Nobody knows who will win the Democratic Primary. Why can’t we admit that and move on?<\/p>\n
The\u00a0New York Times <\/em>thinks it does know, and\u00a0seems so content in their certainty that Bernie\u00a0can not possibly beat Hillary, that\u00a0they have\u00a0been ignoring rather than attacking him. Most of the rest of the mainstream media have followed suit. But those media outlets and their resident pundits have clearly lost some of their stranglehold over the construction\u00a0of “electability”: viz, Trump<\/a>. National polls have consistently shown Hillary with a vast lead, but those polls are much less significant\u00a0than state-based polls conducted a few weeks before a primary, and Bernie’s lead in New Hampshire and neck-and-neck status in Iowa also have been pretty steady<\/a> — and the outcome of those two primaries traditionally have more effect on subsequent primaries than anything that has come before. But that only tells me: we don’t know.<\/p>\n Real small-d democracy necessitates\u00a0living with uncertainty, and in a way embracing that uncertainty. The insider baseball that has dominated political journalism for the past half century is politically enervating at best, anti-democratic at worst. It’s too clever by half, speaking with certainty about things that aren’t certain, while avoiding obvious, if difficult truths. (OK, if you accurately predicted in 2014 that Donald Trump would be the Republican front-runner going into the 2016 primaries, then I want to hear from you. Otherwise, please talk about something else.)<\/p>\n I’ve been enjoying some of the debates between Bernie supporters and Hillary supporters (though I think the more interesting ones are between women<\/a>). Though I’m a Bernie supporter, I think it’s true that it would be a major breakthrough\u00a0to have a committed feminist in the Whitehouse, and that a future political landscape in which the problem is pushing President Hillary to the left does not seem a whole lot worse than a landscape\u00a0in which the problem is trying to get any of Bernie’s progressive policy proposals enacted against enormous resistance. We live in interesting times.<\/p>\n But there’s a tendency in Hillary’s camp, and to some extent in Bernie’s as well, where the debate devolves into insider baseball, where people, with much self-certainty, throw around poll results and anecdotes about how the world “really works.” For example, Katha Pollitt, who\u00a0I like a lot, wrote “