Kmkmiller: "So if primary Sanders is really president Sanders well we have a HUGE problem in 2020 and we know how long it took for the Dem brand to recover from Carter. Is 'changing the system' really so important, do you take a chance on that given that there is a proven track record of success (gay marriage raising taxes on rich) within the system. I think Bernie does look down on his fellow politicians the way Carter did."

Jimmy Carter was elected 40 years ago, arguably as a collective voter reaction to the twin traumas of Vietnam and Watergate. Conditions in the country, as they existed four decades prior, bear scant resemblance to what we face today. Bernie Sanders is no Jimmy Carter, and vice versa. Voters need to assess Sen. Sanders on his own merits and demerits.

Regarding his administrative skill set and how he might govern as chief executive, I would note that Bernie Sanders proved himself to be a very popular and capable four-term mayor of Burlington, VT, having lifted that city out of its vexing post-industrial doldrums to become the vibrant and modern community it is today. In 1987, he was named one of "America's 20 Best Mayors" by U.S. News & World Report.

But the primary reason Sanders enjoyed a successful tenure as mayor is that he was actually very pragmatic in governance, had an eye for talent, and brought on board some extraordinarily capable people to serve in his administration. And he was not at all afraid to avail himself of any opportunities which presented themselves to move the city forward.

When voters rebuffed Mayor Sanders' bond issue to support private redevelopment of the decrepit railyards fronting Lake Champlain, Sanders accepted his defeat at the polls graciously, and then filed suit against the property owners on behalf of those who had opposed him, so that those old railyards would be converted to public rather than private use.

The move surprised his onetime adversaries in the environmental community, and it proved successful when they rallied behind him. The courts found in his favor and today, Burlington's Waterfront Park is the city's most treasured public asset.

Sanders used Burlington's budget surplus not to experiment with his socialist ideals, but to repair city streets. To realize his downtown revitalization project, he worked effectively with business leaders and corporations to make it happen. To create the city's Church Street Marketplace, Sanders harnessed the process of urban renewal to redevelop the downtown core, while ensuring the preservation of both the district's historic buildings that today underscores the district's character.

In fact, for all his strident oratory about leading a socialist revolution, Mayor Sanders' policies actually proved quite beneficial to Burlington's overall business climate. To be sure, he raised taxes on them, but he used those funds to revitalize neighborhoods that would attract customers and become a friendly place to shop and conduct business.

I would suspect that those on the left who've bought into that strident oratory hook, line and sinker would likely find themselves disappointed by Sanders' obvious and pragmatic willingness to compromise. Because as mayor, his ideological purity clearly took a back seat when it came to opportunity for an actual accomplishment.

I'm supporting Hillary Clinton because I believe that she's best prepared amongst the Democratic candidates to be president. But there is absolutely no question that of all the declared candidates for the White House, Bernie Sanders is far more qualified to be chief executive by virtue of his own compelling record in Vermont, than are any of the yahoos in the GOP.

We should be proud to have two very fine candidates running for president, and make that three if you're still taking Martin O'Malley's candidacy seriously. By contrast, I wouldn't support any of the pikers presently campaigning for the GOP nomination, and wouldn't trust them if they were running for a seat on a local school board or water commission.

If she does indeed win, there will no doubt be a lot of pundits and wags who will use that victory as opportunity to dismiss the Bernie Sanders campaign as ineffective and historically unimportant.

I have never seen anyone one this here, certainly, or even in the media suggest such a thing.  Quite exactly the opposite.  Everyone here including me has gone out of their way to say exactly the opposite.  Over and over.  And the media meme is anything but that.

The poll that showed that in fact Hillary's supporters are almost 10 points more excited and enthusiastic than Bernies.

LINK

I enjoyed watching the worry from afar.  Sure, by the time that caucusers head home, there may be a few inches of snow in western Iowa.  But that will keep few home, as that does not yet a blizzard make, not to Midwesterners.  

The same anecdotal sources make me expect Sanders and Clinton to split the urban precincts, Sanders to take the college towns, and Clinton to take rural.

I am not about to google for you.
I don't know what you hope or suspect.

In my opinion, we, as a people, are in much greater danger than before.

No matter what the number, the casualties we are suffering and the casualties we are inflicting are monumental.

When Obama came in in 2008, there was a discernible sigh of relief from all corners of the globe. The Nobel people were so excited that they awarded him the Peace Prize before he had even had his breakfast.

Now, I believe that people around the globe will experience a sigh of relief when he finally retires. No matter who replaces him.

But, although you would never know it from the rhetoric or lack of it from the front-runners, I think that the American people are sick of these dumb wars and want them to end.

What I'm trying to say is that the spelling here, much worse than before is really bad, sometimes, almost unreadable.

If this app functions better than ORCA, it will help address a more fundamental issue that came to a head in the 2012 Republican caucuses, when Rick Santorum's 34-vote win was announced more than two weeks after the state GOP declared Mitt Romney the preliminary winner of Iowa (the "preliminary" part didn't get much attention in all the media coverage). And Romney's victory wasn't the only thing lost in the lengthy verification process: The votes from eight of the state's 1,774 precincts were confirmed to be lost as well. The debacle led to widespread scrutiny of the caucus process and its ability to precisely represent voters' preferences.

So the Microsoft app will fix all that? It'll probably help, but any large-scale data-gathering process will have a margin of error, and eight of 1,774 precincts represents less than half a percentage point. The new Microsoft app may help aggregate the caucus results, but those results are still reached in a decidedly 19th-century way, in which Republicans write their preferred candidate on a blank sheet of paper and Democrats play a glorified game of musical chairs (sans chairs). Under those conditions, a 99.5 percent return seems impressive.

Even beyond the caucuses, all elections have some margin of error -- the 2000 presidential election is a perfect example. In the wake of that election, then-professor of mathematical and statistical sciences at the University of Colorado at Denver William Briggs wrote, "Because of mechanical, electronic, and human errors, the actual precision of vote counting is several orders of magnitude worse than what is needed to determine an election as close as Florida's" and found that the margin of error nationwide was between 1 percent and 2 percent.