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Demand Grows for Biden to Address Tara Reade Allegations as Democrats Wrestle With #MeToo Hypocrisy
"Republicans already basically dismiss sexual assault allegations against their co-partisans out of hand; if Democrats do the same for the leader of their party it will do a great deal to move us back to the pre-#MeToo past."
Apr 28, 2020
Former Vice President Joe Biden is facing a growing demand to address the credible sexual assault allegation made by former Senate staffer Tara Reade as the Democratic Party itself faces accusations of hypocrisy in terms of the #MeToo movement.
"We have reached a point where it is journalistic malpractice for anyone interviewing Biden to refuse to ask him about Tara Reade's allegations, the mounting supporting evidence in her case and the numerous other allegations of his misconduct toward women," author and The Intercept co-founder Jeremy Scahill tweeted on Tuesday.
The increased pressure on Biden and his party comes as new reporting this week and last further corroborated Reade's account of the alleged 1993 attack, which Reade first detailed in full on journalist Katie Halper's podcast last month.
While Biden's presidential campaign has said the accusations are false, the deeper scrutiny into the case has made the silence of the candidate himself and many of his supporters all the more problematic for those in Democratic Party circles who in recent years have championed the #MeToo movement, which has as one of its central tenets the responsibility to take seriously such accusations by women against powerful men.
"This happened, and I know it did because I remember talking about it," Lynda LaCasse told Business Insider of the alleged attack.
LaCasse was Reade's neighbor in the mid 1990s and told the Insider that Reade shared details of the event in question with her in 1995 or '96.
"I remember her saying, here was this person that she was working for and she idolized him," LaCasse told the outlet. "And he kind of put her up against a wall. And he put his hand up her skirt and he put his fingers inside her. She felt like she was assaulted, and she really didn't feel there was anything she could do."
Lorraine Sanchez, a former legislative staffer in Sen. Jack O'Connell's office, also backed up Reade's accusation.
"[Reade said] she had been sexually harassed by her former boss while she was in DC," Sanchez told Insider, "and as a result of her voicing her concerns to her supervisors, she was let go, fired."
Audio that resurfaced last week also backs up Reade's claim. As Ryan Grim reported at The Intercept, Reade's mother called in to "Larry King Live" on August 11, 1993 to talk about how her daughter had suffered at the hands of a powerful boss and had no recourse other than the press.
"My daughter has just left there, after working for a prominent senator, and could not get through with her problems at all, and the only thing she could have done was go to the press, and she chose not to do it out of respect for him," said the anonymous woman, whom Reade confirmed to Grim was her mother.
With Biden now the presumptive nominee, the accusations have exposed a major obstacle for Democrats eager to defeat President Donald Trump--himself accused by dozens of women of sexual harassment and assault.
Writing for The Cut, journalist Rebecca Traister said the entire situation is a "grievous mess," one that has put Democratic women and other feminists in a nearly impossible position.
Now that he is the presumptive choice, [Biden] may in fact be the only presidential bulwark against Donald Trump, who is both murderous and incompetent and whose reelection would lead to further cataclysmic collapse of our environment, health-care system, courts, and democracy, with fatal results that will redound more negatively to women than to men and most negatively of all to women with the fewest resources. In the fight to prevent this, Biden and his campaign will be calling on women -- especially the women who have challenged him in the past, including on feminist grounds--to help him build support by rallying other women around him. That rallying will now have to entail somehow papering over the disgust and dismay provoked by multiple allegations of inappropriate touching and alleged assault made against yet another would-be president.
Traister specifically tackles the issue of what the accusations will mean for Biden's pick for vice president--who he said will be a woman--but others said the implications go beyond that for the Democratic presumptive nominee:
Sarah Jones, writing for the Intelligencer on Monday, noted that as "corroborative evidence for Reade's account begins to mount, Democratic voters find themselves in an unpalatable situation" just as the general election begins in earnest.
"Topping the ticket of one party is Donald Trump, who has been accused of sexual harassment and assault by over two dozen women," explained Jones. "On the other side is Biden, whose handling of the Anita Hill hearing and previous support for the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of public funds for abortion, already made him a difficult candidate for some women to support."
In his Monday column for The Week, Ryan Cooper argued that the whole debacle has exposed serious hypocrisy among Democratic supporters who championed #MeToo, many of them now ignoring or explaining away allegations against their candidate after raising uproar when it was Trump or Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh facing similar charges.
"Now Democrats are set to blow a hole in the movement with their probable nomination of former Vice President Joe Biden for president," wrote Cooper.
The progress gained by the feminist movement will "be grossly undermined if Democrats choose to look past Biden's allegations for political reasons," Cooper argued. "Republicans already basically dismiss sexual assault allegations against their co-partisans out of hand; if Democrats do the same for the leader of their party it will do a great deal to move us back to the pre-#MeToo past, when far too many people looked the other way at abuses committed by powerful politicians. One cannot create a broad political norm against sexual misconduct if the issue becomes a partisan football for both parties."
At 3:00 pm ET on Tuesday, Biden is hosting a virtual town hall on the subject of Covid-19's specific impact on women.
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Time to Debate: How Bernie Could Destroy Biden in 120 Minutes Or Less
Some serious advice for Sen. Sanders from somebody who is not a professional campaign strategist.
Mar 09, 2020
Dear Bernie,
Provided Michigan hasn't been a blow-out against you, the debate next Sunday will be your last and best chance to regain the upper hand. You can do this if you disavow your natural tendency to be kind to Joe Biden and his ilk, and remember what brought you to the movement in the first place, and exactly what kind of mortal threat Biden alone now poses to everything you hold dear. To go soft on Biden is to give a free pass to a segregationist, misogynist, anti-worker grandstander who embodies a lifetime of active collusion in the economy of war and exploitation that you abhor. If you don't overcome your ingrained repulsion toward personal conflict, your followers will feel betrayed for a lost opportunity to take down the establishment at its weakest.
"Despite Biden's orchestrated and meteoric resurrection from the dead, he is by far the most compromised of the establishment candidates. It's your job, and your job alone, to knock him over."
Opening Statement: "I'm going to make the case tonight that Joe is unelectable in a general election, that he's the weakest adversary we could put up against Trump. When you need a steady leader to fight the rise of intolerance and xenophobia in this country and around the world, the last thing you want is someone who put in place the policies that helped bring about the state of anxiety that caused people to jump on Trump's bandwagon in the first place. Being a leading supporter of disastrous trade policies like NAFTA and TPP, which my 2016 opponent in the primaries also supported just as vigorously, is the kind of thing that will cause us to lose the Midwest and other vulnerable parts of the country. If you thought that the Democratic party's firewall collapsed in 2016, wait till you have Joe at the helm; it may be gone for a generation. There's understandable fear and panic among Democrats about what four more years of Trump might mean, but I want to argue tonight that the least likely way to put Trump out of business is to nominate a candidate with as much personal and political baggage as Joe."
Because, despite Biden's orchestrated and meteoric resurrection from the dead, he is by far the most compromised of the establishment candidates. It's your job, and your job alone, to knock him over, the way Tulsi Gabbard annihilated Kamala Karris or Elizabeth Warren did the same to Michael Bloomberg. It will be the most scrutinized debate in ages, and the fate of your social justice movement hinges on bringing out the worst in Biden, as uncomfortable as that might make you feel. The ultimate aim is for you to reduce Biden to a dithering slob of an idiot by the time he knows what hit him, and to show no compassion to him during his real-time unraveling--which you certainly have the ability to trigger, if you check personal feelings at the door and keep in mind what brought you to your sixty-year political struggle.
The moderators will be your first obstacle, before you can even start on Biden's dismantling. They'll come at you right away, even more viciously and unfairly than in the South Carolina debate, asking why you lost the youth vote ("Maybe if we hadn't had seven-hour voting lines in Texas, more youth might have had their vote counted"), if Biden hasn't already proved he's more electable than you ("Joe's first presidential campaign was in 1987, and until this year he'd never placed better than fourth in any state, but let's talk about the limits of how far you can ride nostalgia in an age when Trump is the new reality"), why African Americans don't support you ("Oh yes they do, and they will even more when they hear about Joe's half-century record of helping to start the war on drugs and the mass incarceration epidemic and police militarization"), if you'll disavow the Bernie Bros and what Elizabeth Warren has labeled online hassling and bullying ("What Bernie Bros? Can you point to an example? My supporters are more diverse than anyone else's, this is just a myth"), and why you might be shaky in the Midwest ("If there's any place Joe's not suited to run in a general election, it's the industrial Midwest, because of the job-killing trade bills he spent his entire career legislating"), and any number of other silly, cooked-up "questions" to throw you off balance.
You've got to assert yourself immediately. The first time such a question is directed at you, I would advise you to speak over the moderators' heads and tell them that you won't answer gotcha questions and that you expect them to conduct themselves professionally in order to make sure that the first one-on-one debate between you two is informative to voters: "Joe has never been vetted at the presidential level, and people need to understand that Donald Trump will chew him up and spit him out. Voters deserve to know, without moderator interference, about Joe's liabilities that Trump will hammer at in the general election."
You should dispose of every moderator question directed at you in ten seconds or so, dismissively and laughingly if necessary, and turn every single question around to Biden's unelectability, based on his resume which Trump will exploit. So many of us have noticed how charming, soothing, and statesmanlike you appear in press conferences--both the post-Iowa and post-Super Tuesday press conferences stand out as exemplars. I suspect it's the blatant hostility of debate moderators, and their undisguised pandering to vulgar entertainment, that prompts you to enter your default stump mode and wave your arms around and indulge in abstractions. In more intimate settings, your striking presidential demeanor (which makes you much more electable) is very comforting. So pretend that Joe's been collared in your 1960s Vermont sugar shack, just him and you in your unheated kitchen, and over drinks you're calmly letting him know about a lifetime of disappointment in men like him who sold out early and never had second thoughts.
It won't surprise you to learn that your supporters are very disappointed by your repeated references to "my friend Joe," whom you say you like and respect. Most Americans fail to interpret this as an expression of formal civility, and tend to dismiss every policy criticism that follows such a preface. It's simply not necessary at this point, and if you say anything like that, your cause will be severely damaged. It doesn't set the right tone, which for this occasion should be unpredictable, lighthearted and witty, so don't do it anymore. Joe is the enemy of every value you hold, and has a 50-year record to prove it, so how is he a decent guy still?
Far from acclaiming his decency at every opportunity, the task for you in this debate is to create a taint of fatal association between Biden and Hillary's loss in 2016. Trump will do to him exactly what he did to Hillary because Biden comes from the same policy branch of the Democratic party, peddling the neoliberal trade agreements that killed jobs all over the country, and the mass incarceration and war on freedoms that the same wing of the party pursued exactly in parallel.
You should use well-timed humor--which you're so good at deploying in intimate surroundings free of cheap spectacle--to take down Biden notch by notch, but the best way to make him look unappealing is by dumping the entirety of your stump speech and humanizing every part of your policy agenda by way of personal stories. If at the same time you connect each of those stories with a particular policy that Biden personally promoted, both as senator and vice president, you'll have completed your task.
You tend to launch into your baseline rhetoric when triggered by hostile moderators, but every moment you spend talking about "millionaires and billionaires, the 1 percent, the fossil fuel industry and the drug companies and the insurance industry, and the 60 billionaire donors who support Biden" is a waste of precious time you'll never get back, because after this last pre-scheduled debate, they probably won't let you get near Biden again. You should ask, again and again, for free-flowing debates, for both of you to face each other on any network with minimal moderator intervention, and while he won't agree to the idea it's worth pressing him about it. What they'll probably do is make him pretty much disappear from the campaign trail until the convention, so you'd better realize that your conventional talking points have no place on the debate stage, and that you won't be persuading a single additional voter with the rhetorical indulgence.
Everyone invested in politics has heard your spiel by now, but what they haven't seen recently is the warm, human, lovable side of you, which is closely related to your crossover appeal to independents and Never Trumper Republicans, as evident in the 2016 primaries. For the next few weeks, and particularly on the debate platform, you need to forget about your vast campaign organization, and stop fretting about how what you say will offend anyone. You need not worry about that anyway if you convert each of your policy ideas--Medicare for All, student and medical debt cancellation, free public college, a living wage and the Green New Deal--to real-life stories you've personally experienced, such as Glyndanna Shevlin, the middle-aged worker at Disneyland, where you stood with workers in their campaign for a living wage. You've had many such experiences in the Trump years, joining strikes and direct action all over the country, leading to palpable successes such as concessions by Amazon.
Instead of railing at the abstract "billionaire class," you need to tell story after story of someone whose life was changed for the better because of the movement for economic and racial justice you and others like you have recently led, and how that change will be magnified billionfold with the power of the presidency.
I would also not harp on the "unprecedented voter turnout" which you keep saying is indispensable to beating Trump. Don't dwell on something that hasn't happened in the past, it only exacerbates anxiety and makes voters lean toward the one they feel is the known quantity, even if he promises nothing much. You can instead point to how, based on policy after policy, Biden will depress turnout, and have no chance to compete with the enthusiasm Trump will undoubtedly muster. Every election should be seen at the very least as a base election, and with Biden, there's not a chance that all of the base will show up: "Will suburban women vote for someone who treated Anita Hill as shabbily as Joe did, guaranteeing the installation of Clarence Thomas on the Supreme Court? Not a chance. The Republicans will exploit this, just wait till the primary is over, you'll hear about all of the things I'm raising today. Will African Americans, once they hear the Republican advertising machine play tapes of Joe advocating locking up minority communities in jail, come out enthusiastically? Not a chance. Will young people, saddled with student debt, or older people, burdened with medical debt, come out enthusiastically to vote for 'the senator from MBNA'--not my words, Joe, but it's out there, and the Republicans will use it--who made it so much more difficult to discharge debt through bankruptcy? Not a chance. Will veterans be enthusiastic to support you when they are reminded by Trump again and again about your cheerleading for the Iraq War? Not a chance. Will devastated communities, especially in the Midwest, harmed by calamitous job loss and the opioid crisis, turn out for someone responsible for NAFTA and other disastrous trade bills, which cost us millions of jobs? Not a chance."
Your task is to swivel away from each of the attacks that come your way within a few seconds to make a related point about Biden's own unelectability:
Q. Senator Sanders, will you drop out of the race by the end of the month if Vice President Biden has an insurmountable delegate lead?
A. My job is to make sure that never happens, because the campaign that Donald Trump will mount against Joe's past behavior is going to make our primary fight look like child's play.
Q. Senator Sanders, you haven't explained the cost of your Medicare for All bill, and anyway, do you think 160 million Americans are ready to give up their health insurance?
A. It's irresponsible when so-called professional journalists take up Republican talking points, so I'll just say that guaranteeing health care, which has majority support in all the states that voted on Super Tuesday, is not taking away health care. Instead, I'd like to ask Joe why he feels that the Affordable Care Act, which leaves out 28 million uninsured people, should be the best we can aspire to? And why they weren't able to get the public option through when he was vice president for eight years?
At that point Biden should butt in with gobbledygook about the $50 trillion cost, forcing people who're happy with their private insurance to give it up, improving the existing health care system rather than scrapping it, and needing to give up a pie-in-the-sky dream that will never happen. This would be the time to take a couple of minutes to explain what your M4A plan actually costs, and how you plan to finance it, particularly with taxes on extreme wealth. And say, "Joe might not be as sharp with numbers as he once might have been--he did accuse me of causing 150 million deaths the last time we met--but he's pulling figures out of thin air, and the cost of treatment and prescription drugs is already catastrophic, bankrupting not just individuals but the country."
Q. Senator Sanders, how will your democratic socialism play out around the country, didn't Super Tuesday prove voters have no taste for socialism, and didn't they go for Vice President Biden's doable, affordable, realistic changes?
A. All right, all right, don't call me a democratic socialist, call me an FDR Democrat, an LBJ Democrat! I'm a socialist only if you think a post office or public library or public school is socialist. But let's talk about socialism for the rich, which Joe has supported his whole life, including his Wall Street bailout, which left ordinary people with underwater mortgages without help, his support for tax breaks for the wealthy and letting the big banks cause so much misery and trade policy which benefits only the most powerful. Why don't you ask him about his socialism for the wealthy?
Q. Senator Sanders, Super Tuesday showed there's real hunger to defeat Trump and people are afraid that having you at the top of the ticket will cause down-ballot losses. Democrats won by appealing to suburban voters, centrists and pragmatists, in the 2018 House races; why can't they do the same again?
A. First of all, a midterm election is not the same as a general election; those races are more localized. If you have Joe at the top, with all the scandals [it's important to insinuate Hunter Biden and Burisma at key points] and misjudgments Trump will exploit, it will cause massive losses downticket. Joe is a risky choice. Joe, I'd like you to explain how you came into the vice presidency with the Democrats in control of both the House and the Senate, and within a short period of time, despite the overwhelming mandate voters gave you, managed to lose both houses, and why it is that throughout the eight years you were in the White House the Democratic party suffered incomparable losses at every level of government? Joe, you don't connect with young and progressive voters, the expanded new base in states like Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico and California, as the primary results have shown us. That's what will cause huge down-ballot losses, not fear of a socialism I do not advocate and never have. And, by the way, I've been working hard to elect progressive Democrats all over the country, from Nanette Diaz Barragan in California to Pramila Jayapal in Washington.
Q. [Immigration should come up because the debate is in Arizona, the cosponsor is Univision, and Jorge Ramos is a moderator.] Senator Sanders, how does your plan for immigration differ from Vice President Biden's?
A. My immigration plan is the most progressive since Lyndon Johnson's administration, as I seek to remove the fear in immigrant communities because of our criminalization of the very act of migration. I want to ask Joe if he wishes to apologize today for his administration's policy of deporting more than three million people, many of whom were long-term residents of this country? [As with Gabbard demolishing Harris, ask Joe directly a few times to apologize to the people he harmed, by name; it rattles him.]
While those of us of a more intellectual bent appreciate what the media mislabels as your anger, what the country desperately needs to see from you now is your calm, personal, warm, endearing style, which both press conferences I referenced, and your many one-on-one interviews, so amply demonstrate. We haven't had a glimpse of that in the debates, so most people simply don't know that beyond the alleged "anger" there's a person who's dedicated his life to helping people. Trump was elected because even with his vulgar, xenophobic, brutal style he spoke about the pain of real people. Your job in the debate is to expose Biden as the out-of-touch politician who sent thousands of Americans to die in wars of choice, who always chose the banks and Wall Street and giant corporations against the working person, and who cannot possibly relate to the afflictions of ordinary people. If, throughout the debate, you keep in mind the unbearable grief and suffering you've seen over nearly eighty years of your life, from Brooklyn to South L.A., from Detroit to Lubbock, and take the time to describe this anguish in personal stories and throw it back to Biden as a hugely responsible party, you will have started the process of making the country see you as the compassionate leader whom we need to take care of the most vulnerable among us.
Part of this is to make people afraid of Biden's hidden flaws. I know it might be a bridge too far to ask you to bring up Hunter Biden and Burisma, which goes to the essence of Biden's character for going on and on about his honor and decency without the least compunction to let his family members exploit his official position for financial gain, but it would be great to have advertising preceding the debate hint at this, because Trump surely will unfurl it as the centerpiece of his campaign. Hunter Biden will be to 2020 what Swift Boating was to 2004 and Hillary's emails to 2016, except in this case there will be a real basis to mobilize the same anti-globalist voters who were turned off by Hillary. If your campaign can compel, by persistent advertising, the moderators to bring this up for the first time in a debate, I wouldn't let Biden get off easily. I'd tie the scandal to his lifelong foreign policy misjudgments, choosing as he did to stay close to people who shouldn't be our friends and vice versa.
The biggest payoff from the debate would to be cause sheer mental fatigue and trigger a collapse, such as Carter did to Ford in 1976, while you, like Reagan in 1980, are able to reassure the country that you're not someone outside the mainstream, that you simply want to take the country back to where it was before life became so miserable for so many people, in large part of because of Clinton-Biden policies going back to the 1990s, particularly the enactment of NAFTA, the surrender to Wall Street, the end of manufacturing and steady jobs, the financialization of the economy, and the shredding of the safety net which Biden was in large part responsible for, as in consistently wanting to cut Social Security: "That alone will lose Joe Florida and Ohio and other states with an older Democratic base, they haven't heard it yet, but they will from Trump."
A moment or two of mental fragility is likely to occur, and you should exploit it to the fullest without appearing cruel, but just calmly and lightheartedly showing that you have the stamina and alertness to go toe-to-toe with Trump, whereas Biden doesn't. With your new calm demeanor, and hopefully Biden screaming, "I'm the only guy that..." you can ask the country to picture him on stage with Trump or you, and ask what will happen when Trump attacks him for his desire to cut Social Security or put African Americans in jail or send people to die in Iraq or cut trade deals that devastated the states Trump wants to win again.
Of course your changed debate style cannot occur in a vacuum. It has to be part of an immediately revamped campaign approach in Michigan and elsewhere: joyous, irreverent, unpredictable, and light on its feet. The big rallies, which force you into your podium rhetoric, have to go, replaced by small, retail, improvised events and happenings, town halls and street strolls, showing up where people live and work to generate lots of earned media, rather than more controlled events which bring out the less desirable parts of your rhetorical manner. Your stump speech no longer has any impact because the vocabulary has become too familiar. Worse than providing diminishing returns, the lectern vocabulary of billionaire donors, the Democratic establishment, the 1 percent, and the pharmaceutical and fossil fuel companies is now actively working against you.
Bring out the inner Abbie Hoffman in you, the struggling Vermont freelancer of the 1960s and 1970s, as you speak the language of intimacy and care, acknowledging the new forms of torment, through addiction or hopelessness or incarceration, that have come about in part because of the guy standing next to you and enabling rich Americans to play fast and loose with the rules and hurt us all.
It's really not difficult to do this. a) Don't let the moderators take charge, you should be the one in total control, especially with a senile Biden up there with you, struggling to put words together for two hours. b) Turn every single question toward Biden's record, hit him hard on point after point, bringing up details he might not remember or want to acknowledge. c) Don't think the debate is about your record or policies or vision, it's not that this time; it's your last and best opportunity to put away the only man standing between you and the better future you dreamed of when you were a child in Brooklyn and a poor young man in the 1960s. d) Speak mostly in personal retellings of individuals you have encountered in the last three years and how you'll do everything possible to help them, and don't use a word from the abstractions of your familiar stump speech.
If you leave Biden feeling like he's been mugged, like he can't wait to scream at his staff for leaving him unprepared for your onslaught, you'll walk away the winner, and so will the movement for which you've given your whole life. If Biden has a shred of good feeling remaining toward you at the end, you will have lost, and so will all of your followers. He's the only man standing between you and the dreams of millions of your followers, so you owe it to us to destroy his credibility and clear the path to victory.
Closing Statement: "Americans are looking for comfort, care, and reassurance today. I've spent my whole life reaching out to people who are lost, poor, vulnerable, homeless, jobless, imprisoned, worried, and scared. I understand the desire to go back to the familiar, but reality doesn't work that way. We can't escape into the past, even if for a moment there might be warm fuzzy feelings associated with it. Don't give in to the demagoguery about me, that I'll turn this country into a communist nightmare or something. Don't give in to fear, instead believe that we can attain a new America where no one is poor, sick or helpless without all of us coming together to help. I promise you I won't jeopardize the values that make this country unique. I ask for your vote so we can put this nightmare behind us and be the caring, loving and compassionate America we were meant to be."
Sincerely,
Not a Campaign Strategist
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If It's Biden vs. Trump, This Year's One-Choice Election Will Be for Oligarchy
We don’t need a "Punch and Judy" show between Trump and Biden. But that, along with corporate tyranny, is what we seem fated to get, unless we take to the streets and tear the house down.
Mar 09, 2020
There is only one choice in this election. The consolidation of oligarchic power under Donald Trump or the consolidation of oligarchic power under Joe Biden. The oligarchs, with Trump or Biden, will win again. We will lose. The oligarchs made it abundantly clear, should Bernie Sanders miraculously become the Democratic Party nominee, they would join forces with the Republicans to crush him. Trump would, if Sanders was the nominee, instantly be shorn by the Democratic Party elites of his demons and his propensity for tyranny. Sanders would be red-baited -- as he was viciously Friday in The New York Times' "As Bernie Sanders Pushed for Closer Ties, Soviet Union Spotted Opportunity" -- and turned into a figure of derision and ridicule. The oligarchs preach the sermon of the least-worst to us when they attempt to ram a Hillary Clinton or a Biden down our throats but ignore it for themselves. They prefer Biden over Trump, but they can live with either.
Only one thing matters to the oligarchs. It is not democracy. It is not truth. It is not the consent of the governed. It is not income inequality. It is not the surveillance state. It is not endless war. It is not jobs. It is not the climate. It is the primacy of corporate power--which has extinguished our democracy and left most of the working class in misery--and the continued increase and consolidation of their wealth. It is impossible working within the system to shatter the hegemony of oligarchic power or institute meaningful reform. Change, real change, will only come by sustained acts of civil disobedience and mass mobilization, as with the yellow vests movement in France and the British-based Extinction Rebellion. The longer we are fooled by the electoral burlesque, the more disempowered we will become.
I was on the streets with protesters in Philadelphia outside the appropriately named Wells Fargo Center during the 2016 Democratic Convention when hundreds of Sanders delegates walked out of the hall. "Show me what democracy looks like!" they chanted, holding Bernie signs above their heads as they poured out of the exits. "This is what democracy looks like!"
Sanders' greatest tactical mistake was not joining them. He bowed before the mighty altar of the corporate state. He had desperately tried to stave off a revolt by his supporters and delegates on the eve of the convention by sending out repeated messages in his name -- most of them authored by members of the Clinton campaign -- to be respectful, not disrupt the nominating process and support Clinton. Sanders was a dutiful sheepdog, attempting to herd his disgruntled supporters into the embrace of the Clinton campaign. At his moment of apostasy, when he introduced a motion to nominate Clinton, his delegates had left hundreds of convention seats empty.
Biden represents the old neoliberal order.
After the 2016 convention, Sanders held rallies -- the crowds pitifully small compared to what he had drawn when he ran as an insurgent -- on Clinton's behalf. He returned to the Senate to loyally line up behind Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, whose power comes from his ability to funnel tens of millions of dollars in corporate and Wall Street money to anointed Democratic candidates. Sanders refused to support the lawsuit brought against the Democratic National Committee for rigging the primaries against him. He endorsed Democratic candidates who espoused the neoliberal economic and political positions he claims to oppose. Sanders, who calls himself an independent, caucused as a Democrat. The Democratic Party determined his assignments in the Senate. Schumer offered to make Sanders the head of the Senate Budget Committee if the Democrats won control of the Senate. Sanders became a party apparatchik.
Sanders apparently believed that if he was obsequious enough to the Democratic Party elite, they would give him a chance in 2020, a chance they denied him in 2016. Politics, I suspect he would argue, is about compromise and the practical. This is true. But playing politics in a system that is not democratic is about being complicit in the charade. Sanders misread the Democratic Party leadership, swamp creatures of the corporate state. He misread the Democratic Party, which is a corporate mirage. Its base can, at best, select preapproved candidates and act as props at rallies and in choreographed party conventions. The Democratic Party voters have zero influence on party politics or party policies. Sanders' naivete, and perhaps his lack of political courage, drove away his most committed young supporters. These followers have not forgiven him for his betrayal. They chose not to turn out to vote in the numbers he needs in the primaries. They are right. He is wrong. We need to overthrow the system, not placate it.
Sanders is wounded. The oligarchs will go in for the kill. They will subject him to the same character assassination, aided by the courtiers in the corporate press, that was directed at Henry Wallace in 1948 and George McGovern in 1972, the only two progressive presidential candidates who managed to seriously threaten the ruling elites since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The feckless liberal class, easily frightened, is already abandoning Sanders, castigating his supporters with their nauseating self-righteousness and championing Biden as a political savior.
Trump and Biden are repugnant figures, doddering into old age with cognitive lapses and no moral cores. Is Trump more dangerous than Biden? Yes. Is Trump more inept and more dishonest? Yes. Is Trump more of a threat to the open society? Yes. Is Biden the solution? No.
Biden represents the old neoliberal order. He personifies the betrayal by the Democratic Party of working men and women that sparked the deep hatred of the ruling elites across the political spectrum. He is a gift to a demagogue and con artist like Trump, who at least understands that these elites are detested. Biden cannot plausibly offer change. He can only offer more of the same. And most Americans do not want more of the same. The country's largest voting-age bloc, the 100 million-plus citizens who out of apathy or disgust do not vote, will once again stay home. This demoralization of the electorate is by design. It will, I expect, give Trump another term in office.
By voting for Biden, you endorse the humiliation of courageous women such as Anita Hill who confronted their abusers. You vote for the architects of the endless wars in the Middle East. You vote for the apartheid state in Israel. You vote for wholesale surveillance of the public by government intelligence agencies and the abolition of due process and habeas corpus. You vote for austerity programs, including the destruction of welfare and cuts to Social Security. You vote for NAFTA, free trade deals, de-industrialization, a decline in wages, the loss of hundreds of thousands of manufacturing jobs and the offshoring of jobs to underpaid workers who toil in sweatshops in China or Vietnam. You vote for the assault on public education and the transfer of federal funds to for-profit and Christian charter schools. You vote for the doubling of our prison population, the tripling and quadrupling of sentences and huge expansion of crimes meriting the death penalty. You vote for militarized police who gun down poor people of color with impunity. You vote against the Green New Deal and immigration reform. You vote for limiting a woman's right to abortion and reproductive rights. You vote for a segregated public-school system in which the wealthy receive educational opportunities and poor people of color are denied a chance. You vote for punitive levels of student debt and the inability to free yourself of debt obligations through bankruptcy. You vote for deregulating the banking industry and the abolition of Glass-Steagall. You vote for the for-profit insurance and pharmaceutical corporations and against universal health care. You vote for bloated defense budgets. You vote for the use of unlimited oligarchic and corporate money to buy our elections. You vote for a politician who during his time in the Senate abjectly served the interests of MBNA, the largest independent credit card company headquartered in Delaware, which also employed Biden's son Hunter.
There are no substantial political differences between the Democrats and Republicans. We have only the illusion of participatory democracy. The Democrats and their liberal apologists adopt tolerant positions on issues regarding race, religion, immigration, women's rights and sexual identity and pretend this is politics. The right wing uses those on the margins of society as scapegoats. The culture wars mask the reality. Both parties are full partners in the reconfiguration of American society into a form of neofeudalism. It only depends on how you want it dressed up.
"By fostering an illusion among the powerless classes" that it can make their interests a priority, the Democratic Party "pacifies and thereby defines the style of an opposition party in an inverted totalitarian system," political philosopher Sheldon Wolin writes.
The Democrats will once again offer up a least-worst alternative while, in fact, doing little or nothing to thwart the march toward corporate totalitarianism. What the public wants and deserves will again be ignored for what the corporate lobbyists demand. If we do not respond soon to the social and economic catastrophe that has been visited on most of the population, we will be unable to thwart the rise of corporate tyranny and a Christian fascism.
We need to reintegrate those who have been pushed aside back into the society, to heal the ruptured social bonds, to give workers dignity, empowerment and protection. We need a universal health care system, especially as we barrel toward a global pandemic. We need programs that provide employment with sustainable wages, job protection and pensions. We need quality public education for all Americans. We need to rebuild our infrastructure and end the squandering of our resources on war. We need to halt corporate pillage and regulate Wall Street and corporations. We need to respond with radical and immediate measures to curb carbon emissions and save ourselves from ecocide and extinction. We don't need a "Punch and Judy" show between Trump and Biden. But that, along with corporate tyranny, is what we seem fated to get, unless we take to the streets and tear the house down.
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Beware the Buyer's Remorse of Impulse-Purchase Joe Biden
While Biden may indeed be a "nice guy," he is quite possibly the worst candidate to challenge Trump.
Mar 09, 2020
Now that the dust has settled from the political earthquake of the Super Tuesday primary races, one thing has become clear: Former Vice President Joe Biden, who has become the new frontrunner of the Democratic Party, was an impulse buy -- one that voters may come to regret deeply.
Just a week ago, reality matched expectations. The first few Democratic primary races of the season played out just as polls said they would: with a crowded field of candidates splitting votes several ways and Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders drawing pluralities of support in Iowa (where he essentially tied with former South Bend, Indiana, Mayor Pete Buttigieg), New Hampshire and Nevada. Even in South Carolina Sanders appeared to be closing in on Biden until Rep. Jim Clyburn stepped in with an endorsement. Biden's luck instantly changed, and the stunning speed with which the center-right faction of the party consolidated itself around him between the South Carolina victory and Super Tuesday races was breathtaking.
There was no time to poll voters about a dramatically narrowed field after Buttigieg suspended his campaign just three races after officially winning the Iowa caucuses to align behind the old guard of the party. Following Buttigieg, Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who had not long ago been leading all candidates in her home state of Minnesota -- ahead even of Sanders and Biden -- also pulled out of the race and joined the obedient ranks of Biden backers. Former Texas Congressman Beto O'Rourke, who had ended his campaign months ago, waited until the day before the most concentrated set of primary races to show his allegiance to Biden. The timing couldn't have been more obvious.
Other Democratic Party figures chimed in, including former House Speaker Harry Reid, who wrote an op-ed calling Biden "the Democrat best equipped to oust Trump and stabilize America." In his opinion piece, Reid effectively said what most Biden backers are communicating: While we are in favor of policies that Sanders and Sen. Elizabeth Warren back, we choose Biden over the progressive candidates because we think he can beat Trump better than anyone else can.
Corporate media and Democratic Party propaganda convinced enough voters on Super Tuesday to choose Biden at the last minute.
Others in the corporate media openly expressed relief and fawned over Biden. CNN senior analyst John Avlon explained the day before Super Tuesday that Biden was a "known quantity," "known for his decency and empathy," and was therefore the opposite of Trump. It didn't seem to matter to Avlon that Biden's numerous policy decisions over his long career have been far more right wing and Trump-like than Sanders' -- just so long as his personality is affable.
While Reid can be forgiven for papering over Biden's record (Reid is a political figure, after all) Avlon, who is a journalist, failed to raise even a single aspect of Biden's deeply controversial and right-leaning past -- a legacy that is expertly documented in Branko Marcetic's political biography "Yesterday's Man: The Case Against Joe Biden." Marcetic explaines how "Biden cast a decade's worth of votes that turned into political boomerangs," including on issues of abortion where his Catholic beliefs pushed against the Democratic Party's stance. Much has also been written about Biden's attacks on Anita Hill, his authorship of the 1994 crime bill, his support for the Iraq war and so much more. Additionally, Marcetic reminds us of how "little sympathy" Biden had for the economic woes when he was vice president under Obama:
As he told one gathering in September 2010, he wanted to "remind our base constituency to stop whining." If they "didn't get everything they wanted, it's time to just buck up here," not "yield the playing field to those folks who are against everything we stand for."
This is the Biden that corporate media outlets are loathe to remind us of as he takes on Sanders' progressive economic agenda in the remaining primary races. Jake Novak, writing for CNBC.com, went as far as giving Biden's campaign helpful advice on how best to crush Sanders: "What does he need to do now to make sure he defeats Senator Bernie Sanders and closes the deal this time?"
Has anyone writing in the corporate media yet given Sanders similar advice? There is no pretense about which side the corporate media is on.
With former New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg dropping out of the race on Wednesday and promising his financial support to Biden, the image of the dead guy in the 1989 film, "Weekend at Bernie's," being artificially made to look alive by his employees comes to mind. Biden's once-lifeless operation has been resurrected, zombie-like, by a hastily built edifice of power, influence and money to resemble a successful presidential campaign.
Given his lack of a real progressive agenda, the only justification for Biden as the Democratic nominee is the near-unanimous corporate media insistence that he is best poised to beat Trump and Sanders is not. Except that it's just not true. In a rare instance of The New York Times publishing a clear-eyed view of the election, Steve Phillips, author of "Brown Is the New White," explained how Sanders had a path to victory. According to Phillips, "Almost all of the current polling data shows Mr. Sanders winning the national popular vote." Even others like USA Today columnist Jason Sattler, who openly admitted Sanders was not his favorite candidate, pointed out that the Vermont senator, "has generally beaten Trump in head-to-head polls for five years now." A recent study claiming to prove that Sanders was unelectable, gleefully cited by the pro-Biden crowd to buttress their choice, was thoroughly debunked by Jacobin Magazine's Seth Ackerman.
But with Biden's South Carolina win and the centrist candidates' unexpected endorsements ahead of Super Tuesday, the barrage of anti-Sanders messaging finally paid off, fueling a perfect storm among undecided Super Tuesday voters. The Washington Post explained on Wednesday that "Biden's victories in Virginia and North Carolina and his competitive showing in Texas were aided by voters who made up their minds within the last few days, according to preliminary exit polls ... Biden won about 6 in 10 of the late deciders in Virginia and North Carolina." In other words, voters who chose Biden were not loyal to his candidacy. Instead, their choice was a spur-of-the-moment decision, an impulse buy. In contrast, "Sanders did better in both states among voters who decided earlier than in the last few days."
On the day before Super Tuesday, I was invited to join a panel on MSNBC's "All in With Chris Hayes" alongside actor-director Rob Reiner, who has supported Biden's candidacy for months. During our conversation, Reiner kept insisting that Biden could beat Trump and therefore was the best choice for nominee. As the program wrapped up, we continued our conversation off-camera, and I said to him that even Hillary Clinton in 2016 had been a far stronger candidate than Biden. Reiner readily agreed but explained, "Now that we've had four years of Trump, people will be more likely to choose Biden over him." In other words, our standards for president are so low thanks to Trump that even a weak candidate like Biden meets it. If that is true, then why would Sanders not meet (or surpass) the same standard?
The answer to that question is that Democratic Party elites and corporate media would rather have a weak neo-liberal capitalist than a strong democratic socialist as president, even at the risk of four more years of Trump. After all, with Biden as the nominee, Wall Street wins no matter the outcome of the race. In a testament to the post-Super Tuesday relief of the moneyed class, stock prices shot up, especially in the health insurance industry.
While Biden may indeed be a "nice guy," he is quite possibly the worst candidate to challenge Trump. His debate performances have ranged from lack luster to confused, to utterly unprepared. Remember when Kamala Harris took on Biden last June just as Warren recently took on Bloomberg?
Trump's favorite label for Biden is, sadly, well deserved -- Googling "Creepy Joe" brings up far too many photos and videos of the vice president putting himself disgustingly close to women, smelling their hair, putting his hands on their shoulders from behind and more. He is the butt of jokes on late night shows and the focus of right-wing media scorn. Republicans are lining up attack lines against Biden's role in the Ukraine scandal, and Trump is eager to reflect the humiliation of his impeachment trial back on Biden. Add to that Biden's 30 years of regressive and right-leaning policy decisions, and what remains is a ready-made punching bag for the sadistic and relentless Trump juggernaut.
Corporate media and Democratic Party propaganda convinced enough voters on Super Tuesday to choose Biden at the last minute. But if Biden does end up as the nominee it is likely that his weaknesses will become more apparent with each passing day and voters may experience "buyer's remorse." In just a few weeks and months as the primary races continue, it will be too late to return the damaged goods.
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After Super Tuesday, Bernie Must Go All Out to Make the Case for Biden's Unelectability
The gloves must immediately come off when it comes to treating Joe Biden.
Mar 03, 2020
For the second time (after the heart attack last fall), the Bernie Sanders movement is on life support. Let us not sugarcoat this: last night was worse than the worst-case scenario any Bernie supporter had imagined. The drastic slippage in Texas, Massachusetts, Maine, Minnesota, and even Vermont, let alone Oklahoma, Tennessee, Virginia, and North Carolina, represents a mortal threat to the movement. But there's a glimmer of hope yet, because it was only three days ago that Biden had been written off, so things can change quickly. Of course, we now have the irrefutable fact on the ground of Biden's delegate haul and his victory in a whole bunch of states, prompted by support from African Americans, older voters, and suburbanites, so it won't be easy.
But with continued backing from younger and Latino voters, Bernie needs to quickly figure out a counter-strategy to come roaring back. And come back he can, despite the terrain in the rest of March being quite unfavorable to him, as well as the danger of the media narrative going past the point of reversibility.
Though it's not in Bernie's nature to follow a game plan of the sort I'm suggesting, I hope his advisers will convince him that at stake is the fate of the movement, and the enthusiasm of the millions of engaged voters he's inspired, and that he must rapidly shift his approach. Bernie should demand one-on-one debates with Biden, which would certainly be facilitated by Warren dropping out and not sniping at him, but it's something he should ask for even if the field isn't cleared.
What about Biden's disqualifying record on the war on drugs, the promotion of mass incarceration, and Patriot Act-like attacks on civil liberties, going back to the 1980s and 1990s? What about his opposition to busing and desegregation? What about his horrible treatment of Anita Hill? What about his complicity with Obama's barbarous deportation policy?
The gloves must immediately come off when it comes to treating Joe Biden. He's been let off all too easily this entire campaign, given his atrocious fifty-year anti-liberal record. Blanketing the airwaves to the extent the campaign can, and picking strategic spots to maintain some momentum through the rest of March (probably Ohio, Washington, Michigan, and Arizona), Sanders needs to do to Biden what he should have done to Elizabeth Warren long ago--that is, make his opponent appear ridiculously unelectable, which in fact he is.
1. Press hard on Biden's record beyond support for the Iraq War, unfavorable trade bills, Social Security cuts, and the bankruptcy bill, all of which Bernie did bring up on Tuesday night. But why does it feel like Bernie's critique of Biden only starts after 2003? What about Biden's disqualifying record on the war on drugs, the promotion of mass incarceration, and Patriot Act-like attacks on civil liberties, going back to the 1980s and 1990s? What about his opposition to busing and desegregation? What about his horrible treatment of Anita Hill? What about his complicity with Obama's barbarous deportation policy? What about his advocacy of the kinds of financial deregulation that led to the economic crash?
Bernie did make a start Tuesday evening, but he has been all too reluctant to go after Biden, even when numerous opportunities to draw distinctions have presented themselves. This lack of appetite to engage almost killed his campaign by way of Warren in the fall, until she was questioned by the media and failed to stand firmly behind Medicare for All. If Bernie keeps calling Biden "my good friend Joe," he just adds to the impression in voters' minds that while Biden may have lost a few marbles he is still fundamentally a decent guy and deserves a shot as Barack Obama's legitimate successor.
2. We've heard Bernie's stump speech, with its completely warranted emphasis on the fossil fuel, pharmaceutical, and other industries that are the culprits in our economic serfdom, but for now Bernie needs to come up with a brand-new script. Clearly, voters across the country on Super Tuesday rejected association with "democratic socialism" the way it's been misrepresented in the media, and bought into the reactionary idea that, for example, getting rid of private insurance would be too disruptive and not even doable in any future political scenario. But Bernie's dreams for economic equality seem fantastical only by comparison to the utterly false impression of Biden as a capable executive who's always stood by the little guy.
Bernie needs to zero in on the astonishing aspects of Biden's resume we haven't heard enough about throughout this campaign. Biden not only supported the Iraq War but was one of its most enthusiastic cheerleaders. His own president didn't go for Biden's advice on Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere, so while he may have been a boisterous speechmaker in the Senate his actual record consists of a half-century of gross misjudgments. The same goes for mass incarceration, where he was not just a passive supporter but one of the leading articulators of the whole apparatus of imprisonment that came into being and still exists. He should be challenged on unjustifiable votes in these areas--from wholehearted support for neoliberal trade agreements to Bush/Cheney-like civil rights violations to the persistent aura of misogyny and racism throughout his career--without any regard for his feelings.
3. Change the discourse from "Trump is the most existential threat we face" to "Biden will herald the return of everything that caused Trump in the first place and help bring about something even worse than Trump." I've always been against Bernie taking up the theme of Trump as the worst modern president because each time he does so he makes Biden's superficial case for electability all the stronger. If Trump really is the greatest threat to the republic, then why take a chance with Bernie who promises a political revolution? Why not go with Obama's vice president who looks like he might restore dignity and take us back to some semblance of normality?
Bernie hasn't wanted to go anywhere near that, but I don't think he can win the nomination without taking on Obama's horrendous record on domestic and foreign policy, from drones and assassinations to deficit hawkery and deportations. What Bernie has wanted to do so far is to somehow bypass the sad truth about the last Democratic president and not give the electorate too much to absorb, since Obama remains popular, certainly among those who turned out in droves to support Biden on Super Tuesday.
How, then, to break the link between Biden and Obama? It can only be done by making the desire to go back to Obama less appealing. And by pointing out example after example of where Biden made errors of judgment by standing with Obama on the wrong things, such as cutting Social Security and Medicaid in pursuit of an elusive grand bargain with Republican deficit hawks, or by going along with the continuation of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan despite his own doubts. I know this is a lot to ask for from Bernie, and harder still for not having been attempted before, but I don't see a way around it.
In short, though the situation is critical, all is not lost because Bernie's hardcore base is not going away. The problem lies in expanding that base, and if we are to be honest about Super Tuesday we must admit that across the country voters rejected the way Sanders was said to be describing the change he promises to bring about in favor of a do-nothing restoration. Though I've always supported Bernie's use of "democratic socialist" to label himself, I would not go out of my way to do so for the time being. Rather, a ferocious attack, including paid advertising, must bring to the surface Biden's half-century of reactionary stances, of the kind that should make Democratic voters ashamed to be aligned with him. The fact that Biden has reached a palpable level of senility should also not be off the table.
Those of us who have been with this unprecedented social justice movement with our heart and soul for the last many years expect that Bernie goes to this climactic fight with Biden with nothing left unsaid. No punches pulled, no recourse to the affable civility that comes naturally to Bernie, just a tenacious enunciation of the policies that Biden so enthusiastically supported and that led to the very rise of Trump.
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Dark Money Played a Pivotal Role in Trump's Wisconsin Win
A confidential report claims that secretive groups targeting independent voters helped tip the balance for Trump in 2016.
Mar 01, 2020
Two groups from outside of Wisconsin may have been responsible for President Donald Trump's narrow win in the state in 2016, according to a recently obtained "confidential" report.
The groups have used their "independent" brand name to appeal independents, an advantage Higgins touted to donors at an event in 2015: "Being branded as neutral, but actually having people who know know that you're actually conservative puts us in a unique position."
Between October 29 and November 7, 2016, sister groups Independent Women's Voice and Independent Women's Forum, two nonprofits based in Washington, D.C., launched a campaign to target registered independents and Republican-leaning women in Wisconsin. These efforts moved independent voters in the state by 16 percentage points toward Trump, says the report, which was prepared for both groups by Daron Shaw, a professor at the University of Texas, Austin.
The groups targeted approximately 1.54 million registered voters with multiple choice and 'true or false' quizzes, consisting of questions on the Affordable Care Act and the U.S. Supreme Court. The quizzes were delivered via digital outreach, postcards, and phone calls starting eleven days before the 2016 presidential election.
Heather Higgins, an heiress to the Vicks VapoRub fortune who has led the groups' boards for years, summed up Shaw's findings: Had the quiz messaging not occurred, "Trump would have received an estimated 215,840 fewer votes in Wisconsin, the state completely written off by all the political professionals."
Her website for the group added that without the groups' intervention, "both Trump and [Wisconsin Republican U.S. Senator Ron] Johnson would otherwise have lost Wisconsin by over 100,000 votes each."
Trump won the popular vote in Wisconsin by less than 23,000 votes.
True North Research, a research organization I founded and lead, has just issued a report about the groups, whose election-season activities flew below the radar of most national and state media outlets. It documents the groups' involvement in the 2016 election, as elucidated by Shaw's report, which was obtained by True North last year.
As Shaw's description of Higgins's strategy highlighted, most of the funding to influence women voters came from the Independent Women's Forum, the 501(c)(3) arm of the duo.
That's troubling, Marcus Owen, the former head of the agency's tax-exempt organizations division, told the Center for Media and Democracy. He noted that the IRS stipulates that 501(c)(3) charities "must avoid any issue advocacy that functions as political campaign intervention," whether they name a candidate or not.
Shaw suggested in his report that the potency of the messaging by the Independent Women's Forum and Independent Women's Voice was attributable in part to the power of repeated quizzes to reinforce the answers suggested. As he explained it:
"[E]ven relatively modest quiz messaging can have an impact on people, especially with respect to their knowledge of issue and policy arguments. However, to persuade people about the salience of the issue, or to move broader attitudes on the issue, it seems that multiple 'touches' and different modes of outreach are necessary, as we saw in the Wisconsin test."
The Independent Women's Voice used its outreach to tie those issues to the election.
Shaw found that the quizzes made Wisconsin independents 16 percent more likely to vote for Trump. He also found that the quizzes were more effective with Republican and independent women than with men in making women "more likely to support Trump over Clinton" (17 percent versus 11 percent).
Since 2010, Independent Women's Voices has been deploying women to tell other women to worry about government health insurance interfering with their access to doctors.
The groups have used their "independent" brand name to appeal independents, an advantage Higgins touted to donors at an event in 2015: "Being branded as neutral, but actually having people who know know that you're actually conservative puts us in a unique position."
Although the quizzes were not included in Shaw's report, the website for Independent Women's Voice has quizzes on the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and on the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court (from when Senator Mitch McConnell was blocking President Barack Obama's ability to appoint Merrick Garland). Another quiz combines the two issues.
Since 2010, Independent Women's Voices has been deploying women to tell other women to worry about government health insurance interfering with their access to doctors. The group has also created numerous sites attacking the ACA, particularly around pivotal elections.
Higgins's groups poured millions into ads and other marketing efforts in 2016. Although the amount spent in Wisconsin alone was not reported, the two groups spent a combined total of more than $3.7 million that year. The Independent Women's Forum carried the bulk of that expense, spending more than $2.5 million on what they called "active engagement and market evaluation."
Independent Women's Voice also spent almost $700,000 on "active engagement" and communications, plus nearly $500,000 on polling in 2016.
In contrast, in 2015, the two groups spent only $12,000 on what they called active engagement.
Since 2016, my research found that the groups have raised nearly $20 million, not counting any funds raised in the past fourteen months. In the last presidential election year, donors gave them more than $8 million. That year, they targeted Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and New York, but Shaw concluded their messaging was not as effective in the latter two states, where there was more "noise" from spending by others.
The Independent Women's Voice also issued individual press releases applauding sixty-eight members of Congress who were re-elected after signing a repeal "Obamacare" pledge, including one for Senator Johnson of Wisconsin.
How much the groups will raise and spend this year is not yet known.
Higgins has been focused on Wisconsin since at least 2011, when her groups worked to influence voters' views of unions as Republican Governor Scott Walker faced a potential recall from office. She later claimed the Independent Women's Voice played a decisive role in his success in remaining in office.
Here's how she described that race:
"IWV's research showed that the core belief among Independents who opposed Gov. Walker's reforms was that public employees are underpaid and are making a sacrifice to hold those jobs. Through our educational program, we changed this foundational belief into an understanding that unionized public employees are overcompensated relative to the private sector."
According to Higgins, "support for Scott Walker increased by 31 points among 10,000 likely voters who received our message . . . even though we made no reference to Walker, his reforms, or the recall."
The Independent Women's Voice and Independent Women's Forum grew out of a group of women who were friends of Clarence Thomas and defended him against allegations of sexual harassment during his Supreme Court confirmation hearing in 1991.
They argued, essentially, that because he had not sexually harassed them, he could not have harassed Anita Hill, despite her testimony under oath. Thomas, who angrily denied Hill's charges, was confirmed to the U.S. Supreme Court.
Since then, the Independent Women's Forum has countered the unequal pay claims of the U.S. women's soccer champions and opposed Title IX's guarantees for equal opportunity for athletics for women and girls, among other things.
More recently, the group has attacked a proposal to add a small payroll tax to fund paid leave to care for oneself or a loved one, and urged instead that parents borrow from future Social Security payments to cover time off for a newborn.
Independent Women's Voice has also repeatedly backed male candidates over women, as when it helped Scott Brown, a Republican U.S. Senate contender in Massachusetts, beat Martha Coakley in 2010. Three years later, Independent Women's Voice claimed to have played "a unique and critical role" in South Carolina Republican Mark Sanford's Congressional election win against Democrat Elizabeth Colbert Busch. It even made $176,991 in independent expenditures on behalf of Richard Mourdock in 2012, after the Republican contender for U.S. Senate in Indiana said that, when a woman gets pregnant from being raped, "it's something God intended."
And both groups went to bat for Brett Kavanaugh, as he denied attempting to sexually assault Dr. Christine Blaisey Ford.
The Independent Women's Voice received $4 million from the Freedom and Opportunity Fund, one of conservative operative Leonard Leo's dark money groups, as they fought to keep President Obama's nominee from getting a hearing and while helping make sure President Trump's nominees were confirmed.
In the Trump Administration, the leaders of these two women's groups are gaining an even larger voice.
In 2018, Heather Higgins was appointed by then-House Speaker Paul Ryan to the U.S. Commission commemorating the centennial of the passage of the 19th Amendment, giving women the right to vote. Last November, she was invited to the Oval Office as Trump signed a bill to honor this occasion with a commemorative $1 coin.
Kellyanne Conway, a White House counselor, is a former director on the Independent Women's Forum board and for years was one of the pollsters the Independent Women's Voice used in Wisconsin and elsewhere.
Political observers have long debated how Trump was able to win Wisconsin in 2016. Pundits often cite Trump's digital campaign, the Republican's efforts at voter suppression, Hillary Clinton's failure to visit Wisconsin after Bernie Sanders won the primary, third party votes for Jill Stein, and even documented Russian interference. But the press in Wisconsin has largely failed to cover the role of these stealthy "independent" women's groups.
Whether the groups played as big a role as Higgins claims may never be known. The only question now is whether she will repeat the same game plan in Wisconsin and other swing states in 2020. If so, we need to make sure folks are paying attention this time.
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New Ad Campaign Ties Biden to 'Heartless' GOP Efforts to Cut Social Security
"Why did Joe Biden join Republicans to attack benefits for seniors?"
Jan 21, 2020
Organize for Justice, the 501(c)4 campaign arm of Justice Democrats, is rolling out a series of primary campaign ads targeting former Vice President Joe Biden and former South Bend, Indiana Mayor Pete Buttigieg in early states voting and caucusing to select the 2020 Democratic nominee.
Biden's history as a senator from Delaware was the topic of the first ad, which highlights Biden's multiple statements over the years expressing approval for "heartless" efforts by Republicans to cut Social Security and other public services.
"Why did Joe Biden join Republicans to attack benefits for seniors?" wondered activist Jordan Uhl.
Justice Democrats executive director Alexandra Rojas, who serves as the board president for Organize for Justice, told Common Dreams in a statement that the reality of the U.S. political system forced them into producing the commercials to show the American people the truth.
"As billionaires, SuperPACs, and corporate-backed front groups spend millions to misinform voters about progressive policies and candidates, the progressive movement has to fight back," said Rojas. "Americans need to know about Biden's and Buttigieg's records and their relationships with corporate executives and donors."
The first ad is just the beginning, the group said.
Black Voters Matter Fund co-founder Cliff Albright, in a statement, endorsed the efforts by Organize for Justice to air the details of Buttigieg and Biden's pasts and took specific aim at Biden's comments last year seen as praising segregationists.
"Black America, and by extension all America, needs a presidential candidate who is willing to confront white supremacy," said Albright. "Not pine for the good old days when it was at its height. Not negotiate with it. Not appease it and not hide from it."
Organize for Justice intends to spend around $500,000 on ads over the next two months in early states:
Some of the ads highlight Biden's record working with Republicans to support the Iraq War, the crime bill, and cuts to social security, as well as his poor leadership during the Anita Hill hearings and his support for the bankruptcy bill. Other ads highlight Buttigieg's record at McKinsey, his cozy relationship with Wall Street and Big Pharma, and his flip-flopping over Medicare for All.
Iowa CCI Action Fund organizer Jack Reardon endorsed Organize for Justice's approach.
"Americans have a right to know which candidates are accountable to everyday people," said Reardon, "and which candidates have chosen to be accountable to big money and corporations."
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As 2020 Race Heats Up Ahead of Primaries and Caucuses, Sanders Surrogate Argues Biden 'Has Repeatedly Betrayed Black Voters'
The op-ed from co-chair Nina Turner comes as the Biden and Sanders campaigns are clashing over the former vice president's Iraq War vote.
Jan 11, 2020
Among the signals that the Democratic presidential race is heating up in the final few weeks before the first round of caucuses and primaries, a leader in Sen. Bernie Sanders' campaign on Sunday published an op-ed detailing former Vice President Joe Biden's record on racial issues and encouraging black voters to support Sanders.
In an op-ed for The State--a newspaper based in South Carolina, which will hold the nation's fourth nominating contest on Feb. 29--Sanders 2020 co-chair Nina Turner, an African American woman, wrote:
Will our community side with former Vice President Joe Biden, who has repeatedly betrayed black voters to side with Republican lawmakers and undermine our progress? Or will we stand with Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and a movement that has been fighting for racial and economic justice since the civil rights era?
This critical choice is illustrated by the key differences between Biden and Sanders--which began at the beginning of their respective careers.
Turner highlighted moments from each man's political career to establish a contrast between them. She pointed to Biden's votes and advocacy for "bills designed to prevent black students from accessing white schools" compared with Sanders organizing civil rights protests as a college student in Chicago.
Recalling the 1991 hearings to confirm Clarence Thomas as a Supreme Court justice, when Biden chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, Turner wrote that "Biden facilitated the public degradation of Anita Hill, an esteemed professor already victimized by a powerful man."
The op-ed also noted Biden and Sanders' positions on so-called "welfare reform" in the 1990s as well as "tough on crime" legislation and economic policies, including 2005 bankruptcy legislation that Biden backed. "And today, "Turner wrote, "the differences between Biden and Sanders remain stark."
As Turner explained, Biden "opposes Democratic efforts to legalize marijuana" while Sanders supports not only legalization but also criminal justice reform to address institutional racism; Biden opposes transitioning to a Medicare for All healthcare system, for which Sanders has advocated for years; and Biden "has refused to support Sanders' bill to make public colleges and universities tuition free and cancel all student debt."
"By supporting a racial justice champion like Sanders--and his popular progressive agenda--black Americans will forge a multiracial, multigenerational working-class alliance that will generate the high turnout necessary to beat President Donald Trump," she concluded. "In standing with Sanders over Biden, we will declare that we are not going backward--we are going forward into a future of empowerment and equality for all."
According to Sanders 2020 speechwriter and senior adviser David Sirota--who wrote about Turner's op-ed in the most recent edition of BERN NOTICE, a newsletter he authors for the campaign--Turner scheduled multiple televised interviews to discuss her piece for The State.
Ryan Lizza, Politico's chief Washington correspondent, tweeted in response to Turner's op-ed that "this is the whole kitchen sink against Biden." He added that it "will be interesting to see if Sanders is willing makes these same attacks at Tuesday night's debate."
Alex Thompson, also of Politico, agreed with Lizza's characterization of the op-ed, writing in a series of tweets that it "has kitchen sink vibes."
Responding to one of Thompson's tweets, Sanders 2020 national press secretary Briahna Joy Gray wrote, "I wish the media/political figures were as concerned [about] how Joe Biden's bad judgement has hurt black people as they are [about] the horserace."
"If they covered the substance of the article, they'd have to admit that the critique is true," she added. "Trump won't hesitate to talk about it."
The Twitter thread from Politico's Thompson also mentioned a report he published late Saturday, with journalist Holly Otterbein, about how "the nonaggression pact between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren is seriously fraying," based on "talking points his campaign is using to sway voters and obtained by Politico."
A reproduction of the talking points that Thompson shared on Twitter features sections about Warren, Biden, and Pete Buttigieg. Thompson and Otterbein reported that "it is unclear whether the script is being used for phone calls or door knocking or both, or in which locations."
"The Sanders campaign did not challenge the authenticity of the script, but it declined to comment," Politico noted. "The Warren campaign also declined to comment."
Turner's op-ed and the Politico report came as surrogates for Biden and Sanders' campaigns continued to clash over Biden's vote for the Iraq War, which Sanders himself highlighted during an appearance on CNN earlier this month.
After former Secretary of State John Kerry on Friday defended Biden's Iraq War record--laying blame on the George W. Bush administration, which "broke their word with respect to how they would proceed"--Sanders 2020 senior adviser Jeff Weaver hit back with a statement on Saturday.
"It is appalling that after 18 years Joe Biden still refuses to admit he was dead wrong on the Iraq War, the worst foreign policy blunder in modern American history," said Weaver. "Unlike 23 of his Senate colleagues who got it right, Biden made explicitly clear that he was voting for war, and even after the war started, he boasted that he didn't regret it."
"Bernie Sanders saw the same information and had the judgment to vote against the Iraq War," he added. "That's the kind of commander in chief we need--someone with the toughness and judgment to get those calls right, not someone who undermined Democratic opposition, enthusiastically supported a disastrous war, refuses to admit mistakes, and then tries to rewrite history."
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'We Won't Let Him Forget': Christine Blasey Ford Senate Testimony Plays on Big Screen Outside Kavanaugh Dinner
"The Federalist Society is trying to rehabilitate a credibly accused sexual predator, and we will not allow them to forget Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh's other accusers."
Nov 14, 2019
Activists with Demand Justice and the Center for Popular Democracy Action played video of Dr. Christine Blasey Ford's Senate testimony on a big screen outside of a Federalist Society dinner Thursday night honoring Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh, who Ford accused of sexual assault.
"The Federalist Society is trying to rehabilitate a credibly accused sexual predator, and we will not allow them to forget Dr. Christine Blasey Ford and Kavanaugh's other accusers," Katie O'Connor senior counsel for Demand Justice, said in a statement. "Kavanaugh is not the hero of this story. We still believe Christine Blasey Ford, and we won't let him forget that. Putting on a new robe can't be allowed to erase credible accusations of sexual assault."
As guests of the event waited outside for the dinner to begin, protestors walked among the crowd chanting "I believe Dr. Ford! I believe Anita Hill!"
During Kavanaugh's speech at the invite-only gala, which was sponsored by Facebook, protestors blew rape whistles and yelled "We believe Christine Ford!" and "We believe survivors!"
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'The Answer Is Not Joe Biden': The Nation Magazine Issues Official Anti-Endorsement
"Stumbling through the primaries, Biden's zombie campaign crowds out worthier challengers, handing Trump a free pass on the very issues that should be his Achilles' heel."
Nov 06, 2019
While claiming it's still too early to make a choice between Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, The Nation--among the oldest amd most widely-circulated progressive magazines in the U.S.--went public early Thursday morning with its "anti-endorsement" of the third top-tier candidate in this year's Democratic primary race: former Vice President Joe Biden.
"Biden's long record of poor judgment--on everything from the 1994 crime bill that fueled mass incarceration to his botched handling of Anita Hill's testimony against Clarence Thomas to his defense of Bill Clinton's brutal welfare cuts to his support for the Iraq War to his role as cheerleader for Wall Street deregulation," argues The Nation editorial, make the candidate a uniquely weak opponent to put up against President Donald Trump, "whose reelection poses a clear and present danger to America's survival as a constitutional republic."
"Stumbling through the primaries," the editorial states, "Biden's zombie campaign crowds out worthier challengers, handing Trump a free pass on the very issues that should be his Achilles' heel."
In 2016, The Nation was the first national publication to endorse Sanders in the Democratic primary. And while editor D.D. Guttenplan explained in a recent editorial why "We Don't Have to Choose Between Warren and Sanders Yet," the magazine believed it was time to take a firm position on Biden--running a campaign that is making "muddy what should be a devastatingly clear choice."
Of course some readers responded by saying the call for Biden to withdraw is clearly undemocratic at this stage of the primary process.
But, according to The Nation, there's a strong case to be made that Biden could help repeat history and allow Trump four more years in the White House.
Like Hillary Clinton in 2016, Joe Biden offers the promise of picking up where the Obama administration left off: a restoration of business as usual for the K Street lobbyists and Wall Street speculators whose prosperity the 2008 financial crisis did little to disturb. Indeed, as Joseph N. DiStefano reports in this issue, the man posing as "middle-class Joe" has built his career and his family's wealth on an eagerness to serve not the many Americans crushed by credit card debt but the very banks whose hands are around their throats. The candidate who insists Medicare for All is too expensive for Americans is also the candidate who, like Clinton, endorsed NAFTA, China's admission to the World Trade Organization, and the Trans-Pacific Partnership--all of which have savaged U.S. manufacturing and workers. Clinton's record cost her the industrial heartland (Ohio, Pennsylvania, Michigan) and, with it, the election.
For these reasons and others, the editorial board calls on "Biden to put service to country above personal ambition and withdraw from the race."
While Biden continues to lead most national polls, his grip on clear frontrunner status has slipped as both Warren and Sanders have gained ground.
A new national Monmouth poll released Wednesday showed Biden with the slimmest of leads overall at 23%, but in a statistical tie with Sanders and Warren who both received 20% in the survey with +/- of 5.3%.
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