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,” says Sanderista 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 is the author of “Bernie,” a biography written with the cooperation of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. His next book, the graphic biography “Trump,” comes out July 19th and is now available for pre-order.)
19 Comments.
I could vote for Hillary if she backed all of those things, Ted.
The only problem for me is that she would somehow have to hold the office and then actually DO these things instead of just TALK about them. That leaves me out of voting for her in 2016.
Maybe, if she wins in 2016 she will have metamorphosed from the ugly worm-like creature she is now into a beautiful butterfly by 2020 so I could vote for her then without gagging.
But I doubt that happens.
She has become even uglier during her campaign against Bernie, so she is gaining momentum in the wrong direction.
Glenn,
The problem I see is that Hillary does evil but wants everyone to love her. She genuinely thinks she’s a wonderful, warm, caring — is that low-fat? I swear to God, if it isn’t, I will hurl it in your face you fat, dumb, worthless piece of shit and ship you back to whatever shitstain you escaped from — person. She really thinks that she’s been anointed by the universe to be the first woman president in the U.S. — an accomplishment that, honestly, I cannot imagine any fully realized woman getting too worked up about in the first place at this point. Plenty of countries have already had female leaders, and many of them didn’t need their husbands to get elected. I’m more impressed with Ursula Burns, the first black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company (and who started out in a housing project), than I could ever be with Hillary Clinton’s asterisked and footnoted “accomplishments.”
And HRC is in for a hell of a surprise when she starts getting called on her gender.
“Great, you’re the first female president of the U.S. Can you get the goddamned economy working? Yes or No? Did childbirth give you greater capacity to negotiate a trade deal that won’t put the middle class out of existence? Frankly, Hill, I don’t care what’s going on down the front of your pantsuit; I just would like to see universal health coverage, like they have in England, where Maggie Thatcher used to be PM. Can you keep up with her? Yes or No?”
Hillary, like Obama, will be faithful to the Wall Street money that enabled her campaign.
Hillary, like Obama, will dismiss campaign promises as merely “politics” meant to get votes from people who are without any real interest in policy changes.
She could try a black beret and an El Presidente cigar. I still wouldn’t vote for her, but I’d like to see her properly accessorized. Or a Mao hat, she could absolutely rock a Mao hat…
There’s that Clinton/cigar association again.
She has an absolute majority of pledged delegates. That should be enough to make her the presumed nominee in any reasonable person’s mind. The supers aren’t going to flip that, however much we wish they would. And if they did, wouldn’t that be a bit unfair to the voters who selected her?
Hillary? “in any reasonable person’s mind”?
What are you smoking?
Math. I’m smoking math. I did not say she was a good choice. I said she’s got the numbers and overriding those numbers with supers would be just as undemocratic as it would be if Bernie was leading and the supers denied him.
When I see Clinton convince the DNC to abandon the super-delegate system then you’ll have a point.
Until she does so, however, a majority of the pledged delegates is NOT enough according to the agreed-upon rules by which the primary is being run.
It’s enough for “presumed”. It’s theoretically possible the supers will flip her, but the chance of that is negligible.
Why have elections when projected election results are sufficient to satisfy the War Whore fans?
Hillary tried to win as herself in ’08. She lost. So this time, she’s using Bill. Maybe she’s just a third and fourth term for Bill? Unless she gets term limits revoked.
In any case, President Clinton will put the Syrian Higher National Committee in charge, and they’ve done nothing, ye, t except procliam that Bach was an idiot, and they’ll not be making his mistakes.
Yours,
Michael.
I’m reminded of the joke during the Nixon impeachment. Tricky Dick’s in the portraiture gallery, trying to figure out what to do to save his presidency, and he looks at the portrait of Washington. “Go to the people,” it says. Nixon walks down to Jefferson’s portrait. “Go to the Constitution.”
He gets to Lincoln’s portrait. “Go to the theater.”
A large chunk of Bernie Sander’s supporters — not all, but a lot of them — simply can’t vote for Hillary. They supported Sanders because he was NOT corrupt. Not tainted with decades of backroom deals and insider quid pro quo. They support him because he’s offering something Hillary simply can’t: sincerity.
There is nothing Hillary can do to make those people who have woken up suddenly go, “Gosh, you know, she cancelled Edward Snowden’s passport while he was out of the country, but I know she’ll support personal liberties once she’s president.” or “Gosh, she sure cares about women’s rights, unless those women are Iraqi, and the right they’re asserting is the right to not be blown to Kingdom Come for attending a wedding.”
So she’s pulling a Hail Mary and trying to scare everyone into voting for her to prevent Donald Trump from coming to power. The regular cast here has been round and round that one: Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton differ by so little that it really doesn’t matter for a lot of Sanders supporters which one wins. In fact, a Trump win would actually force even more people to wake up because they wouldn’t be able to kid themselves anymore about who was in power.
This reminds me of people voting Nader in 2000 because “Gore and Bush are the same”. Gore wasn’t Mr Global Warming yet, but he was weakly pro-environment. He was running against two Texas oil men. But “the same”… except not, and we’d live in a different world today if 10% of the Nader voters in FL had looked a little harder at the two Texas oil men.
Anyone here who thinks a Trump win is OK because it will wake people up is probably a white male with a reasonably stable income. Although that, sadly, describes almost everyone on Ted’s site. (I wonder why?)
If Gore had managed to win his home state “we’d live in a different world today.”
If Gore actually believed any of the horseshit he was shoveling, he would have won. We’re back to the whole sincerity thing. Anyone who things Al Gore was doing anything other than coming up with a niche to occupy to differentiate himself clearly wasn’t paying attention. He was veep during the Clinton years. Had Gore won, he’d have triangulated back on all those enviro-promises while Tipper kept going around warning us all that the biggest threat we face is foul language in rap lyrics. How’d those stickers work out, Tipper?
“Twelve percent of Florida Democrats (over 200,000) voted for Republican George Bush”
-San Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 9, 2000
Even if none of the factors mentioned above had happened, the votes of Florida voters themselves show that Ralph Nader was not responsible for George W. Bush’s presidency. If one percent of these Democrats had stuck with their own candidate, Al Gore would easily have won Florida and become president. In addition, half of all registered Democrats did not even bother going to the polls and voting.
http://www.cagreens.org/alameda/city/0803myth/myth.html
To summarize: 1) Clinton or really her handlers need to realize that they need to seriously steal some aspects of the Sanders platform. In the same way that Wiley Coyote seriously needs to stop ordering from the ACME corporation. Probability: 10%. Coyotes are sly.
Then 2) we need more than just words to believe that Lucy won’t snatch the football away *again*. This means an operative platform, i.e. one that is made center stage rather than put in some drawer to collect dust. With specific benchmarks to be hit in 1 year, 2 years … and neo-liberals love their performance indicators (ok, those are just for their layers and layers of underlings).
If only there would be a venue for a presidential candidate to publicly announce specific goals and publicly review their attainment each year… you know like debates, inauguration speech, state of the Union addresses…
“Coming to point 3 of our mission statement, we promised to reduce the prison population for non-violent misdemeanors and we are proud to announce that 30% fewer people have been sentenced to prison in the previous 6 months. This will still let us fall short of our ambitious goal so we are going to institute additional reforms this coming year and I will come before you next year to report.”
Probability: 0.00000000000%
You will never, ever, hear this from a politician like HRC. They have been conditioned for decades to spout talking points and behave like royalty rather than make themselves accountable. Bill and Barack actually managed to connect to their audience on an empathic level even while spouting talking points, which HRC never managed except perhaps when leading for Bill. None of them ever made themselves accountable to anyone even once in their lives. Barack never pulled out his comfortable shoes and joined a picket line, Clinton doesn’t even know what a picket line is unless explained to her by her old colleagues on the Walmart board.
Ted rhetorically (I hope) asks “are Bernie’s supporters naïve enough to think that she would follow through?”
I’d like to think most, if not all, of Sanders supporters are NOT that naive. Many, however, presumably can be manipulated by fear, the essence of American “culture,” to vote for her anyway.
Then there are those who are not naive and who voted for Obumma (however wretchedly that turned out) an alternative in 2008, because even then it was clear they would never, under ANY circumstances, vote for HRC.
The myriad reasons for not voting for her in 2008 have increased roughly 50-fold in the ensuing 8 years … and Obumma HAS done one useful thing in his tenure: forced many to give up their filthy habit of the electoral self-abuse of voting for “the lesser evil.”