The Beatles sang money can’t buy me love, but after last night’s debate we could add debating skills too. By any measure, Bloomberg, in his first appearance on the debate stage, performed woefully. And no complaints here!

This is speculative, but if Bernie has a commanding delegate lead at the time of the convention, but not quite the requisite delegates required for the outright nomination, I don’t see how someone else who is significantly behind him could be awarded the nomination, even if it is perfectly within the rules for the convention to do so. If the margin is narrower, it is a different story.

Every Democratic candidate in the presidential primary is a reformer of some kind. Either they offer a model of reform that is moderate in its aims or one that is progressively/radically democratic. No one in the field is suggesting that we simply return to “normalcy.” To think otherwise bespeaks an under appreciation of the changing and fluid political dynamics of US politics and the Democratic Party.

The conundrum of intergenerational justice is too often presented as a zero sum game. If the older generation wins, the young generation loses. What is missing here is a class analysis that locates the crises that both generations face at the top of the class structure — the 1 percent — and the imperatives of capitalist exploitation of labor, nature, and people generally.

Really good read. I also don’t give too much weight to polls of head to head match ups at this time. The salient questions for me are (1) how will the nominee and her of his campaign message fare in the cauldron of an election campaign against Trump and the extreme right, and (2) what kind of coalition can she or he assemble and will the constituencies that make up this coalition over perform on election day?