A little depressed

I'm calling BS on the authenticity of #NeverWarren.

Go ahead and search it. I haven't seen any *real* prominent progressive accounts pushing it. It started taking off between 5:00 am and 7:00 am EST when all of you MFs were sleeping.

Have we really learned nothing from 2016? pic.twitter.com/VnSMvB36Qx

— Devin Nunes' Alt-Mom (@NunesAlt) January 15, 2020

This is for the fam here, and stuff I'd rather not be talking about at the moment, but it's weighing on me too much.

It looks to me, for starters, like Biden won the last debate and will get the nomination. Or, if you prefer, like Sanders won it for him, with the dramatic murder-suicide of Warren's and his own campaign, when he made her angry enough to break the pact that had helped them create a kind of left coalition that had a kind of a chance.

That is, they'll try to repair it, perhaps, but I don't think it will work; as in 2016, when Sanders's officially expressed support for Hillary Clinton came too late to have an effect on his enraged and WikiLeaks-propagandized young stans in crucial places like Detroit and Milwaukee and Madison and they decided not to vote (reporting has clarified that few Sanders supporters voted for Trump or fringe candidates, but as ever it mostly fails to consider nonvoters, who obviously don't show up in exit polls). Sanders may well win in Iowa (caucus state) or even, less likely, New Hampshire, but he never had a chance of getting the nomination (though as I've said he could win the election if he did somehow get nominated), and Warren (who I think, disclosure, would make a much better president than Sanders and a somewhat better candidate) won't be able to win it in the toxic atmosphere the stans are busy creating in the debate's aftermath. It was already pretty terrible in recent weeks, and this has made it a lot worse.

Yes, I'm sorry to say I think he's been lying. That is:


1. In December 2018, before either had declared their candidacy, Sanders and Warren had the famous dinner (lasagna, somebody said) at her Washington apartment:

Only the two senators were present and they stated what has become abundantly clear: that they are both seriously considering seeking the Democratic nomination in 2020. But neither Ms. Warren nor Mr. Sanders sought support from the other or tried to dissuade the other from running, said the officials familiar with the meeting.

2. Nevertheless a rumor seems to have persisted, perhaps just among the journos, that someone did try to dissuade the other, and Time correspondent Anand Giridharadas asked her about it at the South by Southwest Festival in March 2019:

Warren clarified that while she does not consider herself a Democratic Socialist, she does believe in regulation [as if "belief in regulations" was an eccentricity you wouldn't expect to find among non-socialists—did Giridharadas plant that?].

"Markets have to have rules. They have to have a cop on the beat,” she said. 

Warren also dodged on discussing her conversation with Sanders before she declared her run for president when asked if he had discouraged her from joining the field of 2020 candidates.

“Bernie and I had a private dinner,” Warren said after a momentary pause. “My view is that dinner stays private.”

Which could obviously mean a number of different things, but boils down to two main ones: that he did discourage her and she didn't want to say so, but didn't want to lie about it, or that he didn't, but she wanted to hint that he had. I believe it's the former, if only because it did effectively kill the story for the next nine or ten months, while the two mostly stuck to an initial agreement not to dump on each other, but of course also because I don't believe she plays games with the truth, for which you might want to call me naïf.

Mostly, I should say, but not entirely:

The quasitruce between the two has had moments of friction but has largely held. Last summer, some Sanders aides tweeted criticisms of Warren’s positions on "Medicare for All," of her for not going on Fox News, and more.

The Warren campaign did not respond publicly. But senior Warren adviser Dan Geldon privately communicated with Sanders’ campaign manager, Faiz Shakir, in an attempt to stop the tweets, according to an official familiar with the conversation.

The number of critical tweets did decline, but some Sanders aides, including policy adviser Warren Gunnels, have continued to occasionally jab at her.

3. But by last week, Sanders had pretty definitively broken with the agreement, in line with a lot of negativity all over the primary campaign, as Politico reported on Saturday, in a set of talking points scripted for campaign workers:

The script instructs Sanders volunteers to tell voters leaning toward the Massachusetts senator that the “people who support her are highly-educated, more affluent people who are going to show up and vote Democratic no matter what” and that “she's bringing no new bases into the Democratic Party.”

“I like Elizabeth Warren. [optional]” the script begins. “In fact, she’s my second choice. But here’s my concern about her.” It then pivots to the criticisms of Warren.

And by Monday, the story of the dinner had returned, on CNN, quoting a bunch of anonymi:

The two agreed that if they ultimately faced each other as presidential candidates, they should remain civil and avoid attacking one another, so as not to hurt the progressive movement. They also discussed how to best take on President Donald Trump, and Warren laid out two main reasons she believed she would be a strong candidate: She could make a robust argument about the economy and earn broad support from female voters.

Sanders responded that he did not believe a woman could win.

The description of that meeting is based on the accounts of four people: two people Warren spoke with directly soon after the encounter, and two people familiar with the meeting.

Which sounds like it came from inside the Warren camp, but Ryan Grim cautions us to beware:

Bernie's surge motivated people who had knowledge of it to finally confirm it. But assuming it was Warren's team is just an assumption.

— Ryan Grim (@ryangrim) January 16, 2020

(You should maybe read the whole thread, which  is more judicious and less pro-Warren than my piece.)

4. Sanders quickly responded to the CNN story by claiming not only that he hadn't said what he was accused of saying, but it was logically impossible for him to have said it:

Mr. Sanders, in his statement earlier on Monday, said it was “ludicrous” to think he would have made such a comment.

“It’s sad that, three weeks before the Iowa caucus and a year after that private conversation, staff who weren’t in the room are lying about what happened,” Mr. Sanders said. “Do I believe a woman can win in 2020? Of course! After all, Hillary Clinton beat Donald Trump by three million votes in 2016.”

Mr. Sanders added that he had told Ms. Warren “that Donald Trump is a sexist, a racist and a liar who would weaponize whatever he could.”

(He could have just restricted himself to that last bit, and suggested maybe Warren had interpreted it as meaning more than he intended—but he didn't.) And that evening, Warren, put on the spot, made her own statement:

“Among the topics that came up was what would happen if Democrats nominated a female candidate. I thought a woman could win; he disagreed,” she said. “I have no interest in discussing this private meeting any further because Bernie and I have far more in common than our differences on punditry.” She added that she and Mr. Sanders were “friends and allies” and said she believed they would continue to work together to beat Mr. Trump.

To me it's pretty much evident from the language they used whose story is truer, Monday and in more or less the same language in the Des Moines debate the following night: Sanders again blustering and mansplaining at even greater length, and seemingly unaware he was calling her a liar after she'd made her Monday statement

Well, as a matter of fact, I didn't say it. And I don't want to waste a whole lot of time on this, because this is what Donald Trump and maybe some of the media want. Anybody knows me knows that it's incomprehensible that I would think that a woman cannot be president of the United States. 

and Warren again quietly burying her own claim inside the claim of friendship. Leading to the hot mic moment afterwards where she refused his hand: "I believe you called me a liar on national TV!" And the current crap.

I'm not sure it's what Trump wants, though it's hard for me not to think Russians want it, given the similarities between the way the social media are heating this up and the way they worked in 2016 (Twitter says there's no evidence), working to split the progressive tendency into irreconcilable hostilities, and the way the Ukraine intrigue, looking worse and worse every day, tends to make Biden into a persecuted hero. Not to mention Republicans (see this from Scott Lemieux, who's getting a possibly related paranoia).

If they really do want Biden because they're confident Trump can beat him, they're making a mistake, Biden can certainly win as convincingly as any of the candidates, and I guess he won't be a terrible president—he'll even sign progressive legislation if Congress gives it to him, with the same cheerful confidence and cunning he applied to same-sex marriage—but it doesn't look like the inspiring historical moment many of us have been imagining over the past months.