by Ted Rall
Unless you follow politics
closely, you could be forgiven for thinking that Hillary Clinton has locked up
the Democratic presidential nomination. This is not true. She still doesn’t have
the requisite number of delegates. That could, and probably will, happen next
month when her lead in superdelegates puts her over the top at the Democratic
National Convention in Philadelphia – when the superdelegates actually, you
know, cast their actual votes.
The media, however, doesn’t
want you to know that Bernie Sanders is still in the race. And so, based on
that flimsiest of measures – an opinion survey of superdelegates who are
allowed to change their mind at any point before July’s DNC – they’ve called
the Democratic race for Clinton.
This completely illogical
reasoning logically leads pundits to the question of the month: how can the
Hillary Clinton campaign convince progressive supporters of Bernie Sanders –
whose race was largely based on the assumption that Clinton is so far to the
right that she might as well be a Republican – to vote for her?
Every four years mainstream
political writers and commentators push Democrats to the right after the
primaries, arguing that swing
voters decide presidential elections. Like trickle-down economics, however,
that doesn’t seem to have been true any time in the recent past. Political
parties seem to perform best when they motivate
their base to turn up at the polls. Given the fact that Republican voters
are congenitally more likely to fall in line behind their nominee even if he
turns out to be a potato – or, this year, a proto-fascist – than Democrats,
it’s obvious to everyone that Hillary Clinton will need as many Bernie Sanders
supporters as possible in November if she indeed becomes her party’s nominee.
Obvious to everyone but
Hillary.
Last week, NBC’s Lester Holt asked
her about Sanders: “Can you name one idea that he’s put forward that you want
to embrace? That he has really changed your position on?”
Her answer: a big fat negatori.
“Well, it’s not that so much
as the passion that he brought to the goals that–his campaign set,” said
Clinton.
Granted, I can’t think of anything
she could do to get me to vote for her. But there are millions of Sanders
voters who could be convinced not to sit home on election day, support a
third-party candidate like Jill
Stein or Gary
Johnson, or defect
to Donald Trump. She’ll need those voters if there are any more
Orlando-style terrorist attacks (great for Trump’s fear-based campaign) or, for
that matter, after presidential debates in which I expect Trump to savage her.
Maybe Debbie Wasserman Schultz
can schedule those debates for the middle of the night on Kazakhstani state
television.
Except when she’s hanging out
with investment bankers and Walmart board members, Hillary Clinton reflexively
refuses to compromise. If she continues her “I have nothing to learn from
Bernie and he’ll be lucky to get a speech at the convention” attitude, however,
better get prepared for President Trump.
What do Bernie Sanders
supporters want? As Trump says,
everything is negotiable. So let’s negotiate!
“Add back the public option to
the Affordable Care Act,” Howard Dean suggests to Hillary in the New York Times.
“Let Americans vote with their feet about whether they want to be in a single
payer or the current system.”
The problem with that is, big
insurance companies bribed
her with $13 million in campaign contributions to get her to say that single
payer “will never, ever come to pass.”
Dean wants Clinton to back
Sanders’ “massive overhaul of the criminal justice system, starting with
emptying for-profit prisons and juvenile detention centers.”
Nice idea, except that here
too, she’s owned: she collected as many big donations from lobbyists for the for-profit
prison industry as Marco Rubio.
He also wants her to embrace
Bernie’s push for reforming Wall Street – but how likely is it that someone who
made over $100 million giving speeches to scumbags in the financial services
industry will turn against her backers?
“She should release the transcripts
of her speeches and explain any of the objectionable things she said in them,”
says Stephanie
Rioux. If Clinton were going to show us her speeches, it would already have
happened.
It may not feel like it now,
but Hillary Clinton is in a pickle.
Her supporters keep citing her
willingness to support Barack Obama after her defeat in 2008 as an example
Bernie Sanders ought to emulate now. But Clinton and Obama were ideologically
virtually identical. Both were members
of the right-wing Democratic Leadership Council. True, Obama pretended to
oppose the Iraq war, which Clinton supported. But Obama wasn’t in the Senate in
2003. When he did get the chance to vote on Iraq, he voted six times
out of six in favor of funding it. And he continued the war long after he
took office.
Conversely, there’s a huge gap
between Clintonism and Sandersism. Bernie Sanders is essentially a Democrat
circa George McGovern in 1972: he favors big government antipoverty programs,
socialized medicine, and a limited role for the US military overseas. He’s
skeptical of free trade agreements, and hasn’t met a Wall Street banker that he
likes. Hillary Clinton isn’t just against all that – she’s diametrically
opposed, essentially a Republican circa George W. Bush in 2003, many of whose advisers
she shares.
“Sanders supporters…are
motivated not by animosity toward Hillary Clinton but by a sophisticated
analysis and belief that the system is irreparably broken and compromised,” saysSanderista
Jonathan Tasini. Actually, only the second half of that sentence is true. As
anyone who has attended a Bernie rally can tell you, there’s plenty of
animosity toward Clinton.
So what does Hillary Clinton
do if she wants to win?
She’ll have to sell out some
of her big corporate donors – and she’ll have to do it in a big way. If she
goes big, she could appoint Bernie Sanders as her vice president – a sure path
to victory – or as an economic czar, like giving him both the secretary of the
treasury and the head of the Federal Reserve Bank.
Failing that, she’ll have to
adopt at least a few of Bernie’s major platform planks. But here’s the rub.
Even if she does, are Bernie’s supporters naïve enough to think that she would
follow through?
Ted Rall, syndicated writer
and the cartoonist for ANewDomain.net, is
the author of the book “Snowden,” the biography of the NSA whistleblower.
No comments:
Post a Comment