http://inthesetimes.com/article/18844/bernie-sanders-primary-new-hampshire-hillary-clinton
Some thoughts on Sanders’ New
Hampshire primary victory last night.
BY Corey Robin
This post first appeared
at Jacobin.
Bernie Sanders won the New
Hampshire Democratic primary last night.
Edith Wharton described it
best:
The blast that swept him came
off New Hampshire snow-fields and ice-hung forests. It seemed to have traversed
interminable leagues of frozen silence, filling them with the same cold roar
and sharpening its edge against the same bitter black-and-white landscape.
Some fascinating tidbits about
the Democratic primary voters from the New
York Times exit poll:
72 percent of the voters said
that the candidates’ issues were more important to them than the candidates’
leadership or personal qualities; only 25 percent of the voters said that the
latter was more important to them. This confirms what Jedediah Purdy argued in
an excellent piece contrasting Sanders’s candidacy with Obama’s candidacy.
Obama’s campaign was about him; Sanders’s campaign is about the issues.
68 percent of the voters
described their philosophy as either “very liberal” or “somewhat liberal.” 31
percent said it was “moderate” or “conservative.” What’s interesting about this
data — beyond the leftward shift it marks — is that independents are allowed to
vote in Democratic primaries in New Hampshire. In this primary, 41 percent of
the voters were either independents or undeclared. That we get that kind of
ideological skew in a primary that includes independents, who are often reputed
to be moderates, is telling.
63 percent of the voters want
to replace the current health care system with a single-payer plan.
Only 16 percent of the voters
said they were getting ahead financially (as opposed to keeping steady or
falling behind); Clinton did her best among those voters.
80 percent of the voters said
they were very or somewhat worried about the economy; Sanders won nearly
two-thirds of those voters. 20 percent of the voters said they were not too
worried or not worried at all about it. Clinton won 57 percent of those voters.
Only 10 percent of the voters
said terrorism was the most important issue for them.
48 percent of the voters
decided upon their candidate in the last month. That suggests the race is
still very fluid and that it is not until the campaigns come to the
different states that voters really settle upon their choices.
The best
comment of the evening, though, goes to my CUNY colleague David Jones,
who is providing commentary to the New York Times:
Even so, there were a few
silver linings for Mrs. Clinton. . . . And, though Mrs. Clinton
lost nearly every income group, she did carry voters in families earning over
$200,000 per year.
Remember, back in 1992, Bill
Clinton placed second in the New Hampshire primary, and he declared, “New
Hampshire tonight has made Bill Clinton the Comeback Kid.”
Twenty-four years later, Hillary Clinton places second in the New
Hampshire, and her
campaign declares, New Hampshire doesn’t matter.
Or maybe it does. Politico reports
that after her stunning loss, Clinton’s campaign is getting
a facelift:
Now, after a drubbing so
serious as to call into question every aspect of her campaign from her data
operation to her message, the wounded front-runner and her allies are actively
preparing to retool their campaign, according to Clinton allies.
Staffing and strategy will be
reassessed. The message, which so spectacularly failed in New Hampshire where
she was trailing by 21 points when she appeared before her supporters to
concede to Sanders, is also going to be reworked — with race at the center
of it.
Clinton is set to campaign
with the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner, unarmed African-Americans
who died in incidents involving law enforcement officers and a neighborhood
watch representative, respectively. And the campaign, sources said, is expected
to push a new focus on systematic racism, criminal justice reform, voting
rights and gun violence that will mitigate concerns about her lack of an
inspirational message.
In 1992, the Clintons also ran
a campaign with race at the center of it. Only then, the
point was to get as far away from African-American voters as possible.
They did it by talking tough on crime—and then acting tough on crime. And, yes,
Hillary Clinton was at the center of it all. As Donna Murch writes in
an epic
piece in the New Republic:
Hillary strongly supported
this legislation [Clinton’s crime bill] and stood resolutely behind her
husband’s punishment campaign. “We need more police, we need more and tougher
prison sentences for repeat offenders,” Hillary declared in 1994. “The ‘three
strikes and you’re out’ for violent offenders has to be part of the plan. We
need more prisons to keep violent offenders for as long as it takes to keep
them off the streets,” she added. Elsewhere, she remarked, “We will
finally be able to say, loudly and clearly, that for repeat, violent, criminal
offenders: three strikes and you’re out.”
It’s one thing to walk back
your policies on race and crime because the electoral winds are blowing in the
other direction. But to pivot so shamelessly from one campaign in which you
made war on black America your signature issue to another in which
you make fighting racism your campaign brand—simply because you’re losing
in the primaries (anyone who thinks Clinton would be retooling her campaign
like this needs to read the piece I linked to above)—is, well, a little
breathtaking.
The more Sanders wins, the
more the liberals will tell you he can’t win.
Always in a tone of cool neutrality,
a “just the facts, ma’am” report from reality. Which seems to mask a deeper
attachment to the reality it purports to describe. It reminds me of how Lincoln
characterized Stephen Douglas’s embrace of popular sovereignty: “This declared
indifference, but as I must think, covert real zeal for the spread of slavery.”
In These Times is proud
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Corey Robin is a professor of
political science at Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is the
author of The Reactionary Mind: Conservatism from Edmund Burke to Sarah Palin
and Fear: The History of a Political Idea.
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