Just about every attack that
has been lobbed against Sanders thus far in the Democratic race was once hurled
against Obama.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/18834/hillary-clinton-campaign-bernie-sanders-president-obama-attacks
In the midst of a fierce
primary contest, Hillary Clinton has laid into her opponent: “I could stand up
here and say, 'Let's just get everybody together. Let's get unified. The sky
will open. The light will come down. Celestial choirs will be singing, and
everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.”
“You are not going to wave a
magic wand and have the special interests disappear,” she added.
This wasn’t Clinton in 2016
attacking her opponent, Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders, for what she and her
supporters view as his unrealistic and fantastical promises to the American
people. This was Clinton in 2008, launching a stinging,
sarcastic rebuke to her then-Democratic primary opponent, Illinois Senator
Barack Obama, and his vague pledges of “hope” and “change.”
It’s easy to forget now, but
just about every attack that has been lobbed against Sanders thus far in the
Democratic race was once hurled against Obama. Since then, however, Obama has
gone from being cast as a speechifying lightweight by Clinton to an
accomplished standard-bearer for progressivism.
The charges of blind idealism
have perhaps the clearest parallels. Liberal writers like Jonathan Chait have deemed
Sanders’ platform as having “zero chance of enactment,” while Clinton, in words
eerily similar to her 2008 speech about Obama, said
recently of Sanders, “I wish that we could elect a Democratic president who
could wave a magic wand and say, ‘We shall do this, and we shall do that.’ That
ain’t the real world we’re living in!”
“I am not interested in ideas
that sound good on paper but will never make it in real life,” she said
as the Iowa Caucuses approached this year. The speech echoed her words in 2008,
when she told a
Texas crowd that “I am in the solutions business. My opponent is in the
promises business.”
These critiques all rest on
the idea of the Clinton as the clear-headed pragmatist “who
gets things done” in comparison to idealistic and uncompromising dreamers
like Sanders and Obama. (But in contrast with Obama in 2008, Sanders actually
has an impressive
record of accomplishments in Congress and is well-versed in the kind of grimy,
incremental work involved in passing legislation.)
In 2008, the New York Times reported
Clinton’s advisers charging that Obama’s tax cuts were “unrealistic” and “would
end up forfeiting the Democrats’ hard-won reputation for fiscal discipline.”
Clinton also called
Obama “irresponsible and frankly naïve” for wanting to meet enemy leaders
without preconditions.
Both of these criticisms may
sound familiar to anyone keeping up with the present Democratic contest. Clinton
has fretted that Sanders’ single-payer health care plan would somehow
jeopardize the hard-fought Affordable Care Act, and she and one of her
advisers criticized
Sanders’ suggestion that the United States should normalize relations with
Iran, saying, “It’s pretty clear that he just hasn’t thought it through.”
Obama and Sanders have both
also faced accusations that they are more style than substance. “This other
guy’s madder than she is, and that feels authentic,” Bill Clinton recently
said about Sanders. “And besides, his slogans are easier to say.” Vox's
Matthew Yglesias has similarly
charged that “Sanders’ Wall Street plan is a slogan” and has challenged the
senator to move past mere rhetoric and offer concrete, detailed policy
proposals.
Candidate Obama, now a
hallowed progressive icon brought up by Clinton during the primary fight, faced
a barrage of identical attacks back in 2008.
Obama had “hypnotized” the media
with a “shallow
campaign slogan” and his policies lacked
specifics, pundits said. “There's a big difference between us— speeches
versus solutions, talk versus action,” Clinton said in 2008.
“Speeches don't put food on the table. Speeches don't fill up your tank or fill
your prescription or do anything about that stack of bills that keeps you up at
night.”
Sanders has also been called
unelectable by Clinton and her
supporters
for his embrace of the label “socialist,” warning that a Sanders nomination
would be a huge gift to the GOP. It’s a line of attack that candidate Obama
also had to withstand eight years ago.
Fears about Obama’s
“electability” (which some at the
time viewed as a coded reference to race) were the cornerstone
of Clinton’s campaign.
“I’ve seen a lot of elections come and go and whoever our Democratic nominee is
will be subjected to the full force and effect of the Republican attack
machine,” Clinton cautioned in
2007.
Perhaps the most contentious
attacks faced by both campaigns have been allegations of sexism and other
criticisms of the candidates’ respective supporters. In the 2016 campaign, this
has taken the form of the alleged “Bernie Bro” phenomenon, the army of
fanatical, intolerant and/or misogynistic young, male Sanders supporters who
harass anyone daring to express a pro-Clinton sentiment online.
The narrative has gained
traction despite the fact that Sanders consistently outpolls Clinton among
young women, with liberal pundit Paul Krugman repeatedly invoking
the term
to delegitimize criticism of Clinton. Most recently, in the midst of a string
of anti-Sanders attacks, Bill Clinton complained that Clinton backers have been
“subject to attacks that are literally too profane, often—not to mention
sexist—to repeat.”
Voting for a candidate based
on their supporters' actions is nonsensical. But these allegations are also
virtually identical to those launched by the Clinton camp in 2008. Obama was regularly
accused
of running
a sexist campaign, so much so that there was a notable contingent of
Clinton supporters who threatened to vote for John McCain in the general
election out of spite. Then there was 2008’s version of the “Bernie Bros”,
a spate
of stories from pro-Clinton pundits about Obama’s “creepy,” “cult-like”
supporters. As in 2016, Krugman joined
the fray, complaining that Obama’s campaign was “dangerously close to
becoming a cult of personality” and declaring that “most of the venom I see is
coming from supporters of Mr. Obama.”
The point of all this is not
to say whether these allegations are right or wrong.
Perhaps Obama and Sanders
both do over-rely on rhetoric over concrete policies. Maybe they are too
idealistic for their own good. But despite these perceived shortcomings,
the liberal establishment largely embraced Obama after the 2008 election.
Krugman himself went on to describe
Obama as “one of the most consequential and, yes, successful presidents in
American history.” It’s bizarre to see Clinton and her loyalists trumpet the
same criticisms against Sanders as they did against Obama in 2008—while at the
same time trying to position Clinton as the heir
to Obama’s legacy.
If these supposed flaws
weren’t enough to stop Obama from becoming a successful president (at least in
the eyes of the Democratic Party), it’s hard to see why they would do so for a
President Sanders. It’s time the Clinton camp updated their playbook.
Branko Marcetic is a regular
contributor to In These Times.
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