Dear Commons Community,

The once pro-Trump New York Post has a blistering editorial this morning entitled “Don’t give any money to con artist Trump.” It takes  another swipe at the former president  urging readers not to buy his new collection of digital trading cards.

“Don’t give any money to con artist Trump”

By New York Post Editorial Board

December 15, 2022 10:39pm

Donald Trump’s latest “announcement” was a series of digital trading cards of himself. Getty Images

When Donald Trump teased a “major announcement” Wednesday, the MAGA boards went crazy with speculation. He’s going to be the next speaker of the House! He’s enlisted Ron DeSantis to be his vice presidential candidate! He’s finally found that voter fraud he’s been promising for two years!

But no, it was a digital card collection of Trump dressed up like a superhero. In other words, another money grab.

For those still inundated with Trump’s pleas for donations, which arrive three or four times a day with ALL CAPS emails and efforts to shame you into “not letting him down,” this is no surprise. Trump used to be in the business of hotels, golf courses, wine and dubious universities. Now he specializes in political fundraising.

He raised nearly $100 million promising to “stop the steal” and spent almost none of it on lawsuits or inquiries related to 2020 — because he knew, despite his rhetoric, that there was no steal. He sent emails about how important the midterms were, then banked most of what he raised for his endorsed candidates. These war chests pay for the salaries of families and allies, private jets, expenses — and get funneled into Trump’s other companies through hotel bills, consulting and fees.

The cards depict Trump in a variety of costumes and backgrounds.

Crashing in the polls, facing countless legal threats and opponents gaining in popularity, there is one area Trump can still try to assert his dominance — with money. He still holds sway over the Republican National Committee because he has the most sophisticated donor lists. There are various reasons he announced he was running for president two years early, but one is the idea that if he can build a large enough campaign bank account, he can clear the field.

Unfortunately for Trump, a number of large donors say they’re not going to give to him this time around. And how many of his small-dollar donors, tired of all this “winning” and burned by “major announcements” of the least desirable Pokémon, will finally send those email pleas to spam?

Fool us once, shame on you. Fool us 1,438 times, and it may finally be too much.

Dear Commons Community,

Twitter yesterday suspended several journalists who have been covering owner Elon Musk and his tumultuous ownership of the social media company.

The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Mashable’s Matt Binder, The Intercept’s Micah Lee, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell and journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann and Tony Webster were all suspended without prior notice last night and offered no explanation.

O’Sullivan recently covered the account suspension of @ElonJet, an account that tracked flight data for Musk’s private plane to his great annoyance. Several of the other reporters had tweeted about the incident or posted links to alternative social media accounts tracking Musk’s jet.

“I haven’t heard anything from Twitter at all,” Rupar wrote on his Substack. “I have no idea what rules I purportedly broke.”

@ElonJet’s creator, 20-year-old college student Jack Sweeney, was also suspended earlier.

“Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” Musk tweeted yesterday.

He had tweeted last month that his commitment to free speech extended “even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk”.

He tweeted there would be a seven-day suspension for doxxing, following that up with a poll asking Twitter users to vote on when to reinstate the doxxed accounts.

Twitter also put the freeze on Mastodon, a social media platform that has been siphoning some users away from Musk’s company.

Upon taking over Twitter in October, Musk vowed to champion free speech, and a number of previously banned accounts were reinstated.

But since then, he’s lashed out at mainstream news outlets and come under fire for controversial posts including a misleading tweet about CNN.  

Twitter has become Musk’s personal plaything!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Just weeks after touting a new super PAC to help Republican candidates in the November midterms, Donald Trump wound up spending just a fraction of the $100 million he had available ― and hoarded the rest for his own 2024 presidential run.

The coup-attempting former president in October transferred $60 million from his Save America “leadership” PAC to his Make America Great Again Inc. super PAC, which was ostensibly created to boost GOP candidates in tight races. It collected another $9 million from an existing pro-Trump super PAC and $4 million from new contributions.

Of that $73 million total, though, only $15 million went toward electing Republicans in five Senate races, according to a HuffPost analysis of Federal Election Commission filings, with not a dime spent helping Herschel Walker in Georgia for his Dec. 6 runoff. A full $54 million remains available for the super PAC’s new stated goal, helping Trump win back the White House.

“It’s so obvious to the point of cliche at this point that Trump is in this for one person and one person alone, himself,” said Rory Cooper, once a top aide to former House Majority Leader Eric Cantor. “He steals fundraising, picks lousy candidates, and is an anchor in competitive races, so one would wonder how much longer the party tolerates this loser nonsense.”

Taylor Budowich, formerly a spokesman for Save America and now the head of MAGA Inc., did not respond to HuffPost queries.

He told Politico in late September: “President Trump is committed to saving America, and Make America Great Again Inc. will ensure that is achieved at the ballot box in November and beyond.”

On Dec. 9, in an op-ed published by Newsmax, Budowich describes MAGA Inc. as “the primary super PAC supporting Donald Trump’s 2024 campaign for president.”

Robert Maguire, a campaign finance analyst at the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, pointed out that spending unlimited amounts of money on behalf of other candidates was something Save America could do on its own. That “leadership” PAC, however, is not allowed to spend on behalf of Trump’s own candidacy ― something that the super PAC, which in theory is independent of Trump, can do.

“So he used the midterms as an excuse to dump piles of money into a super PAC that was always meant for Trump’s favorite candidate: himself,” Maguire said.

Republicans ended up with an expectedly poor showing in the midterms, barely flipping the House and actually losing a seat in the Senate. Since then, they have been complaining that their candidates were unable to raise as much from small-dollar donations as their Democratic opponents.

“We really have to modernize to compete with the Democrats dollar-for-dollar, in the ways they fundraise,” Harmeet Dhillon, a Republican National Committee member from California who is challenging Ronna McDaniel for the chair, said in a Fox News interview earlier this month.

Dhillon, who counts Trump as a client in her law practice, failed to mention that Trump’s Save America collected $147 million in small-dollar donations over the past two years ― a significant percentage of all the under $200 contributions given to all Republicans.

Other senior Republicans point out that there are only so many GOP dollars to be had, and if Trump is collecting that many of them when he was not even a candidate, that necessarily translated into less money available for those who actually needed it.

“Trump hoarding cash wasn’t helpful, especially since he dragged most of these losing candidates into the races they eventually lost,” said Scott Jennings, a former White House political adviser to President George W. Bush and an ally of Senate GOP leader Mitch McConnell.

McConnell’s super PAC, in contrast, spent a total of $274 million helping Republican Senate candidates, including those who won the party nominations thanks to support from Trump but who were then largely abandoned by him.

Walker, for example, received $15.4 million in assistance in the Dec. 6 runoff from McConnell’s Senate Leadership Fund. Trump did not report spending anything on his behalf, either through Save America or MAGA Inc.

Walker lost that runoff by three points to incumbent Democratic Sen. Raphael Warnock.

At the end of the midterm elections, Trump still had $31 million in Save America and its associated fundraising committee, in addition to the $54 million in the MAGA Inc. super PAC. The Save America money cannot be used for his campaign, but can be used as a slush fund for other expenses, including personal costs such as his legal bills from the various criminal probes he faces.

Trump is under investigation by the Department of Justice for his role in the Jan. 6 attack, including the scheme to submit to the National Archives fraudulent slates of electors from states that voted for Democrat Joe Biden as a way to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to award Trump a second term. A separate probe is investigating Trump’s removal of highly classified documents from the White House and subsequent refusal to hand them over, even in defiance of a subpoena.

In addition to the federal criminal investigations, a Georgia prosecutor is looking at Trump and his allies’ attempts to coerce state officials into falsely declaring him the winner in that state.

Trump is nothing but a con artist and his MAGA followers are his pigeons!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Outgoing Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s portrait was unveiled Wednesday at the U.S. Capitol, a traditional honor bestowed on a tradition-breaking leader who was not just the first woman to hold the gavel but among the most consequential House speakers in American history — one who “got it done.”

The ceremony at the ornate Statuary Hall drew current and former members of Congress, friends and family. The guests included the Democratic leader’s husband, Paul Pelosi, who is recovering from a brutal attack by an intruder who broke into their San Francisco home seeking the speaker in the weeks before the midterm election.

Former President Barack Obama said in a videotaped message that Pelosi has “inspired a generation of women to run, win and lead because they’ve seen her, what someone like her — and someone like them — can do.”

Obama recounted how his signature Affordable Care Act was all but abandoned after a Senate election defeat, except for Pelosi’s persistence. “The only thing she wasn’t willing to do was give up. And like always, she got it done.”

But it was the former Republican speaker, John Boehner, known for teary eyes at times like these, who did not disappoint.

Choking up as he talked about his own two adult daughters, Boehner said: “My girls told me, tell the speaker how much we admire her.”

John Boehner Chokes Up at Unveiling

Pelosi’s portrait was painted years ago after her first tenure as speaker from 2007 to 2011 but was held back. She regained the gavel in 2019, the first House leader in some 50 years to twice become speaker.

Pelosi announced after the November midterm election, when the Democrats lost power to Republicans, that she would not seek another term as leader, ending 20 years helming the party in the House. She is staying on as as the representative from San Francisco.

Among those in the audience was Rep. Kevin McCarthy, the California Republican who is struggling to round up the votes to replace her as speaker when the new Congress convenes in January. He sat alongside Rep. Hakeem Jeffries of New York, who Democrats elected as their new party leader, the historic first Black American to lead a major political party.

“The younger generation today has the saying: Game recognizes game,” Boehner said. “And the fact of the matter is no other speaker of the House in the modern era Republican or Democrat — has wielded the gavel with such authority or with such consistent results. Let me just say, You’re one tough cookie.”

Painted by the late Ronald Sherr in 2014, the portrait of Pelosi will hang in the Speaker’s Lobby, a room adjacent to the House chamber, filled with the portraits of past speakers, all of them white men.

In her own remarks, Pelosi said she was honored her colleagues “had the courage to elect a woman speaker.”

“This painting will stand out as a woman in that Speaker’s Lobby,” Pelosi said. “I’m honored to be the first, but it will only be a big of accomplishment if I’m not the last.”

Well-deserved recognition.  Pelosi is a model for all government officials!

Tony

Asa Hutchinson

Dear Commons Community,

Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson, who is considering running for president, yesterday called a third Donald Trump White House bid the “worst scenario” for Republicans and said his call for terminating parts of the Constitution hurts the country.

In an interview with The Associated Press, Hutchinson said he planned to make a decision early next year on whether to seek the Republican presidential nomination. Hutchinson, 72, leaves office in January after serving eight years as Arkansas’ governor.

He’s part of a growing cohort of Republicans eyeing a White House run at a challenging moment for the party, which fell short of its hopes for sweeping victories in last month’s midterm elections. Trump, who has already announced another run for the presidency, has faced blame from some Republicans for contributing to the GOP’s lackluster performance by elevating candidates and issues that didn’t resonate with voters during the general election.

Hutchinson has previously said he wouldn’t support Trump’s candidacy in 2024.

“That’s really the worst scenario,” Hutchinson said of another matchup between Trump and Biden. “That’s almost the scenario that Biden wishes for. And that’s probably how he got elected the first time. It became, you know, a binary choice for the American people between the challenges that we saw in the Trump presidency, particularly the closing days, versus Biden, who he made it that choice.”

Hutchinson also derided Trump’s recent statement calling for terminating parts of the Constitution to overturn the 2020 election as “so out of line and out of step with America that it almost does not deserve a response.”

“It hurts our country,” he said. “I mean, any leader, former president that says suspend the Constitution is tearing at the fabric of our democracy. And so we want to make sure that the people know that it’s Republicans that support the rule of law.”

Hutchinson said he’s measuring how much financial support he’d have for mounting a presidential bid, but said he’s also testing to see what kind of response his message is getting as he weighs a run. Hutchinson, who’s been a regular presence on Sunday news talk shows, said he’s been reaching out to other governors, members of Congress and evangelical leaders for advice on a possible run.

“The midterm elections made it clear to me that the GOP needs a bold agenda, but also new voices that’s articulating what our party stands for, the direction we want to take our country,” Hutchinson said.

Hutchinson said he didn’t view the midterms as a rejection of Republicans overall as much as of specific candidates.

“We’re very disappointed that because of poor candidates, poor messaging, looking back instead of looking forward, we didn’t do as well as we should have in the midterm election,” he said.

Hutchinson is among several Republican candidates who are weighing a presidential run. Others include former Vice President Mike Pence, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, and former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo

Despite the potentially crowded field, Hutchinson said he doesn’t expect a repeat of 2016 when GOP rivals hoping to block Trump’s candidacy instead split the vote. Hutchinson said he thinks the early primary and caucus states will winnow the number of rivals to Trump very quickly.

“I think it will be much more methodical this cycle than what we’ve seen in previous years,” he said. “And I think that competition is good and it’s healthy.”

Though he’s offering himself up as a new voice, Hutchinson has been a fixture in Arkansas politics going back to the 1980s when the state was predominantly Democratic. Hutchinson is a former congressman who served in former President George W. Bush’s administration as the head of the Drug Enforcement Administration and an undersecretary of the Department of Homeland Security.

Hutchinson has ramped up his criticism of Trump in recent months, including a speech at the Reagan Library where he recounted his experience as a U.S. attorney who prosecuted white supremacists in Arkansas in the 1980s. Hutchinson contrasted that background with Trump having dinner with a Holocaust-denying white nationalist and a rapper who has spewed antisemitic conspiracies.

Hutchinson said that contrast is one of the reasons he thinks his voice may be needed in the presidential race. Republicans need figures who speak the truth and are not worried “whether you’re satisfying somebody down in Mar-a-Lago or not,” he said.

Hutchinson earned the ire of Trump last year when the governor vetoed legislation that would ban gender-affirming care for minors. GOP lawmakers overrode Hutchinson’s veto and enacted the ban, which has been blocked by a federal judge.

Trump called Hutchinson a RINO — Republican in Name Only — for vetoing the ban. The governor’s successor, former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, has said she would have signed the ban into law.

Hutchinson, who has said he would have signed the measure if it was limited to gender-affirming surgery, called Arkansas’ legislation “one of the most extreme in the country.”

A vocal opponent of abortion who has signed other restrictions on transgender youth into law, Hutchinson said Republicans need to tread carefully on culture wars issues.

“The key thing is for Republicans and conservatives is to think about let’s not instinctively say, well, let’s use the power of government to accomplish our social agenda or our cultural agenda,” he said. “You know, our first response is a strength in the home, the strength and the families and the communities and our churches and synagogues strengthen those because that’s the greatest impact on our culture.”

Nearing the end of his eight years as governor, Hutchinson is touting his work on tax cuts and on expanding computer science courses as his top accomplishments. Hutchinson, who wrapped up his one-year term as National Governors Association chairman in July, is term limited and could not seek reelection. He said he thinks it’s important to have a governor running for the office.

“I’m known for having a steady hand in leadership, but also a bold agenda,” he said. “And I think that’s a good combination for a leader of the country.”

A viable Republican presidential candidate speaking his piece!

Tony

Sam Bankman-Fried

Dear Commons Community,

U.S. prosecutors yesterday accused Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder and former CEO of crypto currency exchange FTX, of fraud and violating campaign finance laws by misappropriating his customers’ funds, saying the investigation is ongoing and “moving very quickly.”

U.S. Attorney Damian Williams in New York said Bankman-Fried made illegal campaign contributions to Democrats and Republicans with “stolen customer money,” saying it was part of one of the “biggest financial frauds in American history.” 

“While this is our first public announcement, it will not be our last,” he said, adding Bankman-Fried “made tens of millions of dollars in campaign contributions.”  As reported by Reuters.

Williams declined to say whether prosecutors would bring any charges against other FTX executives, emphasizing that the investigation was ongoing. He also declined to say whether any FTX insiders were cooperating with the investigation.

Bankman-Fried made a court appearance on Tuesday in the Bahamas, where he was arrested on Monday and where FTX is based. The 30-year-old seemed relaxed in a blue shirt when he arrived at the heavily guarded Bahamas court. It was his first in-person public appearance since the cryptocurrency exchange’s collapse. He told the court he could fight extradition to the United States.

A lawyer for Bankman-Fried requested that his client be released on $250,000 bail. Bahamian prosecutors have asked that Bankman-Fried be denied bail if he fights extradition.

“Mr. Bankman-Fried is reviewing the charges with his legal team and considering all of his legal options,” his lawyer, Mark S. Cohen, said in an earlier statement.

FTX’s current CEO, John Ray, told congressional lawmakers on Tuesday that FTX lost $8 billion of client money, saying the company showed “absolute concentration of control in the hands of a small group of grossly inexperienced, nonsophisticated individuals.”

In the indictment unsealed on Tuesday morning, U.S. prosecutors said Bankman-Fried had engaged in a scheme to defraud FTX’s customers by misappropriating their deposits to pay for expenses and debts and to make investments on behalf of his crypto hedge fund, Alameda Research LLC.

He also defrauded lenders to Alameda by providing false and misleading information about the hedge fund’s condition, and sought to disguise the money he had earned from committing wire fraud, prosecutors said.

Both the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) alleged Bankman-Fried committed fraud in lawsuits filed on Tuesday.

The CFTC sued Bankman-Fried, Alameda and FTX on Tuesday, alleging fraud involving digital commodity assets.

Since at least May 2019, FTX raised more than $1.8 billion from equity investors in a years-long “brazen, multi-year scheme” in which Bankman-Fried concealed FTX was diverting customer funds to Alameda Research, the SEC alleged.

Bankman-Fried has apologized to customers and acknowledged oversight failings at FTX, but said he does not personally think he has any criminal liability.

Bankman-Fried founded FTX in 2019 and rode a cryptocurrency boom to build it into one of the world’s largest exchanges of the digital tokens. Forbes pegged his net worth a year ago at $26.5 billion, and he became a substantial donor to U.S. political campaigns, media outlets and other causes.

A crypto exchange is a platform on which investors can trade digital tokens such as bitcoin.

As legal challenges mount, the U.S. Congress is also looking at crafting legislation to rein in a loosely-regulated industry.

FTX has shared findings with the SEC and U.S. prosecutors, and is investigating whether Bankman-Fried’s parents were involved in the operation.

FTX’s collapse was one of a series of bankruptcies in the crypto industry this year as digital asset markets tumbled from 2021 peaks.

FTX filed for bankruptcy on Nov. 11, leaving an estimated 1 million customers and other investors facing losses in the billions of dollars. The collapse reverberated across the crypto world and sent bitcoin and other digital assets plummeting.

“The crypto sector must see the demise of FTX as a wake-up call,” said Viktor Prokopenya, founder of crypto platform Currency.com.

Bankman-Fried was an unconventional figure who sported wild hair, t-shirts and shorts on panel appearances with statesmen like former U.S. President Bill Clinton. He became one of the largest Democratic donors, contributing $5.2 million to President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign.

Police in the Bahamas said he was arrested on Monday at his gated community in the capital, Nassau. Damian Williams, U.S. attorney in New York, said the arrest came at the request of the U.S. government.

The attorney general’s office of the Bahamas said it expected Bankman-Fried to be extradited to the United States.

Bankman-Fried resigned as FTX’s CEO the same day as the bankruptcy filing. FTX’s liquidity crunch came after he secretly used $10 billion in customer funds to support his proprietary trading firm Alameda, Reuters has reported. At least $1 billion in customer funds had vanished.

Another low-life scheming Bernie Madoff!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm joined researchers to announce a “major scientific breakthrough” yesterday in the decades-long quest to harness fusion, the energy that powers the sun and stars.

Researchers at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California for the first time produced more energy in a fusion reaction than was used to ignite it, something called net energy gain, according to one government official and one scientist familiar with the research. Both spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to discuss the breakthrough ahead of the announcement.

Granholm appeared alongside Livermore researchers at a morning event in Washington. The news was first reported by the Financial Times.

Proponents of fusion hope that it could one day produce nearly limitless, carbon-free energy, displacing fossil fuels and other traditional energy sources. Producing energy that powers homes and businesses from fusion is still decades away. But researchers said it was a significant step nonetheless.

“It’s almost like it’s a starting gun going off,” said Professor Dennis Whyte, director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a leader in fusion research. “We should be pushing towards making fusion energy systems available to tackle climate change and energy security.”

Net energy gain has been an elusive goal because fusion happens at such high temperatures and pressures that it is incredibly difficult to control.

Fusion works by pressing hydrogen atoms into each other with such force that they combine into helium, releasing enormous amounts of energy and heat. Unlike other nuclear reactions, it doesn’t create radioactive waste.

Billions of dollars and decades of work have gone into fusion research that has produced exhilarating results — for fractions of a second. Previously, researchers at the National Ignition Facility, the division of Lawrence Livermore where the success took place, used 192 lasers and temperatures multiple times hotter than the center of the sun to create an extremely brief fusion reaction.

The lasers focus an enormous amount of heat on a small metal can. The result is a superheated plasma environment where fusion may occur.

Riccardo Betti, a professor at the University of Rochester and expert in laser fusion, said an announcement that net energy had been gained in a fusion reaction would be significant. But he said there’s a long road ahead before the result generates sustainable electricity.

He likened the breakthrough to when humans first learned that refining oil into gasoline and igniting it could produce an explosion.

“You still don’t have the engine and you still don’t have the tires,” Betti said. “You can’t say that you have a car.”

The net energy gain achievement applied to the fusion reaction itself, not the total amount of power it took to operate the lasers and run the project. For fusion to be viable, it will need to produce significantly more power and for longer.

It is incredibly difficult to control the physics of stars. Whyte said it has been challenging to reach this point because the fuel has to be hotter than the center of the sun. The fuel does not want to stay hot — it wants to leak out and get cold. Containing it is an incredible challenge, he said.

Net energy gain isn’t a huge surprise from the California lab because of progress it had already made, according to Jeremy Chittenden, a professor at Imperial College in London specializing in plasma physics.

“That doesn’t take away from the fact that this is a significant milestone,” he said.

It takes enormous resources and effort to advance fusion research. One approach turns hydrogen into plasma, an electrically charged gas, which is then controlled by humongous magnets. This method is being explored in France in a collaboration among 35 countries called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor as well as by researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a private company.

Last year the teams working on those projects in two continents announced significant advancements in the vital magnets needed for their work.

A step in the right direction!

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

The SUNY – University at Albany is inviting applications for a cluster hire of 27 faculty in artificial intelligence, with a focus on public health, engineering, education, mathematics, business, homeland security, health disparities, and political science, among other disciplines. The positions will span 20 departments across eight schools and colleges, including a director for the new UAlbany Institute for Artificial Intelligence.

This unprecedented academic expansion follows New York State’s landmark $75 million investment in the Albany Artificial Intelligence Supercomputing Initiative (Albany AI) at UAlbany, which will significantly expand the AI supercomputing resources in New York for teaching and research. With existing research strengths in atmospheric, climate and health sciences, cybersecurity and emergency preparedness, UAlbany will leverage this new funding and computing power to tackle some of society’s biggest challenges.

For more information about the UAlbany cluster hire in AI and to apply, please visit www.albany.edu/ai/faculty-openings.

Tony

Dear Commons Community,

I just finished reading Anthony J. Badger’s  new book:  Why White Liberals Fail:  Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump.  Badger is a British historian and professor of American history at Northumbria University.  Formerly he was a professor at the University of Cambridge.  This book is based on a series of lectures he gave at Harvard University in 2018. Badger looks at major Democratic leaders such as FDR, Carter, and Clinton who put their faith in policies that would be engines of social change and mobility. He concludes that these Democrats failed because of their reluctance to confront directly the “explosive racial politics dividing their constituents”.  It is a quick read at 250 pages but has an important message that resonates about politics and race in our country.  Below is a brief review published in The New York Times.

Tony

————————————

The New York Times

WHY WHITE LIBERALS FAIL: Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump

By Anthony J. Badger

Reviewed by James Goodman, a professor of history and creative writing at Rutgers University, Newark

The Democratic Party coalition that put Roosevelt and his heirs in office included working-class Americans, Black and white. That coalition broke down during the upheavals of the 1950s and 1960s, beginning with the civil rights movement, as white working-class voters began to drift away. Progressives dream of rebuilding it, appealing to shared economic interests across racial lines. WHY WHITE LIBERALS FAIL: Race and Southern Politics from FDR to Trump (256 pp., Harvard University Press, $27.95), Anthony J. Badger’s analysis of liberal white Southerners since the 1930s, suggests how difficult it is going to be to bring the white working class back into the fold.

Badger, a British historian, writes about several dozen educators, journalists and elected officials who saw economic development as the way out of the hole the South was in. Men like Frank Graham, William Winter, Albert Gore Sr., Fritz Hollings and Terry Sanford embraced the New Deal, the Fair Deal, the War on Poverty and every iteration of the “New South.” Badger identifies promising moments in several decades, including (after the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965) successful biracial electoral coalitions. Yet today there are fewer white Democrats in the South than ever.

Why? The historical literature is rich, and the answer is usually race. White liberals failed because they championed, or were associated with, civil rights. But in this volume, based on the Huggins lectures he delivered at Harvard in 2018, Badger finds that explanation unsatisfying. His subjects downplayed race. They championed infrastructure, education and social services they believed would benefit all.

They failed nonetheless, for many different reasons. One is that before the 1960s any Southerner who was not a rabid segregationist was considered a racial radical. Another is that in the half-century since, significant numbers of white Southerners have opposed government programs that would have improved their lives — universal health care, for example — if they thought liberals designed those programs with Black people in mind.

Badger runs from race, and racism, as explanations, but as he himself concedes, he never gets far.

Bernie Sanders and Kyrsten Sinema

Dear Commons Community,

Senator Bernie Sanders said yesterday he believes that part of why Sen. Kyrsten Sinema decided to leave the Democratic Party is because her constituents have lost faith in her, adding that the Arizona lawmaker “helped sabotage” some significant legislation.

Sinema’s decision, announced Friday, to switch from Democrat to independent “probably has a lot to do with politics back in Arizona,” the Vermont independent told Dana Bash on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

“I think the Democrats there are not all that enthusiastic about somebody who helped sabotage some of the most important legislation that protects the interests of working families and voting rights and so forth. So, I think it really has to do with her political aspirations for the future in Arizona,” Sanders said.

Democrats have criticized several moments in Sinema’s voting record, such as when she opposed ditching the filibuster ― even to pass voting rights legislation ― helped block a $15 minimum wage effort, and opposed closing a tax loophole that benefits the ultrarich. She and Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.) have become known as major obstacles to passing President Joe Biden’s legislative agenda.

“But for us, I think nothing much has changed in terms of the functioning of the U.S. Senate,” Sanders continued. “The good news is that we now have 51 votes. We will have the majority on committees. It means that we can go forward and start protecting the interests of working families and deal with the reality that we are increasingly living in an oligarchy, where the billionaire class and large corporations control almost every aspect of our country.”

Sanders is likely correct that Sinema’s party switch won’t change much in the Senate. While Sanders and Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) both caucus with Democrats, Sinema has not outright said she would do the same ― only that she will maintain her chairmanship of two subcommittees. This helps keep Senate Democrats in the majority.

“It probably won’t surprise you when I tell you I’m not trying to be like anyone else,” Sinema told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Sunday when comparing herself to other independent senators. “What I’m trying to do is be true to my values and the values of my state. So I think everyone should make their own decisions about where they fit or where they don’t fit. I’m going to keep doing exactly what I do, which is just stay focused on the work and ignore all the noise.”

Sanders made sure to note, however, that he thinks Sinema’s values include prioritizing corporate interests over her working class constituents, and that she’s not capable of taking on powerful special interests in Congress.

“She is a corporate Democrat, who has, in fact, along with Sen. Manchin, sabotaged enormously important legislation,” he said.

While Sinema’s party switch does not significantly impact the Senate, it will greatly affect GOP odds in the 2024 elections. The senator was expected to face tough primary challenges from Democrats like Rep. Ruben Gallego (Ariz.). As an independent candidate, Sinema now likely won’t face a primary challenger at all.

This, however, means that Arizona voters might have to deal with a three-way race that could divide the non-Republican votes between Sinema and a Democratic candidate ― making it easier for the GOP to win the crucial Senate seat.

“You know, I don’t make decisions based on what the easy road or the tough road is,” Sinema said. “I have always tried to make decisions based on what I think is right. And for me, it’s very important that we have a discussion at home in Arizona and here in the nation’s capital about reducing the partisanship and just focus on solving the challenges that we face in America.”

It will be interesting to see how Sinema’s position plays out from now through 2024.

Tony