Part One:
Our in-studio guest is John Nichols, editor of The Nation. We discuss the results and implicit message of New Hampshire’s presidential primary yesterday. On the one hand, the NH primary has redeemed the early-voting process (after the disaster in Iowa).
In addition, Bernie Sanders’s victory is both a political revolution (as he has often spoken about) and also a media revolution. The latter refers to the fact that almost all media outlets have either ignored the Sanders campaign or, once it began to look like he might do well, they covered him with merciless negativity.
For many Americans, today’s headline (that Bernie won in NH) is big, surprising news. This self-described democratic socialist who was ignored by the media & the public, kept persevering with his message, and what do you know, his message resonated with the voters. The ideas that he’d been espousing turned out to be the issues that regular, everyday Americans cared about, issues that they wanted lifted up and addressed by their political leaders.
In contrast, Joe Biden’s poor result reflected his poor performance on the campaign trail. His speeches “rambled so much that I needed a GPS.” Nichols concludes that journalists can’t cover election campaigns from afar — on TV or by reading about events. “You have to cover campaigns on the ground.” One only wonders what took the media so long to realize that Biden was simply not resonating with the voters. Perhaps voters simply wished that Biden would be able to defeat Trump through sheer force of his association with Obama and wistful thinking about the “good old days” when America was more stable and safe, not a chaotic, impulsive relic of the greatness that was our country’s potential.
Part Two:
We speak with Bob Hennelly, reporter with the Chief Leader in NYC, as well as Scott Braddock from The Quorum in Texas. Hennelly shares some of his many years of experience under the influence of former Mayor Bloomberg in NY. It isn’t a pretty picture.
Bloomberg was controlling, egocentric, and bigoted. To this date, he has not adequately explained — or apologized for — his full-throated support for racist police practices. Bloomberg even thought (correctly) that his $ billions could buy him an extended term as mayor.
Now he’s trying to buy the presidency using only his own money. He has literally bought up the people and places that he’ll need to make his campaign successful. Will the media or the public call him out on this undemocratic approach to democracy? Or will they/we let him get away with it?
