PILE NUMBER ONE—Victories, even Blowout 50 point Landslides, in Caucus States Do Not Really Matter Because Hard-Core Politically Engaged People Tend to Participate at Disproportionate Levels

SAY WHAT?—Wait a second, it is a problem that Bernie wins blowout landslides in five consecutive states because caucuses tend to attract dedicated people? Isn’t that a good thing? Especially when at least four of the five caucuses are jam-packed with people and have long lines to attend? It shows that Bernie has tremendous amounts of enthusiastic support by people willing to work very hard to see Bernie succeed. For the general election having an army of tens or hundreds of thousands of volunteers in nearly every state ready to canvass and work tirelessly for Bernie is the ticket to victory.

And what does it say that Hillary is such an uninspiring candidate that her alleged supporters are unwilling to even caucus for her? In fact, in two of the five recent 2016 caucus states—Washington and Utah—her support fell sharply from what she had in 2008, even though in 2008 she was running against the supposedly tougher opponent, Barack Obama. It seems like a better explanation is that Hillary just has little, and perhaps dwindling, passionate support. That would be an issue getting a lot of attention if we had a credible news media that did not effectively get its marching orders from Clinton HQ.

Oh yeah, one other thing: how come when Hillary “won” the virtual tie in the Iowa caucus and a narrow-victory in the very low turnout Nevada caucus, not a peep was to be heard in the corporate news media about how irrelevant caucuses were? Instead, the main line of analysis of the corporate news media after Bernie’s 5 point loss in Nevada was that it was clear Bernie’s campaign was floundering and approaching death spiral. Seems like caucuses only matter when Hillary wins, even if by a whisker or with extremely low turnouts.

PILE NUMBER TWO—Bernie Does Well in States that are Mostly White, And Fails in More Diverse States Because He Does Not Have Appeal to People of Color

SAY WHAT? Bernie is doing extremely well—even dominating—with Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, Muslim Americans, and Asian Americans. He has gained ground and is within eyesight of catching up with Hillary with Latinos. With apologies to MSNBC’s Joy Reid, Hawaii is not a white state. Just over 20 percent of the state’s population is white. Bernie’s 70 -29 blowout landslide win there last Saturday was accomplished overwhelmingly with non-white voters.

Bernie does have a ways to go with African-American voters, but here too he is making up ground. Bernie’s problem is far more that he is unknown than he is disliked. With African-Americans, Bernie is doing best among people under 40. He is having a difficult time with voters over 60. One suspects as African-Americans in northern states become more familiar with Bernie’s record his support will continue to grow. On issue after issue, on a commitment to civil rights and social justice that is unmatched, on a commitment to principle and personal integrity, Bernie is an outstanding candidate for many African-Americans. Especially those not beholden to the political establishment.

To hear the pundits on CNN and MSNBC talk, Bernie has some fundamental problem attracting African-American voters, like he was some sort of David Duke type dude. In their world Hillary will always get black votes because she has a connection to African-Americans and it is unbreakable. Well, Obama broke it in 2008, and it can be broken again. Or certainly softened. And there is no evidence whatsoever that a Democratic candidate Bernie Sanders would not do as well or better than any other Democrat in the general election—aside from Obama—against a Republican.

Far from being any sort of white supremacist, Bernie has battled racism and white supremacy his entire life, although living in Vermont certainly put him on the sidelines. It is a core part of his stump speech, and has been since even before the Black Lives Matters protests in the summer of 2015. This is why Bernie has attracted the support of many of the extraordinary African-Americans, including Ben Jealous, Cornel West, Spike Lee, Ta-Nahesi Coates, Adolph Reed, Jr., Harry Belafonte, Danny Glover, Rep. Keith Ellison, Angela Davis, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, countless musicians, and many many more.

Indeed age and income may be better determinants than race for who likes Bernie and Hillary right now. In general, Hillary attracts older and richer people. Bernie, the opposite.

PILE NUMBER THREE—The Wisconsin Primary is No Big Deal This Year

SAY WHAT? Wisconsin has always served as a watershed event in the Democratic Party’s primary schedule. Scheduled for the first Tuesday in April, it usually comes deep enough into the process that the field is whittled down to two or three serious players. Since 1960, when primaries become central to the nominating process, the winner there always has become the party’s nominee. (The only year that was not the case was 1968, when Gene McCarthy defeated President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had withdrawn from the race two days before the primary.)

In addition, Wisconsin is also exactly the sort of state a Democrat needs to win to win the White House. It is a state that is a nice cross-section of demographics found across the upper Midwest. If a candidate can win Wisconsin, the thinking has gone, the candidate can win the general election.

That has been its role historically.

In 2008, Barack Obama clobbered Hillary 58-41 and that pretty much put him in command for the nomination, though Hillary never got the memo.

In 2004, John Kerry defeated John Edwards 40-34 and pretty much iced the nomination.

In 1992, Bill Clinton edged Jerry Brown 37-34 and pretty much ended Brown’s chances at overtaking him.

In 1976, Jimmy Carter narrowly beat Mo Udall 37-36, to prove that a Southerner could play in the upper Midwest. In 1980 Carter clobbered Ted Kennedy 56-30, thereby ending Kennedy’s insurgent campaign’s prospects.

In 1960, JFK defeated Hubert Humphrey 56-44 in the race historians believe made Kennedy a viable candidate and put him in the lead for the nomination.

So Wisconsin has always been a big deal, arguably the single most important primary. And it looked to be that way this year, too, until Hillary realized she might lose. Then the spin cycle went into propaganda overdrive and suddenly Wisconsin was no longer an indicator of anything important. It was an honorary caucus state, And, of course, the corporate news media has dutifully regurgitated the party line.

In fact, Wisconsin remains a very big deal in 2016, and there is reason to believe that whoever wins it, as has almost always been the case in the past, will be the party’s nominee. If Hillary was poised to win Wisconsin, this point would be emphasized ad nauseum in the corporate news media. If Hillary won Wisconsin, Bernie would be pronounced DOA across the entirely of the corporate news media. Wisconsin suddenly loses it importance, apparently, if Hillary loses.

Because they all know Hillary is holding a weak hand. She is not popular with voters. I have been doing extensive canvassing with prospective voters in Wisconsin and it confirms what the polls say–Hillary has little enthusiastic support, especially among people under 50. People do not trust her. The more they see her the less likely they are to like her.

Even her hardcore supporters are either people getting paid off by her or expecting jobs for themselves or their friends in her administration. If you go to Hillary’s reddit page to see what motivates the handful of people there to be passionate about Hillary, there are almost no issues to speak of. It seems to be mostly angry bitter people who believe it is Hillary’s turn, like we live in a monarchy and anyone who challenges her right to the crown is a usurper.

That is not a very powerful selling point to a majority of Democrats, let alone Americans.

Not so with Bernie. When people get to know him, they respect him and support him. Even Republicans tend to like him more than Hillary, by a wide margin. And independents adore him. he has all the momentum and enthusiasm in the race. Hillary is reduced to the absurd position that she relies upon low voter turnout to win primaries and caucuses. That says everything you need to know about how weak she is. Because Democrats win general elections when there is high turnout, the kind Bernie routinely generates.

That is why the establishment had to run him out of the race before these truths became widely known.

They tried. They failed.

Five consecutive wins now where Bernie gets at least 70 percent of the vote. Wow.

Bernie was in single-digits or low double digits in the polls for these five states 9 months ago. Just like everywhere else except Vermont. Now he is winning total blowout victories against the biggest brand name in the Democratic Party if not the nation..

If we had a credible news media, for the next week the discussion would be whether Hillary should withdraw from the race so as to not undermine Bernie’s chances in November. The establishment media would obsess with how Hillary, one of the best known politicians in the world, could be demolished in five states she did very well in in 2008. She won many of them. Why is she going so sharply in the wrong direction?

Alas, we do not have a credible media. But we have survived their offensive and they are running out of ammunition.

All hands on deck for Wisconsin. We win there and it is two weeks of intensive campaigning in New York. Hillary’s home state. Bernie won his home state with 86 percent of the vote. Let’s see Hillary match that.

If Bernie wins Wisconsin and makes a ballgame of it in New York, he is the leader. If he wins Wisconsin and New York, Hillary is through. Game over.

Any way you slice it, she is on life support from the corporate media right now.

The next 23 days could shape the course of history. Now or never.

My Take – Hillary Clinton is Sitting on a Corruption Time Bomb (NOT the email servers or Benghazi either) that will Eventually Explode. Bernie Sanders: Light the Fuse Sunday night; Don’t let Trump Light it in the General Election Campaign. I prefer President Sanders to President Trump

Bernie has scored lots of points pointing out that Hillary Clinton was paid $675,000 (to her personal bank account) to do three private talks to Goldman Sachs in 2013 after she left the State Department and was informally planning her presidential run which she announced in April 2015. Bernie has demanded that it must have been a doozy of a talk to be worth that much money to Goldman Sachs, so Hillary ought to share it with all of us.

Hillary laughs it off along with Bernie, and then offers lame excuse after lame excuse for why she will not disclose the transcripts to her paid Goldman Sachs talks. She first claimed she would not release the transcripts until Bernie released his. Well Bernie has done no paid Wall Street talks—he is prohibited from doing them as a member of the Senate—so there is nothing to release.

The Hillary claimed that she would not release the transcripts until the Republican released the transcripts to their paid Wall Street talks. The problem for Hillary is that there is no evidence that Cruz, Kasich or Rubio could do paid Wall Street talks from 2013-2015 because they, like Bernie, were in public office and pocketing money for doing private talks is prohibited by the same ethics laws that affect Bernie.

And there is no evidence after a rudimentary search that Trump got paid to do talks to Wall Street banks in this period, who might have balked at his $1.5 million fee. Plus what exactly would Trump tell a Wall Street Bank? And no one took Trump seriously as a presidential candidate in 2013-15—I mean no one—while everyone knew you were the prohibitive favorite to win the Democratic nomination and a likely winner in the general election. Powerful corporation interests had a distinct interest in buttering your bread.

And since when is Hillary Clinton saying she is only going to meet an ethical bar established by Donald Trump anyway? That is preposterous and insulting. It makes it clear she is obviously hiding something that she believes voters will not approve of, and she is determined to keep them in the dark. It must be really really bad because of her resistance. All the more reason voters must see these transcripts.

For the details and background of her vast wealth from doing corporate talks in the two years before she formally announced her candidacy for president—what was in effect an unprecedented corporate shakedown/pay-to-play tour that made Hillary one of the richest people in the world—see [the work compiled by Jed McChesney](http://citizenuprising.com/5352-2/)

Bernie may be a gentleman and honor her wishes, or prod only gently, but Trump is no gentleman and never trods gently. He will pounce and pounce and pounce and Hillary has no defense.  It may well be game over.

So Bernie needs to call her bluff and demand that she turn over the transcripts of her talks to Wall Street banks.  This nonsense has got to end. He must be unrelenting.

But that is not all he needs to do. Hillary did not just do 3 talks to Goldman Sachs. She did 14 speeches to the largest Wall Street banks and hedge funds in the 18 months from April 2013 to October 2014. [Look at the list of banks and how much they paid.]( http://citizenuprising.com/financial/)

Here is something interesting: [One of the 14 talks was to GTCR hedge fund in June 2014.[(http://www.chicagomag.com/Chicago-Magazine/Felsenthal-Files/February-2016/Hillary-Clinton-speech-GTCR/) You know what the “R” stands for in GTCR? Rauner, as in Bruce Rauner, elected Republican Governor of Illinois in November 2014. Rauner’s hedge fund paid Hillary $280,000 for her talk. Rauner may be the single most hated politician in Illinois for Democrats and independents. He wants to privatize higher education while Bernie wants to make it available to all. Rauner was not active with GTCR in June 2014, but he still had a connection to the firm. Wonder what Hillary said to them? People in Illinois sure deserve to know, don’t they?

And they vote on Tuesday, in perhaps the most important election day of the primary season.

Hillary Clinton is running as a progressive who will better tame and regulate Wall Street for the public than Bernie Sanders. She is their enemy she tells us, despite the massive contributions bankers and hedge fund executives make to her campaign and SuperPACs, because she says some Wall Street executives oppose her.

So let the people see the transcripts to the 14 speeches and judge for ourselves how sincere Hillary’s progressive stance toward the financial sector is. That is only fair. Especially since these 14 talks put $3,260,500 into Hillary’s personal bank account. In earlier times, before public relations and spin, these talks would have been called pay-offs or bribes. That is why it is illegal for a member of Congress, a public official, or an announced candidate for president to do them. Let us see the transcripts to see if there are grounds for concerns.

Press her Bernie. Mention all 14 talks. Mention GTCR. Mention her outrageous personal profit. She has no answer to this as we have seen, yet you joke about one talk or three talks.

It isn’t one talk or three talks to Goldman Sachs, it is 14 talks, to the biggest and baddest firms on Wall Street.

In fact, in truth, Hillary did 91 talks for at least $100,000 each during this period that put $21.6 million into her personal bank account. No active politician has ever done anything like that in American history. But we can get into that rogues gallery of monopolists, influence-buyers and polluters later in the campaign. Right now just nail her on the 14 talks to Wall Street and hedge funds.

Bernie, you need to channel Heisenberg like you did in the debate last Wednesday.  Take it to her. No more Mr. Nice Guy.

Hillary Clinton has the email server scandal hanging over her head. Related to this, she also has the scandal concerning whether she shaped policies as Secretary of States to favor major donors to the Clinton Foundation, donors like Saudi Arabia, the country that beheads dissidents like other people floss their teeth.

Either of these could end her campaign and put her in legal hot water, but no one really knows how they will pan out. At any rate, they feed the widely held view that Hillary Clinton lacks integrity and principle, Not good for her.

Bernie Sanders has wisely stayed away from campaigning on these issues. Leave that sort of sewer campaigning and reckless speculation to the Republicans.

Instead Bernie has wisely discussed Hillary’s corruption when it pertains directly to the core policy issues of the 2016 election. He has emphasized her three private talks to Goldman Sachs that put $675,000 into her personal bank account during the period she was informally planning to run for president in 2013-14. Since both candidates are emphasizing to voters their commitment to taming wall Street, Sanders has demanded that Hillary show the transcripts to these private talks with the public. That way we can see what, exactly, she is telling the pooh-bahs at Goldman Sachs when no one else is listening.

Hillary refuses to release the transcripts, which are in her possession, and has concocted a variety of absurd and idiotic defenses that rank far below “the dog ate my homework” in the lexicon of lame excuses. It is obvious that she thinks the release of these transcripts would do grave damage to her campaign, and perhaps end it. Even the generally pro-Clinton New York Times has editorialized that Hillary should release these Goldman Sachs transcripts.

But here is the interesting thing: Those three Goldman Sachs talks that put $675,000 into her personal bank account were just the tip of the iceberg. Bernie has much more material to work with, the extent of Hillary’s corporate speaking is considerably greater, and considerably sleazier.

Hillary did at least 91 talks, each for a minimum fee of $100,000, to corporations, trade associations and a handful of nonprofit groups from January 2013 to April 2015. The total amount of money that Hillary raised doing these 91 private talks was $21.7 million, averaging around $225,000 a pop. This money did not go to her presidential campaign fund. It did not go to one of her Wall Street SuperPACS. No, it went directly into her personal bank account. These talks made her a spectacularly wealthy woman.

In short, Hillary revived the lost art of getting a direct personal payoff from the very corporate interests that have a clear stake in the policies and regulations she would pursue once she became president.

Thanks to my nephew Jed McChesney—the guy who produced this — we now have a sortable chart that lists all 91 corporate talks, their dates and location, and the amount Hillary pocketed to her personal bank account for doing them. Some of these talks did not even require her to travel—she skyped them in.

Go through this list. Look at the companies that hired Hillary for a talk and what they paid her. These are almost all giant companies with massive lobbying armies and campaign donations associated with them. They have a lot of crucial business with the federal government. This sortable list is a moveable feast of corruption. Look up the identities of some of the groups you may not recognize. Some are massive private hedge funds. Note that Hillary got paid $1.6 million to do several talks to Canadian pro-Keystone groups.Gee I wonder what she had to say to them? That might tell us a great deal about her actual stance of environmental issues.

In fact, Bernie should demand that we see ALL these transcripts. They would give us a great deal of insight into her actual plans for the country and her actual relationship to the most powerful businesses in the country, the ones she has promised to deal with as a progressive in the interests of the people. The voters have a right to see these transcripts before they enter the voting booth.

Hillary knows this is a deadly issue for her and she has done everything in her power to pour water on the flames. Fortunately the corporate news media/NPR have shown little interest in doing any actual reporting and journalism—why do that when you can mindlessly gossip about polls and regurgitate Hillary’s talking points for a living? There have been a few good pieces—and I link to them above—but there has been precious little follow-through.

Bernie gets the blame for a lot of this. If he made these 91 talks an issue in every speech, in every debate, in every interview, he could force it into the public and media eye. He has not done so yet, happily joking about the three talks to Goldman Sachs and allowing everyone to assume that is the extent of Hillary’s corruption. If Bernie doesn’t press the issue, don’t expect the corporate media/NPR to wake up from their slumber and do anything about it beyond what little they have already.

And here is the scary part. It is not just the transcripts that are the issue. It is the very fact that she did this corporate shakedown/pay to play tour at all that reeks of corruption. This alone, even before we see the actual transcripts should eliminate her from the race.

There are six obvious questions.

First, why do these talks begin in early 2013 and end in March 2015. Why wasn’t she riding this gravy train before 2013 and after March 2015?

Answer: As Secretary of State or as an elected official it was illegal for her to do paid speaking gigs. A violation of ethics laws. That is why Senator Bernie Sanders has not done paid gigs, and the few he did for pennies were all donated to charity. In fact, January 2013 was the first time Hillary could legally do something like this in decades.

Likewise, once Hillary formally announced her candidacy for president in April 2015 she could no longer legally do paid speeches for the same reason.

Second, so Hillary wasn’t breaking the law then. What’s the big deal? Answer: If Hillary retired in January 2013 and had no plans to return to public life whatsoever, and made her sentiments loudly known, this would not be such a big deal. But everyone knew Hillary was going to run for president and that she would enter the race with a commanding lead. That is why only Bernie, O’Malley and a few eccentrics even dared to enter the race against her. One suspects corporations might have been less willing to fork out so much money to a retired Secretary of State who had no presidential prospects. Celebrity retired Secretary of State Colin Powell ranks among the best compensated speakers among retired politicians, but he did not make $21.7 million over a two-year period for doing private corporate talks. Not even close. And anyway, he is not planning to run for president. She found a loophole—she could do corporate speeches for a huge fee as long as she was not a formal “announced” candidate—and drove a Mack Truck through it and all the way to Fort Knox. Violate the letter of the law? No. Violate the spirit of the law? Absolutely.

Third, So wait, you mean to tell me that other candidates for president have not routinely gone around and made vast fortunes doing private talks to the nation’s largest corporations just before they formally announced their candidacy? Isn’t that the American Way?

Answer: No other mid-career private citizen (not covered by ethics laws) in American history has ever done anything this brazen. Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, and Walter Mondale, were all private citizens like Hillary in the years before they ran for president. None of them did a corporate speaking tour. They did lots and lots of speeches during these years, but the talks tended to be to build up their political bases, not to make themselves fabulously wealthy. Hillary Clinton is truly a pioneer and trailblazer in this area.

Fourth: Hey wait a second. Hillary has said she was not at all sure she was going to run for president after she left the State Department. You some sort of mid-reader or what?

Answer: That is one of her defenses, but it simply does not comport with the documented record. At the very least, she was seriously entertaining the idea, and if that was the case she should not have been aggressively pursuing a corporate shakedown tour. Even if we allow her to claim she was just chilling in 2013 and not thinking at all about a presidential run, by 2014 she was seriously considering the issue. That means aroud 50 of these 91 talks and more than $10 million in personal income were during the period she was not a formal candidate but extremely very seriously entertaining the idea. Hillary apparently confided in associates by the end of 2014 that she was all in for a presidential run, though she did not announce until April 2015. During the first three months of 2015 the unannounced candidate Hillary Clinton did six of these talks for around $1.5 million. That’s a nice chunk of money for a few hours work. And, oh yeah, this was when Hillary went to Canada to do three of her private talks to pro-Keystone pipeline groups for $750,000. Nice work if you can get it. (Sure would like to see those transcripts, Hillary.)

Fifth: Hillary claims the money these firms paid her for the speeches has absolutely no influence over how she would conduct herself if she were to be elected president. Therefore this is a non-issue and just mudslinging by desperate opponents.

Answer: This is a flat out lie. Ethics laws prohibit the sort of corporate speaking gigs not because they prove that a bribe for a shakedown has definitively taken place. That is almost impossible to prove, and smart corporations and smart politicians would never put themselves in a position where their fingerprints would be on the weapon.

Ethics laws prohibit the appearance of impropriety. They prohibit politicians from putting themselves in a position where there were legitimate concerns that they were being compromised. Period. That is why what Hillary did from January 2013 to March 2015 was illegal when she was Senator or Secretary of State and became illegal again when she formally announced her candidacy for president in April 2015. There is not a legal bar that once must prove these payoffs were direct bribes. Otherwise Barack Obama or any public official could do $500 million in corporate talks this year and also claim innocence just like Hillary. Good luck proving otherwise. It is simply not an acceptable proposition for a democracy to allow people to collect massive speaking fees from corporations and claim it is no problem because they have no influence over them.

Sixth: I don’t get it then. Hillary was already rich. Her husband is extremely wealthy. Why would she be so short-sighted and greedy to do something that could jeopardize her presidential campaign?

Answer: I can only imagine that Hillary gambled that times had changed, and no one would care much if she raked in a quick $21.7 million while she was informally planning her 2016 presidential run. Everyone has a SuperPAC and everyone is out to get fabulously wealthy after a career in “public service.” If someone questioned her on taking the corporate speaking gigs, she would just say “Hey, everyone else does it,” that same way she responded to Bernie Sanders’ criticism of her Wall Street funded SuperPACS: “Hey, President Obama had Wall Street funded SuperPACs, too, so if you criticize me you must be attacking him, too.”

Hillary Clinton, like all the mainstream pundits and experts, made one fatal flaw in her calculations: she did not anticipate the rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump. Two candidates running on anti-corruption platforms that refuse to have SuperPACS. If Bernie (and Trump) had not gotten in the race and become so successful, her risk might have paid off. Now she looks like she made an incredibly irresponsible and ethically challenged decision to hold these talks. According to Carl Bernstein, the White House is alarmed by the short-sighted greed Hillary displayed by doing these corporate talks. They think it could cost her the nomination.

If Bernie pursues the issue the White House may be proven right. If he does not, that delicious task will be left to the Republican nominee, who I suspect will show far less reticence about shouting about this from the mountaintops.

The evidence is in. Voter turnout is dramatically lower in the Democratic primaries in 2016 compared to 2008. This is especially true in the Republican confederate states where Hillary has won her landslide victories—states that no Democrat has won in decades and no Democrat will win in 2016. There the voting population is a dwindling few of older return voters.

It is because of Hillary’s landslide victories in these extremely low turnout, extremely low enthusiasm, extremely low information states that the entirety of the corporate news media and NPR have declared the Democratic race is over, and Hillary is the people’s choice. The people have spoken, and it is only a matter of time until Bernie Sanders acknowledges the truth that the vast majority of prospective Democratic voters are clamoring for Hillary. He is a loser.

This is pure propaganda, encouraged by the Hillary camp and dutifully parroted by the corporate news media/NPR.

Low Democratic primary and caucus turnout compared to 2008—not to mention all other major democracies– is true pretty much across the board. It is not an accident. It tends to be greatest in those states where Hillary gets her landslides. Hillary’s team sees that roughly 7 in 10 first-time voters in the 2016 Democratic primaries and caucuses are voting for Bernie. Their solution: minimize the number of first-time voters.

Had Hillary been unopposed, or opposed by a mainstream corporate Democrat, the DNC would likely have been working on registering and activating millions of young people, and people of color, to get them to the polls in November. Then Hillary could play the role of progressive, and few would care about her corruption, duplicity and obedience to Wall Street, because there would be no other game in town.

But because Bernie is in the race, and because Bernie gets most of the new voters in the primaries, by a wide margin, Hillary and the DNC have all but suspended any encouragement of voter registration and participation in the process. The less people know, the less they participate, the more likely Hillary’s nomination.

And, ironically, with far fewer engaged and activated new voters, the more likely her defeat in November. The big money people bankrolling Hillary and party officials are finally waking up to the immense problem they have created and accentuated to get Hillary the nomination. Now that elites are waking up to the problem, elite news media are paying attention. Nick Confessore lays it out in asuperb piece in today’s New York Times.

How did Hillary and the DNC depress turnout? First, Hillary and the DNC are perfectly content to have the corporate news media/NPR provide as little coverage as possible about the Democratic race. Have fewer debates. The less coverage of Sanders there is, the more difficult it will be for him to get votes, because most voters still know little or nothing about him.

The research done shows the Republican race has gotten far more coverage than the Democratic race by orders of magnitude. Even MSDNC, the “liberal” pro-Democratic network, has spent endless hours discussing the minutiae of the Republican presidential race in 2015-16. Obscure candidates have received relatively lavish attention, and Trump has been an obsession since before his poll numbers spiked. The ratio of Trump coverage to Bernie coverage across all media has been stunning.

In addition to minimizing debates, Hillary minimizes coverage of Bernie and the Democratic campaign by doing very little public campaigning compared to Bernie. While he does one or two major rallies to many thousands of people every day, she does very few public events, and the ones she does are controlled, with small turnouts, insipid and uninspired. Much of her time is spent doing private fundraisers with the 1 percent crowd or photo ops with African-American ministers or gun violence victims on her way to a fundraiser with the hedgefund billionaire crowd.

Because Hillary is content to have little news coverage of her campaign, the corporate news media/NPR do much less coverage of Bernie. He is only covered in the context of what Hillary does and what Hillary’s team is accusing him of. If Hillary does events that get coverage then, maybe, corporate media would say “Hey let’s see what Sanders is doing.” But it Hillary is silent, Bernie is pretty much out of luck.

So here we have one of the greatest political stories in a generation if not longer in American presidential politics—a maverick democratic socialist Senator taking on the establishment and getting astronomical and historically unprecedented support, especially from young people—and it is basically of no particular interest to our corporate news media/NPR. For that reason Bernie’s degree of difficulty is exponentially higher than that faced by Obama in 2008, when Keith Olbermann and MSNBC gave him extensive and sympathetic daily coverage. They knew they were covering history in the making and they were determined to be part of it. Every day they dissected and debunked Hillary’s inane charges against Obama. It was crucial to Obama’s success. This year, MSDNC amplifies the baseless charges, and its coverage of the Democratic race seems to be derived from a daily review of talking points delivered to MSDNC (and the corporate news media/NPR) by the Hillary campaign HQ.

This time, they are content to be on the wrong side of history it seems. The difference? Obama, for all that was attractive about him, was an establishment guy with big money support. Sanders is the real deal.

If this “repress the turnout’ strategy works to get the nomination for Hillary, it will cover up the fact the she is a uniquely disliked and unpopular candidate. The only way Democrats win presidential races is with relatively high turnout. Period. That is why Obama won a landslide in 2008 and a victory in 2012. As Confessore points out, without a surge in turnout by young voters and the dispossessed, the Democrats will fare like John Kerry in 2004.

Bottom line—Bernie’s analysis of the importance of voter turnout jumps out. His entire political revolution is based on the idea of radically expanding voter turnout and citizen participation—the exact opposite of what Hillary and the DNC are doing. Bernie is the strongest candidate to win in November. Hillary is a very weak candidate—especially against a candidate like Trump who can exploit her weaknesses like no other Republican– and it is becoming increasingly difficult to see how she can win in November. And if she does, the race will be so negative and with such low turnout it will be hard to see how she could ever govern effectively.

At some point some of these Democratic superdelegate elected officials are going to wake up and say, “My God, what have I done?”Many of them could be printing up their resumes after the November election as well, and see the Republican Party controlling all branches of government.

This is still our nomination to win. Every day the case for Hillary gets weaker and weaker. That is why she and the DNC and corporate media are trying to give Sanders the bum’s rush to get him out of the campaign ASAP. We have to make it through March 15 in one piece. If we do, the chances are good that we are looking at President Sanders come January 20, 2017. So treat the next 12 days like everything depends on what happens in the next 12 days. Because that is true. Donate as much as humanly possible right now. Volunteer. Whatever is possible.