Portside

I wanted to see Elizabeth Warren run for president. Institutional support was thin. They said that Warren didn't have a chance of winning. I found the argument that Elizabeth can do more in the Senate (but not in the Senate leadership!) than the presidency to be condescending - another manifestation of the glass ceiling. Yet the same people who were making those arguments against Elizabeth running are now Clintonsplaining that I'm a self-hating woman and a bad feminist.

Reader Comments: The Bernie Generation, and Bernie and After, and Hillary; Clinton's Attack on Reconstruction; Backlash to Corbyn and Sanders; Flint, Racism, African Americans and the Criminal Governor Snyder; The Syrian Peace Talks; Announcements: Building on Bernie: What Comes Next; Migrant Labor in China: A Post-Socialist Transformation; #BlackLivesMatter - Books on Black Liberation

A grassroots organizing effort may bring out between 10,000 and 20,000 Latinos to caucus in Iowa on Monday, and Bernie Sanders may be the beneficiary.

Monday night, Hillary Clinton butchered Reconstruction's history. It's a good opportunity to correct the record, and glean why Lincoln really was America's greatest president. Reconstruction in reality was a briefly successful attempt to build a true democracy in the South. Clinton implies that it was Southern anger at unjust Reconstruction policy that led them to institute Jim Crow, but Jim Crow was the goal from the very end of the war.

The Bernie generation is our political future, joining with groups demanding living wages or $15/hr, Black Lives Matter, the Dreamers, and 350.org. With their roots in the Occupy movement, they are viscerally mad at the rigged economy based on McJobs and the monopoly power of the plutocrats.This is such an important election, the riskiest of my lifetime. If we win, then we can resume our quarrels and patient work for peace and justice.

There’s no question that the United States is long overdue to elect a woman head of state. But electing Hillary Clinton — or anyone else who supported the invasion of Iraq — would be sending a dangerous message that reckless global militarism needn’t prevent someone from becoming president, even as the nominee of the more liberal of the two major parties.

The Clinton campaign has aggressively sought campaign donations from the biggest financial interests and Clinton has personally taken millions of dollars in speaking fees from Wall Street and the health care industry. Meanwhile, Sanders has generated enough true popular excitement and small donations to be financially competitive at a presidential level.

Perhaps more important than Sanders’s gain in the polls is how it happened: by patiently hammering on his message, regardless of what other candidates said.