So finally we have a winner of the popular vote in the Iowa caucus. The 6000 margin for Bernie Sanders in the title may go up a little, or may come down a little, but the recanvassing of Iowa that DNC Chairperson Tom Perez is calling for the Iowa Democratic Party to conduct won’t change the basic outcome – Bernie Sanders won Iowa.
Both Sanders and Buttigeig will each get about 11 delegates towards the required total of 1886 delegates needed to secure the Democratic Party nomination.
If I can hearken back to the analogy I used on a previous post – it might look like sizable chunks of the US establishment rushed down a beach to throw rocks and sand on top of a sand castle only for the incoming wave to wash everything away.
But put aside the fact that Pete Buttigieg’s campaign paid $40k to “Shadow Inc”, the company that provided the dodgy app used in Iowa. And put aside the fact the parent company of “Shadow Inc” is a company called ACRONYM that’s packed with ex – Clinton operatives. Also put aside the fact that McGowan, the head of ACRONYM, is married to Michael Halle, a senior strategist with the Buttigieg campaign. And you know what else might as well be put aside? Put aside the fact that Pete Buttigieg announced victory in Iowa in spite of the fact that no results had been announced.
In other words, let’s put the first part of the fracas down to incompetence. And let’s put Buttegieg’s premature victory announcement down to raw and somewhat cynical politics. Where does that leave us?
Well, that leaves us with a very bizarre situation of an Iowa Democratic Party drip feeding cherry picked results and media reporting on those partial results, that clearly shpowed Sanders leading in the popular vote, as a win for Pete Buttigieg. They did this by concentrating on the state delegate equivalent totals (sde’s) that have nothing whatsoever to do with the Primary process.
Here’s Bernie Sanders’ explanation. (go to 16min 50 sec)
So now the focus moves to New Hampshire. Pete Bettigieg has risen in New Hampshire polling, but probably only because every day media declared him the winner off the back of a new subset of results that they chose to present in a particular way.
I dare say Sanders would have received a similar triple bump had media focused on the popular vote. But whatever…Biden is done and dusted and Buttigieg’s current visibility amounts to no more than the blip from a shooting star.
Oh. And now Nate Silver – no fan of Bernie Sanders – is predicting that Sanders will more or less clean up on Super Tuesday. So I really hope that any volunteer working for the Sanders campaign takes absolutely nothing for granted, ignores what Nate Silver is saying, and fights for every vote as though they are trailing by double digits.
The reason I say that is because anyone who thinks the US establishment will take the prospect of a Sanders Presidency lying down is a fool. Here’s a hyper link to an interview that offers an insight of the mentality of liberals who oppose Sanders. All stops and then some will be pulled out to prevent Sanders being the Presidential nominee or President, even if that means backing a second term of Trump as a few prominent liberal media pundits have said. And the world needs a Sanders’ Presidency. Desperately.
As of right now we (humanity) are cratering into god knows what on the climate change front. Now, I’m not saying a Sanders Presidency will make everything all right again. It won’t. But both the Democratic Party establishment and the Republican Party posit China as an adversary instead of as a necessary ally to get the world moved away from fossil and other carbon creating sources of energy.
As Mark Blyth has pointed out, when China and the US and Europe move on climate, then the world moves on climate. It’s that simple. And of course, that ‘simple’ involves China, the US and Europe working alongside each other – not creating bogey men of one another.
And then there’s the fact that what happens in the US ripples to the rest of the Anglosphere. And here it gets selfish and points to some of the reasons why the current US election matters to people on the left.
I really never want to hear any fool of a politician say that neo-liberalism is just ‘what happens’ to people, as Jacinda Ardern did in an interview with Guyon Espiner just before the last NZ election. I want vacuous clowns of her ilk to fuck off and never be heard from again. And I never want to hear it insinuated that poor people are just too costly a problem to deal with; that housing will come to the homeless by way of some trickle down; that instances of poor physical and/or mental health are just unfortunate personal tragedies unfolding in a vacuum.
It almost doesn’t matter what angle we look at the world from these days – we need to turn on a dime. Bernie Sanders, if he assumes one of the most powerful political positions in the world today, may or may not be able to help that happen. But certainly, no one else is on the horizon who could even remotely approach by way of helping that possibility be realised.
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