The Abbreviated Pundit Round-up is a daily feature at Daily Kos.
Today is the culmination of the Nevada primary. may the best candidate win, and without Russian interference. Oh, btw, that interference is the story of the month, and maybe the election.
WaPo:
Bernie Sanders briefed by U.S. officials that Russia is trying to help his presidential campaign
Asked why the briefing was reported now, a month later, Sanders said: “I’ll let you guess about one day before the, the Nevada caucus. Why do you think it came out?”
Sanders pointed to a Post reporter and said sarcastically: “It was The Washington Post? Good friends.”
“We report news when we learn it,” said Kristine Coratti, a spokeswoman for The Post.
NY Times:
Bernie Sanders, the Teflon Candidate, Faces Sudden New Tests
The Vermont senator has long brushed off political vulnerabilities and evaded attacks from rivals. But the spotlight on his front-runner status and possible Russian interference could pose challenges.
Senator Bernie Sanders has the kind of vulnerabilities that make political opponents salivate. Yet throughout his congressional campaigns, the 2016 primaries, and now his second White House bid, one rule has defined the senator’s political rise: Nothing sticks.
Now that durability is about to be tested in ways that Mr. Sanders has never experienced in his 50-year electoral career. The disclosure on Friday that intelligence officials believe Russia has been interfering in the 2020 race to help his candidacy may distract from his campaign message and force him to contend with questions, worries and disinformation about the Russian efforts.
He is also no longer a quixotic junior senator from the idiosyncratic state of Vermont. He is now the Democratic presidential front-runner, and if he captures the nomination, can expect to face a tidal wave of negative advertising. President Trump and the Republican Party would likely spend millions branding him as a socialist.
How you handle stories like this is important, and what’s here is not good.
Was he trying to keep this from the public? Why? And what’s the deal with blaming reporters for doing their job? Really, really , really a bad look. He should have stuck to his statement.
This is not nit-picking. The response from Bernie and his surrogates is now a major campaign issue.
Politico:
Half of Americans Don’t Vote. What Are They Thinking?
Inside the largest ever survey of the politically disengaged.
“There’s a lot of conventional wisdom as to why somebody would not vote, but nobody has really gone to these citizens and asked them why they don’t vote,” says Sam Gill, chief program officer at the Knight Foundation, which decided to undertake the study last winter. “It’s the story of this huge portion of the population that consistently sits this out.”
Politico:
Down-ballot Republicans watch with glee as Sanders gains steam
Trump and Republicans are suffering in the suburbs. But they're confident voters there will view Bernie as worse.
It “takes a good foil" to turn the tide back in favor of the GOP, Chambers argued. "It takes someone who you can contrast with and say, ‘This is my vision, and this is theirs. Which one do you support?’ And Bernie Sanders offers that foil up and down the ballot for Republicans and it’s one that we’re going to take advantage of.”
The White House is embracing the strategy in its bid to maintain control of the Senate and flip the House. Republicans have a razor-thin Senate majority.
“This is Bernie Sanders’ and AOC’s party now,” said White House counselor Kellyanne Conway, referring to progressive icon Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. “Bernie is not just the socialist standard-bearer; he may well be the presidential nominee.”
The offensive provides a window into the emerging Republican 2020 strategy. Fifteen months after suffering sweeping losses in the midterm elections, the party is moving aggressively to make inroads with the voters who deserted them.
Frank Bruni:
Why Democrats Are Bound for Disaster
Win, lose or draw, there’s no legitimacy in America anymore.
But in the case of this debate, what happened at the bitter end was probably most meaningful. All six candidates onstage were asked to envision a situation — utterly plausible this year — in which none of them went into the Democratic convention in Milwaukee in July with a majority of pledged delegates and, therefore, an unequivocal claim to the nomination. Should the politician with a plurality of delegates be the nominee?
Only Bernie Sanders, who currently has the best shot at being that person, said yes. The others said no. That would mean a brokered convention, in which the votes of uncommitted “superdelegates” or alliances formed among certain candidates are necessary to put someone over the top. And it would be a nightmare scenario for the Democratic Party, which is deep into a bad dream already, because it would invite further cynicism, second-guessing, cries of illegitimacy and irresolution in a country that’s paralyzed by all of that.
Axios:
Bloomberg's debate backfire could seal it for Bernie
Mike Bloomberg got into the 2020 race to stop Bernie Sanders and socialism. If he doesn't bounce back from this week's debate, he may seal the deal for both.
Why it matters: Bloomberg’s own campaign has warned that Sanders could lock up the nomination in mere weeks, thanks to rivals splitting the opposition vote. But Bloomberg’s own spending makes it harder for other rivals to cut through — and virtually assures he sucks up significant delegates.
- A top Bloomberg official tells me the response is simple: Recover at the next debate — Tuesday in South Carolina.
David Roth/TNR:
Bernie Sanders Is No Donald Trump
The question, then, is why they would bother to make this obviously facile and unconvincing comparison in the first place. That answer has two parts. One is that none of these people are really much good at their very important jobs. The other is that they are scared, because Sanders’s ongoing run toward the Democratic nomination suggests that a critical mass of voters has noticed as much, and is ignoring them. If there’s any real parallel to be drawn between Trump and Sanders, it’s how their respective rises have revealed the flubby redundancy of their respective parties’ establishments.
Author privilege:
Tim Miller/Bulwark:
The 5 Lessons from 2016 Democrats Need to Understand If They Want to Stop Bernie
History is repeating itself. Democrats can learn how to save their party from seeing how the Republicans lost theirs.
Barring a drastic change in the race, Bernie Sanders is going to be the presumptive Democratic nominee 11 days from now.
Eleven days.
Sometimes when I explain this to people I feel like Randy Quaid in Independence Day running around telling everyone at that trailer park that he was abducted by aliens only to be given quizzical looks until the laser beams in the sky start leveling cities and it’s too late to stop Donald Trump. I mean the aliens. The problem is that if I’m the Randy Quaid character, I don’t know who out there is Jeff Goldblum’s satellite engineer, the guy with the genius plan to use a MacBook to take down the hordes of Bernie Bros. I mean the aliens. Sorry. It happened again.
All of which is to say that while Republicans lived through the same situation Democrats are in now in 2016, I actually lived in it. I saw it happen from the inside.
So for those who weren’t probed quite as personally as I was, I wanted to provide an emergency guide to what I learned during the invasion of 2016.
From a conservative perspective, natch.
Ryan Cooper/The Week:
How much will Medicare-for-all save Americans? A lot.
Overall, it's a great piece. However [John] Oliver is far too wishy-washy on the cost question. He notes that some studies have found enormous savings, and even the libertarian Mercatus Center found a small cost improvement. However he notes that some studies predict higher spending, especially one from the Urban Institute which found dramatically higher spending, and concludes it's impossible to say what might happen on costs. "No one can possibly know for sure," he says. "There are just too many variables involved."
But this simply isn't so. To start with, as Matt Bruenig explains at the People's Policy Project, the Urban Institute study has major problems. Most importantly, they did not actually study the Medicare-for-all bill sponsored by Bernie Sanders. Instead they substituted their own plan in which reimbursement rates are assumed to be 15 percent higher than in the Sanders plan. That's why their cost estimate is so high, but it simply has nothing to do with what the actual bill in question might do if implemented. Furthermore, they seriously underestimate the potential administrative cost savings for hospitals (relying on a fact sheet from a lobbyist group), and simply assume "utilization," or use of medical services, will dramatically increase (more on this later).
On the other hand, the latest research does examine policies more in line with the Sanders bill. The most wide-ranging of the three new studies was by Christopher Cai and others, published in January in PLOS Medicine. They conducted a meta-analysis of Medicare-for-all research — that is, they surveyed a bunch of papers on the topic, picked out the best 22, and aggregated the results. (These papers were not all directly about the specific Sanders bill, but they were a lot closer than the Urban Institute paper.) They found that 19 of the analyses "predicted net savings ... in the first year of program operation and 20 ... predicted savings over several years; anticipated growth rates would result in long-term net savings for all plans."
Oh, btw: