hold Israeli leaders accountable for war crimes. Every moment of inaction contributes to the unimaginable suffering of everyone in Gaza."
"All across the country we showed that when our families stick together, we are powerful," one organizer said.
Tens of thousands of people in more than 225 towns and cities across the U.S. came out on Saturday as part of the Families First National Day of Action to protest Trump administration and Republican policies that defund the safety net while funneling unprecedented amounts of cash toward immigration enforcement.
The day of action came around three weeks after the U.S. House passed and President Donald Trump signed a budget bill that would strip 17 million of Americans of their health insurance and 2 million of their food aid while making Immigration and Customs Enforcement the highest-funded federal law enforcement agency in U.S. history.
"Yesterday marked the 35th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act. And we are just days away from the 60th anniversary of Medicaid and Medicare at the end of this month. These policies represent a promise we made to each other: that no matter the ups and downs of life, our ability to take care of our families, from one generation to the next, should be supported," Ai-jen Poo, executive director of Caring Across Generations and president of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, told Common Dreams on Sunday.
"But a big ugly budget bill just passed," Poo continued, "that breaks that promise by making historic cuts to programs like Medicaid, Medicare, and SNAP, by using our tax dollars to stoke fear and rip families apart simply due to their immigration status. This is not what families want, and those who passed it must know that the vast majority of us want our tax dollars to go to healthcare and food, a safety net for families, supporting public funds for families, health, food, and the economic security for all of us, not billionaires."
"To show our power and resolve for a better future we came out in the thousands all across the country."
Families First is a coalition made up of over 75 organizations including Caring Across Generations, National Domestic Workers Alliance, MoveOn, Community Change Action, MomsRising, Planned Parenthood, People's Action Institute, Family Values @ Work, Families Over Billionaires, Fair Share America, Working Families Power, and labor unions like the Service Employees International Union (SEIU); American Federation of State, County, and Municipal Employees; American Federation of Teachers; and the National Education Association.
"To show our power and resolve for a better future we came out in the thousands all across the country, hosting over 225 events where we peacefully protested, to show the intergenerational face of those of us prepared to hold the ones who passed this bill accountable every day, and to take action. From spelling out the word 'familia' on the beach in California, taking a Medicaid Motorcade through the state of Indiana, to a rally in D.C. on the National Mall at the seat of power," Poo said.
Here are some highlights from Saturday's day of action.
On the National Mall across from the U.S. Capitol building, organizers capped a 60-hour vigil opposing Medicaid cuts with a rally at 12:00 pm ET.
Jennifer Wells, the director of economic justice at Community Change, spoke at the rally on the important role that Medicaid and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) played in her life.
"I'm here both as an advocate and organizer and as someone who has lived the realities we're fighting to change, as a person who has been directly shaped by the programs that are currently under attack," Wells said. "I was a Medicaid kid, I was a SNAP kid. These programs kept me and my mom and my brother healthy, alive, and moving forward when we had nothing to fall back on."
Families gathered in Newark's Military Park to protest the budget cuts.
"Congress is helping the rich get richer while cutting healthcare, education, and support for working families," New Jersey Citizen Action wrote on social media. "We're making sure everyone knows who's responsible. We're fighting for a country where every child is cared for, no one goes hungry, and we all have access to the healthcare we need to live."
The Indiana Rural Summit planned a "Motorcade for Medicaid" to drive by rural hospitals across the state.
"We're using the event as a touchpoint to demonstrate the importance and value of local hospitals that are at risk of closing because they have historically relied on Medicaid for financial viability," organizer Michelle Higgs told The Republic. "We want to amplify the voices of those who are impacted, whether they're disabled, have a chronic illness, or are elderly."
Union members took to the streets from Miami, Florida to Seattle, Washington.
SEIU members marched in cities including Tampa; Orlando; Miami; Washington, D.C.; Allentown, Pennsylvania; New York City, Boston; and Las Vegas. Meanwhile, hundreds of union workers protested in downtown Seattle.
In Connecticut, SEIU members marched to the Brennan Rogers Magnet School, which closed due to a state funding shortfall.
"Cleaners, healthcare workers, construction workers, we are the ones that make this country run and we ask for no special privileges in return. but we are under attack," Ciro Gutierrez, a 32BJSEIU Connecticut commercial member, said.
Reflecting on the day of action, Poo concluded: "All across the country we showed that when our families stick together, we are powerful. When we share our stories, we break through. When we stand side by side—from small towns to big cities—we can't be ignored. And we won't be divided."