For Bernie, we win via the High Road, not Harassment

Bernie Sanders is my candidate for president, and what I have put into his campaign evidences that no one is more devoted to his cause than I am.

But among my brothers and sisters working for the political revolution, a disturbing trend has grown, and there need to be more voices coming out against it: the heavy dose of bitter vitriol mixed with the elixir of revolution that we offer to America.  Venom will never lead us to victory.

The most recent incident: "SuperdelegateHitList.com" (since changed to SuperdelegateList.com) created by Chicago Activist Spencer Thayer, whose invitational tweet asked  “So who wants to help start . . . a new website aimed at harassing Democratic Superdelegates?”  (WaPo).  Thayer has since responded to the storm of criticism (including tales of late-night threatening calls to the homes of Hillary-declared superdelegates creeping out the likes of 12 year-olds answering the phone) by removing the word "Hit" from the name of the site, as well as publicly encouraging people to be polite in their lobbying of Superdelegates.

But the words "Harassing" and "Hit" at the moment conception cast the die, because there's no second chance to make a first impression.  And among the ranks of my fellow Bernie supporters, Thayer is not alone in words & actions that utilize vinegar rather than honey in engaging those who aren't already Bernie supporters.  Examples abound on social media, like this one I saw this morning:

Addressing one's audience as "idiots" is not the best recipe for making converts out of doubters.  Now, whoever generated this meme probably imagines that the real targets of conversion are not actually the purported addressees of the meme, but the bitter, outraged pugnacity with which this and other pro-Bernie messages are often suffused only fuels an impression that our ranks are filled only with acerbic aggression, sullen complaint, and outraged animosity--not to mention the image (mirage?) of sexist "Bernie Bros" that has grown like a cancer on the public face of the political revolution.  Perhaps it's unfair, but politics is about perception--and we supporters of Bernie need to work on ours (which is not true of the candidate himself).

One of the important roots of this is anxiety, and the accompanying paranoia, from a perception that the deck is stacked against Bernie, and institutions and people (embattled DNC chair Debbie Wasserman-Schultz most frequently cited) that in fairness ought to be neutral are actually tipping the scales corruptly against our candidate.

Anxiety & paranoia, added to what has seemed to some of us like a media blackout, or pig-pile on Bernie, has been brewing a stew of nasty emotions that have emerged in all the ways mentioned above, and this is dangerous for two reasons: 1) our movement won't grow if we lead with negativity, and 2) a serious, nasty new rift on our side of the political spectrum may lead the Left in general to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in November.

So we who want Bernie to be president should not only avoid such negative tactics, but denounce them.  We should not trumpet a "Bernie or Bust" position (which I disagree with strongly, but which position I can understand).  Expressing that is not going to help Bernie win any more primaries, and may very well drive away Democrats who are on the fence about our candidate.

After last night's debate, one telling observation in the media was that "Both candidates would do well to understand that vehemence is not a substitute for substance."

If that's true of the candidates, it's vastly more true for us, the armies of the political revolution.  Neither Superdelegates nor primary voters will be won over by harassment, vitriol, or complaints.  And Bernie will not win without winning over people who aren't already in his corner.

Not all, but a great swath of those voting for Hillary are voting for her only because they think she can win in November.  They've heard Bernie's platform--and most like it--but Bernie needs to prove he can win, and we need to help, not hinder.  Superdelegates, especially, are looking more than anything to bank on a winner, and they will come over to Bernie, if he & we can convince them he's a winner.

And we can.

As of now, Bernie has won fewer overall votes (a misleading metric because of the differences between primaries & caucuses), fewer pledged delegates (1,307 to 1,087), and fewer states (18 to 16).

But that can change in the next 11 days.  If Bernie wins the New York primary, and then can be seen to have won the flurry of primaries on April 26 (PA & MD are the big prizes, but CT, DE, and RI are also voting then), Bernie can cut into the pledged delegate count, and perhaps more meaningfully, as a symbol, move ahead in the number of states won.

It is metrics like these that will make Superdelegates sit up and take notice--even those who've already committed themselves to Hillary.  And so if we want to bring them over to Bernie, working to get Bernie the win in those six states in the next 11 days should be our priority.

Bernie wins elections--and Superdelegates--with honor, not harassment; with goodwill, not grievance. By May--and certainly by June, after victory in the California primary--Bernie will have a good case to make to the Superdelegates, and we'll be ready to help in whatever way he needs.  But until then, we who want Bernie will only be undermining his cause if we focus on "hit-lists," complaints, and the kind of off-putting protestations of unfairness that will draw no one to our cause.

The Unexamined Roots of the Case for Trade: More stuff is always better

International trade has been growing as a point of contention since the Trans-Pacific Partnership arrived in the public sphere a year ago, and has become increasingly prominent in the US presidential primaries. But lost in discussions about who gets hurt who is exploiting whom is a critical perspective on the central benefit of free trade: cheaper access to consumer goods.

The discussion of the effects of trade is simple to conceive of as a back-and-forth:

• + Trade Case: Comparative Advantage!  If we can Product A more efficiently than Product B, and another country makes Product B more efficiently, then it makes more sense to make a lot of Product A, sell it to the other country, and buy Product B from them cheaper than we could make it ourselves. We'll spend less money to get the same or of both Products than if we made everything at home.
• - Trade response: but when we start importing Product B instead if making it in America, all those good people at Product B factories lose their jobs!
• + Trade Response #1: but if we've got more trade overall, more people get jobs at Product A factories, so it balances out.
• + Trade Response #2: plus, the more trade we've got, the more efficiently everything is being produced and consumed, so we can afford more Products of every kind.
• - Trade argument, at this point, usually devolves into demonizing foreigners who are "taking" the jobs of workers in Product B factories, or something about national pride, along with suspicious attempts to portray Product B factory workers as more truly "American" because of their blue-collar status, and thus more worthy of our protection--or else more well-founded targeting of the increasing profits that accrue from trade to the owners of capital.

Ultimately, though, economists and politicians defending more trade (often rolled into "globalization") are able to carry the argument not by parrying these points, but upon the seemingly unassailable Response #2, that the broad benefits for all outweigh the costs of the few who lose their jobs.  This utilitarian, even possibly socialist logic of "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few" (Spock, or Jeremy Bentham?) is hard to argue against, which helps explain why the other side goes of into other types of counter-arguments.

But while the logic may be sound, the assumptions that underlie it deserve scrutiny.  What exactly is this broad benefit of trade that accrues to all?  Binyamin Applebaum (NYT) distills it as "Everyone gets a discount," while Thomas Black & Isabella Cota (Bloomberg) unpack slighlty more "the benefits of the surge of cheap imports, primarily subdued inflation that preserves consumers' purchasing power."

More and more access to cheaper physical things is the great benefit that trade provides--and indeed, if we can buy a TV from China for $300 instead of $600, are we not better off?  If we can afford to buy farm-raised shrimp from Southeast Asia for $6.99/lb instead of paying $12.99/lb for shrimp caught in the Gulf of Mexico, don't we have access to a better life?

The central benefit of trade depends on the refusal to posit that the answer to these questions might be "no".

But if we examine the lives of genuinely struggling Americans, facing poverty, joblessness, and the inability to climb up even the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, are these problems connected to constrained access to cheap goods and food? Is clothing too expensive? Cell phones? TVs? No: lots of families are trapped in cycles of poverty, but not because there is too little cheap stuff on offer to American consumers. Quality housing, less exploitative legal systems,  safe neighborhoods, and better-resourced schools are lacking, but those cannot be imported.

And what if we examine the lives of Americans in the precarious middle-class? It may be that the latest smartphone or tablet is more accessible because of trade with China, and new school clothes and fall fashions are more affordable because they come from factories in Bangladesh or Mexico. But the speedier integration of new technologies into the expected consumer basket has also loaded families with new expenses: your cable-internet package with all the right channels and download speeds to accommodate streaming over multiple devices may cost 6-7 times what you paid for cable in the 1980s, but incomes have not kept pace. And your family plan for smartphones is a new monthly bill altogether that 1990s budgets weren't forced to juggle. Indeed, many blessings of the "surge of cheap imports" come with monthly service charges that load expense onto services that cannot be replaced by trade (cell phone service cannot be imported), so are we economically better off?

A deeper problem is this: the access to lots more cheap imported goods has enormously expanded the potential participants and arenas of the most dangerous game in capitalism: "Keeping up with the Joneses." Conspicuous Consumption (Thorstein Veblen) is on the rise in reaches of the American income spectrum where it would have been simply unthinkable a half century ago, and in realms of consumption then not even imaginable: which G of iPhone do you have? What store do you buy your organic baby food at? Do you get the free version of Spotify or do you pay for Pandora?

Conspicuous Consumption, as a concept, is an enormous challenge to the basic assumptions upon which argument for trade rests. More trade is good if we are always only spending money on something that really makes our lives better, and thus, if any given thing we can get is cheaper, our lives are better because we can have more of it, or more of something else we otherwise couldn't afford that will make our lives better.

Conspicuous Consumption is the idea that due to social constructions of power and the fear of feeling inadequate (not to mention the power of marketing to get us to spend money on things that do not make our lives better), a lot of our spending is not driven by well-informed decisions about what we really want, need, or will make our lives better, but rather is wasted on things we're bamboozled into buying--many of which may make our lives much worse.

In the end, if trade's main benefit to "the many" has been expanding their capacity to buy more and more cheap goods that often do not make our lives better, but frequently make them more cluttered, expensive, and unhealthy, then the logical structure buttressing the “broad benefits” of trade falls away.

Berning CVA

Canvassing in Culpeper VA Sat, Nov 14: Charlottesville Bernie troops provide reinforcements for the local Bernie outpost!

So the blog's been a bit moribund recently, alas!  Why?  Basically, because we've been so busy!  Jasmine & I both applying for lots of part-time work--looks like I'll be an Adjunct Prof of Economics for Piedmont Virginia Community College in the spring semester . . . unless something more compelling comes up before my background check clears.

But much more than professional activities, we've been busy with Bernie volunteering!  Apart from diving into organizational work of the Charlottesville & Central VA for Bernie volunteer group, we've been getting out the word collecting signatures for Bernie to get on the VA ballot.  The state actually has one of the higher bars to getting on the primary ballot (in fact, in 2012 Rick Perry, Newt Gingrich, Rick Santorum & other Republicans failed to make it on the ballot, leaving the Republican field to just Mitt Romney & Ron Paul).

On Election Day here in VA, when the entire state senate was up for re-election (and where Democrats put up the feeblest of efforts against Republican gerrymandering), Jasmine & I trolled our local polling places with Rachel, another Bernie volunteer, collecting well over a hundred signatures. We also collected a few nasty comments about Mao Zedong as well as accusations of the purveyance of male bovine excrement, due in part to a deficit of wisdom owing to our failure to have been born when Barry Goldwater was running for president.  We later learned that the precinct where we were (Baker-Butler elementary school, our own polling place, though we became Virginia residents too late to vote in the election) is the most conservative in Albemarle County (where Democrats swept the County board of Commissioners elections).  In other precincts around the city & county, our colleagues found lots of people willing to sign for Bernie: over 1,150 just from our Charlottesville group (Bernie apparently needs 5,000 for the whole state).

And even in our precinct we gathered over a hundred signatures and even got about half a dozen names of people local to this part of the county who want to join the offshoot Bernie group we're trying to start: Albemarle North for Bernie.  We have our second meeting this week at a volunteer's house in the beautiful town of Barboursville, where the pretty terrific and famous wine is made.

And we've found other outlets for our enthusiasm for the political revolution--such as the Charlottesville Raise Up for $15 minimum wage rally, where we showed up in Bernie paraphernalia and got to speak to the crowd, and even made it onto local TV, NBC 29 (about 20 seconds in)

and into the local paper, the Daily Progress, where Jasmine was quoted extensively, following her comments at the rally about the insecurity of non-benefit, temporary work, like the adjuncting she did at Colgate.

In general, it's exciting how vibrant a community we've found around here, and how much people like us seem to be accepted into at least certain quite politically active sectors--like the county Democratic party, one of whose vice chairs wanted to have coffee with me after meeting at the polls and invited me to their monthly meeting.

The abundance of dynamic grassroots political and social activism that we've found in Virginia could be due to many factors.  That Virginia is a purple state in flux, where Democrats and others on the left perceive chances to change things in the coming years, may inspire the openness to new actors & allies that they know such change will require.  This itself undoubtedly stems from a huge difference with Central New York: Central Virginia (and the whole state, really) is an area that is growing, on the upswing, and as new people arrive, looking for new opportunities, the ferment only feeds upon itself.  Central New York, by contrast, is decades into a demographic & economic decline, with young people, activists, and entrepreneurs (political, business, or otherwise) often needing to go afield for opportunities if they don't already have a secure place in the region's economic, political, or social structure.  Hamilton, NY has been lucky to attract a notable exception in the past several years in Good Nature Brewing, and its success and planned expansion do incite hope that more people will buck the trend by investing in Central New York, which those who have managed to make a solvent life there know has much to offer.

Of course, Charlottesville is exceptional in many ways, too: one of the wealthiest and most liberal areas of "non"-Northern Virginia, it's a hotbed for all kind of social, artistic, and political activities (and with the persistent delight of Southern courtesy that sets it apart from a Cambridge, MA or Brooklyn).

Culpeper, Virginia, by comparison, an hour up the road towards DC, is neither as prosperous nor as liberal.  Jasmine & I got to experience it yesterday when we drove there with some other local Charlottesville Bernie-supporters to join the lone member of the Culpeper for Bernie group, Earl (see the photo above), in collecting signatures at the farmers' market.  Culpeper is in Virginia's 7th Congressional District (one that's gerrymandered even more Republican than our 5th District) and no surprise it was the most in need of more signatures to be collected for the campaign.  The farmers' market was not nearly as active as what we've seen in Charlottesville, or in Hamilton (even though Culpeper has about 5x the population of the latter!), and it was a scrabble to get many signatures.

Interestingly, we got a bunch of signatures from people who said they're hardly regular Democratic voters, but want "anybody but Hillary" to be the next president.  Depending on which of the current occupants of the Republican clown-car gets nominated for president next summer, a Democratic nomination of Bernie Sanders could well generate a curious new phenomena: the Bernie Republican, foil of the famous Reagan Democrat.  We'll see.

But yesterday's jaunt was important for reasons besides just the signatures: one was helping Earl (and a couple of people who came out of the woodwork as potential Bernie volunteers) shore up his own sense of a movement for Bernie.  If there really is to be major political change in this country, a movement, then it's going to take people moving, at least for a few hours, a day, or a weekend: going physically to places where the movement is not as strong, and spreading the word, wearing the T-shirt, putting a human face to the concept of "Democratic Socialism" (which, after going over it with the chair of economics at PVCC, we decided is really just a brand of Keynesiansm).

And that's why we're here in Virginia, with no jobs, trying to get something started.  I was really excited this weekend by the people we met--vendors in the Farmers' Market who donated parmesan bread to the Bernie volunteers, an African American lady from a local church who's really excited for Bernie (and told us that she thinks her community might be holding its collective nose if Hillary is the name next to "D" on the ballot next fall), several Spanish-speakers who were  not registered to vote, but had clearly never been approached before in this country as members of a civic polity, and even some of the anti-Bernie people who were interested to mix it up a bit.  People like us--not just me & Jasmine, but everybody in the picture above--getting out there, talking to strangers, believing that there's more on offer for America than dynasties, elites who "know better," and apathy of the masses, and putting themselves on the line for something are what it will take to give the lie to the easy rationalization that Bernie can't win (which is in many cases = "we're stuck with the mediocrity we've got").  We can do it--not for Bernie, but for the sake of this country, and a people that need to wake up and realize that they can take back their own democracy.

Democracy in America: Civil Society, Academic department meetings, and Insurgent political campaigns

With apologies to U Chicago Press, whose image I am using.

So, after a long series of over-loaded trips for two aging Japanese stalwarts (a '97 Toyota Camry, to be rewarded with some expensive exhaust work; and an '03 Honda CRV), Jasmine & I arrived at our cabin, on the outskirts of Charlottesville over a week ago.  Since Virginia isn't into profusions of municipal governing bodies (the opposite of New York!), we live in no town or city, but Albemarle County is our only governing entity under the level of the Commonwealth of Virginia.  I'll have to rhapsodize about the idylls of county living in another post, though (as well as tell other news): this one is about organizing for Bernie.

So I was involved in CNY for Bernie, based in Hamilton, in the couple of months before leaving, although peripherally, since I knew I was leaving.  I was also in touch with a group in Baldwinsville, NY, and like to think I helped inspire them to get their group off the ground.  

Volunteering for Bernie, it turns out, is do-it-yourself, at least at this point in the campaign.  Nobody from the campaign (still thinly staffed outside IA & NH) will tell you what to do, organize events, or lead.  You have to be the change you've been waiting for, and lead yourself.

Arriving in CVA (as I've gathered the Charlottesville region is known), Jasmine & I attended our first Bernie event just three days later, a Happy Hour at the local bar Firefly.  We met a number of enthusiastic Bernie supporters, including some students half our (my) age or younger, and a number of other enthusiasts from local activists to entrepreneurial pet-sitters to old-hands of VA politics known to chew the fat with the likes of Bob Goodlatte.

One fascinating dynamic, though, common to both groups, is how hard it is to run a meeting.  In fact, as an outsider trying to participate without elbowing my way in, it was clear that these group, full of goodwill and energy, and a lot of fellow-feeling, have as many impediments to administrative accomplishment & efficiency as any department or program at Colgate University!

Having cogitated at length upon (not to mention contributed to) the function & dysfunction of multiple such committees at Colgate, I often thought to myself, "Well, this must be so dysfunctional because we're a bunch of professors; how can we hope to achieve administrative functionality and positive group dynamics when they are the very things that are dis-incentivized by academia."  But if this is true, then a sample of academics should perform much worse administratively than any randomly-met group of individuals.  But two such (in CNY & CVA) randomly drawn groups (selected purely on being pro-Bernie) seem to evince the same difficulties, of getting hung-up on the short term, or even terminologies, sidetracked by emotional commitments, failure to listen to each other, tendency to speak out of a feeling of needing to speak, rather than to move the group towards a goal, and oversensitivitiy to "authoritarian" leadership tendencies in running a meeting, among others.

This presents a dangerous power imbalance in society: if groups of citizens met for bringing change to a politics that serves the status quo; groups of academics who devote themselves to wisdom & expertise in fields that could serve society; or other collections of individuals not already part of the power-structure of the managerial class (which extends from government through private business, higher education, and even established NGOs and non-profits) cannot get their act together and organize themselves, then the organizations of that power-structure will never face the kind of challenge that can hold them accountable.

This is true of university administrations vis-à-vis faculties, workers vis-à-vis employers, union members vis-à-vis union leaders, HOA or Condo Association members vis-à-vis their boards, and of course, citizens vis-à-vis their governments, not to mention a plethora of other cases where the advantages of the already-empowered are amplified by their fewness in number and honed administrative experience.  

But in the words of E. E. Schattschneider, "The only defense against organization is counterorganization" (Party Government, 1942; p. 44).  In truth, this is no more or less than a call for Americans (or anybody) dissatisfied with a status quo that seems not serve the common good to return to the roots that Tocqueville found when criss-crossing this country in the early 19th century:

Tocqueville found that everywhere in America, groups of citizens were always organizing and learning how to run a meeting, how to work together in a group over time, how to act collectively.  Even the most Rugged Individualists in what were then the "western" states would get together and discuss, work in groups, solve problems, and advance collective goals.  The only cure for not knowing how to run a meeting is to keep holding meetings and try to learn how to run them better--or identify someone with the knack for it, and help them learn.

Unfortunately for Democracy in America, today in this country so many of us are so busy with our own individual or family demands, desires, and responsibilities, that hardly anybody wants to join groups that hold regular meetings anymore.  We're happy to send checks (or simply donate online) to the social causes or political campaigns we support, but this does not teach us the skills to actually enact democracy--it is not participation.

Tocqueville worried that democracy in any country might lead to tyranny and violence, as it had in Revolutionary France.  The rare genius of America that he found was that so many citizens were involved in enacting democracy, practicing citizenship, so that those who made it to the top could be restrained by masses of educated, activist, and administratively well-versed citizens who themselves committed to holding the powerful accountable.  These were not the masses of Europe who transformed into mobs bringing a bloody dictator like Napoleon Bonaparte to power (Vladimir Lenin?  Mao Zedong?).

Today, we have dissatisfaction with leadership in both our political parties, and in other spheres of the society, as well.  But how much of it inspires the patience and self-sacrifice of . . . going to meetings?  It seems all too little--much more goes into the shouting, posturing, and anger that could bring an American Napoleon to power--perhaps Donald Trump?

Bernie turning a corner? Young voter turnout Oct '15 => Nov '16

Since last week's release of fundraising numbers, and Bernie's huge rallies in Massachusetts, I think perceptions of his campaign are starting to take an important turn, with some who've dismissed him, even to the degree they are positively exploring how Bernie might change the terms of political expectations for Democrats in unlikely places.  This extends beyond potential cheerleaders or the putatively neutral to the likes of ultra-conservative Howard Kurtz, whose newfound engagement could be some kind of strategic bomb-throwing, or an attempt to be the right's canary in the coal mine.

An additional early (and potentially faulty) sign of a change in momentum is the first "defection" of a member of the Democratic establishment, AZ Congressman Raúl Grijalva (though, as head of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, on the fringe of establishment) who's become the first federally elected official to endorse Bernie for president (if NYC mayor Bill de Blasio follows through on rumors, this would be an even bigger indicator of establishment "melt" from Hillary)

Interestingly, this (perceived-by-me) shift in tone in the media has come at a time when poll numbers among the Democratic primary contenders have not budged nationally, or in early primary states (and in fact, while IA or NH have not budged, and a slew of more newly-polled states (links as of 10/8/2015) show Hillary with a commanding lead, and Bernie often in third place.  Why the change, then?

One answer explains why pundits are changing their tunes: Bernie is now polling better than Hillary in head-to-head match-ups with potential Republican nominees in the two swing states he's been most active.  Also, as Philip Bump of the Fix has shown cleverly, Hillary's flood of campaign-funds may well run dry before the year is out, while Bernie can go back to the well with his large number of small donors--650,000 at last count.  The Clinton campaign "did not disclose" (doesn't that phrase just sound like it was invented for Hillary?) its total number of donors.  And finally, Hillary's persistently negative net favorability ratings increasingly render her claim to better to being more electable than Bernie Sanders increasingly dubious.

But beyond the kind of short-term factoids like these which pundits attend to, there's a greater reason why they (and everybody!) should recognize the realistic chances of Bernie winning the nomination--and the general election (and hoping he does, unless you'd rather see a Republican).

It's buried inside the first national poll that shows Bernie in the lead over Hillary.  Now, before those in favor of Bernie get too excited about this poll, conducted for the Independent Journal (which seems to be a kind of conservative outlet), it should be noted that you won't see this on any poll-average aggregator, because it's an internet poll.

Why look askance at an internet poll?  The answer to this question is actually the reason why Bernie is the future Democrats should look to.  Traditionally, many internet polls depend on who shows up at a certain web-site, and as a result, their results are highly biased because liberals go to certain web-sites, conservatives go to others, etc.  However, examining the methods of Google, which carried out the poll, it looks like their Consumer Surveys division may have really solved this--and indeed with a sample of over 1000 likely Democratic voters (screened according plans to watch the debate next week), more than double that of any of the RCP-averaged polls, this looks like a very unbiased measure of likely-to-vote Democrats' preferences for Bernie vs Hillary . . . as long as they use the internet, that is.

And here is the bias that necessitates throwing this poll out of the averages: the population of the country that surfs the internet in this country is probably skewed in many ways, and definitely skewed young.  Thus, in a poll where Bernie beats Hillary 60%-28% among 18-24 yo, and 48%-32% among 25-34 yo, it's no surprise that we get a hugely different result from  most national polls, most of which still put Hillary out in front by 20%.

Indeed, the sample for this poll bears little resemblance to the electorate, in terms of age: estimating categories (Google breaks them up a little differently), see the skew in this poll compared to the Exit Polls from the 2014 Election:

Age Group	18-29	30-44	45-65	65
Google Poll	23%	27%	34%	17%
2014 Exit Poll	13%	22%	43%	22%

Clearly, this national survey of Democrats that would give Bernie a slight edge in October of 2015 looks nothing like the electorate that showed up to the polls at the last federal election.  That electorate, where Hillary runs well ahead in the last two age-groups, would give Hillary the win over Bernie easily.

But here is the key question: what do Democrats want the age-profile of the electorate on November 8, 2016 to look like?  If we want (and work) to make it look like one that would give Hillary the win over Bernie, then we will get an electorate that will likely give them the same result as the 2014 midterm elections.  

This is perhaps the strongest point in favor of Bernie's electability: a Bernie campaign and a Bernie nomination would be far more likely to give an age profile that looks like the bottom row here:

Age Group	18-29	30-44	45-65	65
Google Poll	23%	27%	34%	17%
2014 Exit Poll	13%	22%	43%	22%
2008 Exit Poll	18%	29%	37%	16%

That gave Democrats the best presidential election result since 1964.  

If we want something like that again, then we should look to and work for a similar electorate, for the good of our country.  We should not cling out of fear to the kind of presidential campaign (from the perspective of electoral age-profile) that must be at the heart of Hillary Clinton's campaign strategy. That is a recipe for de-mobilization, apathy, and disenchantment of the very youth voters Democrats need to win.

Even if you don't mind Hillary Clinton's policy stances, Democrats should back Bernie, because "We can win" beats "We're afraid to lose".

Value a major secret to living well: unpaid household work

If some people have been following our blog and been attracted to and impressed by what we've been eating--from Fried Rice to Dal & Aloo Gobi, or even just sausages with peppers & onions and mashed peas, you've hopefully realized that the reason we eat so well is all the cooking Jasmine does, how well she does it, and perhaps most importantly (especially for the SNAP challenge), that she cooks from scratch.

This last means that not only are our meals more healthy, because they don't have a lot of processing or preserving chemicals in them, but also that the cost of food is quite low, compared to pre-prepared or partly-prepared foods that I used to eat (like jarred spaghetti sauce, Trader Joe's Mandarin Orange Chicken, etc) before Jasmine was in my life.

But we can eat this way only because we, as a unit, have the time, energy, and willingness to invest in this unpaid household labor.  And by "we," I mean Jasmine, who does almost all of it in our house. We've been able to afford mostly because, until I quit Colgate, I was making a lot more money than she, as she was teaching part-time, on an adjunct basis, and not put upon with any (in truth, I should say "as many") extra administrative responsibilities as I was.  So she has had time & energy to spare for unpaid household labor.

This rather traditional (but not un-progressive) arrangement seemed to come rather naturally to us, partly because for Jasmine to achieve greatness as a poet doesn't necessarily depend on slogging through the trenches of typical academia, whereas for me to achieve . . . well greatness is not exactly the right word . . . as a political scientist, does require it.  But also because Jasmine has a knack and a penchant for performing such household labor excellently.  While I would be slogging at the office, Jasmine has always been willing to slog through the trenches of baking no-knead bread, perfecting new recipes, taking charge of nutrition & shopping, not to mention other important aspects of unpaid household work, like doing laundry, cleaning, doing the dishes.

We were lucky, though, because of how much money I earned: in fact, it put us in the top 25% of households according to income.  My salary alone was only around $15k less than couples where both work.

But this is not most people's experience: in 2008, the median income for (heterosexual) couples where only the husband worked was about $30k less than if they both worked; among couples where only the wife worked, it was $40k less.  Those differences of $30k-$40k of annual income in America makes the difference between a secure place in the upper-middle class (the median income of a family where both parents work would place them above about 85% of households in our country), and a struggle to pay for even some of the many accoutrements of middle-class life: nice house, two cars, vacations, sports or lessons for kids, family vacations, ample retirement funds & college funds, a TV or two, cable, smartphones etc.

And indeed, all this is aside from the constantly hard-pressed situation of single-parent families, whom the combination of government + consumption demands expect to work at least one full-time job, and often more, and who also get almost no help paying for child-care.  The idea that a single-parent ought to stay home most of the day and perform the kind of unpaid labor that Jasmine does to make our lives excellent, much less to provide care, and solid parenting, self esteem, and life-lessons for his (or, as well all know is far more frequently the case, her) own children would be anathema to most of the political & budgetary establishment of this country, who would never countenance the idea of such "takers" getting any outside support for the task of raising the next generation of Americans instead of working multiple low-wage jobs and paying through the nose for childcare.

Why do we live in a society where so many of the things that make family life rich, delicious, and a good environment for raising children are considered "luxuries" that ought to give place to retirement & college savings, and other "normal" middle-class consumption expectations (unless you're really rich)?

It's a tough question, and it's not all about politics or policy, but there are ways that policy can support people bucking the trends of our society, and does, in other countries, like Germany, Sweden, and Switzerland, which Bernie wants to emulate.  In America, it will take a revolution to change these kinds of things--the political revolution that Bernie is calling us to is not the whole solution (just as getting Bernie elected president is not the whole of the political revolution this country needs; we need big change in Congress, too!).  But a political revolution is a good beginning to get people thinking about how lots of things need to be different in this country, including the how we value (and how our government encourages us to value) to value family & labor (both unpaid in the house, as well as outside the home).  That's one big reason why we're for Bernie.

Money cannot buy votes in America or: How Democrats can learn stop worrying about Hillary and Feel the Bern

In 1963, Peter Sellers starred as Inspector Clouseau in one of the most hilarious, ingenious screwball comedies of the era.  Who could have imagined that the next year would see an actor with such a capacity for absurd frivolity as about half the cast of a film that would go down in history as one of the most sobering cinematic treatments of the defining political dilemma of the age: the Cold War?

Perhaps the rise of Bernie Sanders to challenge the "biggest non-incumbent front-runner in modern presidential history," and certainly the idea that he'll win, is even more unlikely than vagaries of Hollywood and the artistic legacy of a brilliant, disturbed Englishman half a century ago.  But in these days of anxiety among the Clinton branch of the Democratic party, and increasingly desperate attempts by her campaign to show that she's "not as bad as people think," it's worthwhile to consider the biggest tangible advantage that she's been purported to have: Money.

Notwithstanding Mitt Romney's whining, we all know direct payments from candidates' (or their super pacs') coffers cannot purchase votes in America.  Money can be used to hire staff, finance GOTV operations, buy ads, run polls, or subsidize campaign swag, but what it cannot do by itself is draw voters to support a candidate.

Hillary Clinton still leads most Democratic polls (outside NH and a couple in IA), but she has a big problem: She's addicted to money.

And that is both cramping her style and devouring time that she should be using to focus on drawing voters to her (or at least stanching the hemorrhage in her support).  Hillary spent Thursday in Massachusetts, with four events--three fundraisers, and a policy discussion.  Her closed-door fundraisers apparently netted her about half-a-million dollars, but they only allowed six or seven hundred people to even see her (another four hundred turned out to the policy discussion, pushing her Mass interaction to just over a thousand voters).

Compare this to Bernie's Saturday in Massachusetts: his event in Springfield, originally scheduled for the steps of Springfield City Hall, then moved to a sports arena because of the size, was expected to draw 3,000 people.  Instead, 6,000 showed up to this free and open event.  In his campaign speech in Boston later that night, 20,000 filled the convention center down by the seaport, while a crowd of more thousands who couldn't fit stood outside in the chilly night air outside to watch him on the jumbotrons set up.

Although the excitement and enthusiasm of those already Feeling the Bern is one reason why we should be quite sanguine about Bernie's chances, even more important is these events' role in drawing people to the campaign; free and open to the public, and filling people with the excitement of participation, they have a great capacity to built an emotional tie that can connect undecided supporters to Bernie, like the 59 year-old lady from Belmont who told Globe reporters as she arrived that she was "uncommitted" in the contest, but "unenthusiastic" about Clinton.

And with Hillary's onerous time commitment to small ("intimate" is the word that sells tickets to such events) fundraisers (composed of people already so committed to her that they'll fork out $250-$2,700 just to get in the door), her ability to connect with voters not already solidly in her column is severely hampered.  If she seems impersonable, or is too scripted, such events (where she'll run into none of the surprises that Bernie has on his bumpy campaign trail) are unlikely to help.  But Hillary, or at least her campaign strategy, is addicted to money, and they seems the most direct route to it.

Bernie, and his campaign strategy, by contrast, are about people.  And indeed, if all the people who came to Bernie's events in Massachusetts yesterday gave $20 to his campaign, his campaign would receive just as much as Hillary's, with doors wide open and no cover charge!  In fact, this has already been happening for months, part of why Hillary was only able to raise $2m more than Bernie's $26m this summer, holding 58 fundraisers while he held just seven.

The truth is, people like Bernie.  And if his ideas seem crazy to anyone, it's only because so many of his have been disappointed or brainwashed into historically abysmal beliefs about how limited our system of government is in its ability to improve the country.  This campaign is about changing hearts and minds to help Americans remember an old truth about our democracy: that if they use the power of the vote, they are government.  Unfortunately for Hillary Clinton, she is too busy with fundraising and trying to appear hip to remember that an election is about a competitive struggle for the people's vote, not just the people's money, and I believe this is what is driving her ever lower in the polls.

Thus, anybody reading this who has wanted Hillary for president (as I used to, myself!), but is now struggling with anxiety about her personality, her capacity to best Marco Rubio or John Kasich, or even her qualification for highest office, should stop worrying and Feel the Bern.

Jasmine & Dan: the Foodstamp Challenge for Bernie

In addition to thinking about how this quarter's fundraising totals show the spreading devotion of people to a real leader like Bernie, rather than a focus-grouped construction, we can also think about the thrift of the Sanders campaign, vs that of the Clinton campaign.

We can see how Bernie gets more bang for his (campaign) buck in how far he has come in the polls since the start of his campaign, compared to what he's spent.  With $25m in the bank, Bernie has spent about $16m to get to where he is, way up in NH, neck-and-neck in IA, and advancing in national polls.  By contrast, Hillary's got $32m in the bank, meaning she's spent about $43m to get from where she was in April to where she is today.

In honor of Bernie's thrift, and also to help adjust our own personal budget for a period of reduced income, my wife Jasmine & I have decided to take up the Food Stamp Challenge, to consume in a week only food (and drink) that would fit into a week's SNAP benefits budget, or about $58 for two people.  Many celebrities have done it, eating for a week in a way that they would never seriously sustain long-run (sometimes failing) in order to illustrate that the calls for cutting or constraining SNAP funding is a Scrooge-like act of bullying the vulnerable, rather than cutting wasteful spending or attacking lavish benefits for the undeserving.  We have a different goal, though, which we can aim at mainly because Jasmine is such an able, educated & informed, and multifaceted cook of nutritious and delicious foods, and already highly economical in terms of both groceries and the food we eat (I contribute nothing but a mouth and an appetite--and I make the coffee every morning).

Our goal is to discover not how "wacky" it is to try and live off of foodstamps for a week, but to recreate a SNAP-only lifestyle in the best way possible, thinking about the time, effort, knowledge & skill it takes to eat decently off of foodstamps (Jasmine's knowledge & skills--none mine: I'll be the "taker" in this undertaking).  That's if it is indeed possible to eat well off of food stamps: Jasmine is a far better candidate than Cory Booker or Gwyneth Paltrow to truly put this to the test.

(Also this will be useful because we may well qualify for foodstamps as we undertake a long period of mostly unpaid labor volunteering for Bernie and writing.)

Stay tuned here for Jasmine's posts telling about our foodstamp challenge, photos & all!

Money in Politics and devotion to a cause (Bernie)

Today, after the end-of-the-third-quarter campaign fundraising dashes for Bernie, Hillary, and the rest of them, the campaigns revealed how much money they took in during the first full quarter of fundraising.  Bernie raised $26m ($2m on the last day!), an increase from the $15m he raised up through June 30.  Hillary Clinton's campaign raised $28m, a drop from the $47m she raised previously.

It's true that Hillary did outraise Bernie, but the main story-line of this campaign news "event" is that Bernie's on the rise and Hillary's having problems.  She held 58 fundraising events in the period, while Bernie only held 7, and Bernie has had 650,000 individual contributors and has average donations of about $25, while for Hillary . . . well, her campaign won't say, but given how many of her big-dollar donors have been donating the maximum $2,700, it's probably less than half as many as Bernie's campaign has--maybe as few as 1/20th.

But beyond just the comparisons of how much money, and expectations, there's something else going on here, the comparison of how much money it takes each campaign to get campaigning done.  If Hillary had to take time out for a fundraising event two out of every three days in the quarter (many exclusively open only to those who could fork over hefty donations), then she's not campaigning as much as Bernie is, even while she's got more money.  And while Hillary has more campaign staffers hired, both as price consultants as well as "ground troops" in important states, Bernie might actually have more labor going into his campaign if you count not only hired help, but volunteers organizing events.

Here in Hamilton, we passed the hat around our group of about 30 people to spring for 2,500 4"x 6" campaign hand-out cards that were spread all around Whitesboro, NY, and other places in the course of canvassing.  None of this came out of the Sanders campaign coffers.  Does Hillary have such free labor on offer, or operations like "Coders for Bernie"?

I doubt it: Hillary's campaign is bought-and-paid for, because people just don't like Hillary enough to devote anything more meaningful than dollars to her campaign.  Hillary lacks charisma not just in the classic sense, but in the sociological sense: she doesn't have Charismatic Authority (Thanks, Max Weber!).  Her husband did, and millions of people wanted to do what he said because it became clear to them that it was the right thing to do, especially when he said it.  Bernie has the same capacity, which is why my wife & I quit our jobs to move to Virginia to volunteer for Bernie, and so many other people are devoting time & effort, not in return for paychecks & résumé lines, to the political revolution that Bernie is calling us to.

Bernie Sanders vs Hillary Clinton--"We can win" vs "We're afraid to lose"

I support Bernie Sanders for President.  I knew of him when he was a politician in Vermont (and met him in middle school), and when he decided to run for president, I decided to quit my tenure track job teaching political science at a liberal arts school in upstate New York to volunteer for his campaign, because the movement to start a political revolution that will elect Bernie president, and bring sweeping change (maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but soon, and for the rest of our lives) in Congress and Washington in general is the kind of thing I can believe in a way that I could not believe in the mission of the the increasingly corporatized institution of higher learning where I'd been teaching for the previous half-decade.

I now have no regular income, having insurance through Obamacare, and am moving with my wife to Virginia, an early primary state, to volunteer for Bernie and write books.  I did this because I believe we can win.

Following the campaign with a magnifying glass (one of my main occupations until I move in a couple of weeks), Bernie's rise has been striking, and though I never bore Hillary Clinton ill-will (I just think Bernie's better, and will really stand up for what I believe in), I've become increasingly aware that one major impediment to more people switching from her to Bernie is the central motivation of fear.

Reading this post from Vox, where several Iowa voters said they liked Bernie, but were afraid he wouldn't be able to win the general election, reminds me of two conversations recently.  One was last spring, after I told colleagues I was quitting my teaching post.  One of them, in the philosophy department, ribbed me a little, saying that although he was impressed by bold move, he questioned what the point was, given the small chance that Bernie could beat Hillary or become president.  At the time, I reacted with pique: I asked him if he was a political scientist, or if he specialized in elections and political parties in his research (my specialty), angrily implying that he didn't know what he was talking about, and I did.  He backed down.

Whether my friend and former colleague has a more accurate vision of our country's political future than me with all my academic training, though, is not as important as what I've begun to realize is where he--and many other of my friends who do not want to see Donald Trump or any other Republican in the White House--are coming from.  They are not inspired by Hillary Clinton, and they don't really believe she'll improve our country very much.  But a Hillary presidency would stave off the major and disastrous changes that a president from the party that keeps trying to shut down the government would likely usher in.  While David Axelrod's observation that "Hillary: Live with it!" is not a very energizing rallying cry for a campaign, that is, in fact, exactly what many of my Bernie-skeptical friends kind of want--they feel comfortable with Hillary, and they could live with her as president, while they couldn't with any of the top Republican contenders (nor could the US economy, society, or middle class, probably, given how the Tea Party would be in the driver's seat even if a reasonable moderate like John Kasich were elected).

But why are they so afraid of Bernie Sanders?  As came up again recentcly when probing some of my liberal friends in DC, they just don't believe Bernie can win a general election.  But how can some voters in Iowa, professors at a liberal arts school in upstate New York (not political scientists--or very avid followers of politics), and DC insiders be guided in the primary by such sure perceptions of a general election 14 months away?

In some ways, this is a logical inversion of the ostensible point of primaries.  Like first-round elections of run-off systems, primaries allow you to "vote your heart" without "wasting your vote," since you can always vote for the merely "lesser evil" candidate in the general election (or run-off, in countries like France, Brazil, or Poland).  In other ways, voting in the primary on the basis of "electability" (which is just another word for "fear that my values and choices are too alien to the rest of the country, which wouldn't support the candidate of my heart in a general election") is also a bit of mathematical tomfoolery: if you think others see primaries as a chance to vote with their hearts (the reason primaries exist), but that you that you can foil them by casting your one vote more "wisely," then you haven't thought about the weight of your one vote in the entire primary electorate (one voice can be slightly more influential in caucus states like Iowa, but only marginally); and by contrast if you think others see primaries as chances to pick the most "electable" candidate from the party, then it doesn't really matter how you vote (unless it's really unclear which candidate is most electable) anyways.

But recalling these discussions, and reading alternate coverage of Hillary and Bernie in, for example, the Washington Post, I realized that there's something deeper going on in my friends who think like this: Most of them are comfortable with their lives and the way the world is, and in this they are like most journalists and political pundits whose stories about Hillary's woes almost always comprise or at least conclude with attempts to reassure readers that she's still the favorite.  These observes fear to discover that the state of the world is not what they have been telling themselves: it has seemed to them that things in this country are going "ok," that a status quo candidate like Hillary could beat any of the [adjective] comers on the Republican side, and that there's no way this country has problems deep enough cause a mass hysteria enough to put Donald Trump in the White House, or deep enough to need a political revolution to solve them, like the one that could (will!) put Bernie Sanders in the White House.

They're not only afraid of Bernie losing, it may also be that they're afraid of discovering that they're in a cable-news, hybrid-suburbia, full 401k & good health benefits, comfortable bubble that actually includes precious few (and fewer) Americans with each passing year.  Afraid to find out they're in the Truman Show along with only a few million other citizens of this country, while the vast majority have to scrape & hope & pray for their economic futures and those of their families.  In a country where over 30% of Hispanic children and nearly 40% of African American children grow up in poverty, there are still bubbles where affluent white people can be comfortable living with Hillary and the stalemated status quot.  They look at Bernie, and they are afraid to lose the illusions of comfortable America with good chances for all that Clinton allows them cling to.  Instead, they should awake to fact that we can build that country again, but only if all people of good heart and good conscience--people like me and you--approach this coming electoral struggle, the struggle to build a movement much larger than Bernie Sanders, and the struggle to rebuild America as a place with good chances for all, with the attitude of "We can win," not "we're afraid to lose."  The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.