Paul Krugman’s Friday column comes out just after midnight my time on Thursday. I thought for a little while about live blogging the event. Now that even the most innumerate can see that Hillary Clinton has won the Democratic Party nomination, would Krugman move on to something besides another “Clinton rocks! Sanders sucks!” article. I thought the idea was very funny because I was almost certain that he would write something different. But I was wrong. Although his article, Wrath of the Conned, is nominally about the Republicans, it reads more like an attack on Sanders. Krugman is one of the great poor winners.

The article doesn’t mention Sanders by name and certainly doesn’t give him any credit in the campaign. You know, because Sanders sucks. The best we get is the truly ignorant claim that nonwhite voters supported Clinton because her “challenger” (Not Sanders!) “sometimes seemed to dismiss” the achievement of Obamacare. Yeah, it was all about Obamacare, Krugman. I’m a big Obamacare supporter, but it does far too much argumentative work for Krugman in his apologias for Obama.

Krugman also quoted the Crimson Hexagon study in the most facile way, saying that Clinton got the most negative coverage. That’s true, but it’s important to note that it wasn’t that much more negative than the other candidates and that the same study found the media covered Clinton far more than it did Sanders.

I don’t especially care, I suppose. But it is a good illustration of how people are often poor winners. Would it be so hard to say something nice about what the Sanders phenomenon has done? Clinton has turned left during this primary because Sanders was pounding her from the left. Imagine where we’d be now if Jim Webb had seen Sanders’ level of support. We wouldn’t be talking about the minimum wage; we’d be talking about who was going to drop more bombs on more countries.

Politicians do not exist in a vacuum. Clinton has shifted to the left on both trade deals and Social Security — because of the success of Bernie Sanders. Does he — Do we?! — get any credit for this? Or are the Krugman’s the nation going to continue to stew about Sanders’ unfortunate “Clinton isn’t qualified to be president” comment (which he took back far more publicly than he stated it)?

Poor Winners Can Help Us!

Scott Lemieux wrote a really good article over at New Republic yesterday, Why Hillary Will Govern More Like Bernie Than People Think. This goes along with what I’ve been saying for some time to disappointed Sanders supporters, “He made Clinton, the Democratic Party, and America better.” But now I find that I have to say it to Clinton supporters. Yes, Clinton is a politician, and like them all — including Bernie Sanders — she shifts with the political winds. And she would have been a far worse candidate if she had spent the last year having only to counter the insanity of the Republican Party.

Lemieux’s article is mostly about Virginia Governor Terry McAuliffe, and how he’s turned out to be far more of a progressive than anyone would have thought given what a political hack he has always been. Lemieux noted:

And so too has Clinton, I believe. And it has happened in a big way. As Lemieux said, “Leaders often act as weathervanes, but this isn’t a bad thing if the wind is blowing in the right direction.” So maybe it’s best that people like Krugman are determined to be poor winners. It can encourage the rest of us. We need to keep blowing — and hard.

Back in 2000, I worked long hours for a company named Equilibrium. They were known for a product that was very popular among professional graphic artists, DeBabelizer. It converted graphic files from one format to another. But I was hired when the company was on a big expansion, creating a product that they still sell, MediaRich. At the time, it was pretty cool, but now sounds almost trivial. It allows websites to change images on the fly. So if you are looking at a page selling shirts, you could see the model in all the different colors the shirt comes in. And it could do a whole lot more than that.

I liked that job. It paid well and I worked with some really great people. But I remember this one meeting. We had been working long hours because we were getting ready for some kind of product launch and one of the vice-presidents said, “We work hard and we play hard!” I thought it was a stupid thing to say because I had heard the exact same thing said at every corporate job I’d ever had, including at Microsoft. And it was always said with the same cheerful enthusiasm that indicated that the speaker thought it was a clever phrase they had just made up rather than the most tired of cliches.

Long Hours Goofing Off

Over time, I’ve come to see that it was not just a cliche, it was also a lie. In fact, it is a double lie. My time in corporate America has shown that mostly, people do not work hard. They work long. It’s a way of proving fealty to the corporation, “Look, I’m willing to spend 12 hours a day in this cubical and rarely see my wife and kids! I’m a team player!” Meanwhile, these same people mostly goof off. I even see it here on Frankly Curious. I had asked my direct boss why it was that traffic here goes down so much on the weekends; she said, “It’s the same for every site; people surf the web most at work.”

Similarly, my last job was a tiny startup. We did amazing work until we ran out of money and the company was taken over by a bunch of real estate investors who destroyed it through utter incompetence. But the head of the company was in every day, putting in those hours. But what was he doing? Every time I looked, he was on some website about sail boats (he was really into boats). It’s pretty typical, though. So the idea that everyone is working hard is just nonsense.

At that point at that company, I wasn’t working either. I was terribly sick (I almost died). But more, everything I had built the two years before was being destroyed in the name of the egos of a real estate agent and a boat mechanic. When I was at Equilibrium, however, I wanted to work and go home. I did not like this nonsense of hanging out at work. But then, I was about ten years older than the other workers and was far more interested in finishing my first novel. And it annoyed me that I was expected to work long hours as though it were some kind of religious observance.

But the other part of this myth is the “play hard” part. I don’t even know what it is to “play hard.” But these people certainly didn’t do it. They didn’t play at all. It would be better to say that they “worked long and goofed off hard.” Because just killing time in a way that doesn’t seem like you are goofing off is a large part of what the people at Equilibrium did.

This occurred to me today as I was reading Thomas Frank’s new book, Listen, Liberal. A lot of the book is a critique of the “innovation mentality.” You know what it is: this idea that if we all get college degrees and think like entrepreneurs, then we will live in a bright shiny world. He talks about how every town goes out of its way to bring in those great “innovators” who will revitalize the boarded up downtown regions where people only go if they want to by sex or drugs. Frank remarked:

I remember at Equilibrium, we had a great big break room. And in it was a very expensive Foosball table. I never saw anyone play it. In fact, in all those long hours I never saw anyone in the break room (which I passed by often), except on Thursday mornings, when they would bring in bagels, and people would come in, get a bagel and cream cheese and take it back to their desks where they would eat and “work.”

This all goes back to the breakdown of worker solidarity. And here we have a variation of the paradox of thrift. Everyone wants to prove to the boss that they are the hardest worker. But there isn’t really that much work to be done. There were certainly times when long hours were required, but these were rare. And they were always because of sequencing: I needed to wait around for one person to finish something so that I could do my part. But the rest of the long hours is just one individual trying to outdo another individual. The end result, is that everyone ends up spending a whole lot more time at work, without any more getting done.

“Work hard, play hard” is a myth people use to justify wasting large parts of their lives.

It goes to show just how overworked I am that I’m only now getting to something I saw a week ago in a post at No More Mister Nice Blog, How Your Right-Wing Uncle Is Going to React to Harriet Tubman on the $20 Bill. The point of the article is that Republicans will use Tubman differently how ever it works for them. So she will either be a terrible communist or a great gun loving Republican. It’s this latter conception of her that I find interesting and incredibly annoying.

The truth is that Harriet Tubman was a gun loving Republican. But the problem with that is that you can’t really compare someone who was born almost 200 years ago to someone today. Let’s start with the most obvious and silly thing. Of course Tubman was a Republican! The Republican Party was the anti-slavery party. I assure you that if chattel slavery were an open issue today, it would be the Republican Party that would be on television reading passages from the Bible to justify it. In the 1960s, the Democrats and Republicans crossed paths on this issue. This is the main reason why the south went from solidly Democratic to solidly Republican.

My message to Republicans: after decades of using racial dog whistles to win elections, it is time to embrace the fact that you are a racist party. The group of people who ended slavery in this country might have called themselves Republicans, but they don’t represent who you are today.

Who’d’ve Thought Harriet Tubman Was Like That?!

The issue of guns is a little more subtle but far more interesting. You see, in the early days of the union, the Constitution really did protect gun rights in a most feeble way. It was only after the Civil War that gun rights started to be expanded because the southern states were trying to disarm former slaves. So of course Harriet Tubman would be pro-gun — both before and after the Civil War.

Compare this to what I’ve found in my life to be the typical gun owner: someone who owns a dozen or more guns and is waiting for the revolution that keeps not coming. You know: Ammon Bundy. These are people who live in a fantasy land where every Democratic president is a despot just waiting to storm their home. Its particularly funny when you consider that our military now has drones. So when Bundy and his fellow idiots occupied Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, it really didn’t matter how many guns they had. The government could have just blown them all up using a drone.

On the other hand, guns actually did provide former slaves some degree of protection against state governments that really were trying to kill them. So it not only makes perfect sense that Harriet Tubman would be a gun loving Republican, it was entirely predictable. Yet we get absolutely fatuous statements from conservatives like this:

So we are supposed to be surprised. Why? Because Republicans think we are as stupid and ignorant as they are.

I wasn’t going to write about it. And the truth is, I’m going to try to make this short. When Paul Krugman wrote yesterday, A Note on the Soda Tax Controversy, I figured I’d let it slide. After all, at this point, I do a search for “Sanders” on anything Krugman writes, and if I find it, I don’t read the article. Or at least I try to. I usually manage to read at least half the article and it is usually nonsense. It’s what I always say, and what neuroscience proves: we make up our minds and then we come up with arguments to justify ideas that might as well have come from our guts.

But then I noted this morning that Jonathan Chait (who might as well be Paul Krugman when it comes to any discussion of Sanders) wrote, Why Is Bernie Sanders Making Right-Wing Arguments Against Taxing Soda? Right-wing arguments? What could they be?! Well, it turns out it is only one argument and that it is only “right-wing.” That is to say, it’s right-wing in Chait-land where everything is either right-wing or communism if Jonathan Chait doesn’t agree with it.

For those of you not following it, Hillary Clinton wants a soda tax on these sugary drink so that America gets healthier. It’s not a bad idea. I’m not necessarily against it. Call me agnostic. And call me agnostic because there is another side to the issue. Bernie Sanders is against this tax because it is regressive. You can see what a right-wing argument he’s making there. That is: you can see it if you have Jonathan Chait’s eyes that allow him to throw out pejoratives for anything that he doesn’t happen to agree with. It’s interesting that when Michael Bloomberg wanted to ban soda in anything larger than 16 ounce containers, Jonathan Chait ridiculed it.

As Chait noted, the fact that such a tax would hit the poor hardest would probably make the tax most effective, since the rich spend more of their money on pricey Gamay Beaujolais. But it occurs to me, a liberal, that are ways to make everyone more healthy that don’t require doing it on the backs of the poor. It is only because Chait and Krugman and Clinton are all wedded to neoliberal approaches to social problems. Global warming?! How about a carbon tax! Obesity?! How about a soda tax! Both of these are regressive, but neoliberals don’t care because they aren’t poor.

And would it surprise anyone to know that the poor actually consume less junk food than their richer counterparts? But it seems that the modern Democrat has but one tool to deal with problem. So when Bernie Sanders isn’t for a neoliberal “solution” to a problem he acknowledges, then he’s “right-wing.”

I happen to know that Sanders is for a far better solution to the problem of bad eating by the poor: more food stamps. Am I the only one who remembers the article in Mother Jones two years ago, People on Food Stamps Make Healthier Grocery Decisions Than Most of Us? The issue is poverty, not “incentives.” And people like Chait, Krugman, and Clinton think the issue is training the poor, because it’s their own damned fault.

But why listen to me? I am apparently “right-wing”!

I’ve written too many articles about how ridiculous the Clinton campaign has been with regard to Bernie Sanders. Apparently, I have a super power that allows me to read a poll — a power that is apparently unavailable to the Clinton campaign. Another of my super powers is the ability to remember all the way back to 2008. My take away from that primary was that the Democratic base really didn’t like having to choose between any of the three main candidates, but most especially between Obama and Clinton. So 2016 has represented a great opportunity for these people to have the best of all worlds.

So it’s been really annoying to watch the Clinton campaign never take the high road and always act as though it was in a very close match. But maybe it’s just me and my age. I find Sanders supporters very silly much of the time too. The other day, I saw a short video from The Young Turks, and they were discussing how it was a good thing that the Republicans looked set to nominate Trump, because he was the only one that Clinton could beat. What do you even say to such nonsense?! That’s the kind of thing I expect from Fox News where it is taken as a certainty that Hillary Clinton will be in prison by June.

But the implication of the complaints coming from the Clinton campaign seems to be that Sanders should just know that he’s an issue candidate and that he should therefore not hurt the obvious eventual nominee. Now, I called this race back in February — because of my super powers of poll reading and history remembering. But the truth is that the race is rather tight nationally. Real Clear Politics has Clinton ahead by just 4 percentage points. But there are a few things to keep in mind with this.

First, 4 percentage points is really quite a lot. That’s what Obama beat Romney by. What’s more, in all the polls during the last month, Clinton has been right at 50%. And if you assume that she would get roughly 50% of the undecided vote (And you should!) she is well above 50%. This is a race between two figures in the Democratic Party that are both well liked. It isn’t a surprise that the race would tighten over time.

The other issue is that the national figures don’t matter at all. I don’t know if anyone remembers the obscure presidential election back in 2000. During that there was all kinds of controversy about who had won in Florida, even though one of the men had clearly won the majority of votes nationwide. I still get the question, “Can Sanders win the nomination?” In the sense that anything could happen (a humanity destroying asteroid hitting the Earth this calendar year), then yes, Sanders can win the nomination. But reasonably: no, Sanders cannot win the nomination.

Now I keep hearing that Sanders is hurting Clinton by staying in the race. Of course, the same people have been calling for him to step down for months. But the Clinton campaign thinks that Sanders is hurting Clinton in the general election. That might be the case. But I have a hard time taking it seriously for two reasons.

First, Sanders being in the race has made Hillary Clinton a far better candidate. If she had just floated through this campaign with only Martin O’Malley to fight with, she would have been a much worse candidate once the general election started. So the Clinton campaign really ought to balance out the good things that Sanders has done for them compared to the minor damage he has done. And it is minor damage. Who thinks that the Republicans wouldn’t have tried to attack her on her Wall Street connections?

The second reason is demonstrated very well in an article by Brian Beutler yesterday, Democrats Should Stop Sweating Sanders’ Attacks on Clinton. He notes how Clinton was far more vicious toward Obama when she was losing in 2008. For example:

But again, I think the issue is that the Clinton campaign just takes it as granted that Sanders could never win the primary. So it was totally okay for her to say she should stay in the race because who knows what information might come out about Obama. But it isn’t okay for Sanders to do the same thing because the Clinton campaign doesn’t think he’s a viable candidate.

Just to be clear: Clinton will win the nomination. Sanders will stay in the race. Clinton is not going to be noticeably harmed by Sanders’ attacks. Once Clinton is the nominee, Sanders will support and campaign for her. There’s nothing special about this campaign. Except for all the whining.