Chris Hedges's Blog, page 31

Pete Buttigieg Can’t Be Defeated Soon Enough

This article originally appeared on Salon.

It’s obviously asinine to proclaim that the Democratic presidential campaign has reached a turning point in the middle of February, after one disputed election that involved about 175,000 voters and will never be resolved to everyone’s satisfaction. But on the eve of the New Hampshire primary, with its long history of launching some presidential contenders and sending others to their doom, that’s exactly where we are.

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If New Hampshire is just as unrepresentative of 21st-century America as Iowa — it actually has fewer people of color, which is quite an accomplishment — at least this will be a straightforward primary election, with the winner determined on the revolutionary principle of who gets the most votes.

Sure, that’s a dig at Pete Buttigieg, the now-former mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who got to declare victory in Iowa despite finishing second in actual votes, based on abstruse mathematical formulas that A) no one really understands and B) do not appear to have been applied with any consistency. Couldn’t, like, Andrew Yang have swooped in and sorted all this out in a few hours with his team of math geniuses? The answer to that, I presume, is no, given that the theme of the Democratic race so far seems to be: We took a system that didn’t work very well and nobody really liked, and made it worse.

Someone will win New Hampshire, at any rate. It might be Buttigieg, who has been the subject of a media boomlet this week after his unexpected surge in the Iowa caucuses. On the other hand, it definitely might not be: He has also been subjected to considerable abuse from the left (at least some of it unfair and mean-spirited) and took an epic smackdown during Friday night’s debate from Sen. Amy Klobuchar, who has had quite enough of a small-town mayor stealing her Midwestern shtick and “moderate lane” voters and wants all of it back on her desk by tomorrow morning with no excuses, Buster.

Whatever happens this week, after reading my colleague Amanda Marcotte’s reporting from New Hampshire, I see Buttigieg as a political mirage: a human Throwback Thursday, an echo of an echo of a particular kind of middle-ground Democratic idealism that goes back through Barack Obama and Bill Clinton to John F. Kennedy. It has a narrow but profound appeal to a subset of Democratic voters who would like to smooth over the discord of the last 60 or 70 years in American life into a narrative of upward progress, temporarily interrupted by Donald Trump.

Buttigieg’s vision, which seems to be permanently short on specifics and constantly subject to change, could fairly be described as making America great again — not, of course, in the Trumpian white-nationalist sense, but in an equally vague idiom of Scout meetings and mainline Protestant churches and “public service,” where children of all races attend above-average schools, entrepreneurial dreams are nourished and rational discourse can restore a hopeful future.

His evocation of a kinder, gentler nation is central to the often-noted paradox of his candidacy: By far the youngest contender in the Democratic field, he appeals almost entirely to voters over 45. Buttigieg is literally an old person’s idea of what young people in America ought to be like, right down to the no-longer-unconventional fact that his marriage, so blindingly wholesome and middle American that it would give Norman Rockwell a toothache, involves another man.

We should indeed pause to observe that no openly gay person has ever previously won a presidential primary or been a legitimate presidential candidate — and yes indeed, the fact that Buttigieg’s sexual orientation appears to be a total non-factor supports the narrative underlying his campaign. Whether Buttigieg can translate his appeal beyond older white people in rural states remains to be seen; to this point, he looks like a candidate who has dressed up an imaginary vision of the past in robes of wokeness and is selling it as the future.

If Buttigieg has much to gain and much to lose in New Hampshire — it’s difficult to imagine him winning another state, if he doesn’t win this one — that goes double for Sen. Bernie Sanders. He has consistently led in the polls in recent weeks, and scored a historic victory over Hillary Clinton in the state four years ago, becoming the first Jewish candidate to win a major-party primary election. Sanders is in a far better position than any other Democrat in the race, which in itself is an amazing development, considering how much loathing he provokes among many moderates, and how many people believe he can’t possibly win a general election against Trump. He has an immensely loyal fanbase and continues to break all the records in small-dollar fundraising — but if he doesn’t score a convincing win in the Granite State, that will throw the Democratic race into even more turmoil than already exists, and will cast Sanders’ tenuous frontrunner status into serious doubt.

None of that is a prediction, by the way. I don’t know what will happen on Tuesday, and I 146 percent do not know who the Democratic nominee will be. As politics nerds will tell you, there’s a supposedly inflexible rule that you can’t win the Democratic nomination without finishing in the top two in either Iowa or New Hampshire. Or at any rate, that hasn’t happened, going back to the dawn of the modern primary system in 1972.

That would seem to signal doom for both Joe Biden and Elizabeth Warren, who will both be delighted if they finish third, not to mention Klobuchar, the favorite of all ordained members of the pundit class, who may finally (and to my immense surprise) be Klobu-charging toward a respectable result. But before you start yelling at me about letting black voters speak and sexist “erasure” and all the Amy data points: I agree! None of the so-called rules matter anymore, and the only thing we will know for sure on Wednesday morning is who won New Hampshire.

It’s of course tempting to speculate: Biden is clearly in deep trouble and the sand is kinda running out of the hourglass for Warren, with two supposedly favorable states off the board and a tough road ahead through Super Tuesday. What the hell states can Amy Klobuchar actually win, that aren’t Minnesota and that exist outside Jonathan Chait and Jennifer Rubin’s dreams? Somewhere, isn’t Mike Bloomberg writing checks and cracking wise, waiting for Bernie and Mayor Pete and Uncle Joe and the rest of these no-hope toilers to bring it home to Papa?

But no. Margaret Sullivan of the Washington Post recently issued a salutary injunction to people like me (and her, and other people arrogant enough to believe that our musings on politics might be worth reading) to stay out of the prediction business. Years ago, Bill Moyers told me that the question of who will win and who should win were always the least useful questions in politics. Every time I think about that wisdom, I regret the moments when I’ve defied it.

Pundits are really bad at predictions, first of all: Definitely no better than “random dude on barstool,” and frequently worse. If the gruesome car-wreck of the 2016 election didn’t teach us that — and apparently it didn’t — there’s already a long legacy of genius takes on this year’s campaign, in which we were told that Beto O’Rourke would galvanize the youth vote, Kamala Harris was an unstoppable frontrunner, Kirsten Gillibrand would lead a wave of righteously angry women, Steve Bullock was the perfect political combo and Bernie was leftover socialist mashed potatoes and would be out of the race by last summer.

All those things are true, perhaps, in other strands of the multiverse. In this one, we’ve got a wintry showdown between one guy who would be the oldest president ever (and is beloved by young people) and another who would be the youngest president ever (and is beloved by older people). If you’ve got a time machine, go back a year or so and put some money down on that prospect in Vegas. But be careful about your return date, because the only safe prediction about the 2020 Democratic campaign is that it will look completely different in a few weeks. And, oh yeah, it will still be an incredible mess.

What’s Driving Democrats’ ‘Bernie-or-Bust’ Freakout

Even before the debacle of the Iowa caucuses, in which the Democratic Party managed, despite its ineptitude, to deny Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., a clear public victory by spiking the results entirely, there was a palpable sense of panic among the party’s conservatives. (For some reason, we have all agreed to call them “centrists” or “moderates.”) While his poll numbers remained fairly strong nationally and throughout the more heavily African-American South, Joe Biden seemed to be fading — in some cases almost literally — before our eyes.

Once-viable liberals like the prosecutor-turned-senator Kamala Harris or former HUD Secretary and San Antonio Mayor Julián Castro dropped out or never caught on. The several interchangeable governors from the Mountain West — How many? Who were they? (we may never fully know) — disappeared, as did the similarly interchangeable congressmen. Warren tacked slightly to Sanders’ right but remained far too left for America’s insane political establishment despite an agenda best described as that of a Christian Democrat in Europe. Klobuchar remained, unbowed and unpopular. Buttigieg? Bloomberg? Might as well give it a try!

What had become clear, however, was that just as a fractious Republican field had failed to coalesce around an establishment figure in 2016, aiding or at least permitting the victory of Donald Trump, so too would the presence of so many Democratic candidates redound to Sanders’ advantage. (That so many Clintonites have convinced themselves that Sanders is some kind of communist Donald Trump — a brooding Stalin to Trump’s febrile Hitler — only makes their fear all the more visceral.) Meanwhile, they fretted that this failure to unite would carry into the general election, just as they believed it did in the last presidential election. If Sanders’ supporters’ original sin was backing another candidate in the primary, then their mythical failure to rally around Clinton against Trump was the evil and wickedness of man in the days before God sent the flood.

Into this fracas have swaggered several Twitter personalities, most notably the socialist lawyer and think-tanker Matt Bruenig and the hosts of the popular leftist podcast, Chapo Trap House. (Full disclosure: One of the podcast’s hosts and founders, Will Menaker, was my book editor, and I consider him a friend. I have been a guest on the show several times.)

Turning the logic of unity so often deployed against them by Clinton’s supporters, they argued that if it was the duty of Democrats to line up behind the most electable candidate, to eschew their own preferences of policy and personality in order to defeat Donald Trump, then it was necessary — obligatory — for all Democrats to support one Bernard Sanders. If Sanders diehards are the one unmovable bloc within the party, they reasoned, then a good portion of them were guaranteed to stay home if he isn’t the nominee. Only by joining them could nervous Democrats cement the full party coalition and prevail.

This argument began, I think, as an only half-earnest provocation — a dare to the many voices in professional Democratic circles who preached unity so long as it aligned with their own preferred choices but who reacted with incredulous rage if you suggested that it was they, not you, who might have to hold their noses and back a guy they didn’t really like. But over the months — perhaps because of the outraged reaction it engendered among a cadre of former Clinton backers — it solidified into something more like an article of faith, and later a battle cry of the Sanders-supporting online left.

This message makes people very, very angry. It is sabotage. It’s blackmail. It’s misogyny! It’s juvenile petulance. It is the privilege of non-immigrants and white people who, if they have suffered at all under Donald Trump, have not suffered enough and would inflict him again on the poor and the vulnerable simply because they could not have their way. It is “purity” politics. It’s unrealistic. It isn’t fair. It’s bomb-throwing. It’s masturbatory. It’s disrespectful. It is impudent and insolent for these nobodies, these outsiders, these jokers who have never consulted on a campaign or designed a media strategy or jockeyed for a West Wing job or run a think tank (although Bruenig has, in fact, done at least the last) to make demands from a position of — let’s be honest — some negotiating strength.

But the real source of the anger this “Bernie-or-bust” rhetoric engenders is rooted in a few specific kinds of incomprehension among lifelong Democrats broadly and professional-class Democrats specifically.

First and foremost, they view politics transactionally: Candidates are a product to be created, packaged and sold to consumers — you, the voter. Second, trained by a party apparatus that has been flinching since George McGovern’s defeat in 1972, they can’t understand a candidate who is actively trying to win rather than avoid losing, who is willing to say, “Fuck it; I might win and I might lose, but I’m going to do my damnedest to enact my program.” Third, and most critically, they are absolutely flummoxed by a political movement based in an actual, positive commitment to a governing agenda rather than a negative commitment simply to stop Donald Trump. A movement, in other words, that views defeating Trump as a necessary precondition but not an end in itself.

Now, I am admittedly a Sanders supporter. Representation matters, and I think it is high time we have somebody in the White House who looks like me (i.e., a weird, ungainly Jew, who talks with his hands and whose spouse has to tell him to keep his voice down in restaurants). I am not, perhaps, as devoted as his most ardent backers. In other words, I’m precisely the kind of wobbly voter that they are warning you about. I feel more warmly than most Sanders’ supporters toward Elizabeth Warren, even after her unnecessary and ill-considered attempt to smear him as a sexist, and I think I could vote for her with mild regret, knowing that the system can’t be defeated at the ballot box and hoping that she has enough Gorbachev in her to steer us through a Soviet-style collapse.

I might even be persuaded to vote for Amy Klobuchar if she were the nominee. If nothing else, she has proven she’d be willing to channel Lyndon Johnson and bully members of the Senate in increasingly florid ways. The rest of them? I suspect I’d probably stay home. Never have I seen such a collection of weirdos, billionaires and careerist dweebs without the slightest indication of a core moral code or a common sense of humanity.

Here we come to the fear that is the fertile soil in which anti-Sanders anger grows. (And here, too, their obsession with comparing him to Trump is instructive.) They saw how Trump, backed by an unshakable core of followers and supporters, not only won an election but also bent the whole professional infrastructure of the GOP — and the whole party in turn — to his program and style of government.

They see how many of the usual consultants, advisers, campaign managers and assistant-undersecretaries were either sidelined, made the sad march to “Never Trump” media sinecures that paid well but remained far, far from power, or were forced to reinvent themselves as mewling, subservient Trumpists, humiliating themselves daily and hiding in bushes until their mad sovereign tired of them and dismissed them with a tweet and an insult. They think: That could be my fate too.

The fear is probably unwarranted, in large part because Trump’s GOP came pre-radicalized — an already-ugly stew of racial resentment, nativist paranoia and violent militarism. The Democratic Party remains, by and large, a cautious and technocratic center-right institution that would passively resist a Sanders agenda, taking every occasion to play Herman Melville’s famous fictional character Bartleby, who replies to every request from his employers with, “I would prefer not to.”

But without a line to the White House, it’s still very possible that the consultant class would grow less lucrative, and that an alliance of up-and-coming, media-savvy and policy-oriented lawmakers from Rashida Tlaib to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Katie Porter to Ayanna Pressley will give Sanders a popular and quotable base of support in the legislature that will move the party, whether it prefers it or not.

Oscars Get With the Political Program

In Hollywood on Sunday night, in a country riven by income equality, political schisms and fear of foreign takeovers of homegrown businesses, an edgy tragicomedy of haves and have-nots in contemporary South Korea took four Oscars. “Parasite” was the top story of this year’s Academy Awards, landing best screenplay, best director, best international feature and best picture for filmmaker Bong Joon-Ho. It was the first time a film with subtitles won the top prize and the first time one person won four Oscars in an evening since Walt Disney swept the documentary (“The Living Desert”) and animation categories in 1954.

And then there was “American Factory” from Barack and Michelle Obama’s Higher Ground Productions. This year’s documentary Oscar-winner chronicles the culture clash in Dayton, Ohio when a Chinese auto-glass manufacturer takes over a shuttered GM auto plant. The prize was shared by filmmakers Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert.

No one mentioned the current president by name, but supporting actor winner Brad Pitt (“Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood”) accepted his statuette by noting the 45 seconds allotted for his thank-yous was more time than the Senate had given Trump’s former National Security Advisor John Bolton during the Impeachment Hearings.

Thus did the 92nd Academy Awards mirror geopolitics, economic policy and electoral politics — all in under 220 minutes. Ratings-wise, the broadcast hit an all-time low in the U.S. More’s the pity, for the politics of representation that underpinned the show produced by Stephanie Allain and Lynette Howard Tyler made for the most diverse and enjoyable Oscars in years.

Singer/actress Janelle Monae (“Hidden Figures”) kicked off the evening with a musical number that filled the Dolby Theater with energy and life. “Demoted” former Oscar hosts Steve Martin and Chris Rock traded ripostes, and were quite sharp (see below). Though female directors were for the most part overlooked in the screenplay and best director nominations, women won non-acting statuettes for musical score, animated short, documentary, production design and costume design. Apart from Bong Joon-Ho, there were fewer wins for people of color, an exception being the prize for animated short, and there were a lot of pointed jokes about the lack of representation.

Oddly enough, no one noted the irony of Academy members awarding an Oscar to a film that critiqued their privileged lives. Still, this year’s “Bongslide” (the coinage of A.O. Scott) made me feel that the Academy honored a terrific best film in “Parasite,” a geographically specific story about a universal problem. Paradoxically, it also honored a terrific documentary that looked with a gimlet eye at the downside of the internationalism celebrated with the best picture win.

Below are seven random thoughts I scribbled down during the ceremony:

1)  Janelle Monae can light the world up with her smile — and set the house on fire with her voice.

2) No one wears three outfits at the same time with as much élan as Diane Keaton.

3) Everyone at the Dolby Theater was happy with the Brad Pitt and Bong Joon Ho wins, even their fellow nominees.

4) Best musical score winner Hildur Guonadottir made the best acceptance speech, exhorting woman to listen to the music inside them.

5) Love Elton John and Bernie Taupin (whose “I’m Gonna Love Me Again”(from “Rocketman”) won best song, but  Cynthia Erivo’s “Stand Up”(from Harriet) is the year’s best song.

6) Chris Rock’s observation that “Mahershala Ali has two Oscars. Know what that means when he gets stopped by the police? Nothing” was the best-delivered joke at the ceremony. Second-best was Steve Martin’s quip that to make sure the Oscars didn’t repeat the gaffe of announcing the wrong best picture winner, it had adapted the Iowa Caucus App.

7) Rebel Wilson and James Corden scored best visual joke when they come out to give award for special effects in their furry-creepy costumes from “Cats” and said, “No one knows the importance of good special effects like us.”

 

 

Oscars Viewership Plunges to All-Time Low

NEW YORK — Without a host or a great deal of pizzazz, ABC’s telecast of the Academy Awards reached its smallest audience ever of 23.6 million viewers.

The Nielsen company said Sunday night’s audience was down 20 percent from a year ago. The previous low-water mark for the Oscars was the 26.5 million people who watched in 2018.

The Academy Awards honored “Parasite” as best picture. While that made history as the first-ever foreign language film to win the top award, it was clearly not an audience-grabber. The Oscars were held sooner in the year than usual, and that may have prevented the show from building buzz.

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“It was too predictable, too white and too boring,” said Tom O’Neil, founder of Goldderby.com, a website devoted to awards show news.

The actors who took the four biggest prizes — Joaquin Phoenix, Renée Zellweger, Brad Pitt and Laura Dern — had also swept previous awards, so there were few surprises and few indelible moments, he said on Monday.

“The only suspense of the evening was for best picture, and the average viewer hadn’t seen ‘Parasite’ or ‘1917,’ so they weren’t emotionally invested,” O’Neil said.

For the second straight year, the Oscars went hostless, opening with a rousing production number from Janelle Monae and a crisp comic monologue with Steve Martin and Chris Rock. But a handful of critics felt the lack of host was a handicap this year.

Dominic Patten of Deadline said the show “bellowed out for a ringmaster to harness what soon became a lackluster circus.”

“One thing a host can do is give the broadcast a shape and a voice when nothing else provides them,” wrote James Poniewozik of The New York Times. “And this year’s show seemed to feel the vacuum more, turning out a grab bag of emotional high points and perplexing uses of time.”

Hank Stuever, critic for the Washington Post, said the show was too predictable. He called it “Oscar autopilot — three and a half hours of Hollywood cruising along at 35,000 feet. Viewers could be forgiven for nodding off for most of the flight.”

“I missed having a host,” Joy Behar said on “The View.”

For much of the 2000s, the Oscars hovered between 35 and 45 million viewers, often the second most-watched television program of the year after the Super Bowl. As recently as 2015, the show reached 37.3 million viewers.

In defense of the motion picture academy, live television viewing in general has dropped significantly over the past few years with the explosion in streaming services. Still, the numbers have to be concerning.

Viewership for the Golden Globes (18.3 million) and Grammy Awards (18.7 million) were also off from 2019, but the drop was not as steep.

British Traveler Illustrates How Easy It Can Be to Spread a Virus

LONDON — A middle-aged businessman from England who vacationed in the Alps has illustrated how the ease of international travel is complicating global efforts to track and contain the new coronavirus that emerged in China.

From the Singapore hotel where he is believed to have picked up the virus during a conference, to a ski resort in the French Alps and a pub in his hometown of Hove on the southern coast of England, as well as the flights he took on his way back to Britain, the man came in contact with dozens of other people, potentially infecting them before he was diagnosed and hospitalized. Health officials are now hunting for them.

Already, five Britons who stayed with him at a chalet in the Alps have been diagnosed with the virus, including a 9-year-old boy. Another man who stayed at the resort was discovered infected after returning to his home on the Spanish island of Mallorca.

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The apparent ease with which the virus spread raises concern that some of the 90 others who attended the conference may also have been infected and “may go on to initiate chains of infection in their home countries,’’ said Dr. Nathalie MacDermott, a clinical lecturer at King’s College London.

The World Health Organization warned that given the relatively small cluster so far, it would be unfair and an exaggeration to characterize the businessman as a “super-spreader,” or someone who infects an unusually large number of people. And this is by no means the only cluster seen in the outbreak.

Another small one, for example, was tied to a Chinese woman who traveled to a meeting at a German auto parts company. The virus spread to a dozen employees and their family members in Germany.

Still, the case of this single traveler from England underscores the importance of quick cross-border information-sharing and detective work to find other people potentially exposed.

The virus has infected more than 40,000 people globally and killed over 900, with the overwhelming majority of cases in China. It is unclear exactly how it is transmitted, but experts think it is spread mostly by droplets when people cough or sneeze. Health officials warn that it can take up to 14 days for those who have been exposed to show symptoms.

Most people have only mild symptoms such as a fever and runny nose. But some develop pneumonia. Those who fallen severely ill have been mostly over 60 with other health problems.

WHO’s director-general, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, said the spread of the virus among people like the British businessman who haven’t been to China is concerning.

“The detection of the small number of cases could be the spark that becomes a bigger fire, but for now it’s only a spark,’’ he said. “Our objective remains containment. We call on all countries to use the window of opportunity we have to prevent a bigger fire.”

The story of the British man begins with a business conference like so many that take place all over the world as multinational corporations and groups bring together employees, clients and others to share information, sell products and enjoy all-expenses-paid getaways.

The man, who hasn’t been identified publicly, flew to Singapore for a Jan. 20-22 event sponsored by his employer, Servomex. The company, based in a two-story industrial building in the town of Crowborough, 35 miles south of London, makes industrial sensors sold around the world.

In a statement, Servomex said “a limited number of its employees in different countries have been diagnosed with the coronavirus and are now being treated.”

The Grand Hyatt Singapore, a five-star hotel with 677 guest rooms, said Singapore’s Ministry of Health informed it that three people who attended the conference experienced symptoms after returning to their home countries of Malaysia and South Korea and have now been diagnosed with the virus.

The hotel said 94 foreigners stayed at the Grand Hyatt at the same time as the Servomex conference, including people from Wuhan, the Chinese city at the epicenter of the outbreak. The hotel said it is now deep-cleaning guest rooms, meeting spaces, restaurants, the fitness center and other public areas.

One of the people infected was the Hove man, who flew on to France before he started to display any symptoms. He reportedly joined his family for four days at a three-story chalet in Contamines-Montjoie, a resort in the Mont Blanc region that offers downhill skiing from 25 lifts, well as cross-country skiing, skating and paragliding.

Jerome Salomon, head of France’s national health agency, said that in the wake of the episode, 61 people, including many children who went to school with the boy, were tested and proved negative for the virus.

The businessman flew back to Britain on Jan. 28 on an EasyJet flight from Geneva to London’s Gatwick Airport. The airline did not disclose how many people were aboard but said England’s public health agency is contacting all passengers who were seated near the man.

Once back in Britain, the businessman visited The Grenadier pub in Hove, which said it was told by the public health agency that there was “minimal ongoing risk of infection” to guests or staff.

A school in the community, Portslade Community Academy, said that one its students has been told to “self isolate,’’ the local Brighton Argus newspaper reported.

“It does appear that the index case has passed on the infection to an unusually large number of contacts,’’ said Dr. Andrew Freedman, an expert on infectious diseases at Cardiff University. “As such, he could be termed a ‘super-spreader.’’’

During the 2002-03 SARS outbreak, the deadly disease made its way to the wider world after a Chinese doctor who had treated patients on the mainland checked into a Hong Kong hotel.

He ultimately infected six other hotel guests staying on the same floor, possibly when he sneezed or coughed as they were waiting for an elevator, according to Hong Kong health authorities. Some of those guests then took SARS to Canada, Taiwan, Thailand and Singapore, seeding new outbreaks.

But Dr. Michael Ryan, WHO’s emergencies chief, said: “It’s way too early and much more of an exaggeration to consider the Singapore conference event a superspreading event.”

___

Associated Press Writers Maria Cheng In London, Elaine Ganley and Angela Charlton in Paris and Jamey Keaten in Geneva contributed.

The Iowa Caucus Was Even More Disastrous Than Previously Thought

A week after the Iowa caucuses, the winner has yet to be determined. Observers and Democratic Party officials initially blamed technology, which made sense, as the app the Iowa Democratic Party used to count votes was seemingly held together with the software equivalent of duct tape and prayers. Developed in a rushed two months by Shadow, a company with links to the Clinton and Obama campaigns, the app was used despite concerns of multiple cybersecurity experts that it had not been rigorously tested and was susceptible to hacking.

There were indeed problems with the app, but in the week since the Iowa debacle, multiple sources reveal that the app — and what Iowa Democratic Party Chair Troy Price called a coding issue — is only one piece of the chaotic puzzle.

According to The New York Times, the caucus “crumbled under the weight of technology flops, lapses in planning, failed oversight by party officials, poor training, and a breakdown in communication between paid party leaders and volunteers out in the field, who had devoted themselves for months to the nation’s first nominating contest.”

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On Wednesday, Bloomberg reported that the phone number for reporting the results of the Iowa caucuses was posted on the internet message board 4chan, with instructions to “clog the lines.” After initially declining to comment, the Iowa Demcratic Party confirmed to Bloomberg that it had “experienced an unusually high volume of inbound phone calls to its caucus hotline,” many of them from “supporters of President Trump who called to express their displeasure with the Democratic Party.”

Even without the 4chan calls, communication broke down frequently. According to the Times, “most precinct caucuses ran smoothly across the state. But when some precinct leaders tried to report the results, the app sometimes froze. Calls to the state party hotline sometimes languished on hold for five hours.”

There also were inconsistencies in reporting across the voting precincts:

In the Times review of the data, at least 10 percent of precincts appeared to have improperly allocated their delegates, based on reported vote totals. In some cases, precincts awarded more delegates than they had to give; in others, they awarded fewer. More than two dozen precincts appeared to give delegates to candidates who did not qualify as viable under the caucus rules.

Staffers were in an information blackout. Some, the Times reports, were

“[waiting] in a room with no windows, no food, no water and no information. They took turns trying to call state party officials in search of information.”

Price failed to assuage concerns, saying on a Monday night conference call that the delay was due to having to collect and report three different sets of data. Jeff Weaver, a Bernie Sanders adviser, was unconvinced. “You always had to calculate these numbers; all we’re asking is that you report them for the first time.”

The Iowa debacle has not been conducive to Democratic Party unity, either between campaigns or between state parties and the national party. On Sunday, The Washington Post described the situation as on “the brink of open war.” The Iowa situation brought up difficult memories of the 2016 campaign for Bernie Sanders supporters, who believe the Democratic National Committee may be prejudiced against them. “They can shout unity all they want,” Nina Turner, a national co-chair of the Sanders campaign told the Post, “but the actions show otherwise.”

Relations also are strained between Price and DNC Chair Tom Perez, who, according to the Post, are “privately deflecting blame onto each other.”

Read the full Times story here.

The Historic Triumph of the Irish Left

What follows is a conversation between Jacobin contributor Michael Taft and Greg Wilpert of The Real News Network. Read a transcript of their conversation below or watch the video at the bottom of the post.

Greg Wilpert: It’s the Real News Network and I’m Greg Wolpert in Baltimore. Ireland is scheduled to hold parliamentary elections this coming Saturday and it does not look good for the two parties that have dominated Irish politics for the past 100 years. The two parties which have alternated in government since Irish independence in 1921 are Fine Gael, the party currently in control under the leadership of Leo Varadkar and Fianna Fail. Both are generally considered to be center right parties that have dominated Irish politics more for historical and not illogical reasons. The main insurgent in this election is Sinn Fein under the leadership of Mary MacDonald. Originally, this party was the political wing of the provisional Irish Republican army, which led the fight for Northern Ireland’s independence from Britain in the 1970s to the 1990s. Ever since the conflict ended in 1998 Sinn Fein has become more of a traditional left party.

Recent polls suggest that Sinn Fein could win 25% of the vote on Sunday overtaking the traditional parties, Fine Gael and Fianna Fail. If so, this would represent a major shift in Irish politics. Joining me to analyze the upcoming election is Michael Taft. He’s a researcher for the Irish Trade Union, SIPTU and blogs at Notes on the Front. Also, he recently wrote an article for Jacobin titled, This Month’s Elections in Ireland are a Historic Opportunity. Thanks for joining us today, Michael.

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Michael Taft: Thank you.

Greg Wilpert: What are the main issues in this election and why have the parties, Fianna Fail and Fine Gael not been doing so well in this campaign?

Michael Taft: Well, the main issues would be similar to issues across Europe. Housing is a particular issue. We have a crisis in homelessness and especially children’s homelessness. We have rising rents, which are more and more beyond the reach of young working people. And we have a boom in house prices, which makes it more unaffordable for people to buy a house. So that’s one issue, housing. Another issue is a health crisis. We have hundreds of thousands on the waiting list and that might not seem too big when compared for an American audience, but when you consider the population of Ireland is about 4.8 million, hundreds of thousands represents a significant proportion of people who are in queues waiting to be seen by consultants or doctors or enter into hospital. So these are parts of the legacy of austerity that the country went through between 2008 and 2014 and okay, we exited the Troika bailout program.

We seem to have gotten our public finances in order but what really happened was all the problems that were stored up during austerity were actually just kind of shoved out to the period now. So we’re living with all those mistakes Now the reason why Fianna Fail and Fine Gael are doing so poorly is because one, they don’t seem to be in touch with people’s, they don’t seem to be empathetic, don’t seem to understand the conditions that working men and women are in. And that’s extremely important in Irish politics, that type of empathy. Secondly, people are now starting to realize, although the realization been a long time coming, but it’s now being crystallized and actually ideologically there’s not a whole lot of difference between Fianna Fail and Fine Gael.

They were the two parties that opposed each other and they were the main alternatives to each other for a hundred years, but that arose out of divisions in the civil war. Those divisions are no longer relevant. Sinn Fein is the largest party, the largest non-conservative or progressive party has been the beneficiary of that and that is coupled with the fact that they have some of the best, what we call parliamentary back-benchers, spokespersons for housing, spokespersons for health, spokespersons for finance. So they are young, intelligent, and to many people, they represent a break with the two traditional parties. So that on Saturday we could see is Sinn Fein getting more votes but not necessarily more seats.

Greg Wilpert: From what you’re saying, it seems that the economic issues are dominating. How is it though that this is such a major issue when according to most analysts, Ireland has been doing quite well economically speaking. That is, they’ve been considering it an economic success story since 2013 with a steady economic growth and declining unemployment.

Michael Taft: During the austerity period, unemployment rose to extremely high levels. Immigration, which has constantly plagued the Irish economy and Irish society, began to rise to very high levels. But also there was huge spending cutbacks. So as the economy has recovered, there’s been an attempt to restore those cuts. But the problem is we had seven, eight years of those cuts and we’re a long ways away for restoring it. Secondly, while there has been an increase in employment, which is welcome, there’s also been an increase in precarious employment. People who have irregular contracts, they are temporary workers, under employed. So there is an issue in many sections of the economy about the quality of that employment. And as I said, all those problems just were stored it up during the austerity period. And then of course, once we got out of the program, once we could start back into normal budgetary functioning, they blew up.

You can’t keep cutting back house building for years and years and expect it to return it overnight. The same thing with health care, so as I say, we’re living through this legacy of austerity. There are people who feel that the recovery is passed them by, that the quality of the employment or their quality of living standards is certainly not what it was before the crash and certainly wasn’t [inaudible 00:06:29] have expectation. Just to give you one small little stat, I don’t want to get too much in statistics, but 40% of Irish people are unable to afford an unexpected expense. That would be like your dishwasher breaks down, there’s a hole in your roof, your car needs a repair. 40% cannot afford an unexpected expense. That’s the very definition of precarious living.

Greg Wilpert: Now these numbers that you’re mentioning, it sounds kind of typical for across Europe and even the world I would say, but so how is it that Sinn Fein, which has long been considered politically taboo because of its connections to the IRA during the conflict in Northern Ireland has been able to benefit from this? That is, in the past also was the labor party that led the Irish left or the Irish Progressive’s. So how is it that Sinn Fein has become mainstream now and what does that mean for the Irish left more generally?

Michael Taft: Well, you’re right, labor was the left alternative, if you will, to the two major parties. And that was traditionally the case up to 2011. Unfortunately, labor, like so many other social democratic parties throughout Europe, labor went into a coalition as a minority partner with Fine Gael and of the two traditional parties, Fine Gael would be considered more right wing, and in that coalition government between 2011 and 2015, labor stood over some horrendous spending cuts, tax increases on low and average income earners, cutbacks in investment. And quite simply, they were nearly wiped out in the 2016 election. They lost 30 out of 38 seats in Parliament. They suffered the same experience as [inaudible 00:08:18] did in Greece. So they have not recovered, people have not forgiven them, people don’t trust them. So it through that Sinn Fein was the party that that grew, that gained support for people. And one sense Fianna Fail and Fine Gael have stated over and over, they will not negotiate with Sinn Fein after the next election.

And people believe that’s hypocritical. Okay. Yes, there was the past with the IRA. There are people who still ask legitimate questions about the organization, Sinn Fein and the role of former IRA people in that. However, all parties here in the Republic insist that Sinn Fein go into coalition with parties up in the North, in Northern Ireland in Stormont. And yet you have the two traditional parties saying, well we expect you to go into coalition in the North or we’re going to have nothing to do with you down south. People perceive that as hypocritical. People perceive that as unfair. And as a lot of people said, they are just tired of this continuous Fianna Fail or Fine Gael rule. So in many instances you hear the expression, well let’s give them a try. You know, they can’t be worse than the others. And you know, people have had experience, good experience, a particular TD, that’s TDs are members of parliament here in Ireland or a, you know, particular Sinn Fein politicians. So they’re willing to kind of overlook those problems and see what Sinn Fein has to offer.

Greg Wilpert: The rise of Sinn Fein and of the left parties in Ireland, generally actually fits with the fragmentation of politics around the world at the time and also, which is has been a reaction to some of the economic issues that you were talking about earlier. Now, however, it does seem to be a little bit different in Ireland in the sense that the left under Sinn Fein’s potential leadership could come out ahead on Saturday. Whereas in the rest of Europe it has generally been the far right that has gained more momentum under these conditions. Now, why is there are no far right so to speak, gaining in Ireland or is there as in the rest of Europe?

Michael Taft: We do have a kind of micro far right parties and so you can’t say that we’re free of the far right influence, but it plays a very minimal role here. I think that can be explained by a couple of things. One attempts to generate anti-immigrant feeling and is usually quite unsuccessful in Irish culture because don’t forget Ireland, we’re Irish have sent the immigrants throughout the world. So there’s an empathy with the issue of immigration. Secondly, there’s a sense that the far right represents anti-democratic tendencies, whereas the political culture of Ireland ever since it won its independence has been one of building democracy.

Don’t forget in the 1930s when so many European countries were falling, falling under authoritarian or fascist rule, the Irish were actually busy building democratic institutions. So I guess you’re pretty reluctant to let go of democracy when you spent a hundred years trying to get it in the first place. So we are, thankfully, not plagued by the far right. Obviously you always have to keep a watch for them. So in that sense we don’t have an extreme right wing in Ireland. Even in the past there was a kind of a small neo-liberal party, progressive Democrats, but they never got more than three or 4%. So when they were in coalition with Fianna Fail they had undue influence. That doesn’t mean to say that neo-liberalism hasn’t held sway in Ireland, it has. We’ve seen privatization of a number of state enterprises. We’ve seen tax cuts to corporations and a clutch to higher income earners. So in that type of kind of fiscal conservative sense, the right has its play. But in terms of a far right or an out now neo-liberal right party, we haven’t had that much experience.

Greg Wilpert: Okay. Very interesting. But we’re going to leave it there for now. I was speaking to Michael Taft, researcher for Irish Trade Union, SIPTU and blogger at Notes on the Front. Thanks again, Michael for having joined us today.

Michael Taft: Thank you.

Greg Wilpert: And thank you for joining the real news network.

Turkey Says It Has Retaliated After Deadly Syrian Shelling

ANKARA, Turkey — Turkey said it retaliated Monday after “intense” shelling by Syrian forces killed five of its soldiers and wounded five others in Syria’s northern Idlib province, a marked escalation a week after a similarly deadly clash between the two sides.

The exchange of fire came as a Russian delegation held a second round of talks in the Turkish capital of Ankara to discuss the fighting in Idlib province, which has uprooted more than a half-million people in the past two months. No statement was issued at the end of the talks.

The fighting led to the collapse of a fragile cease-fire brokered by Turkey and Russia in 2018. Turkey supports the Syrian rebels, while Russia heavily backs the Syrian government’s campaign to retake the area, which is the last rebel stronghold in Syria.

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A U.N. official said the number of people displaced by the violence since Dec. 1 reached nearly 700,000, up from 600,000.

“That’s more than 100,000 people in just over a week,” said U.N. regional spokesman David Swanson.

“This could well prove to be the largest number of people displaced in a single period since the Syrian crisis began almost nine years ago,” Swanson said, reiterating the call for an immediate truce.

The U.N. “remains deeply alarmed about the safety and protection of over 3 million civilians in Idlib and surrounding areas, over half of whom are internally displaced, as reports of airstrikes and shellings continue in Syria,” U.N. deputy spokesman Farhan Haq said in New York.

At least 49 civilians were killed between Feb. 1-5, with at least 186 civilians killed in January, he said.

Most of the displaced are living in open-air shelters and temporary homes in rain, snow and freezing temperatures near the Turkish border. Half of the displaced are believed to be children.

Food, shelter, water and sanitation, hygiene, health, education and protection assistance are all urgent priorities, Haq said, with the humanitarian community seeking $336 million to help 800,000 people in northwestern Syria for six months.

The fighting has led Turkey to send hundreds of military vehicles and troops into Idlib province in the past week, bringing both countries’ forces into direct confrontation, a rarity in the Syrian conflict.

Eight Turkish military and civilian personnel and 13 Syrian soldiers were killed in a clash in the province last week. Turkey has warned Syria to retreat to cease-fire lines that were agreed in 2018.

The Turkish Defense Ministry said its five troops that were killed and those who were wounded were reinforcements that had been sent to Idlib.

“Our fire support vehicles immediately fired on the targets with intensity and the necessary response was given,” the ministry said. The statement did not say where the attack took place but news reports said it was at Taftanaz, where Turkish troops were allegedly trying to set up a base.

A later statement said the retaliation was in line with Turkey’s rules of engagement and its right to self-defense.

At least 115 Syrian positions were targeted in the retaliatory strikes, the ministry said, adding that more than 100 Syrian forces were “neutralized.” In addition, three tanks and two artillery positions were destroyed, while a helicopter was hit, the ministry said. The claim could not be independently verified.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, an opposition monitoring group, gave a higher casualty toll, reporting six Turkish soldiers were killed and seven were wounded in the Syrian shelling at the Taftanaz air base. It added that four Syrian rebels were killed in the shelling.

Omer Celik, the spokesman for Turkey’s ruling-party, said it was out of the question for the Turkish troops to vacate the observation posts in Idlib, adding that Turkey would continue to respond to “systematic” Syrian government attacks

Celik also said Turkish troops would continue trying to ensure that Syrian government forces withdraw to previous positions.

“The Turkish will carry out the necessary work to ensure that the (Syrian) regime retreat from the line it has violated with the aggression,” Celik said.

Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said Turkish and Russian delegations exchanged proposals over Idlib at a first meeting Saturday in Ankara.

The Russian team returned to Ankara on Monday from a visit to Jordan and held talks with Ibrahim Kalin, a top aide to President Recep Tayyip Erdogan.

During the meeting, Kalin “emphasized the need for the attacks against Turkish soldiers and the observation to be stopped,” according to a statement from his office, carried by state-run Anadolu Agency.

Syria’s military has vowed to continue its campaign.

An early morning airstrike on the village of Ibbin in a rebel-held region of Aleppo province near Idlib killed nine people, including six children, according to activists from the Observatory and the Step news agency, an activist collective. At least 10 people were wounded.

The Syrian government’s campaign appears aimed at securing a strategic highway in rebel-controlled territory for now, rather than seizing the entire province and its densely populated capital, Idlib.

The government-controlled Syrian Central Military Media released a map of the area of fighting showing that Syrian troops only have 15 kilometers (9 miles) left from seizing full control of the strategic highway, known as the M5. The highway links the national capital of Damascus with the country’s north, which has for years been divided between government and opposition forces.

Meanwhile, a car bomb in a Syrian town controlled by Turkey-backed opposition fighters killed at least four people and wounded 15, the Anadolu Agency reported.

The attack was the latest in a series of explosions in Turkish-controlled regions that have killed and wounded scores of people. Turkey has blamed the Syrian Kurdish militia, known as the People’s Protection Units.

The bomb went off on a main street in the town of Afrin, which Turkey took control of following a military incursion in 2018, Anadolu reported. It said some of the wounded were in serious condition, adding that the death toll was likely to rise.

The Turkish offensive has aimed at pushing Kurdish fighters away from the border. Those Kurdish fighters had been key U.S. allies in the fight against the Islamic State group. Turkey considers the Syrian Kurdish fighters terrorists linked to a Kurdish insurgency within Turkey.

___

Mroue reported from Beirut. Associated Press writers Sarah El Deeb in Beirut and Edith M. Lederer in New York contributed.

Trump Puts Rejected Budget Cuts Back on the Block

WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump unveiled a $4.8 trillion election year budget plan on Monday that recycles previously rejected cuts to domestic programs like food stamps and Medicaid to promise a balanced budget in 15 years — all while leaving Social Security and Medicare benefits untouched.

Trump’s fiscal 2021 plan promises the government’s deficit will crest above $1 trillion only for the current budget year before steadily decreasing to more manageable levels, relying on optimistic economic projections, lower interest costs, scaled-back overseas military operations and proposed cuts to agency budgets that run counter to two previous budget deals signed by Trump.

The budget “sets the course for a future of continued American dominance and prosperity,” Trump said in a message accompanying the document.

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“There is optimism that was not here before 63 million Americans asked me to work for them and drain the swamp,” Trump said. “For decades, Washington elites told us that Americans had no choice but to accept stagnation, decay, and decline. We proved them wrong. Our economy is strong once more.”

The plan had no chance even before Trump’s impeachment scorched Washington. Its cuts to food stamps, farm subsidies, Medicaid and student loans couldn’t pass when Republicans controlled Congress, much less now with liberal House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., setting the agenda.

Pelosi said Sunday night that “once again the president is showing just how little he values the good health, financial security and well-being of hard-working American families.”

Trump’s budget follows a familiar formula that exempts seniors from cuts to Medicare and Social Security while targeting benefit safety net programs for the poor, domestic programs like clean energy and student loan subsidies. It again proposes to dramatically slash funding for overseas military operations to save $567 billion over 10 years but adds $1.5 trillion over the same time frame to make his 2017 tax cuts permanent law.

Trump’s proposal would cut $465 billion from Medicare providers such as hospitals, which prompted howls from Democrats such as former Vice President Joe Biden, who said it “eviscerates Medicare,” while top Senate Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York said Trump is planning to ”rip away health care from millions of Americans” with cuts to Medicare and the Medicaid health program for the poor.

Trump’s budget would also shred last year’s hard-won budget deal between the White House and Pelosi by imposing an immediate 5% cut to non-defense agency budgets passed by Congress. Slashing cuts to the Environmental Protection Agency and taking $700 billion out of Medicaid over a decade are also nonstarters on Capitol Hill, but both the White House and Democrats are hopeful of progress this spring on prescription drug prices.

The Trump budget is a blueprint written under Washington rules as if he could enact it without congressional approval. It relies on rosy economic projections of 2.8% economic growth this year and 3% over the long term — in addition to fanciful claims of future cuts to domestic programs — to show that it is possible to bend the deficit curve in the right direction. The economy grew by 2.1% last year.

That sleight of hand enables Trump to promise to whittle down a $1.08 trillion budget deficit for the ongoing budget year and a $966 billion deficit gap in the 2021 fiscal year starting Oct. 1 to $261 billion in 2030, according to summary tables obtained by The Associated Press. Balance would come in 15 years.

The reality is that no one — Trump, the Democratic-controlled House or the GOP-held Senate — has any interest in tackling a chronic budget gap that forces the government to borrow 22 cents of every dollar it spends. The White House plan proposes $4.4 trillion in spending cuts over the coming decade.

Trump’s reelection campaign, meanwhile, is focused on the economy and the historically low jobless rate while ignoring the government’s budget.

Ever since his days as a presidential candidate, Trump has been promising a health care plan. The budget repeats that promise but offers few details. It lays out a “health reform vision” that calls for better care at lower cost and protecting people with preexisting medical conditions. The budget also proposes tens of billions of dollars in Medicare cuts to hospitals and a Medicaid work requirement that would winnow the rolls.

On Capitol Hill, Democrats controlling the House have seen their number of deficit-conscious “Blue Dogs” shrink while the roster of lawmakers favoring costly “Medicare for All” and “Green New Deal” proposals has swelled. Tea party Republicans have largely abandoned the cause that defined, at least in part, their successful takeover of the House a decade ago.

Trump has also signed two broader budget deals worked out by Democrats and Republicans to get rid of spending cuts left over from a failed 2011 budget accord. The result has been eye-popping spending levels for defense — to about $750 billion this year — and significant gains for domestic programs favored by Democrats. Trump’s new budget essentially freezes defense at current levels while proposing a 3% military pay hike.

The White House hasn’t done much to draw attention to this year’s budget release, though Trump has revealed initiatives of interest to key 2020 battleground states, such as an increase to $250 million to restore Florida’s Everglades and a move to finally abandon a multibillion-dollar, never-used nuclear waste dump that’s political poison in Nevada. The White House also leaked word of a $25 billion proposal for “Revitalizing Rural America” with grants for broadband Internet access and other traditional infrastructure projects such as roads and bridges.

The Trump budget also promises a $3 billion increase — to $25 billion — for NASA in hopes of returning astronauts to the moon and on to Mars. It touts a beefed-up, 10-year, $1 trillion infrastructure proposal, but $800 billion of that comes through existing surface transportation programs. It contains a modest parental leave plan championed by first daughter Ivanka Trump and includes $135 billion in savings over the coming decade as part of an unspecified set-aside to tackle the high cost of prescription drugs this year.

Trump’s U.S.-Mexico border wall would receive a $2 billion appropriation, more than provided by Congress but less than the $8 billion requested last year. Trump has enough wall money on hand to build 1000 miles (1,600 kilometers) of wall, a senior administration official said, most of it obtained by exploiting his budget transfer powers. The official requested anonymity to discuss the budget before it is made public.

The reduced wall request could ease the way for action on appropriations bills in the GOP-held Senate, where a fight over last year’s far larger wall request stalled work on the annual spending bills for months.

Trump has proposed modest adjustments to eligibility for Social Security disability benefits, and he’s proposed cuts to Medicare providers such as hospitals, but the real cost driver of Medicare and Social Security is the ongoing retirement surge of the baby boom generation and health care costs that continue to outpace inflation.

With Medicare and Social Security largely off the table, Trump has instead focused on Medicaid, which provides care to more than 70 million poor and disabled people. President Barack Obama successfully expanded Medicaid when passing the Affordable Care Act a decade ago, but Trump has endorsed GOP plans — they failed spectacularly in the Senate two years ago — to dramatically curb the program.

Trump’s latest Medicaid proposal, the administration official said, would allow states that want more flexibility in Medicaid to accept their federal share as a lump sum; for states staying in traditional Medicaid, a 3% cap on cost growth would apply. Trump would also revive a plan, rejected by lawmakers in the past, to cut food stamp costs by providing much of the benefit as food shipments instead of cash.

Other cuts, outlined in an annual “Major Savings and Reforms” volume that’s ignored every year, include eliminating heating subsidies for the poor and $405 million worth of grants to boost community service work by senior citizens, along with plans to dramatically slash legal aid to the poor, the National Endowment for the Arts, and subsidies to states such as California saddled with high costs for jailing criminal migrants who enter the country illegally.

Pete Buttigieg Has CNN to Thank for His Iowa ‘Victory’

Four days after the Iowa caucuses took place, no victor has been declared and the vote remains mired in controversy and irregularities. But if you’ve been watching CNN for the last few days, you could be excused for imagining Pete Buttigieg had won.

Some at CNN simply took it as fact that Buttigieg had won Iowa—like David Axelrod, who declared (2/4/20): “The way he won in Iowa, and I think he was trying to make this point here, is a road map.” CNN anchor Jim Sciutto, ready to discuss the impact of an undeclared race, asked senior analyst Harry Enten: “Pete Buttigieg, you know, he’s a winner by a slim margin. Do we see a bounce there?”

While the declared winner, based on “State Delegate Equivalents,” remains uncertain, it has become increasingly clear that Bernie Sanders won the popular vote in Iowa—at last count, by more than 6,000 votes in the first round, or 3.5% of total votes cast; in the final alignment, in which supporters of non-viable candidates go with a second choice, Sander leads by 2,600 votes and 1.6 percentage points. The SDE is an intermediary calculation between the popular vote and the national delegates; rather than directly translating between the two, it advantages rural precincts, which is why a candidate can win the popular vote but lose the SDEs.

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In the past, journalists had no other information to go on, so they took the SDE as the sole measure of victory. But now that, under pressure after the 2016 caucus debacle, the party is releasing more information about the vote totals, journalists have a choice about what to emphasize—and CNN has clearly chosen to stick with the SDEs, in which Buttigieg had the slimmest of leads.

Anchor Wolf Blitzer warned viewers away from taking the popular vote seriously (2/4/20): “But remember, the popular vote is interesting, but it’s the state delegates who will determine the winner of the Iowa caucuses.” He then threw it to CNN political director David Chalian, who concurred:

[Sanders] wanted this popular vote total reported, because they understood they could run up the score, let’s say with the young people in college towns. But the way that the caucuses work, Wolf, is that if you have support everywhere across the state, you can collect more delegates, and that’s the important metric for who wins.

It’s obviously valid to report who takes more national delegates (which, throughout all these reports, was a tie between the top two—Buttigieg now leads by one). But the importance of Iowa, as all reporters know, is not the number of national delegates candidates come away with—Iowa has 41, out of a total of 3,979 awarded at the convention—it’s the momentum a candidate gets from their performance in Iowa. And reporters at CNN seemed quite eager to see Buttigieg get that bounce.

CNN‘s Chris Cuomo was a particularly enthusiastic booster of Buttigieg and the SDE count. On Wednesday (2/5/20), he told viewers:

I’ll tell you the popular vote. But SDE is what matters, the delegates…. Popular vote: We don’t follow it as a metric, why? Because like with the electoral college, it’s the delegates. That will make the biggest difference, who carries the most into the primary and into the convention into the state.

Cuomo also commended Buttigieg for declaring victory before any results were released: “He’s looking good, saying he won last night. The media was chirping all day. Now it seems to have been a good move for the Buttigieg campaign.” And the CNN anchor preempted any Sanders claim to the contrary:

Now the Sanders campaign will say, no, we have more votes than he does. Just like in the general election, you win through delegates, like the electoral college. And Buttigieg is leading. This is a huge boost to his campaign.

His guest Mitch Landrieu raved: “It was a big night for him and historically. This was the first openly gay candidate that’s ever run and won. That alone is a special moment.”

The next day (2/6/20), Cuomo again came to Buttigieg’s defense: “Buttigieg had the media nipping at his heels about saying he was victorious. He was right to say it. He got denied the bump he should have gotten for winning Iowa. But he was right.” When White House correspondent Abby Phillip noted that “Democrats were criticizing him for coming out and doing that on that night,” Cuomo interjected:

The audacity of hope, as it turns out, because now they all need to shut up. He wound up doing the best in Iowa, as far as we know…. Fortune favors the bold. He said, I think we’ll be victorious. It will be that way now, no matter how it shakes out.

Later, when Buttigieg came on his show (2/6/20), Cuomo introduced him as “unknown a year ago, now taking the stage tonight as the leader in the Iowa caucuses.” To launch the interview, Cuomo announced that

the Iowa Democratic Party just released the final batch of results from the caucuses, 100% of precincts reporting. You are holding a narrow lead of a tenth of a percentage point over Senator Sanders on the state delegate equivalents, which is the metric that we use to determine a winner. What is your reaction?

Buttigieg responded, “Oh, that’s fantastic news, to hear that we won.”

Of course, no winner had been declared at that point, because the results were so close (Buttigieg’s SDE lead stood at 0.1 percentage points) and there were many irregularities; the AP has still declined to officially declare a winner, and most of the rest of the media are following suit. But Cuomo declined to temper himself or his guest.

Cuomo was not the only one to praise Buttigieg for his victory speech. When anchor John Berman asked commentator Paul Begala about it, Begala replied (2/4/20):

I think it’s very smart. Again, he knows more than we do because he’s got volunteers and supporters in all of those caucuses…. So I like the fact that Buttigieg, and Amy Klobuchar did some of this as well, jump out quickly and say, hey, I actually did win, even though we have no idea if they did.

(Berman did not object to Begala’s praise.)

Sanders, on the other hand, was not given such a pass at CNN. Upon his (accurate) announcement that “in terms of the popular vote, we won a decisive victory,” CNN‘s Ryan Nobles (2/6/20) countered: “But the rules of the Iowa caucuses make it clear the winner is determined by the state delegate equivalent, not the popular vote.”

After judging both candidates’ declarations to be “premature,” Jake Tapper went on to only cast doubt on one of them (2/6/20):

But actually, the way that this is done, state delegates or state delegate equivalents, and Buttigieg is slightly ahead there, and this is done — this is a race for delegates, not a race for the popular vote.

Some are beginning to backtrack; on Wednesday (2/5/20), Jeff Zeleny, CNN‘s White House correspondent, reported that “there’s no question that Pete Buttigieg is still leading the way.” On Thursday morning (2/6/20), Zeleny was arguing that Buttigieg was “certainly pulling off an upset over Bernie Sanders” and “will certainly take this narrow almost victory.” By later in the day, however, as Buttigieg’s SDE lead shrank to 0.1 percentage points, Zeleny was walking back his analysis: “Essentially, it’s a wash. They’re going to split the number of delegates.”

But of course, by then the narrative had been established. While some lamented that Buttigieg didn’t get the lift he would have if the results had been clear from the start, it’s obvious now that the results are probably too close to ever be completely clear—which means that talking about only one candidate as the “winner” as preliminary results trickled out gave that candidate an unearned boost.

WaPo: The Iowa Democratic Party may have been more important in shaping the primary than Iowa voters

And corporate media may have been most influential of all (Washington Post, 2/6/20).

The Washington Post’s Philip Bump (2/6/20) noted that, in extremely close races, “incomplete election results can lead to incorrect perceptions of the outcome and even shape how the rest of the votes are counted”; the initially declared winner is able to approach the recount “from the position of having been the apparent winner based on the initial results, giving him leverage in any arguments about how things were progressing.”

Bump’s otherwise perceptive analysis had a glaring omission: the role of the media. He argued that “the political ecosystem” had been building up to the moment of the Iowa results release, so that when the initial 62% of results were released, they had been waiting anxiously for “any grist to start operating.” “Those machines were hungry for a winner so they could start grinding away, and now they had one.”

These “machines,” wrote Bump, were both literal—”bits of software aimed at processing race results and determining the direction of the primary race moving forward”—and figurative, “processes left over from past primaries or ones constructed with an eye toward the boundaries of the current primary field.”

Ah yes, the machines that the party knows will gobble up their incomplete results and spit out a winner, even when one doesn’t exist yet. If only we also had journalists in this political ecosystem, to thwart such senseless behavior.