95 North. . . The Newspaper

In Shattered: Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign , author Jonathan Allen presents a highly readable and compelling political narrative underlining the myriad of deficiencies in Hillary Clinton's 2016 Presidential campaign. Allen places much of the blame for Clinton's loss on the shoulders of millennial big-data champion Robby Mook. Accordingly, the larger lesson here suggests that the overuse of analytics and big data over gut, human instinct, and common sense can lead to utter failure. You can't poll-test everything. Mook wanted to put in place a "strategy" to show the American public the real Hillary Clinton. When it is called a strategy, well, it rings hollow. Authenticity can't be contrived. There is still place in the world for business, government, and other organizations to construct visions and act effectively without reducing human beings en masse to a collection of data points that can be sold and tossed around by the elites. Clinton...

Should an American political party have a truly democratic nominating process? Or should party insiders and bosses select candidates? It seems to be not only fairly obvious that a democratic nominating practice not only produces a strong candidate in a general election, but would be the ethically sound, democratic, and fair thing to do. But some dark forces are arguing otherwise. Somehow,  this piece  in the New York Times argues that the process should become less democratic because "party bosses have more knowledge" of who is and isn't capable of potentially holding office.  The authors of this NYT piece claim that part of our problem is the "insistence that parties be run democratically" and that there is "real danger" in holding fair elections. Excuse me while I vomit in disgust. It's true- the Republican party has a more democratic nominating process. Reading this piece by less than admirable Democratic party members makes it clear th...