The GOP frontrunner, seen here approximating his measurements.
Donald Trump wants America to feel assured: his penis is really, really terrific. The GOP frontrunner took presidential politics to the third grade playground last week, responding to Marco Rubio’s insinuation that a person with small hands may have other small appendages. To be fair to Trump, Rubio started it. But Rubio’s remark was made at a rally, not on network TV. Continue reading
Bernie Sanders appears with his wife Jane to give a speech on Super Tuesday.
As results from Super Tuesday poured in last night, the media narrative began to hold that Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were the night’s biggest winners and would, eventually, square off against one another in the general election. While there’s plenty of reason to believe this will be the case, the media’s horse race-style coverage of the primaries leaves important aspects of the story untold. Continue reading
Clinton’s accusation that Sanders isn’t “really a Democrat” is true, but it actually makes him a stronger candidate.
At Thursday’s Democratic town hall, Hillary Clinton unleashed a new line of attack against Bernie Sanders, saying, “Senator Sanders has also attacked President Obama. He’s called him weak; he’s called him disappointing. He tried to get somebody to run against him in the 2012 election in the primary… Maybe it’s that Senator Sanders wasn’t really a Democrat until he decided to run for president.” Continue reading
Bernie Sanders, a senator from Vermont, is zeroing in on the “inevitable” Hillary Clinton.
Bernie Sanders is surging. In the first primary in Iowa, he came from far behind to virtually tie with Hillary Clinton. In New Hampshire he beat her in a 22-point landslide. He’s been getting more exposure than ever. Yet Sanders’s prospects for the Democratic nomination remain in heavy doubt. And with that, so too are dimming the Democrats’ prospects for winning the White House in November. Continue reading
Steinem apologized for remarks she made on Real Time disparaging young, female Sanders supporters. In 1996 she declared Sanders an “honorary woman.”
When serious coverage of the 2016 presidential race began last year, pundits assumed the general election would come down to Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush. Such a matchup between two families that have dominated presidential politics for 30 years would be as establishment-friendly as could be imagined. Instead, both parties’ nominations have been disrupted by insurgent candidates who are not beholden to classic Washington interests.
Both of these candidates, Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump, have faced strong resistance from their party’s establishment. Republicans, however, seem more willing to praise Trump for shaking things up; Democrats are less amused at seeing their establishment rankled. With Sanders gaining real momentum with his primary performances, the Clinton camp and its supporters have been escalating an attack that’s been in play since the beginning of the race: accusing opponents of sexism. Continue reading
The media has adopted a narrative of Sanders as the wild-eyed idealist and Clinton as the pragmatist.
On Monday the first official leg of the presidential nomination process took place in the Iowa caucuses. As results came in throughout the night, the Democratic race was as close of a nail-biter as can be imagined. At the time of this writing, Hillary Clinton maintains an extremely slim lead of less than half a percent over Bernie Sanders. Whatever the outcome this showing is undeniably a boost to Sanders’s momentum, making it clear he’s got a shot at winning the nomination overall.
With an intense race still to be run, a narrative has been forming over the last couple months. It holds that Hillary Clinton is the pragmatic, sensible choice for Democrats – a centrist with the political clout to make moderate changes. Sanders, meanwhile, is a naïve idealist proposing lofty, transformational reforms that will never see the light of reality. Better, then, that voters choose Clinton.
There’s a subtext in this analysis that often goes unspoken: It’s as though everyone who believes it is saying, “Sure, we would like to see Bernie’s policies implemented, but we just know it can’t happen.” For a presidential candidate especially, this is a depressingly cynical tack to take, and certainly no example of strong leadership. Continue reading
Bernie Sanders’s somewhat libertarian track record is a point of contention for Hillary Clinton, but could be an asset in the general election.
It’s very difficult for Hillary Clinton to position herself to the left of Bernie Sanders, but she’s spent much of the last month or so trying to do just that. One issue she seems to be getting away with it on is gun control. In debate after debate Clinton has kept Sanders defensive on gun control, touting her ‘F’ rating from the NRA against his ‘D-.’ Continue reading
Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, a long-serving independent, wants to bring all Americans along for his political revolution.
Things are going well for Bernie Sanders’s presidential bid. Over the last two weeks, the Vermont Senator won the endorsement of the highly influential progressive group MoveOn, received kind words from Vice President Joe Biden, had an extremely strong showing at the most recent debate, and is now polling within striking range, if not ahead of, Hillary Clinton in the key early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire.
Against enormous odds, it’s really starting to look like Sanders has a chance. Largely dismissed when he announced his candidacy, over the course of his campaign Sanders has excited a bold movement into existence – a movement that America desperately needs. Continue reading
After being ganged up on by civilian Trump supporters, a Black Lives Matter activist is ejected from a Trump campaign event.
When Donald Trump formally launched his presidential campaign on June 16, he brought out a seemingly contradictory response in commentators. The most straight-faced of news commentators thought he was a joke and didn’t expect him to last. Only the cynics, Sarah Palin fresh in their memory, worried that he had a real chance. Five months later and the cynics were right: Trump remains on top in the GOP primary.
According to Nate Silver, the analyst who famously predicted nearly every state in the 2008 and 2012 elections, Trump’s prospects of actually winning the nomination – let alone the presidency – remain slim. Silver may well be right, but it doesn’t mean Trump will be disappearing off American TV sets anytime soon. His mere presence in the race has already done enormous damage to our national conversation. Continue reading
Bernie Sanders lays out his vision of democratic socialism to a crowd at Georgetown University.
Millennials might be willing to embrace socialism, but the word has been a liability for self-defined democratic socialist Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign. It was the focus of his first question at the first Democratic debate. To his credit, Sanders has not tried to distance himself from the word. Instead, on November 19 Sanders delivered a powerful, campaign-defining speech at Georgetown University outlining his vision of democratic socialism and the future of the nation. Continue reading
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