Category Archives: 2016 Election

Bernie’s First Commercial

(Overton Window explained.)

NakedCapitalism asks the obvious question:

Sanders won the CNN focus group, the Fusion focus group, and the Fox News focus group; in the latter, he even converted several Hillary supporters. He won the Slate online poll, CNN/Time online poll, 9News Colorado, The Street online poll, Fox5 poll, the conservative Drudge online poll and the liberal Daily Kos online poll. There wasn’t, to this writer’s knowledge, a poll he didn’t win by at least an 18-point margin. But you wouldn’t know this from reading the establishment press. The New York Times, the New Yorker, CNN, Politico, Slate, New York Magazine, and Vox all unanimously say Hillary Clinton cleaned house. What gives?

As far as I can tell there was no scientific polling done of “who won” which is very odd given that there were such polls after the GOP debates. All the above are unscientific polls. But so too is the poll of pundits.

I don’t know who made that picture, I saw it at Down With Tyranny, but it’s the sort of thing that wins elections.

Graphics like the following, from the same source, are much more informational, but I think much less effective for most people:

Update: Does Rand Paul belong in the top picture? I thought he was more isolationist. Actually, if you go by the second debate, wasn’t Donald Trump also?

It’s early, but I’m calling it for this parenthetical aside in the NYT’s retelling of Carly Fiorina’s disastrous turn as HP’s CEO:

The centerpiece of those deals was the company’s $24.2 billion merger with Compaq Computer, which divided the HP board and greatly increased the company’s work force, size and breadth of products.

The deal was so personal to Mrs. Fiorina that she referred to HP as “Héloïse” and Compaq as “Abélard,” a pair whose romantic letters became treasures of medieval French literature, which she studied at Stanford. (Abélard was eventually castrated after fights with Héloïse’s family, a detail Compaq executives were unaware of at the time.)

Props to the Clinton campaign for this video summing up the painful GOP debate on Wednesday: