I just put together a Twitter list of WGBH News folks. Many of us are tweeting about Super Tuesday. Hope you’ll take a few moments to check in.
Category: Politics
Clinton, Obama, Libya, and the New York Times
Yes, I read all of the New York Times‘ two-parter on Hillary Clinton and Libya. Is it damaging to Clinton? It depends on your perspective regarding the use of force.
On the one hand, the reporting shows that Clinton pushed hard to get us involved despite President Obama’s misgivings, thus helping to create the current disastrous situation. On the other hand, you could argue that the disaster flows directly from Obama’s tentativeness—letting himself be dragged into a conflict he didn’t want and then refusing to do what was needed to ensure stability.
For all the outstanding work the Times has done, I suspect that this won’t move anyone’s needle. If you’re a supporter of Clinton’s muscular approach to foreign policy, you’ll think this vindicates her. If you’re more inclined toward Obama’s non-interventionism (as I am), you’ll wonder why the president didn’t say no right from the start.
Can the media handle a Clinton-Trump contest?
Previously published at WGBHNews.org.
It’s been fun. But with Donald Trump increasingly looking like he might actually win the Republican presidential nomination, there are signs that voters—and the media—are ready to get serious.
First, despite a narrower victory in the Nevada caucuses than anyone would have expected a few months ago, Hillary Clinton may be poised to cruise to the Democratic nomination and leave Bernie Sanders in her rear-view mirror.
According to polling analysis conducted by Nate Silver’s Five Thirty Eight site, Clinton is virtually certain to win South Carolina this Saturday, as well as all seven of the 10 Super Tuesday states that the site is tracking—including Massachusetts, where Sanders is thought by some pollsters to hold a slight edge. (Among the states Five Thirty Eight is ignoring: Sanders’s home state of Vermont, where he’s a lock.)
Maybe this simply reflects the Clinton campaign’s natural strengths. But it may also represent a calculation on the part of Democratic primary voters that Clinton is more likely to beat Trump than Sanders is.
Second, the Michael Bloomberg media boomlet may be coming to an end. According to Michael Crowley of Politico, Bloomberg and the people around him believed he might stand a chance of winning as an independent against a couple of outsiders like Sanders and Trump—but that he has no stomach for running against Clinton.
“If he runs with Hillary in the race he could wind up being the guy responsible for making Donald Trump president and he doesn’t like Trump at all—I don’t think he wants to go down in history as being the guy who elected Trump,” Crowley quoted an anonymous master of the universe as saying.
So where does that leave us? With a little more than eight months to go until the November election, what we see may be what we get: a Democratic nominee whose strengths and weaknesses have been on public display for the past quarter-century versus a Republican nominee who spews hate toward Latinos and Muslims, advocates torture, and calls for the murder of terrorists’ families.
For Clinton, the risks in the months ahead are considerable, even if her nomination seems all but assured. She’s an effective fighter when cornered. But when events are moving her way, she has a tendency to let her foot off the gas and cruise, with predictably disastrous results.
It happened in 2008, when she found her voice and transformed herself into an effective presidential candidate only after Barack Obama had taken what proved to be an insurmountable lead.
It happened again last fall, when her triumphant congressional testimony on Benghazi and a strong performance in the first Democratic debate seemed to ensure an easy ride for her. Instead, she reverted to her default setting—bland, overly cautious—and let Sanders become the second biggest story of the campaign after Trump.
Why does this keep happening? My guess is that Hillary, unlike Bill, doesn’t particularly care for politics and prefers to draw into herself except when she’s facing an existential threat.
Barring something completely unforeseen (and I would never rule out such a thing), Sanders will be little more than an irritant moving forward. As that perspicacious political observer Richard Nixon put it the other day, “Sanders is no longer a wolf at Mrs. Clinton’s door. At worst he’s a dog who won’t shut up.”
But Clinton is also likely to look a lot more formidable in the afterglow of Super Tuesday next week than she is in the fall, even if Trump is her opponent. Among other things, her private email server—which, to my mind, she has never adequately explained—is liable to keep coming up as an issue. Trump will go after the Clintons with everything he’s got, something he gave us a taste of recently when he trotted out victims of Bill’s sexual harassment.
In a Washington Post opinion piece, Harvard’s Danielle Allen came very close to comparing Trump to Hitler (personally, I think Berlusconi is a more apt analogy) and urged Republicans to stop Trump before Clinton is the only person left standing in his way. Allen wrote:
Republicans, you cannot count on the Democrats to stop Trump. I believe that Hillary Clinton will win the Democratic nomination, and I intend to vote for her, but it is also the case that she is a candidate with significant weaknesses, as your party knows quite well. The result of a head-to-head contest between Clinton and Trump would be unpredictable.
Whether Clinton prevails over Trump will depend at least in part on the press doing its job. The false equivalence of trying to cover the campaign from the exact midpoint between Clinton’s moderate liberalism and Trump’s dark rantings is not what our democracy needs.
The media, which has done so much to enable Trump’s rise (as that noted critic Newt Gingrich pointed out Monday), must hold him accountable for his ugly anti-American rhetoric, a business record rooted in “good old-fashioned bullying,” and his utter lack of relevant experience to be president.
If nothing else, it’s been an interesting campaign. That’s not necessarily a good thing.
OK. Jeb Bush is not going to be the Republican nominee.
A little over a month ago I predicted that Jeb Bush would win the Republican nomination. I wasn’t joking, but I knew my prediction had little chance of coming true. I figured that (1) it should come true, given Bush’s status as the most plausible adult in the Republican field and (2) if he somehow pulled it off, I’d look like a genius.
Well, so much for that. Looking forward, it requires no predictive powers to observe that the nominee will be Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, or Marco Rubio—in other words, a hate-mongering fascist or a hard-right Tea Party favorite. (Frank Bruni usefully reminds us that Rubio’s views are no more mainstream than those of his Canadian colleague).
Washington Post conservative blogger Jennifer Rubin lost it during Trump’s victory speech:
This is an embarrassment to the party and the country. He shouts about the wall and winning. Here comes President Hillary
— Jen "Denial Dooms Democracy " Rubin (@JRubinBlogger) February 21, 2016
Later she recovered and started tweeting optimistically about Rubio. Well, we’ll see, won’t we?
The case against Henry Kissinger—and why it still matters
Henry Kissinger is back in the news thanks to Bernie Sanders, who went after Hillary Clinton at Thursday night’s debate for taking Kissinger’s advice. “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend,” Sanders said, to which Clinton replied: “I listen to a wide variety of voices that have expertise in various areas.” (I am not doing the full exchange justice. Click here for the debate transcript and search for “Kissinger.”)
In following the debate on Twitter, I was surprised at the extent to which people seemed bemused that Sanders would bring up someone who hasn’t served in public office for 40 years. Yet Sanders’s critique certainly struck me as relevant. To this day, many observers refer to Kissinger as a war criminal for his actions as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and secretary of state. And, frankly, the case against him is strong, particularly with regard to the Nixon administration’s secret war in Cambodia and its role in the overthrow and assassination of Chile’s elected socialist president, Salvador Allende.
In 2001 the late journalist Christopher Hitchens wrote a 40,000-word, two-part article for Harper’s that was later published as a book called The Trial of Henry Kissinger. I wrote about Hitchens’s polemic for The Boston Phoenix, summarizing Hitchens’s evidence in some detail and comparing it to what other Kissinger biographers had found. My conclusion: a bit simplistic but compelling nevertheless.
So how closely associated is Hillary Clinton with Henry Kissinger? Certainly there’s an element of guilt-by-association in Sanders’s accusation, which is his M.O. Count me as among those who are tired of Sanders’s constant insinuations that anyone who takes campaign contributions from Wall Street is by definition corrupt.
Still, this New York Times piece by Amy Chozick makes clear that Clinton didn’t just accidentally bump into Kissinger one night at Zumba class. Chozick points out that when Clinton reviewed Kissinger’s book World Order for The Washington Post, Clinton wrote: “Kissinger is a friend, and I relied on his counsel when I served as secretary of state.” Clinton continued: “He checked in with me regularly, sharing astute observations about foreign leaders and sending me written reports on his travels.”
I don’t think we have to worry that Clinton will be giving the 92-year-old Kissinger an office at the White House if she is elected president. Still, Sanders has identified not just a political problem for Clinton but a substantive one. She needs to address it.
New Hampshire may fuel media talk of Bloomberg, Biden
Previously published at WGBHNews.org.
It’s a little after 11 p.m. With the all-important question of whether Jeb Bush will finish third or fourth in New Hampshire still unanswered, allow me to anticipate two names we’re going to be hearing in the days ahead: Michael Bloomberg. And Joe Biden.
In fact, it’s already started. And the results of the first-in-the-nation primary guarantee that it’s only going to intensify.
Bloomberg, the former mayor of New York, is the more plausible of the two names given that he’s letting it be known he’s considering an independent run. The New Hampshire results make it more likely, not less, that he’ll keep gearing up for a possible campaign.
Consider what the Democrats did to themselves. Everyone was expecting Bernie Sanders to beat Hillary Clinton. But he handed her such an unexpectedly crushing defeat that she can’t help but emerge as a damaged candidate. She’s still likely to win the nomination as the campaign moves on to states with substantial African-American populations. But she’s looking more vulnerable than ever in November, provided the Republicans manage to choose a nominee who is recognizably of the human species.
Oops. Donald Trump also won big tonight. Although he fell considerably short of a majority, he got about 35 percent of the vote, far ahead of second-place finisher John Kasich. The Iowa winner, Ted Cruz, an extremist much loathed within his own party, was running third, just ahead of Bush. Marco Rubio, who seemed to be emerging as a contender until his circuit board malfunctioned at last Saturday’s debate, faded to fifth.
So the Democrats are stuck with a diminished Hillary Clinton or, less likely, a 74-year-old left-winger who—if conventional wisdom means anything at all anymore—probably could not win a general election. And Trump, detested by a majority of the public, may be on a glide path to the Republican nomination.
Of course, the conventional wisdom also holds that an independent can’t be elected president. But if the Democrats and the Republicans both nominate candidates who are unacceptable to the broad middle of the electorate that decides elections (and yes, I realize that the broad middle is a lot smaller than it used to be), then surely there is an opening for someone like Bloomberg, a moderate with a reputation for competence. Yes, he’s dour, uncharismatic, and has a well-deserved reputation for nanny-statism. But it’s precisely those non-scary qualities that could make him a viable alternative.
And the media are stoking a Bloomberg run. The veteran media critic Jack Shafer wrote for Politico earlier today that “as Bloomberg works his way through the editorial food chain and breaks through the primary election news, I’m certain reporters will be setting themselves on fire to convince their editors to assign them to Bloomberg.”
Count me as someone who thinks Bloomberg might actually be able to defeat Sanders and Trump, if that’s what it comes to.
Which brings me to a Biden candidacy, a far less likely possibility. Unlike Bloomberg, Biden has declared pretty definitively that he wouldn’t enter the race. It’s also too late logistically for him to enter the Democratic primaries.
But Biden would make some theoretical sense if the race between Clinton and Sanders ends in a muddle, or if the email controversy in which Clinton is embroiled leads to legal trouble. In either case, so this line of thinking goes, the Democratic National Convention might turn to a respected non-candidate like Biden as the nominee.
Is this going to happen? Almost certainly not. A brokered convention is a quadrennial fantasy, but it is almost impossible under the modern primary system. Still, if you search Google News for “Biden 2016,” you’ll find that plenty of people are giving the idea some thought.
For my purposes, what matters isn’t what is going to happen. Rather, it’s what you’ll be hearing from the media as the two major parties, suffering from self-inflicted wounds, limp ahead. New Hampshire not only didn’t settle anything. It left us with a race that won’t be settled for some weeks to come.
Post-debate media mockery may doom Rubio’s campaign
Previously published at WGBHNews.org.
I come today not to bury Marco Rubio, but to take pulse of the media landscape to determine whether the pundits are going to bury him. And the answer is yes. Yes they are.
The establishment choice for the Republican nomination, bolstered by a better-than-expected performance in the Iowa caucuses last Monday, ran into a wrecking ball named Chris Christie at Saturday night’s presidential debate. Judging from the media reaction, Rubio’s status as a serious candidate may effectively be over.
It started even before the debate ended, when the venerable journalist James Fallows of The Atlantic took to Twitter and called Rubio’s meltdown the “most self-destructive debate performance since Quayle ’88 and Stockdale ’92.”
https://twitter.com/JamesFallows/status/696176435854229504?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw
It continued on CNN, where conservative commentator Matt Lewis called Chris Christie’s devastatingly effective takedown of Rubio “a murder-suicide.”
And it carried over to Talking Points Memo, with liberal analyst Josh Marshall opining that Rubio’s “flailing will be a key subject of discussion for the next two days. And that’s a terrible way to close. It’s hard to overcome an echo chamber effect in a febrile news environment over 48 hours.”
In case you missed it (and if you had something better to do on a Saturday night, I salute you), Christie went into full New Jersey bully mode and mocked Rubio’s inexperience, sneering that Rubio was unable to speak in anything other than “a memorized 25-second speech.”
Rubio got flustered, challenged Christie to little effect—and then, incredibly, came back with one of his memorized lines not once, not twice, not thrice, but four times. To wit: “This notion that Barack Obama doesn’t know what he’s doing is just not true. He knows exactly what he’s doing.”
The lead debate stories in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe, and, I’m sure, numerous other papers this morning referred prominently to Rubio’s self-destruction. Worse, the Florida senator became a viral sensation—and not in a good way.
A parody Twitter account, @RubioGlitch, made its debut, with each tweet ending, “He knows exactly what he’s doing.” On both sides of the Atlantic, commentators compared Rubio’s performance to a famous scene from The Stepford Wives. “Like Paula Prentiss, he got stuck in malfunction mode,” wrote my Northeastern colleague Alan Schroeder, a presidential debate historian, at The Huffington Post.Added Jonathan Freedland in The Guardian: “It looked like that sequence from the 1970s thriller The Stepford Wives, when a software glitch reveals that a human-like character is in fact a robot.”
Several commentators have pointed out that the Rubio-Christie exchange came early, and that Rubio regained his composure after that. But ABC inflicted three hours of debate-related TV on us (the actual debate was closer to two and a half hours), and I’ve got to believe that the first hour drew by far the most viewers. Besides, whatever lasting impressions people form will come from after-the-fact media coverage.
The one note of caution I could find was from Nate Silver of Five Thirty Eight, who wrote that, bad as Rubio looked, voters may not agree with the pundits:
Political reporters are in the “fog of war” phase of the campaign where our reactions aren’t necessarily good matches for those of voters at home. Some of the reason we reporters thought Rubio’s answer was so awful is because it confirmed some of our gossip about Rubio, namely that he tends to give pat, repetitive answers. But we tend to be more sensitive about that stuff, because we watch every debate from start to finish, and then we see lots of the candidates’ stump speeches and town halls on top of it. There’s a fine line between a candidate who seems stilted and repetitive and one who seems “on message” instead.
Rubio was by far the biggest story coming out of Saturday’s debate, but there were other stories as well. John Kasich turned in a fine performance, and for once post-debate commentary was swinging his way. He was ebullient during a CNN interview in the spin room. (Of course, he’s always ebullient.)
As conservative as Kasich is, the Republican Party has moved so far to the right that he is regularly dismissed as a RINO (a Republican in Name Only). But Kasich may be perfectly positioned to do well in New Hampshire, as independents who are turned off by Hillary Clinton and wary of Bernie Sanders may choose a Republican ballot instead. It’s hard to see Kasich doing well after New Hampshire, but Tuesday could be a good day for him.
I’ve made it to the 750th word of this piece without mentioning Donald Trump, the frontrunner. I thought he got away unscathed. Yes, I’m appalled at his full-throated endorsement of torture (“I would bring back waterboarding and I’d bring back a hell of a lot worse than waterboarding”), and I’m even more appalled that no one seemed to care. But the other candidates, other than Jeb Bush, didn’t challenge him all that much.
And when Bush went after Trump on eminent domain, Bush won on substance but Trump won on style, attacking the “donors and special interests” he claimed had packed the debate hall and were booing him. “The move was classic pro-wrestling—like Vince McMahon baiting the crowd,” said Jonathan Last of The Weekly Standard. “And it was so crazy that it kind of worked.”
As for Ted Cruz, he may have won Iowa, but it seems unlikely that he’ll do as well with New Hampshire voters, who have not been kind to evangelical candidates in the past. In response to the dirty tricks his campaign engaged in to sway Ben Carson’s supporters in Iowa, Cruz has settled on a characteristically cynical tactic: apologize for his campaign’s claims that Carson was dropping out of the race while claiming that they really believed it to be true. Cruz had to misrepresent CNN’s reporting in order to pull it off, but whatever.
The downfall of Marco Rubio is what we’ll be talking about this week. A candidate can survive many things, but mockery is not one of them. The next few days are going to be telling, but I really think it may be over for him. Which means that what’s left of the Republican establishment is going to have to come up with another alternative lest it get stuck with Trump or Cruz.
I recently predicted that Bush would win the nomination based on nothing other than the process of elimination. On Saturday, Rubio may have gotten himself eliminated.
Media spin Rubio and Sanders as Iowa’s big winners
Previously published at WGBHNews.org.
For the next week you’re going to be inundated with prognostications about what the results of the Iowa caucuses mean for New Hampshire and beyond. We’ve all been wrong about so many things that I’m not sure why anyone should pay attention. So tonight let’s pause for a moment and consider what has actually happened.
As I write this, Ted Cruz has won the Republican caucuses, beating Donald Trump. Marco Rubio is running third, which was expected, but turned in such a strong performance that he may yet slip ahead of Trump, which wasn’t expected. On the Democratic side, Hillary Clinton is leading Bernie Sanders by the slimmest of margins, and it’s possible that we won’t know who actually won until sometime Tuesday.
On the surface, Trump’s bad night may suggest a victory for sanity. But consider: Cruz, Trump, and Ben Carson together received some 61 percent of the votes. And all three of them are extremists who share similar anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim views. In fact, Cruz and Carson are considerably to the right of Trump, who subscribes to no ideology beyond what’s advantageous to him at any given moment.
By winning an impressive 23 percent (as of this moment), Rubio has finally emerged as the establishment Republican alternative after months of failing to pick up the baton. Jeb Bush, John Kasich, Chris Christie, and the rest can go home now. But are the kinds of people who support Cruz, Trump, and Carson really going to turn around and vote for the establishment choice?
Maybe they will. Rubio, after all, was elected to the Senate with Tea Party support in 2010, and during this campaign he has moved far to the right on immigration. His pandering on religion excludes anyone who doesn’t subscribe to his particular brand of Christianity—never mind that he himself has been a Catholic, a Mormon, and an evangelical. If the way to defeat extremism is to offer extremism lite, then Rubio may be the Republicans’ best bet. But I suspect he’d be easy pickings for the Democrats if they weren’t so battered and bruised themselves.
I’m not sure how impressed I’m supposed to be by Sanders’s near-win over Clinton. Other than New Hampshire, Iowa was always going to be his best state. I’m inclined to think that any victory by Clinton, no matter how slim, should be seen as a victory. Sanders is still likely to take New Hampshire next week, but that’s already been baked into everyone’s expectations. Her advantages for winning the nomination remain enormous.
But now we get into the media-expectations game. And Clinton is going to get hammered over the next week because she didn’t win Iowa by a wide enough margin, even though there were plenty of reasons to believe she wouldn’t win at all.
You could see the consensus emerging tonight on cable news: There were two winners—Marco Rubio and Bernie Sanders—and one big loser—Trump. Cruz was getting very little credit for his victory. And Clinton was portrayed as barely hanging on by her fingernails. Thursday’s debate looms large.
I don’t know how much it’s going to matter. The media may still be capable of setting the narrative, but the voters themselves are less willing to go along with each election cycle. Trump is the ultimate media creation (more the entertainment media than the news media), and, after a months-long build-up, he flopped on opening night.
Anyone searching for clarity tonight had to be disappointed. I wasn’t. The Iowa caucuses are a tiny event in a small, non-representative state. They shouldn’t decide anything, and they didn’t—Martin O’Malley’s and Mike Huckabee’s exits notwithstanding.
Maybe New Hampshire will tell us more.
Debate does little to stop Bernie’s media-fueled momentum
Previously published at WGBHNews.org.
There are few story lines the media love more than “Clinton is in trouble.” Just saying it out loud brings back warm, gauzy memories of Gennifer Flowers, Monica Lewinsky, and Whitewater, of Benghazi and private email servers.
So I suspect there was almost nothing that could have happened at Sunday night’s Democratic debate to change the narrative that Bernie Sanders is surging and Hillary Clinton is hanging on for dear life.
None responded to the moment more predictably than Glenn Thrush of Politico, who opens by writing that Clinton’s attacks on Sanders “reinforced his characterization of her as an establishment politician so desperate she’d say anything to win,” and that the Vermont senator represents “an existential threat” to her candidacy.
The Washington Post’s lead story on the debate, by Anne Gearan and Philip Rucker, offers a calmer version of the same idea, with phrases such as “she sought to puncture Sanders’s insurgent appeal and regain her footing after a difficult stretch” and a reference to “the newly potent threat Sanders poses to Clinton in her second White House run.” For good measure, the Post’s Chris Cillizza pronounces Bernie a winner and Hillary a loser.
In fact, those of us who watched—and it’s not likely there were many of us given that it took place in the middle of a holiday weekend—saw nothing all that dramatic.
Sanders, as usual, shouted and did a decent job of getting his points across. Clinton, as usual, was in command of the issues, though there’s no doubt she went after Sanders far more than in the previous three debates. Martin O’Malley, as usual, was there.
My own sense was that this was Clinton’s weakest performance, but still generally fine. I thought her worst moment was her closing remarks about sending a campaign aide to Flint, Michigan, to look into the drinking-water crisis. Why didn’t she go there herself? But I’ve seen plenty of commentary to the contrary. For instance, Paul Volpe and Quynhanh Do of The New York Times call it “her best moment of the night.”
But because the prospective voters who did not watch are going to depend on the media to tell them what happened, the takeaway is going to be that Clinton failed to stop Sanders’s momentum. That’s not wrong, just simplistic.
On the issues, I thought Clinton bested Sanders on guns, health care, and foreign policy, whereas Sanders was better on Wall Street and campaign-finance reform.
Clinton’s argument against Sanders’s newly released health-care proposal, which calls for a single-payer system that would eliminate private insurance (see Jonathan Cohn at The Huffington Post for details), isn’t really fair.
No, Sanders would not scrap the Affordable Care Act. But even liberal Democrats inclined to support single-payer are sure to recall what a horrendous slog it was to get the ACA passed. My guess is they’re disinclined to go back for another round.
“If Democrats couldn’t pass single-payer with a Senate supermajority, how would Sanders do it with a Republican House and, at best, a narrow Senate edge?” asks David A. Graham at The Atlantic. “She [Clinton] knows the limitations of health-care politics better than almost anyone.”
Though it might not have been immediately evident, Sanders may have seriously wounded himself with his answers on foreign policy. Despite offering some unconvincing caveats, he sounded like he’s all but ready to emulate Ronald Reagan and send a cake to the Iranian mullahs. Twice Sanders said the United States should work with Iran, to remove Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad from power and to defeat ISIS. Let’s roll the tape:
But I think in terms of our priorities in the region, our first priority must be the destruction of ISIS. Our second priority must be getting rid of Assad, through some political settlement, working with Iran, working with Russia.
But the immediate task is to bring all interests together who want to destroy ISIS, including Russia, including Iran, including our Muslim allies to make that the major priority.
I have to agree with Boston Globe columnist Michael Cohen, who says of Sanders that “it’s blindingly apparent that not only does he not understand foreign policy and national security, he simply doesn’t care to know more.”
NBC News moderators Lester Holt and Andrea Mitchell did a good job of keeping things on track and covering a wide range of issues. But when Mitchell pressed Sanders on whether he would support tax increases, I would have liked to see a disclosure that she’s married to former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.
And, finally, some counterintuitive polling wisdom from Five Thirty Eight’s Nate Silver. His analysis of multiple polls shows that Clinton has an 81 percent chance of winning the Iowa caucuses on February 1 and a 57 percent chance of winning the New Hampshire primary (where, as this Real Clear Politics compilation shows, Sanders is widely believed to be ahead) on February 9.
If Clinton takes both Iowa and New Hampshire, the race for the Democratic nomination will be over.
Sanders called a liar over a difference of opinion
Glenn Kessler, The Washington Post‘s fact-checker, gives Bernie Sanders a rating of “Three Pinocchios” for claiming that partial repeal of the Glass-Steagall law helped cause the 2008 financial collapse. It’s complicated, as you’ll see. But my conclusion is that Kessler wrote a pretty good analysis and then undermined it by calling Sanders a liar when we’re really only talking about a difference of opinion.
Several years ago I wrote a commentary for The Huffington Post on the limits of fact-checking. As I said at the time:
The problem is that there are only a finite number of statements that can be subjected to thumbs-up/thumbs-down fact-checking…. The fact-checkers are shifting from judging facts to indulging in opinion, but they’re not necessarily doing it because they want to. They’re doing it because politicians don’t flat-out lie as frequently as we might suppose.
Sanders believes the erosion of Glass-Steagall protections helped create an environment that made the 2008 financial collapse more likely. Kessler disagrees, and he’s found several experts to support his viewpoint. That doesn’t make Sanders a liar. I suspect Kessler knows better, but he’s got Pinocchios to bestow, and today Bernie’s number came up.