RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/iowa-caucus-democrats-disaster-trump-sanders-949655/amp/

EXCERPT

“What happened over the five days after the caucus was a mind-boggling display of fecklessness and ineptitude. Delay after inexplicable delay halted the process, to the point where it began to feel like the caucus had not really taken place. Results were released in chunks, turning what should have been a single news story into many, often with Buttigieg “in the lead.”

The delays and errors cut in many directions, not just against Sanders. Buttigieg, objectively, performed above poll expectations, and might have gotten more momentum even with a close, clear loss, but because of the fiasco he ended up hashtagged as #MayorCheat and lumped in headlines tied to what the Daily Beast called a “Clusterfuck.”

Though Sanders won the popular vote by a fair margin, both in terms of initial preference (6,000 votes) and final preference (2,000), Mayor Pete’s lead for most of the week with “state delegate equivalents” — the number used to calculate how many national delegates are sent to the Democratic convention — made him the technical winner in the eyes of most. By the end of the week, however, Sanders had regained so much ground, to within 1.5 state delegate equivalents, that news organizations like the AP were despairing at calling a winner. 

This wasn’t necessarily incorrect. The awarding of delegates in a state like Iowa is inherently somewhat random. If there’s a tie in votes in a district awarding five delegates, a preposterous system of coin flips is used to break the odd number. The geographical calculation for state delegate equivalents is also uneven, weighted toward the rural. A wide popular-vote winner can surely lose.

But the storylines of caucus week sure looked terrible for the people who ran the vote. The results released early favored Buttigieg, while Sanders-heavy districts came out later. There were massive, obvious errors. Over 2,000 votes that should have gone to Sanders and Warren went to Deval Patrick and Tom Steyer in one case the Iowa Democrats termed a “minor error.” In multiple other districts (Des Moines 14 for example), the “delegate equivalents” appeared to be calculated incorrectly, in ways that punished all the candidates, not just Sanders. By the end of the week, even the New York Times was saying the caucus was plagued with “inconsistencies and errors.”

Emily Connor, a Sanders precinct captain in Boone County, spent much of the week checking results, waiting for her Bernie-heavy district to be recorded. It took a while. By the end of the week, she was fatalistic.

“If you’re a millennial, you basically grew up in an era where popular votes are stolen,” she said. “The system is riddled with loopholes.”

Others felt the party was in denial about how bad the caucus night looked.

“They’re kind of brainwashed,” said Joe Grabinski, who caucused in West Des Moines. “They think they’re on the side of the right… they’ll do anything to save their careers.

An example of how screwed up the process was from the start involved a new twist on the process, the so-called “Presidential Preference Cards.”

In 2020, caucus-goers were handed index cards that seemed simple enough. On side one, marked with a big “1,” caucus-goers were asked to write in their initial preference. Side 2, with a “2,” was meant to be where you wrote in who you ended up supporting, if your first choice was not viable.

The “PPCs” were supposedly there to “ensure a recount is possible,” as the Polk County Democrats put it. But caucus-goers didn’t understand the cards.

Morgan Baethke, who volunteered at Indianola 4, watched as older caucus-goers struggled. Some began filling out both sides as soon as they were given them. 

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/02/impeachment-and-amnesia/

When it comes to executive excess, Trump lacks remorse and Democrats lack self-awareness.

‘If this had happened to President Obama, a lot of people would have been in jail by now.” So went President Trump’s morning-after remarks, following the GOP-controlled Senate’s acquittal vote, the denouement of the Democrat-controlled House’s approval of two thin-gruel articles of impeachment.

To say the president is defiant, that he is without remorse, understates the matter.

In a midweek speech explaining her not-guilty vote, Senator Susan Collins (R., Maine) maintained that the president had “learned his lesson.” By week’s end, she sheepishly allowed that her assessment had been “aspirational” — Collins’ aspiration, that is, not Trump’s.

The president would not pretend to be either sorry or grateful for his reprieve. This is a big part of what ardent Trump supporters love about their man. Alas, it is just as big a part of why the president’s approval numbers languish in the 40s when they ought to be in the 60s, with a humming economy, record low unemployment, and the nation at relative peace.

President Clinton was not sorry either — not really. As shown by his occasional outbursts in recent years, he internalized the storyline that he was the victim, not the villain, of the Lewinsky scandal that led to his impeachment. But 21 years ago, his peerless political instincts told him, a just-acquitted sitting president, that it was important to feign contrition. He apologized to the American people, conceding that his misdeeds were shameful and had put the country and the Congress through a painful ordeal.