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Tag: 2000 election
What Sanders — And His Supporters — Must Remember Before November

What Sanders — And His Supporters — Must Remember Before November

Exactly one year before Election Day – on November 8, 2015 – Bernie Sanders was asked whether his agreement with Hillary Clinton on basic issues outweighed the conflicts that he proclaimed at every campaign appearance.

Speaking on television rather than on the stump, the Vermont senator conceded reluctantly that he and Clinton concur on some issues. But then he added an entirely gratuitous endorsement:

“And by the way, on her worst day, Hillary Clinton will be an infinitely better candidate and President than the Republican candidate on his bestday.”

That moment of reassuring reason is worth remembering as the debate becomes more rancorous. Clinton isn’t foreordained to win the Democratic nomination, so Sanders neither will nor should hesitate to emphasize their differences.

So far, in fact, his challenge has improved both her candidacy and the national discourse. It is healthy for Democrats to argue about the best ways to ensure more good jobs, higher wages, universal health care, affordable higher education, paid family leave, immigration reform, national security, and a clean energy future.

But the overwrought reaction of some Sanders supporters – who already insist they cannot imagine voting for Clinton because of her campaign donors, her paid speeches, her vote on Iraq, or her support for some of her husband’s policies two decades ago – evokes bad memories of another, truly disastrous presidential campaign.

It is no accident, as they say, that those who “feel the Bern” today include prominent supporters of Ralph Nader’s independent presidential campaign in 2000. Their urge to overthrow the mundane, demand the utopian, reject grubby compromise, and assert moral purity is as powerful today as four cycles ago; and perhaps even more so, especially among those who feel somehow “disappointed” by President Obama. But political decisions based solely on such emotional considerations can prove terribly costly to our country and the world – as we discovered when George W. Bush usurped Al Gore.

Nader and his supporters were not responsible alone for the appalling outcome of the 2000 election but – along with the Supreme Court majority and Gore himself — they bear a substantial share of blame. Their defamatory descriptions of the Democratic nominee were echoed across the media by reporters, columnists, and commentators who knew better — from the pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post to the cable networks.

Mocking Gore for his supposed personal flaws, such as an alleged propensity to exaggerate his achievements, was as fashionable in media and political circles then as it is to denigrate Hillary Clinton now. Clever people delighted in contrasting Nader’s — and even Bush’s! — “authenticity” with Gore’s stiff insincerity. (Indeed, many of the same pundits are still doing versions of the same stupid pundit tricks.)

Besides, according to the Naderites, there were no important differences between the Democratic nominee and his Republican opponent. Or at least none that merited as much concern as Gore’s earth-toned suits and the preppy character he did or didn’t inspire in a romance novel. A wave of such idiotic babble delivered America and the world into a catastrophic Bush presidency.

Fortunately, the parallels only go so far. Sanders chose a far more responsible route than Nader when he decided to run for the Democratic nomination rather than jump to a third-party line. He has focused on substantive issues and admirably dismissed fake scandals like Benghazi and Clinton’s emails. But by repeating his unfounded insinuation that Clinton’s paid speeches and Wall Street donors have somehow corrupted her, he is inflicting damage that will be very hard to mend.

Looking toward the likelihood that either Clinton or Sanders will face Donald Trump next fall, those corrosive tactics are shortsighted. Should Sanders win the nomination, he will want and need Clinton’s support. And should she defeat him, he will and should want her to win — if he believes what he said last November, and understands the exceptionally dangerous threat posed by a Trump presidency.

The next round of Democratic primaries could encourage still more destructive bashing, from either camp or both. The candidates and their supporters ought to think beyond the moment – and pay attention to filmmaker Michael Moore, an outspoken Sanders backer.

On the evening when his candidate won an upset victory in the Michigan primary, Moore tweeted this message: “A special congrats to Hillary for her victory in Mississippi on International Women’s Day. If you win the nomination, we will be there [with] you.”

Once a zealous backer of Nader, Moore eventually apologized for that tragic mistake. Evidently he would rather not feel that sorry again.

Democrats, Don’t Blow It

Democrats, Don’t Blow It

The death of Antonin Scalia has set off yet another epic partisan struggle as Senate Republicans seek to deny President Obama his constitutional right to nominate the next Supreme Court justice. They want to wait out Obama’s last year in office, hoping his successor will be one of their own.

If the Democrats choose Bernie Sanders as their presidential candidate, Republicans will almost certainly get their wish. Furthermore, the Republican president would probably have a Republican-majority Senate happy to approve his selection.

The makeup of senatorial races this November gives Democrats a decent chance of capturing a majority. Having the radical Sanders on the ballot would hurt them in swing states.

Some Sanders devotees will argue with conviction that these purplish Democrats are not real progressives anyway, not like our Bernie. Herein lies the Democrats’ problem.

No sophisticated pollster puts stock in current numbers showing Sanders doing well against possible Republican foes. The right has not subjected Sanders to the brutality it routinely rains on Hillary Clinton — precisely because he is the candidate they want to run a Republican against. Should Sanders become the nominee, the skies will open.

One may applaud Sanders’ denunciation of big money in politics, but a moderate Democrat in the White House could do something about it. A democratic socialist not in the White House cannot. Campaign finance reform would be a hard slog under any circumstances, but a seasoned politician who plays well with others could bring a reluctant few to her side.

Some younger liberals may not know the history of the disastrous 2000 election, where Republicans played the left for fools. Polls were showing Al Gore and George W. Bush neck-and-neck, particularly in the pivotal state of Florida.

Despite the stakes, prominent left-wing voices continued to back the third-party candidacy of Ralph Nader. You had Michael Moore bouncing on stages where he urged cheering liberals to vote for the radical Nader because there was no difference between Gore and Bush. Republicans, meanwhile, were running ads for Nader. That was no secret. It was in the papers.

When the Florida tally came in, Bush held a mere 537-vote edge. The close results prompted Florida to start a recount of the votes. Then, in a purely partisan play, the conservative majority on the Supreme Court stopped the recount, handing the election to Bush.

The bigger point is that Gore would have been the undisputed winner in 2000 had Nader not vacuumed up almost 100,000 Florida votes, most of which would have surely gone to him.

Same deal in New Hampshire, where Nader siphoned off more than 22,000 votes. Bush won there by only 7,211 ballots.

Now, Sanders is an honorable man running a straightforward campaign for the Democratic nomination. One can’t imagine his playing the third-party spoiler.

But what makes today similar to 2000 is how many on the left are so demanding of ideological purity that they’d blow the opportunity to keep the White House in Democratic hands. Of course, they don’t see it that way. This may reflect their closed circle of like-minded friends — or an illusion that others need only see the light, and their hero will sweep into the Oval Office.

The other similarity to 2000 is the scorn the believers heap on the experienced liberal alternative. They can’t accept the compromises, contradictions and occasional bad calls that attach to any politician who’s fought in the trenches.

The next president will almost certainly be either Clinton or a Republican. Democrats must ask themselves: Whom would you prefer to name future Supreme Court judges?

Follow Froma Harrop on Twitter @FromaHarrop. She can be reached at fharrop@gmail.com. To find out more about Froma Harrop and read features by other Creators writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Web page at www.creators.com.
COPYRIGHT 2016 CREATORS.COM

Photo: Independent presidential candidate Ralph Nader speaking at a campaign event in Waterbury, CT at 195 Grand St. Creative Commons, user Ragesoss.

5 Worst Voting Rights Attacks Since 2000

5 Worst Voting Rights Attacks Since 2000

When George W. Bush became the first person to lose the popular vote and still take the White House since 1888 — with huge assists from Jeb Bush, John Roberts, Ted Cruz, and the Supreme Court — it proved to conservatives that it was too easy to vote in America.

And W.’s administration, filled with several officials who had built careers on opposing the advances of civil rights, went to work to fix that.

Ari Berman’s new book Give Us the Ballot, which is being released on Tuesday — just two days before the 50th anniversary of the passage of the Voting Rights Act — tells of the rise and what could be the fall of America’s second reconstruction. It’s the story of a revolution that begins in a nation where black women and men literally had to risk their lives to overcome hurdles to register and vote. It spans five decades in which a singularly successful piece of temporary legislation found a permanent foothold to help ground an expansion of the right to vote in places it had been denied for nearly all of American history. And it ends after the election of the first black president inspired a conservative movement rebuilt on a Southern Strategy to strike a blow to the “crown jewel of the civil rights movement” by again shrinking the most fundamental right in a democracy.

The through line of Berman’s inspiring but gut-wrenching history of the last century’s struggle for voting rights is the life of John Lewis, the youngest speaker at 1963’s March On Washington and current congressmember from Georgia. Lewis was beaten in Selma and has been a witness to or an active participant in every effort to expand ballot access in the last five decades. And his testimony provides the most stirring indictment of the right wing’s mission to retain power over a “coalition of the ascendant” with legislation that exists only to discourage the votes of minorities, students, and the poor.

You need to read this book to understand what has been won and what we risk losing. But to get a sample of the assaults on the right to vote in what he calls “counterrevolution,” here are 5 of the worst attacks on voting rights from the right since George W. Bush quite literally took office.

1. Ohio 2004.
The only reason the 2000 election even ended up in the Supreme Court was because Florida’s purge of the voting rolls left 12,000 citizens, 44 percent of them African-American, unable to vote. “We did think it was outcome determinative,” the Civil Rights Commission reported. Democrats went into 2004 determined to not forget what had happened in Florida. But on Election Day in 2004, history repeated itself, Berman suggests.

Republicans in Ohio didn’t need to purge voting rolls or stop the count, they just needed to make sure that John Kerry’s voters didn’t have easy access to the polls. “Overwhelmingly Democratic precincts in Columbus received seventeen fewer voting machines in 2004 than 2000, while heavily Republican precincts got eight more machines.” The result? Democrats had to wait hours longer to vote than Republicans. In the end, an estimated 174,000 Ohioans left their lines before voting. Bush won the state by 118,000 votes.

2. Bush’s Department of Justice fires U.S. Attorneys for not inventing voter fraud.
Beginning in 2002, the Department of Justice, led by Attorney General John Ashcroft, was on a mission to find voter fraud — while massive mortgage and securities fraud that would lead to the financial crisis went largely unattended. In the end all they proved was that they’d been wasting their time. Of more than 300 million votes cast, they’d nailed 86 convictions. Not a single case involved voter impersonation or had swung an election. Meanwhile administration officials helped suppress an Ohio State/Rutgers University study that found voter ID laws reduced Latino turnout by 10 percent and black and Asian-American turnout by 6 percent in 2004. In other words, they worked just as conservatives had designed them to. Republican donors refused to accept that there was no evidence to justify new voting restrictions and demanded that someone be punished for not finding it. After the 2006 election, respected U.S. Attorneys David Iglesias — the basis for the character Tom Cruise played in A Few Good Men — and John McKay were forced out of their jobs for failing to indict anyone for fraud Republicans were sure existed.

“It’s very frightening, and it doesn’t exist,” Iglesias said, comparing voting fraud to the bogeyman parents say is in the closet to keep kids in bed. “U.S. Attorneys have better things to do with their time than chasing voting fraud phantoms.”

3. Trying to steal the 2012 election — and failing.
If Bush losing the popular vote proved access to the polls was a problem, Obama’s landslide election had proven it had become an epidemic. In 2011 and 2012, 27 new laws in 19 states, nearly all Republican, put new limits on voting. Voter ID laws backed by The American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) were introduced in 37 states, all nearly identical. In addition, five states — including the two crucial swing states with the worst records of voting integrity, Ohio and Florida — cut early voting time. The Department of Justice used Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act, which requires certain states and counties to pre-clear all changes to voting laws, to prevent the most egregious attempts to suppress the vote. But if 2012 had been as close as 2004, as many suggested it would be, it wouldn’t have mattered. Voters in Florida reported that they were forced to wait several hours and often make two trips to the polls in order to vote. But a backlash to the new restrictions so baldly targeted at minorities resulted in their turnout rising over the 2008 election. For the first time ever, a higher percentage of black voters showed up at the polls than white.

4. Gutting the Voting Rights Act.
A major subplot in Berman’s book is Chief Justice John Roberts’ passion for limiting voting rights. And ironically, President Obama’s re-election helped him build that majority he needed to do it. In his majority decision for Shelby County v. Holder, Roberts praised the law, which he had claimed was constitutional during his confirmation hearing. “But history did not end in 1965,” he wrote. Deploying the logic of “equal sovereignty” that had not been used by the Court since the Dred Scott decision deprived all black people of citizenship, he gutted Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act by throwing out the formula used in Section 4. His argument was the formula, which allows for state counties that show a strong commitment to voting rights to opt out, was not reflective of current realities.

“These men never stood in unmovable lines,” John Lewis wrote in his reaction to the decision. “They were never denied the right to participate in the democratic process. They were never beaten, jailed, run off their farms or fired from their jobs. No one they knew died simply trying to register to vote. They are not the victims of gerrymandering or contemporary unjust schemes to maneuver them out of their constitutional rights.”

5. Shelby opens the voter suppression floodgates.
The speciousness of Roberts’ argument was proven by how several of the states freed from Section 5 immediately reacted to its gutting. Texas immediately put its voter ID law into effect. Pre-Shelby this had been blocked because over half a million Latinos lacked ID and might have to pay, adjusted for inflation, more than the poll taxes that had been outlawed by the VRA, just to secure the papers needed. North Carolina was already in the process of enacting the worst set of voter suppression laws since Reconstruction. After Shelby, it toughened its voter ID law to make it more restrictive than Texas’. Voters in 14 states faced new restrictions during the 2014 elections, the first without the full protection of the VRA since 1965 and, coincidentally, the election with the worst turnout since before World War II ended.

Our voting rights landscape, Berman notes, now resembles the period before 1965. The first Reconstruction fell to violence legitimized by the Supreme Court. Whether our second reconstruction meets the same demise depends on the enduring strength of the remaining sections of the law, and the hopes of fixing it before conservatives construct permanent legislative and judicial majorities that make it possible. And while demographics may be on the side of the ascendant, the cunning effectiveness of a movement so delusional that it can only process failure as fraud presents a fearsome opposition.

“How many of you are going to leave here and remember the blood of the martyrs?” William J. Barber, the architect of North Carolina’s Moral Mondays movement that rose up in part to oppose the right’s attack on voting rights, asked a crowd in 2014.

Berman’s book is asking us that same question.

Photo: Bill Selak via Flickr

4 Things To Remember About Jeb Bush

4 Things To Remember About Jeb Bush

After six months of coyly “considering a run,” during which time he raked in uncounted millions in donations, former Florida governor Jeb Bush is set to formally announce his candidacy for president Monday at a rally in Miami.

During his candidacy limbo, Bush asserted that he would be his “own man,” separate from both the troubled legacy of his brother and the congested field of GOP candidates already in the running.

As he strives to revamp his image in the long campaign ahead, Bush will stretch himself pretty thin in order to appeal to the far-right Tea Partiers who booed him at CPAC and the old guard GOP, of which he is a conspicuous member, and which doesn’t have many other credible options.

Here are four things to remember about Jeb that he would probably just as soon forget.

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1. Miguel Recarey

Jeb Bush, while his father was vice president, lobbied on behalf of a man later found to be the mastermind behind one of the largest Medicare frauds ever, possibly helping him to defraud the government out of millions.

In 1985, Jeb, then a real estate businessman and entrepreneur, was paid $75,000 by Miguel Recarey, the head of health maintenance organization International Medical Centers (IMC) for real estate work. The only problem is IMC never actually purchased a building from Bush, who claimed to not know of Recarey’s shady past. Known for having ties to the Miami mafia, Recarey had participated in the Mob assassination plot against Fidel Castro in the early 1960s and failed to file income tax returns in 1969 and 1970, serving a short time in prison.

Instead, Jeb phoned Health and Human Services Secretary Margaret Heckler to see whether IMC, the largest recipient of federal Medicare funds at the time, could get a special exemption regarding the balance of customers. So instead of having a 50/50 balance of Medicare patients and private (paying) customers, IMC could get more Medicare money, which they did — in 1986, with 80 percent of its customers Medicare beneficiaries, the company was collecting over $30 million a month in Medicare payments, eventually totaling $1 billion.

Although Bush denied contacting her, Heckler confirmed to the Huffington Post in 2012 that he “indeed lobb[ied] her personally, and that his input played a major role in her thinking.” Two other HHS officials, including Heckler’s chief of staff, confirmed during congressional testimony in 1987 that Bush did indeed call Heckler on behalf of Recarey.

An investigator from HHS and eventually two members of Congress, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Rep. Pete Stark (D-CA), launched an investigation into Medicare fraud, which led eventually to the shutdown of his company and a Federal indictment charging Recarey with bribery and fraud.

Recarey fled the country in 1987 to Caracas, Venezuela, but only after he received a $2.2 million income-tax refund. He was taken into custody in Spain in 1993, but released a year later when the country rejected the extradition request, according to a 1994 report by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

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2. Orlando Bosch

The anti-Castro Cuban militant Orlando Bosch—who was responsible for multiple terrorist attacks in Latin America in the decades following the 1959 revolution, including the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner which killed all 73 onboard—found an unlikely advocate in Jeb Bush.

In 1989 Bush was a Florida real estate businessman, in thrall to Miami’s Cuban-American population, whose support he would rely upon in his first run for governor in 1994. And while then-attorney general Dick Thornburgh called Bosch an “unrepentant terrorist,” Cuban exiles in Miami, where the city commissioners once officially declared an Orlando Bosch Day, considered him a hero.

After Bosch was detained by the Justice Department on an immigration violation, Bush successfully lobbied his father, George H. W. Bush, for a presidential pardon. Bosch had safe haven in America until his death in 2011.

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3. Bush v. Gore 

Governor Jeb Bush was hardly an innocent bystander in the fracas that led to his brother becoming the 43rd president. Florida, then and now a critical electoral state, had a Republican governor and legislature in 2000 — it was well suited to support George W. Bush.

Despite recusing himself from any role involving the recount, Jeb allowed many staffers — including much of his legal team — to take unpaid leave to work on his brother’s campaign.

But the state was dealing with much tougher, granular issues — who was “allowed” to vote. Most of the policies perpetuated by the Bush administration targeted minorities and the poor. One controversy involved convicted felons. Following state law, these felons aren’t allowed to vote, and so must be purged from voting rolls. As governor, Jeb Bush passively allowed the backlog of ex-felons to grow — up to 62,000 as of 2002 — which also included a growing list of small offenses that disproportionally affected the urban poor, like cashing unemployment checks after a person has started a new job.

But the rolls were known to have serious errors — mixing up first and middle names and confusing similar-sounding names and nicknames were only two of the problems, as detailed by Vanity Fair in its 2004 recounting of Florida’s voting procedures four years earlier.

Because there were so many errors on the voting lists, each county handled its rolls in different haphazard fashions. Some counties threw out the list. Some scrupulously checked, while others took it at face value. Miami-Dade county sent out letters informing people they could come in for a hearing. The problem was that many of the addresses were outdated, so people were never notified. Even as late as 2004, many of those wrongly listed as being ineligible to vote had never been reinstated. Just in time for Bush’s re-election.

A 2001 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report on the 2000 election found that Florida’s voting system was seriously flawed, with systematic discrimination reaching back long before the election.

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4. Terri Schaivo

As Florida governor, Jeb Bush used his power to intervene in the tragic dispute between the husband and parents of Terri Schiavo, a St. Petersburg, Florida resident who had been in a persistent vegetative state for over a decade.

In 2003, Bush used a hurriedly passed law (“Terri’s Law”) to grant himself the authority to reinsert Schiavo’s feeding tube, against the wishes of her husband, Michael Shiavo.

Along with obstructing Michael’s right as Terri’s legal guardian, Bush installed a neurologist at Schiavo’s hospice to “deduce and represent” her “best wishes and best interests” — which is to say the best interests of a governor pandering to his conservative base — and report them to him.

A court eventually ruled Terri’s Law to be unconstitutional, and Schiavo passed away shortly after her feeding tube was removed in 2005 — but not before becoming a pawn in a widely publicized national battle between “right-to-life” conservatives and disability rights activists, thanks to Governor Jeb.

Photo: Jeb Bush, via Facebook