The new narrative for South Carolina voters from the DNC .......and brought to you by who else but MSDNC
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Here is the link to the video:
Shaun King on Twitter
It's technically true. Members of the party determine the nominee. Some states leave the door open for people who are not registered for a given party to fly a flag of convenience to vote in a primary, but the Supreme Court has decided that primaries are a party election run by the parties and not a public election.
When that decision came down Washington State had the most open primaries in the country and the state doesn't have party registration. Over 90% of the Washington public liked the way it was done, but both parties moved to close up the primary process in this state despite the public's opinion. The state experimented with a few primary processes that were legal within the SCOTUS decision and ended up settling on the method used now, which was adopted by California.
Back when this happened I was living in the Seattle area and there was much discussion about what it all meant on local talk radio (which has political programs, but aren't super partisan like the national programs).
While technically true that it is the party who determines the nominee, even if it is by millions contributing. It is technically limited to Democrats or those who want to call themselves Democrats for the day. The optics are not very good with statements like that.
I noticed Chris Hayes spent most of a program discussing Bernie's position and even calling him the probable nominee the other day. I didn't get the feeling there was anti-Bernie bias. He had both pro and anti-Bernie Democrats on to discuss it. He had another segment on it last night. I don't watch much TV news, but I happened to have some time around 5 PM the last few days and saw his show.
There has been some discussion on MSNBC, but also in other news sources about Bernie's doubling down on socialism, praising people like Fidel Castro for some of his accomplishments. It has brought about some snarkers pointing out Hitler's good qualities (he was a vegetarian, he liked dogs and apparently children, etc.) There were also people pointing out that John Wayne Dacey brought a lot of joy to children as a children's party entertainer and other upsides of otherwise horrible people.
I saw his comments at this week's debate and on 60 Minutes and while I think they are appropriate for an intellectual college seminar that examines the upsides and downsides of Castro's Cuba, Fidel Castro's good points are bad optics for a major political campaign.
If you look hard enough you can come up with something positive to say about almost anyone. But Bernie is falling into the same trap a lot of Democrats have done, being too much of an academic and the Republicans turn everything they say in the primary against them in the general. He's handing the Republican slime machine cases of bombs to use against him in the general and it concerns me quite a bit. If he had any political instincts at all he would be trying to nuance his past comments away instead of doubling down on them.
In real market news it looks like the markets are reacting to Trump's incompetence in dealing with the corona virus. The case that popped up yesterday of the California resident who didn't appear to have any connection to any other known cases appears to have come in contact with the cruise ship passengers without any protection. I was concerned that evacuating the passengers like they did was going to set it loose in the general population. This may be the only case, but it does show the government was not taking the proper precautions to prevent spread of the disease. I suspect we're going to see more cases like this spring up over the next week. The average incubation period is 14 days and the passengers were evacuated 10 days ago.
I saw portions of Trump's news conference yesterday and the contract between Trump's "everything is fine" message and the experts' comments was dramatic. He not only looked like a loon, but one who was making some major mistakes. Trump knows that the economy has to hold together for his re-election chances to remain possible, but the corona virus put a torpedo in the world economy that is just about guaranteed to trigger a world-wide recession. The world economy was already softening, but this outbreak has trashed the economy of the country that is at the heart of the world economy. That is definitely going to have ripple effects that are already being felt.
We are already seeing shortages of components to things made outside of China because most manufactured goods around the world have something made in China incorporated in the final product.
I expect the stock market will bounce back a bit. It tends to bounce back after a big shock like this. But the underlying economy is going to remain poor for a while.
