JB: What makes Bernie the best candidate to beat Trump?
TC: Election maps from RealClearPolitics, put together using statewide polling averages, show that in a Trump/Sanders general election, Sanders wins swing states like Pennsylvania and New Hampshire outright, while putting traditionally red states like Arizona, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, Nevada, North Carolina, and Utah into contention.
Comparatively, a Clinton/Trump matchup is disastrous for the Democratic ticket, as Clinton would not only lose all the aforementioned states, but blue states like Michigan are swing states if Clinton is the nominee. Previous maps showed Clinton put Minnesota and Oregon at risk, as well. Even though the Democratic establishment is loyal to Clinton, even they have to admit that she's the riskier choice when looking at the polls.
The Democratic establishment may be in the midst of its last stand right now. Should Democratic party bosses write off Sanders and his supporters' demands for a truly progressive party platform, the abolition of superdelegates, an end to big money politics, and the opening of primaries across the country, I seriously doubt enough of his supporters would vote for Clinton in the general election.
If Donald Trump wins in November, it will be a disastrous four years for everyone in the country. But the silver lining may be that the Democratic establishment will wither away, and the millions of supporters galvanized by the Bernie Sanders movement will take over the party and steer it in the right direction in time to win major progressive victories in 2020 and beyond.
JB: Thanks for bringing us up to speed, Tom. I feel like I have a much better handle on this topic now. Tell us more about how the DNC, Hillary's campaign and the MSM came to work together to "pitch stories with no fingerprints." Any conjectures on how it came about in the first place? I would have loved to be a fly on the wall when that first feeler got sent out.
TC: On Tuesday, Guccifer 2.0 again released a new set of documents--a dossier, if you will--that the DNC assembled to help Hillary Clinton back in April and May of 2015. What it reveals is that the DNC, which told the public it was neutral in the primaries, was not. They studied all the attacks against Hillary Clinton on a variety of issues, from the Clinton Foundation to her email server, and generated a list of talking points for Clinton and her campaign officials to use in the media.
This further shows a collusion between the DNC and the Clinton campaign to plant messages in the media that "muddy the waters" around the most vulnerable parts of Clinton's record. Any column by Paul Krugman about Hillary Clinton in the last year sounds very similar to the DNC talking points leaked on Tuesday.
Obviously, by "pitching stories with no fingerprints," there are no fingerprints by which to trace back to the DNC in its interactions with the media. This could mean that talking points were sent through personal email accounts rather than accounts subject to public records requests, or that messages were relayed over the phone, or in-person to the journalists themselves. There's no way to confirm directly, hence the "no fingerprints" phrase the DNC employee used in the email. And they were successful in that way.
But when looking at the original leak, including the opposition research conducted against Donald Trump and other Republican candidates, all of those talking points sound very similar to dominant narratives repeated ad nauseam on the networks about Trump and the GOP field of candidates. The argument that Trump is a bad businessman, for example, was one of the leading messages the DNC had in its oppo research document, which we of course heard in the mainstream cable news media for months on end.
JB: You've rightly pointed to the hypocritical treatment the press is giving this leak, especially since they carried the Trump opposition research leak from the same website. How lethal is the media silence on this matter? Will social media and the alternate press be able to break through that barricade? And isn't Sanders campaign's stunning lack of media coverage [or distortion of his positions, if he was covered] further evidence of the bias and collusion that you write about?
TC: I think the media silence on this is intentional, but social media's amplification of it can and does make a difference. On the original story we published on USUncut.com, we garnered roughly 58,000 total engagements (likes, shares, comments), making it one of our most viral stories that week. I think one thing this primary season has proven is that social media, not traditional media, is what drives the conversation.
Major media companies have gotten so lazy that most of their content now comes from lurking on platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, and basing their content on what goes viral on those platforms. Election coverage used to be driven by stuffy editors in air-conditioned newsrooms, but now it's driven by millions of people interacting with engaging content on social media.
Obviously yes, Sanders had a stunning lack of coverage in the early days of his campaign. That very well may have been deliberate, as the DNC has been caught pushing pro-Clinton messaging directly to the media since 2015. USUncut.com has previously written about this in great detail--your readers likely remember back in August of 2015, when Sanders went on a barnstorming tour down the West Coast and attracted over 100,000 people to rallies in Seattle, Portland, and Los Angeles. Even on his biggest day, he got less than 500 media mentions across the 10 biggest media networks, while Clinton got roughly 600 that same day despite not holding any mega-rallies. But media networks were forced to pay attention to Bernie Sanders after his fans on social media made stories about him dominate Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit, and especially after Sanders started raising millions of dollars through small donations that came mostly through the internet.
We're living in a democratized media space now, where everyday people get to decide what the news covers based on what we say is worth covering. It's a very exciting time to be a journalist.
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