Unity, Democrat-style

-- This is how you do it, Democrats:

JUDY WOODRUFF: How much do you think, Mark, the fact that they sort of — the White House orchestrated this, this week, in a way that they just — they gave Bernie Sanders gave the space to get out when he wants to.

MARK SHIELDS: Democrats, historically, when they form a firing squad, form a circle. This was a total exception.

It was brilliantly choreographed. In addition to the president’s endorsement, a man not noted for his self-doubt, to say that she was the most qualified presidential candidate in his lifetime was quite an admission and statement.

I thought the other part of it, Judy, was the deference and respect and space they gave — given to Bernie Sanders, that he’s paid homage, he’s paid tribute, and I think deservedly so. He lost the nomination, but he won the future of the Democratic Party.

... and this is how you don't.

I keep John around on the blogroll feed in the right-hand column -- he's long gone from my FB and Twitter feeds due to being much more obnoxious even than this -- because I like to laugh at his thinking he's full of wit and his 5th-grade spelling and language skills, not to mention the logic he employs.  As the strongest Hillary sycophant that I have found, he's just too dense for me to be concerned with any longer.  And lately I feel the same way about anybody who takes his political opinions as anything but a joke.

What John will seemingly never understand is how Bernie Sanders made socialism cool.  And that genie ain't going back in the bottle.  Four years from now, when President Hillary Clinton is thrashing around like a drowning woman because of a failed Iran war, a turd-filled economy, an approval rate in the mid-20's and losing badly to whomever the GOP nominates, he's going to be blaming "soshulists" -- anybody but Democrats -- for her one-term failure.  Bookmark this post.

No hope and change on the horizon

Scattershooting while we wait for Bernie Sanders to make up his mind ...

-- Kuff wrote a good post -- maybe I should say Will Saletan and Josh Marshall wrote good posts that Kuff aggregated and excerpted and then added a paragraph at the bottom, worth about 15% of his post -- regarding the Trump University scandal that Drumpf has broadened into a racist diatribe spewed at the US judge presiding over the fraud lawsuits ... which has blown back on him even from some GOP tongue-cluckers (not GOP voters so much, to be certain).  Kuff dutifully tied in Greg Abbott and Dan Patrick for their endorsements of Il Douche, even mentioned Ken Paxton's 'cease and desist' order in passing, but left out the Florida attorney general's not-insignificant involvement.  There is -- and has been for awhile -- a national story here, which several of the bigger dung beetles in the media have finally hopped on and dug their pincers into.

Is it possible that no matter who gets elected president, both are going to be facing some measure of criminal justice shortly before or after they're elected?  This is a hideous development for Trump, the GOP nationally, and Pam Bondi in particular, but it won't be so much as a shoo-fly for our Texas fascists to have to wave away from their faces.

-- And Bud Kennedy knows better than this -- as well as do the poli-sci profs he quotes about the possibility of Texas turning blue because the Libertarians might get 10% of Trump's vote -- but like many of us political bloviators, he's running out of things to write about and we're still five months away from the election.

I'll just rewrite the following sentences: Texas has the worst conservatives on the planet, both Republican and Democrat.  And it's going to be that way for years to come.  The Republican voters aren't changing it, and the Democrats who bother to vote can't.

So in the absence of meaningful news or dialogue, we're going to get fair and balanced items like Mark Cuban's Tweets trolling both Trump and Clinton.  Fun!

I'm looking forward to reading a lot of stupid things written by otherwise intelligent people in the months ahead.  The Libertarians are benefiting from the dearth of two-horse race developments, but my guess is that there will continue to be only a little speculation about the Green Party's prospects, even as mockery or criticism, at least until they come to town in August to tap Jill Stein as the November standard-bearer.

They're still trying to move beyond "First they ignore you" stage among the binary thinkers in the media, large and small.

A, o, way to go, Ohio

It was the difference in 2004 for W Bush (maybe we should point out Ken Blackwell's unique role in that) and it is likely to be once again.

-- Latest polling in head-to-head matchups between Drumpf and Clinton have her taking a small lead.  Remember that this was Kasich's big win as favorite son in the spring GOP primary.  Clinton took 56% of the vote against Sanders in mid-March.  Future polling that includes Gary Johnson and Jill Stein should be even more interesting.

-- They have a high-profile US Senate contest on the ballot, with incumbent Rob Portman (R) facing former Gov. Ted Strickland (D).  That race is tight as a tick.

-- There are two indies and a Green running with Portman and Strickland.  Scott Rupert, the most conservative of the two independents, ran in 2012 and got 4.5% of the vote.  That's going to be bad news for Portman, despite his clinging to Trump.

-- Sen. Sherrod Brown has been lightly rumored as Hillary's running mate, and has made some short lists of late, but Elizabeth Warren has a better chance of being picked because it would be less likely that her Senate seat is lost to the Republicans (in the long run).  If Brown should wind up as her running mate, though, the GOP is absolute toast.

-- The big thing for Buckeye Staters in November 2016 is fair trade.  Via Thom Hartmann ...

Don Gonyea on NPRs Morning Edition talked to a former steelworker and lifelong Democrat in Canton, Ohio who is supporting Trump in this election based on his rhetoric on trade.

Other steelworkers told Gonyea that they would have supported Bernie Sanders because he was as clear as Trump about trade, but that given a choice between Trump and Hillary, Trump is more outspoken about how badly the middle class has been hurt by our disastrous trade deals.

And if anything should worry Democrats about the general election, it should be the very real possibility of losing the votes of rank-and-file working people and lifelong Democrats to Donald Trump and other down-ticket Republicans who might start parroting his anti-trade rhetoric.

Ohio's courts have recently turned back voting restrictions attempted by state Republicans, another good omen for Dems.  And this Hill piece is excellent if you want to get deeper into the Buckeye weeds, with the urban vs. rural county divide and GOTV efforts keying on the trade issue.

Even the tenth most populist county in the state, Mahoning County, the heart of the Mahoning Valley, an area devastated by trade deals, new technologies and the home of the remains of America’s once mighty steel industry.

A Democrat powerhouse of voters with Youngstown as its capitol – it went big for Obama in 2012 but the primary results in 2016 showed a big win for Trump and a lot of cross-over votes for the controversial Republican presumptive nominee.

In the primary in March, Ohio saw a tremendous number of Democrats crossing over to vote in the Republican primary said Sracic, “Statewide, about 6 percent of Republican voters in the primary in Ohio were formerly Democrats. In Mahoning County, nearly 27 percent of voters in the primary were previously Democrats,” he said.

“If Trump were to somehow win this county, the election is over,” said Sracic, “I still think that is unlikely, what may be more likely is that Trump performs as well as Reagan did back in the 1980's,” he said.

In 1984, Reagan lost Mahoning County, but earned about 41% of the vote. That may not sound significant, but since then no Republican has ever earned even 40% of the votes of these working class voters.  Will these Reagan Democrats and their children become Trump Democrats?

Ohio is going to be my favorite state to watch in this cycle.