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It happens every four years: Iranian go to the polls, over-eager analysts get caught up in the horse race, and journalists fall into the trap of exaggerating differences between the candidates to coincide more with the Western notion liberal-conservative divide than with the differences permissible in the Iranian political sphere. Throw into the mix blind acceptance of Iranian statistics with regard to participation and a conflation of reporting from the capital Tehran with events throughout a country six times the size of Great Britain and the analytical malpractice is complete.

Voters cast their ballots during the presidential election in a Jewish and Christian district in the center of Tehran, Iran, May 19, 2017. TIMA via REUTERS.

Look at the big picture:

First, the elections arent an outlet for the Iranian people to change society; they are a means for the Supreme Leader, like a master marionette, to shuffle around the factions in power to keep any single group from growing too powerful.

Second, Westerners should not project terms like reformism, liberalism, and conservatism upon Iranian politicians. Firstly, just because one figureEbrahim Raisi, for exampleis hardline does not mean that his opponent, Hassan Rouhani, is liberal, reformist, or even moderate unless, of course, liberalism and moderation mean commitment to the destruction of Israel, support for Hezbollah, continued gender segregation, repression of religious freedom, and commitment to the export of revolution. Likewise, many of the so-called conservatives actually embrace an economic philosophy more akin to socialism than to free market capitalism.

The simple facts are these: Irans elections are more about style than substance. The president doesnt have control over key policies or the security forces. The presence of factions does not mean the divisions between factions are significant. To get caught up in election fever risks playing into Irans good cop-bad cop strategy, an Iranian tactic which for too long has allowed them to advance their interests with impunity.

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Stop looking for liberals in Iran's elections - American Enterprise Institute

Traditional liberal strongholds teamed up with the growing progressive class of greater Center City in Philadelphias primary election Tuesday to give Larry Krasner and Rebecca Rhynhart impressive victories in the races for district attorney and controller.

Twenty-nine of the top 30 divisions with the highest voter turnout are in Northwest Philadelphia, Center City, and West Philadelphia, according to data analyzed by NBC10.

When compared to a map of results(courtesy of local mapmaker Wes Weaver)in the district attorneys race, the high-turnout neighborhoods line up with those that voted for Krasner for district attorney. He is a defense attorney with no prosecutorial experience who is expected to upend the culture in the DAs office.

The high-turnout locations also help explain how Rhynhart, a former city budget official, easily -- and surprisingly -- beat Alan Butkovitz, a three-term controller and longtime Democratic Party machine leader in the city.

Rhynhart, 42, was a favorite of the citys rising progressive political class, with many calling Center City home.

The neighborhoods that favored her greatly out-voted those that have traditionally favored Butkovitz in the Northeast and South Philadelphia.

When it comes to turnout, the power wards of Northwest Philadelphia once again showed their strength. Numerous divisions in the Ninth, 21st and 22nd wards turned out at more than 35 percent, according to the data provided by the City Commissioners Office.

That compares to an overall city turnout of 17 percent. All the figures are preliminary until the commissioners certify the results, which will take place in the next three weeks.

In addition to the Northwest and the growing influence of downtown progressives (who live in the Second, Fifth, Eighth, 15th and 30th wards), one ward in West Philadelphia also proved consequential on Election Day.

The 46th ward covers much of the neighborhoods north of Baltimore Avenue from 45th to 58th streets as well as south of Baltimore and west of Clark Park.

The highest total votes cast for a single division in the city was 446 in the 46th wards 17th division, which encompasses the Cedar Park neighborhood. Turnout was 44 percent.

Ryan Godfrey, a polling place inspector for the division, marveled at the high number of voters on Election Day. The makeup of the neighborhood mirrors the results in the citys two biggest races.

This is a super activist community, he said. Were in Cedar Park and theres lots of people interested in politics and the local politics especially.

He said his neighborhood doesnt need a political machine apparatus to get out the vote.

With the end near for Butkovitz, who is symbolic of Philadelphias old guard, the entire city this week took a step in that direction.

Below is the list of the 30 divisions in Philadelphia by most votes cast in the 2017 primary election:

Published at 2:52 PM EDT on May 18, 2017 | Updated at 8:24 AM EDT on May 19, 2017

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Liberals, Progressives Beat Up Philadelphia's Party Machine on Election Day - NBC 10 Philadelphia

A new Forum Research poll shows the Ontario Liberals have crept up in popularity. They are now just ahead of the NDP. Both are still far behind the Tories. Queen's Park analyst Robert Fisher talks about what might be behind the latest jump in pubic support for Kathleen Wynne's Ontario Liberal party.

Fisher spoke with theCBC'sConradCollacoabout the new poll and the decision by Ontario NDP Deputy Leader Jagmeet Singh to run for the leadership of the federal party to replace Tom Mulcair.Listen to the full interview by clicking the image at the top of the page, or read an edited and abridged transcript below.

Veteran political analyst Robert Fisher delivers his insights into Ontario politics every two weeks. (CBC)

AForum Research poll done May 9thfound the Conservatives in the lead with 41 percent support, followed by the Liberals at 28 and the NDP at 23.It was a change from a March poll that showed the Liberalsin third place.Why do you think the Liberals have rebounded?

It's a snapshot in time. If they were to take a poll today who knows what the numbers might be. Considering the timing of the poll, taken right after the budget, you must say the numbers must in some way reflect the budget. The poll found that there was "major support" for the Liberal pharmacare plan and for the expansion of rent control. These numbers are a long way away from the numbers in the Forum March poll. The question now is can the government continue what appears to be upward movement. Even senior Liberals will acknowledge privately that there is a long, hard road back to the top for Kathleen Wynne.

This week at Queen's Park news came of a leaked report saying rates will skyrocket in 2022.The Liberals say it's an old document.NDP Leader AndreaHorwathcalled for the legislature to sit for an extra week to address the issue. Why are we still waiting for the Liberals to pass the cut in hydro rates they've been promising for months?

If you have a majority government you can do what you want. Earlier in the week the budget was passed. The government used its majority. They could do the same with hydro. There will be more public hearings next week on hydro and maybe the whole plan is not yet put together. The opposition asked and asked and asked all weekfor cost numbers on the hydro plan but they were never delivered while the governmentdenied the numbers in the leaked report.

At some point the hydro plan is going to be in place because the government is absolutely committed to having a 24 percent rate cut in place by thesummer. If you're Kathleen Wynne and have a 15 percent approval rating it's a promise you'd better keep.

If this legislation doesn't get passed before the summer breakwill the Liberals pay for that delay?

Yes and no. At some point the government will pass it. Andrea Horwath tried and failed to get the legislature to sit an extra week. It's not that the opposition is against cutting rates. The opposition has long called for rate cuts. They are concernedthat if we have a cut now what will happen after the next election, say four years from now after the next election.The public hearings will answer some questions and the government will provide more details at some point but ultimately the plan will go ahead.

How are the party leaders doing in the polls?

For the Liberalsthe long road back to the top includes dealing with Kathleen Wynne'spopularity. At 15 percent approval that's a problem when we are about a year from an election. The disapproval of Kathleen Wynneis at 70 percent, sort of historic highs. Patrick Brown and Andrea Horwath have more positives than negatives. They are pretty close together in the category of who would make the best premier.The poll also indicates that both are still, for many people in Ontario, largely unknown. They have some work to do.

In partial defence of the two opposition leaders historically Ontarians don't pay a lot of attention to provincial politics between elections. While Ms. Horwath has been around for a long time it would be a concern to both parties thatthere is a lack of identifiability particularly for Patrick Brown. Lots of work for them to do between now and June 2018.

One other change at Queen's Park this week was the announcement by now former NDP deputy leader Jagmeet Singh that he's running for the federal NDP leadership.How do you see that affecting the provincial NDP?

I don't see this as Mr. Singh abandoning Andrea Horwath in her hour of need. He had flirted with the federal party before. In 2015 there was a lot of talk he would be a candidate. Instead he stayed at Queen's Park and was offered and accepted a role as deputy leader.He's going to keep his seat as an MPP for Bramalea-Gore-Maltonand should he fail I've been told he'll run provincially. If Ms. Horwath fails to bring her party at least to official opposition in the next election she is probably going to be history. Guess who will be there to seek the provincial party leadership. None other than JagmeetSingh. He's collected many IOU's, politically speaking, in Ontario and other provinces as well. He thinks long range and maybe he's got his eyes on the first prize in Ottawa and prize 1A at Queen's Park.

He has already affected the federal race in that he is a candidate who is very different from the others who are there including wearing the turban, the custom-made suits, the appearance in Gentleman's Quarterly Magazine not too many New Democrat candidates appear in Gentleman's Quarterly Magazine.

Mr Singh is very interesting guy. He is fluently bilingual. My Francophone friends tell me his French is more than passable. He campaigned for the NDP in Alberta and in the last B.C. election. He's well known in Ontario in his role as deputy leader. He's going to make a difference in the campaign. He might not win but he'll raise his profile.

Another interesting note on his resume He's a trained mixed-marital arts fighter in Brazilian jiu-jitsuas well...

Yes. He'dbe up against the boxer in Justin Trudeau. Boxing over jiu-jitsu or jiu-jitsu over boxing? Nevertheless, he's all of that and more. That makes him an interesting and unique candidate in any race he's in.

Jagmeet Singh is a lawyer and deputy leader of the Ontario NDP. He speaks French and Punjabi and has represented a Brampton riding in the provincial legislature since 2011. (Mike Crawley/CBC)

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Guess who's back Liberals rise in latest Ontario politics poll: Fisher - CBC.ca

The on-again, off-again threat from the White House to shatter the Affordable Care Act appeared to be on again Friday, as Politico reported that President Trump told aides in a Tuesday Oval Office meeting that he wants to end subsidies for people who buy health insurance on the state and federal exchanges.

The theory is audacious: Despite marking his fourth month in office, and despite the control his party holds over Congress, the plan from the president, party leaders and Republican campaign groups is to blame any increase on premiums on the Democrats. But so far, Republicans have stayed on message and Democrats have struggled to draw attention to tremors in the insurance market that can be traced to the White Houses shaky management.

Its very clear that President Trump and Republicans here in Congress are not interested in improving the exchanges, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-Md.) said at a news conference this week. President Trump said, The best thing, politically, is to let Obamacare explode. Heres the thing: Theyve been doing the detonating from Day One.

At issue are several vital components of the ACA, and the response of insurers to the White Houses on/off signaling. In his first week as president, Trump signed an executive order neutering the individual mandate, absolving the IRS from trying to collect a penalty from people who declined to buy insurance. The White House also briefly canceled advertising ahead of the ACAs winter enrollment period analysts argued that the decision cut down on new enrollees, even after the advertising started up again.

But the subsidies fight has always been seen by Republicans as a way to make the ACA unaffordable, thereby kick-starting the death spiral that the current funding system prevents. Out of power, Republicans sued to stop the subsidies, arguing that they were illegally paid out because Congress had not specifically appropriated the money that the Obama administration was distributing. Today, the subsidies could be stopped by that lawsuits success or by the presidents decision.

The wrinkle: Republicans are portraying any market failure not as a result of their management but as the basic ACA structure self-destructing. When the American Health Care Act was resurrected, House Speaker Paul D. Ryan (R-Wis.) led Republicans in citing the decision of Medica to pull out of Iowas exchange as proof of the ACAs collapse.

Iowa is down to one insurer, Ryan said. Now that one insurer is saying that it will have to pull out of 94 of 99 counties. This is happening right now! This is a crisis, and it is happening right now!

In an interview with The Washington Post before the vote, Medica Vice President Geoff Bartsh cited the uncertainty over the governments commitment to the ACA as unknown risks influencing the companys decision. Yet since their push for repeal began in January, Republicans have talked about a rescue mission, portraying any market failures as inevitable. The urgency to pass the bill which does not provide subsidies to people on the exchanges is packaged as a response to the natural progress of the ACA.

Whatever they do, they need to act, because more people are losing their health care, premiums are continuing to rise, said House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) in a Fox News interview this week, referring to the Senate.

Not for the first time, the two parties are engaged in political messaging that assume alternative realities. Democrats clutch to polling that has universallyfound voters readyto blame Trump and Republicans if the health-care system spins out of control. In a Kaiser poll released last month, three-quarters of all voters including 51 percent of Republicans said that the president and Congress should make sure the current law works. A majority of Democrats and independents said that any further problems would be the fault of Republicans.

Yet in that poll, just 34 percent of Republicans said that health insurance setbacks, such as higher premiums, would be the fault of Trump and Congress. Republican messaging plays not to the skeptics but to the base and to a sense that Democrats would be hypocrites if they blamed anyone but themselves for a staggering ACA.

Last year, Democrats blamed the insurance companies. Now, theyre blaming Republicans, wrote Republican Nationial Committee rapid-response director Michael Ahrens in a Friday email to reporters. Not surprisingly, no one is buying it.

That messaging email, however,provided just three pieces of evidence. Two were CNN interviews in which Democrats were reminded that insurers were leaving before Trump won. One was a 2016 campaign clip of NBC reporting on higher premiums posing a risk for Democrats.

The rest is here:
Democrats accuse White House of causing ACA tremors, then shifting blame - Washington Post

Democrats also need to beef up their foreign-policy analyses.

Senators Elizabeth Warren and Cory Booker. (Olivier Douliery / Abacapress.com; Charles Sykes / AP Photo)

The Center for American Progress, the Democratic establishments premier think tank, gathered luminaries and potential 2020 candidates this week for what it billed as an ideas conference. Their goal was to focus not what could have been, as CAP Vice President Winnie Stachelberg said, but on new, fresh, bold, provocative ideas that can move us forward.

In the basement of Georgetowns Four Seasons Hotel, the posh watering hole for Washington lobbyists, lawyers, and visiting wealth, the conference was at turns a debate about the future, and a demonstration of the difficulty in talking about a positive agenda when Trump looms over everything.

Virtually every speaker dutifully invoked the theme of the day: Resistance is not enough; Democrats must propose what they are for. Each then proceeded to rail at one Trump folly or another, and called on progressives to join in defending what was achieved over the last eight years.

There was a vigorous competition on who had the best Trump putdown. Instead of the sign on Harry Trumans desk that read The buck stops here, Senator Cory Booker offered, Trumps should read The ruble stops here.

Do you get the feeling that if Bernie Madoff werent in prison, Elizabeth Warren said, hed be in charge of the SEC right now? Representative Maxine Waters topped them all by calling for Trumps impeachment: We dont have to think impeachment is out of our reach, she said.

The first sessions of the day on the economy revealed that Bernie Sanderss agenda is gaining ground among mainstream Democrats. Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti described his success in passing a $15 minimum wage, a large infrastructure program, and tuition-free community college. Senator Jeff Merkley, the sole senator to support Sanders in 2016, indicted the trade and tax policies that give companies incentives to move jobs abroad, and called for major investments in infrastructure, renewable energy, and education. Medicare for All still appeared to be off the table, however, with most speakers focused on defending Obamacare against the Republican assault.

Senator Elizabeth Warren used her presentation to present a broader argument for Democrats. She argued that concentrated money and concentrated power were corrupting our democracy, and noted that Trump did not invent these problems. On concentrated money, she argued not simply for overturning Citizens United and moving to publicly financed elections but also for taking on the revolving door between Wall Street and giant companies and government, the bought and paid for policy experts, and the armies of lobbyists that distort our politics. She also argued for picking up the anti-trust stick to break up monopolies and the big banks, and revive competitive markets.

Investor and environmentalist Tom Steyer, one of the Democrats billionaire benefactors, provided a clear agenda for addressing catastrophic climate change, as well as savvy advice on the coalition needed to bring reform about. Since Republicans are hopeless and business wont lead, Steyer called for building a coalition around a green-jobs agenda that offers jobs that pay a decent wage, reaching out to labor, people of color, and businesses that will gain in the transition in a bold plan to rebuild the country.

The foreign-policy discussion, in contrast, was virtually bereft of new ideas or serious analysis. The United States is mired in wars without end and without victory. Its war on terror has succeeded in spreading violence and minting terrorists. Its humanitarian intervention in Libya has produced a failed state. Its globalization strategy has been devastating to Americas working class. Were facing rising tensions with both Russia and China. Both parties are pushing for spending more on the Pentagon, which already consumes 40 percent of global military spending. The clear and present danger of climate change doesnt get suitable action, but we can commit $1 trillion to a new generation of nuclear weapons.

THE STAKES ARE HIGHER NOW THAN EVER. GET THE NATION IN YOUR INBOX.

Surely progressives ought to be at least considering a fundamental reassessment. Instead, Susan Rice, Obamas former national security advisor, offered platitudes. She called for the US to sustain its mantle of global leadership. Instead of Trumps vow to bomb the (bleep) out of ISIS, we should use our full arsenal. She called for a balanced approach, including strong defense (able to respond to any threat at a moments notice), skillful diplomacy, smart development and domestic strength.

On the foreign-policy panel, Senator Chris Murphy, who is seen as a leader of progressive foreign-policy thinking, criticized Trumps foreign policy by improvisation and delivered a strong defense of diplomacy and the State Department. Bizarrely, with the US headed into its sixteenth year of war in Afghanistan, the only mention of the debacle came tangentially from Representative Adam Schiff, who invoked disgraced former General David Petraeus on the importance of US aid in building a competent government in Afghanistan. Apparently pouring over $100 billion in that feckless effort is not yet enough.

The national press treated the event as an early audition of potential 2020 presidential contenders. Senators Kirstin Gillibrand laid out her national paid family leave plan. Senator Kamala Harris took apart Attorney General Jeff Sessions revival of the failed war on drugs. Virginia Governor McAuliffe warned about gerrymandering and the importance of winning gubernatorial races before the 2020 census and state-level redistricting. But Senator Merkley and Representative Keith Ellison, the only Sanders supporters present, were placed on panels, and Sanders wasnt even invited.

The most interesting contrast was between Warren and Senator Cory Booker, who were both given star turns. Warren was full of fire and brimstone, while using her speech to put forth a clear analysis and reform agenda that pushed the limits of the Democratic debate. Booker closed the conference with a passionate address, invoking the progressive movements that have transformed America, concluding that Democrats cant merely be the party of resistance, but must reaffirm Americas impossible dream. It was a speech brutal on Trump, replete with good values, sound goals and uplifting oratory, and unfortunately devoid of concrete ideas.

Read more from the original source:
How Can Democrats Form an Agenda When Trump Looms Over Everything? - The Nation.