Presidential candidate Bernie Sanders said Sunday he’s in “negotiations” with the Democratic National Committee following an ugly spat that led to the firing of a Sanders campaign staffer accused of accessing voter data belonging to the Hillary Clinton campaign.

“We're trying to work with the DNC to put this whole thing behind us,” Sanders said on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”

“Frankly,” the Vermont senator added, “I think for the American people there are far more important issues having to do with the disappearance of the American middle class and huge income and wealth inequality and climate change.”

Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/12/bernie-sanders-dnc-data-breach-217149#ixzz3vZ0Bo9KZ


__________________

I don't care much about this story, so I'm glad to hear Bernie is working to put this to bed.

Seems this wasn't posted yet.

http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/polls/ipsos-reuters-23413

1) 2016 New Hampshire Democratic Presidential Primary
Asked of 600 likely voters - democrat
Hillary Clinton (D) 46%
Martin O'Malley (D) 3%
Bernie Sanders (D) 43%
Other 0%
Undecided 7%


http://elections.huffingtonpost.com/pollster/polls/arg-23409

...

The brouhaha over this little fiasco has been intense, and made worse by the fact that only a few thousand people in the United States understand anything about the voter tools involved. Few journalists—to say nothing of armchair activists—have enough campaign and field management experience to truly understand what happened. That ignorance has led to wild accusations and silly reporting from all sides, whether from conspiratorially-minded Sanders supporters or schadenfreude-filled Republicans.

...

Even without being to export, however, merely seeing the topline numbers of, say, how many voters the Clinton campaign had managed to bank as “strong yes” votes would be a valuable piece of oppo. While it’s not the dramatic problem that a data export would have been, it’s undeniable that the Sanders campaign gleaned valuable information from the toplines alone. It’s also quite clear that most of the statements the Sanders campaign made as the story progressed—from the claim that the staffers only did it to prove the security breach, or that only one staffer had access—were simply not true. It’s just not clear at this point whether the campaign’s comms people knew the truth and lied, or whether they were not being told the whole truth by the people on the data team who were still making up stories and excuses to cover their tracks. I suspect the latter.

...

This doesn’t mean that Wasserman-Schultz hasn’t, in David Axelrod’s words, been putting her thumb on the scale on behalf of the Clinton campaign. She clearly has been, judging from the intentionally obfuscated debate schedule and from her demeanor and reaction to this recent controversy. The Democratic Party would have been wiser to bring the campaigns together privately and resolve the matter internally. Instead, Wasserman-Schultz chose to take it public to attempt to embarrass the Sanders campaign, and merely managed to embarrass herself and the Party’s data security vulnerabilities in the process.

Still, the Sanders camp’s reactions have been laughable. It was their team that unethically breached Clinton’s data. It was their comms people who spoke falsely about what happened. The Sanders campaign wasn’t honeypotted into doing it—their people did it of their own accord. NGPVAN isn’t set up to benefit Clinton at Sanders’ expense—and if the violation by the campaigns had been reversed, Sanders supporters would have been claiming a conspiracy from sunrise to sundown. What’s very clear is that the Clinton camp did nothing wrong in any of this. Sanders campaign operatives did, and then Wasserman-Schultz compounded it by overreacting. And in the end, the right thing ended up happening: the lead staffer in question was fired, and the campaign got its data access back.

...

http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/political-animal-a/2015_12/an_explanation_of_what_bernie059035.php

______________

Pretty decent analysis, worth reading in it's entirety before passing judgement.

.....

Clinton currently has the support of 51% in the three-way Democratic horse race; Sanders gets 42%. And Martin O’Malley, a former Maryland governor, has just 4%.

Three percent of Iowa likely Democratic caucusgoers remain undecided, according to the Nov. 16-22 poll.

These results are almost unchanged from the last Quinnipiac survey in Iowa, in late October, which showed Clinton at 51% and Sanders at 40%.

......


http://onpolitics.usatoday.com/2015/11/25/poll-clinton-leads-sanders-by-9-points-in-iowa/

By Lauren Kelley November 23, 2015

Bernie Sanders' brother, Larry, recently sat down with 'Rolling Stone' to discuss his sibling's background and candidacy.

(see video at link)

In a previously published clip of Rolling Stone's interview with Bernie Sanders' big brother, Larry, the elder Sanders became emotional talking about his pride for "Bernard."

In this longer video from that interview, Larry Sanders discusses what Bernie was like as a child (a bit of a jock), how both brothers became left-leaning politicians (they grew up in working-class Brooklyn, in the aftermath of the Holocaust, motivating them to fight for justice for all), and why Bernie's had such success raising money without relying on Super PACs. "He is a very honest person....People can disagree with his ideas, but they know where he stands," Sanders says. "And the crazy length of American political campaigns has in this case actually worked out [in his favor]. People have had many months to get to know him."

...........

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/bernie-sanders-brother-gives-glimpse-into-their-childhood-the-real-bernie-20151123

Hillary and Bernie's poll numbers are starting to level off as shown in the most recent polling average chart. The state polling is also starting to curve in the direction of the national trend, what does Bernie have to do to change this trend?

.......

Grayson’s inclusion on the Clinton Florida Leadership Council leads an observer to consider two possible scenarios.

The first is that Grayson is (finally) endorsing Hillary Clinton. But in doing so, he moves decidedly to the center, brazenly putting himself in a better political position to face Murphy in the Democratic Senate primary. However, this strategy only serves to push Grayson away from his Sanders/Daily Kos base, essentially thumbing his nose at his most fervent supporters.

The other can be summed up in two words: “my bad.”

In this instance, Grayson is not REALLY endorsing Clinton – which would not be surprising for someone known (charitably) as a “loose cannon.”

.........

http://floridapolitics.com/archives/194910-say-it-aint-so-alan-grayson-endorses-hillary-clinton

___________________________


Weird article, still thought it was worth sharing.

By Jamelle Bouie

Everyone indulges it, but at this stage of the game, who won? and who lost? are the least interesting questions of the presidential debates. More useful is what did you learn? After all, that’s the point of debates—to learn about candidates as they address moderators, answer questions, and interact with each other. In the GOP debates, for example, no one has cared what Jeb Bush has to say about taxes, as long as he’s in the mainstream of the party. What actually matters is how he responds to pressure and provocation, and on both scores—in the debates, at least—he has failed.

On Saturday, Democrats held their second presidential debate, this time at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. Hosted by CBS News and led by John Dickerson (also a Slate colleague of mine), the topics ranged from ISIS and the attacks in Paris to immigration reform and gun control. And watching the three-way fight between Hillary Clinton, Bernie Sanders, and Martin Malley, what did we learn?

Hillary Clinton is stuck when it comes to foreign policy. As a matter of strategy, Clinton won’t critique or criticize the Obama administration. At every turn, she praises President Obama and his accomplishments. And it makes sense—she wants to endear herself to rank-and-file Democrats, including black Americans, who strongly support the president. But there are places where Obama could have done better, or had the wrong judgment. To many observers, that includes the Middle East. We know Clinton has a critique of Obama’s policy toward the Middle East, especially with regards to ISIS—she says so in her book, Hard Choices.

And so during the debate Clinton struggled to defend Obama’s record on the Middle East, and his past stance toward ISIS in particular. “Won’t the legacy of this administration, which you were a part of, won’t that legacy be that it underestimated the threat from ISIS?” Dickerson asked. Clinton didn’t have an answer. Instead, she offered the audience what she would do as president, without reckoning with the choices she made—with Obama—while secretary of state. This approach continued even as the debate turned to other subjects. When faced with problems in the Affordable Care Act, for instance, Clinton can’t make a forthright critique. Instead, she has to praise the policy, praise Obama, and find some way to move forward. It’s tough and it’s tedious, and it’s an unneeded drag on Clinton’s candidacy; the kind of problem that could spawn new problems, if she can’t deal with it. Put differently, the easiest way for Clinton to escape the trap of the status quo is to break with Obama and put real distance between his administration, and her prospective one.

.......

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2015/11/tough_debate_for_clinton_sanders_o_malley_has_strong_night.html

___________________________


This article makes me uncomfortable, because it's an issue that isn't being discussed much now, but will likely be a major issue in the GE if Hillary gets the nomination.

The Biggest Difference Between Clintons' and Sanders' Policies Isn't Their Substance

It's how they'd try to enact them.

—By Patrick Caldwell

The contrasts between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are largely differences of degree. He's a self-proclaimed socialist; she fashions herself a "progressive that likes to get things done." He hopes to bust up the biggest banks and offer free tuition at public colleges and universities; she wants to tamp down on risky Wall Street behavior and require students to work part-time in order to attend college without building up debt.

But these discrepancies would likely disappear if either Democratic candidate wins the presidency and attempts to push these bills through a Republican Congress that considers all of the proposals too far left for its liking.

The real difference between Sanders and Clinton might come down less to the what of their policies than to the how of implementing them. When Sanders unveils a new policy as part of his presidential campaign, he tends to pair it with legislation he introduces in the Senate. Judging from his campaign, a President Sanders would spend much of his time trying to convince Congress to pass massive legislative overhauls.

Clinton, on the other hand, often pair ideas for legislation with promises of executive action in her policy fact sheets. When she rolls out a new policy proposal, the most details are usually in descriptions of the unilateral actions she would take through the power of the executive branch.

.......

http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2015/11/hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders-executive-orders-bills

____________________________


Certainly this is going to be an issue for either candidate: how to work with a Republican House determined to thwart any and all legislation introduced by a Democratic President. Is doing what they can through executive action going to be the only way to accomplish anything while we still have a completely dysfunctional Congress?