So why would Planned Parenthood, Human Rights Campaign and NARAL Pro-Choice America endorse Clinton? Why wouldn’t they just sit on the fence until the general election? “If you have 100 percent Planned Parenthood voting record, 100 percent pro-choice voting record, there are people who are asking, why is the leadership not either supporting Bernie Sanders or why are they, you know, opposing him?” Sanders asked Monday night. What more do they want from him?

Good question, and NARAL had an answer. “Senator Sanders once again highlighted the difference between an ally and a champion,” Kaylie Hanson, NARAL Pro-Choice America National Communications Director, said in a statement about the Town Hall. “His voting record is sufficient, but it doesn’t make him a champion for women. That champion is Hillary.” Cecile Richards has echoed that sentiment: “We have a lot of friends in Congress, but we have one true champion,” she said.

Clinton has championed abortion rights as central theme of her campaign to be the first woman president, while the Sanders campaign has been largely focused on fixing systemic income inequality and campaign finance reform, sometimes at the expense of other priorities. “Once you get off of the social issues—abortion, gay rights, guns—and into the economic issues,” he told Rolling Stone last year, “there is a lot more agreement than the pundits understand.”

That quote—offered early in the campaign—has been widely interpreted to suggest that Sanders has ranked his political priorities, and that “social issues” like abortion could take a backseat in the Bernie revolution. “We can’t afford a Democratic nominee for president who treats abortion rights like an afterthought,” wrote Emily’s List president Stephanie Schriock on Friday. She went on to accuse Sanders of treating reproductive rights like “extra credit,” and noted that Sanders doesn’t mention anything about abortion, contraception, or reproductive care anywhere in his entire health plan.

Former Sec. Clinton was asked how voters can be sure that income inequality will be a top priority for her. She talked about her decades of fighting for equality in all areas. She said, “I have a really long history of taking on all inequality.” One thing that is becoming clear is a lot of younger voters might not be familiar with Clinton and her record.

Her next question was a foreign policy question that asked where she stood on a scale from 1-10 on military intervention. She said that she thinks it is imperative to avoid military action, which should only be used as a last resort, not a first choice. Clinton repeated her promise of no American ground forces in Syria and Iraq. Speaking of Iraq, Clinton said that he has more of record of judgement than one vote on the war in Iraq. She repeated for roughly the billionth time that her vote for the Iraq war was a mistake.

...
Clinton was played Bernie Sanders’ America ad. She responded that she loved it. Clinton said that you in campaign poetry and govern in prose. She said we need more poetry like the Sanders ad.

Former Sec. Clinton was asked which former president inspired her most, and she answered Abraham Lincoln.

Hillary Clinton’s performance at the CNN Town Hall was nothing less than presidential level. Clinton was intelligent, passionate, and it was clear that there is not another candidate in this race that possesses her level of knowledge.

Chomsky, who lives in the blue state of Massachusetts, said he would vote for Clinton if he lived in a swing state such as Ohio.
Story Continued Below

“Oh absolutely…my vote would be against the Republican candidate,” Chomsky told Al Jazeera English’s Mehdi Hasan in a two-part interview — part of which will air Friday on “UpFront.”

Chomsky cited “enormous differences” between the two major political parties. “Every Republican candidate is either a climate change denier or a skeptic who says we can’t do it,” Chomsky said. “What they are saying is, ‘Let’s destroy the world.’ Is that worth voting against? Yeah.”

The MIT academic, a self-described libertarian socialist, called Sanders “a New Dealer” rather than a “socialist,” and praised him overall but offered a grim view for his campaign.

Hillary Clinton, trailing Bernie Sanders in the polls here just weeks from the first-in-the-nation primary, sought to woo voters with promises to battle for the middle class — and reminders of her experience and the achievements of her husband Bill’s administration.
...
She also aligned herself closely with President Obama, praising him for facing a “recalcitrant, obstructionist Congress.”

Crowds waited for hours in the frigid temps to enter packed venues full of both loyal Clinton supporters and undecided voters.

Some said the Vermont senator has noble goals, but his experience pales in comparison to Clinton’s.

And in 2016, the relentless focus on Clinton’s appeals to women, from Lena Dunham and Demi Lovato headliners in Iowa to a Planned Parenthood’s endorsement in New Hampshire, often ignores the fact many women simply like Clinton.

She has fans, and not just women who want a woman president, or who generally support women candidates, or voters who see her as the best shot to keep a Democrat in the White House. She has real, honest-to-goodness, dyed-in-the-wool supporters who don’t just want Clinton to win the White House, but fully expect she will. And they adore her.
...
At a Naral event in Concord, Lynne Snierson, from Salem, New Hampshire, said: “I realize that younger women don’t necessarily connect with this, but for those of us who fought in the vanguard of the feminist movement in the 60s, the thought of a woman president resonates really deeply.”

“I’m 63,” she explained, “I was obviously born in 1952 and I understand that when I was a young woman, the thought of a woman being president was pie in the sky.”

Before knocking on doors, volunteers were shocked Clinton visited a canvassing kick-off event.

“I was excited to door knock before this, but I'm even more excited now,” canvasser Kerry O’Brien said.

Dozens of volunteers were door knocking in Exeter.

“It was really exciting to me,” canvasser Jackealena Peguero said. “I didn't know that she would be here.”

Clinton told supporters that there is a lot of work to do but she’s confident she can win New Hampshire.

The paper’s endorsement is credited for greatly improving the fortunes of 2004 Iowa runner-up John Edwards, but most of these candidates haven’t gotten anything like the Edwards bounce. The average post-endorsement bump has been a statistically insignificant 3 percentage points. That’s less than the 8-percentage-point bounce candidates have earned in New Hampshire after locking up an endorsement from the New Hampshire Union Leader. We can also see that both Bob Dole in 1996 and George W. Bush in 2000 lost more than 5 percentage points after being endorsed by the Des Moines Register.

That’s not to say the paper’s endorsement is meaningless. For one, it may hold more sway for Democrats than for Republicans. All four of the Democrats who have gotten the endorsement have done better than projected, compared with three of the five Republicans. And this year it wouldn’t be surprising, for instance, if the Des Moines Register’s decision not to endorse Donald Trump doesn’t affect his fortunes too much given that the paper already called on him to drop out of the race.

The Des Moines Register is the largest paper in the state. Even if newspaper circulations are down and most people aren’t going to be swayed by an editorial page endorsement, it could help drive news coverage for days. Most important, both the Democratic and Republican races right now are very tight. Even though Rubio probably won’t receive enough of a boost to win the Republican caucuses in Iowa, the endorsement could help him finish higher there, in turn helping him in the fight to win the title of “top establishment candidate” in the GOP race. Clinton could be put over the top, however, even if she receives only the 1.1 percentage point bounce she got after the paper’s endorsement of her in 2008.

Most of this is nothing but a whole lot of hype, with Iowa and New Hampshire easily being the two most hyped states of the entire process. Candidates literally spend months in these states gearing up for these first two presidential primary elections.

Except, it’s mostly pointless.

You see, in the grand scheme of things, these two states have very specific and unique voting demographics that are terrible representations of the American population as a whole. Which means they’re fairly poor predictors as to what the rest of the country thinks about a candidate.

Krugman asks the right question to advocates of Big Change: How, exactly, is it supposed to occur? Progressives certainly do not want more "bipartisan compromises" than Obama contemplated, and for years Republicans have embraced super-lobbyist Grover Norquist's cynical comparison of bipartisanship to date rape.

One idea, of course, is that inspired by the concept of the "Overton Window": that you can move the range of acceptable policies and thus the center of discussion by opening the bidding on any given topic with a more radical proposal. To use the most common example, Democrats might have gotten a more progressive health-care law enacted in 2010 if they had first proposed a single-payer system instead of a private system with a public option. The trouble with that example is that it was Democratic senators, not Republicans, who opposed the public option, the Medicare buy-in, and other progressive twists on Obamacare. With Republicans opposing any action at all, that's all it took. Now some left-bent folks would say this shows why "centrist" Democrats need to be removed from the party. But that takes time, and as 2006 showed, even a primary loss cannot necessarily remove a Joe Lieberman from office.

Another thing you hear from Bernie Sanders himself is that the political system is fundamentally corrupt, and that progressive change can only become possible if the moneylenders are thrown out of the temple via thoroughgoing campaign finance reform. But that will require either a constitutional amendment — the most implausible route for change — or replacement of Supreme Court justices, the slowest.

And then, as Krugman himself notes, there are "hidden majority" theories that hold that "bold" proposals can mobilize vast majorities of Americans to support radical action and break down gridlock. Few are as easy to explode as Ted Cruz's "54 million missing Evangelicals" hypothesis, but the belief of some Sanders supporters that Trump voters (and many millions of nonvoters) would gravitate to Bernie in a general election is not far behind as the product of a fantasy factory.

Here are three scenes from the history of slavery in North America. In 1637, a group of Pequot Indians, men and boys, having risen up against English colonists in Connecticut and been defeated, were sold to plantations in the West Indies in exchange for African slaves, allowing the colonists to remove a resistant element from their midst. (The tribe’s women were pressed into service in white homes in New England, where domestic workers were sorely lacking.) In 1741, an 800-foot-long coffle of recently enslaved Sioux Indians, procured by a group of Cree, Assiniboine, and Monsoni warriors, arrived in Montreal, ready for sale to French colonists hungry for domestic and agricultural labor. And in 1837, Cherokee Joseph Vann, expelled from his land in Georgia during the era of Indian removal, took at least 48 enslaved black people along with him to Indian Territory. By the 1840s, Vann was said to have owned hundreds of enslaved black laborers, as well as racehorses and a side-wheeler steamboat.

A reductive view of the American past might note two major, centuries-long historical sins: the enslavement of stolen Africans and the displacement of Native Americans. In recent years, a new wave of historians of American slavery has been directing attention to the ways these sins overlapped. The stories they have uncovered throw African slavery—still the narrative that dominates our national memory—into a different light, revealing that the seeds of that system were sown in earlier attempts to exploit Native labor. The record of Native enslavement also shows how the white desire to put workers in bondage intensified the chaos of contact, disrupting intertribal politics and creating uncertainty and instability among people already struggling to adapt to a radically new balance of power.