Who is the one Republican candidate who can defeat Donald Trump? The one who still pretends to be a Democrat.
Violence Has No Place in Politics
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Following violence at Donald Trump’s raucous rallies, Hillary Clinton says that violence has no place in politics. But what about the violence in hers?
SYNDICATED COLUMN: I Dunno If Hillary is Evil, But She Sure is Dumb
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To her enemies and many of her supporters, the brief on Hillary Clinton is that she’s evil but smart. “Smart leadership for the 21st century,” declares her website. Cynical and calculating she may be, people say. Sure, she’s an opportunist. But she knows the American political system inside and out — so she’ll be able to work her Machiavellian magic as president. Hopefully, on our behalf.
In this case, conventional wisdom is 100% wrong. Hillary’s intentions may or may not be purely self-serving. But she’s far from the political genius she’s being portrayed.
She may or may not be evil. But she certainly isn’t smart.
Look at the former senator’s vote in favor of the Iraq War. An evil decision? Maybe. While the results were catastrophic, there’s no way to see into her soul. Maybe she wanted to liberate Iraqis from dictatorship. Saddam was a tyrant. We’ll never know what she was really thinking.
What we know for sure is that that vote was political suicide. It caused her to lose the presidency to Barack Obama in 2008. It hobbled her in her primary campaign against Bernie Sanders.
This is not one of those hindsight-is-20/20 things. During the run-up to the war in late 2002/early 2003, many smart people expected the war to go badly exactly the way that it did. Leftist opinion columnists and editorial cartoonists (cough cough) repeatedly scoffed at Cheney’s claim that our invasion troops would be “welcomed as liberators.” Middle East experts correctly predicted the chaos, sectarian violence, regional destabilization and Islamist radicalization that would fill the power vacuum created by the overthrow of Saddam. Millions of citizens marched in the streets to oppose this optional war. It didn’t take a genius to see it coming — but she didn’t.
Only fools believed the Bush Administration’s nonexistent evidence (c.f. random metal tubes) and ridiculous rationale for war (“what if Saddam somehow built a nuke, then made friends with his mortal enemies, then gave those terrorist enemies his nukes as a gift, and then what if they figured out some way to ship them to the U.S.?”). Neocon fools. Republican fools. Fools like Hillary Clinton.
Hillary’s apologists say she had no choice. That, in the face of bloodthirsty voters’ lust for vengeance post-9/11, she had to act tough. But that’s nonsense. Senator Clinton represented liberal New York, where the war was unpopular from day one. She wouldn’t face reelection until 2006 or the presidential race until 2008 — three to five years after casting her vote. Just as the antiwar crowd predicted — yet Hillary was unable to — the Iraq War began going badly within months. By early 2005, most voters thought it was a mistake. A sharp politician would have anticipated that. A smart presidential aspirant, able to anticipate how things would play out in Mesopotamia, would have placed her chips on the antiwar side of the political betting table.
Then there’s her email scandal.
What was she thinking? Can she think?
When Clinton took over the State Department in 2009, she was already planning to run for president in 2016. She and her husband have come under GOP attack throughout their careers. Given the sharp scrutiny she was sure to come under seven years hence, why didn’t she order her staff to follow the government rules concerning email to the letter? A savvy political insider would have gone by the book, erring on the side of conservatism, rather than use a private email server for classified government correspondence. She was a moron. Now she faces a possible indictment.
Incident after incident indicates that the Smart Hillary construct is as much of a fantasy as her supposed record of progressivism.
It’s been obvious for a while now that 2016 was shaping up as the Year of the Political Outsider. Both parties are relying on their base to win, rather than the swing voters who were so important during the Clinton 1990s. The Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements, and numerous polls, pointed to widespread disenchantment with the establishment. Yet Hillary acted like it was 1993, tacking center-right like the corporatist she is. She solicited the usual old big donors.
She even gave speeches to Goldman Sachs. In 2013!
Hillary radically underestimated the Bernie insurgency. Her messaging has been relentlessly tonedeaf, as when her aging surrogates Madeleine Albright and Gloria Steinem insultingly old-splained to young female voters that they owed her their votes. Less than a year ago, Hillary was still pimping every job-killing “free trade” deal she heard about — even though they were unpopular with voters. Now Hillary is running out of money and losing momentum to a socialist who is eating her lunch in primary states she took for granted.
Time after time, over and over, Hillary proves she doesn’t get it. She’s not intuitive. She has no sense of what people are/must be thinking. She’s incurious, failing to feel shifts in opinion or circumstance. She’s stuck in the past. She wallows in her bubble. Which, when you consider that even the wealthy patrician FDR had a strong sense of what voters cared about, is frightening.
In a Democratic debate, she brags about her bromance with Henry Kissinger, telling liberals — who consider him a war criminal — that she relies on Nixon’s deviant mad bomber for foreign policy advice.
At another debate, she conflates Bernie Sanders’ vote against the Wall Street bailout with a refusal to help the auto industry. Even in Michigan, no one is fooled. Does she think we’ve forgotten how gross that Bush-Obama bailout was?
After Nancy Reagan dies, she gives the Reagans credit for starting a “national conversation” about HIV/AIDS. The Reagans were disgusting homophobes, pleased as punch that gays were dying en masse. They refused to fund research to fight the disease. They started a national conversation about HIV/AIDS the way Hitler started a national conversation on Jews. Now she says she “misspoke,” that ultimate all-purpose meaningless verb.
Could this be similar to her amazing statement to a black voter that no one had ever asked her about her support for the 1994 Clinton crime bill, which sent millions of black people to prison for minor offenses? How is this possible? Did Hillary really not know about the Reagans’ antigay bigotry? Or was she lying but assumed no one would notice? Either way: idiotic.
Vote for Hillary if you want. But don’t vote for her because she’s smart.
She is many things.
Smart isn’t one of them.
(Ted Rall is the author of “Bernie,” a biography written with the cooperation of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. “Bernie” is now on sale online and at all good bookstores.)
SYNDICATED COLUMN: Hillary Clinton Proves the Adage: The Best P.R. in the World Can’t Sell a Terrible Product
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Democrats don’t fight over the size of their presidential candidate’s genitals. But that’s little reason for Democrats to gloat in 2016. If Democratic officials get their way — at this writing, that seems more likely than not — Hillary Clinton will win her party’s nomination partly due to the same reason as Donald Trump seems poised to win his: massive ignorance on the part of the voters.
The result will be a yuge disaster.
At a Democratic debate on February 4th, Hillary Clinton was asked about the three speeches for which Goldman Sachs infamously paid her $675,000 as recently as 2013. (Would she release the text of those talks, so the public could judge whether she had promised special favors to the corrupt Wall Street firm? “I’ll look into it,” she promised.
By the next morning, The New York Times reported, it was clear that the Clinton campaign planned to stonewall the people’s right to know: “it did not appear that much looking was underway.”
“I don’t think voters are interested in the transcripts of her speeches,” Clinton’s pollster told reporters. This, like many things that come out of the Clinton spin machine, was not true. Bernie Sanders won the New Hampshire primary in a landslide in large part because Democrats in the Granite State believed she was covering up something shady in her Wall Street speeches.
More than a month later, at the Flint debate on March 6th, she was still taking flak for Speechgate. By then Hillary had settled on a line about as far removed from “I’ll look into it” as “stick it where the sun don’t shine”: “I have said,” she said through her plastic grin, “and I will say again, I will be happy to release anything I have as long as everybody else does too.” Which is nonsense: no one expects Republican candidates to yield to demands from a participant in a Democratic primary.
For an old guy, Bernie struck like a viper: “I’m your Democratic opponent. I release it. Here it is!” the senator scoffed, throwing invisible pieces of paper at the audience. “There ain’t nothing! I don’t give speeches to Wall Street for hundreds of thousands of dollars.”
Bill and Hill have raked in $153 million in speaking fees since 2001. Which is more than the GDP of three countries. But how many Democratic primary voters know that she is one of the most personally corrupt leaders ever, or that the Clintons have probably sold more political access to corporations than all other American politicians in history combined? Based on tracking polls and her current delegate lead, roughly the same number of Democrats is aware of Hillary’s record as Republicans who believe in science.
Granted, the fix is in for Hillary. The DNC scheduled debates at times when no one would get to see Bernie. The wildly antidemocratic superdelegate system designed to prevent progressives from getting nominated has been working perfectly. Super Tuesday, another scheme to conservatize races by frontloading southern states, went to her. And corporate media doesn’t cover him. Given the obstacles, he’s kicking ass.
Nevertheless, watching Hillary’s tortured defense of her indefensible refusal to cough up her Wall Street transcripts the other night, I was struck by how easily a voter who comes to Clinton v. Sanders cold, ignorant of the two candidates’ records, could conclude that she’s more qualified for the presidency. She’s great — if you don’t know your stuff.
Judging from the results so far, many Democratic voters are voting based on vague impressions rather than the hard facts — which makes them no smarter than the conservative evangelists backing the vulgar, thrice-married, breast-ogling Trump.
Befitting her long tenure at the devil’s crossroads of big money and big government, the former First Lady and Secretary of State came off as far more polished than her rival, the independent socialist Senator from one of the nation’s tiniest states.
Hillary isn’t president yet, but she played one on TV. She namedropped and Beltway-wonked and reminded us that she “traveled around the world on your behalf as Secretary of State and went to 112 countries” (attending state dinners and sightseeing is what passes for a hardship). Hapless Bernie, arrested during the civil rights movement at the same time Hillary was campaigning for right-wing racist Barry Goldwater — why would any black voter support her against him? — swung and missed a slow, low pitch right across home plate, unable to summon up a good answer to what “racial blind spots” he had.
(Correct answer: “I’ll never be black. So I’ll never know what it’s like to be black. As president, I will be surrounded by black people and I will listen to them.”)
As usual, Hillary looked the part. She rocked her straight-out-of-central-casting first woman president look with an overpriced designer Dr. Evil jacket that evoked the catty, nasty dictator played by Kate Winslet in the dystopian “Insurgent” movies.
Thanks to HD TV, Bernie’s off-the-rack suit highlighted his dandruff.
Hillary looks presidenty. She talks presidentish. A lot of voters don’t know how badly she screwed them, especially by pushing NAFTA and free trade. So she is favored to win the Democratic nomination. But she’s a terrible candidate. Tracking polls show that she has lower odds than Bernie of defeating Trump in November.
Just wait until Donald and his shiny new best friend the GOP establishment — who will fall in line, they always do! — start reminding voters of the colossally corrupt record Hillary has trying to run away from. Bernie has been too polite to call her out. Donald? He’ll be beyond brutal.
As they say in P.R., all the marketing in the world can’t compensate for a bad product.
Hello, President Trump.
(Ted Rall is the author of “Bernie,” a biography written with the cooperation of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. “Bernie” is now on sale online and at all good bookstores.)
(Ted Rall is the author of “Bernie,” a biography written with the cooperation of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. “Bernie” is now on sale online and at all good bookstores.)
SYNDICATED COLUMN: For Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton, Politics is Personal
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Could the clash between Clintonian “realism” and Sandersian “idealism” come down to personal history?
Hillary Clinton’s sales pitch to Democrats is simple:
Get real! The Republicans controlling Congress (and who’ll likely still be in charge in 2017) won’t even allow President Obama to fill the late Antonin Scalia’s vacant seat on the Supreme Court. There is no way in hell, she says, that these intransigent SOBs will pass pie-in-the-sky bills like Bernie Sanders’ proposal to replace Obamacare — an insurance company-friendly scheme originally conceived by a right-wing think tank, which Republicans now call socialistic — with Bernie Sanders’ “Medicare for All,” which would eliminate insurers in an actually socialistic way.
Hillary says she won’t make promises she can’t keep. Maybe that, as opposed to the mountains of cash she collects from Big Pharma and the piles of dough she rakes in from health insurance giants, is why she thinks the United States can’t join the rest of the First World by creating a universal coverage healthcare system.
Or maybe it’s personal. Hillary can’t possibly imagine what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck. Should she or Bill ever contract some nasty disease, the Clintons’ $110 million nest egg can easily cover the cost of the fanciest doctors.
She’s always been personally comfortable. Hillary grew up solidly middle class, never worrying where her next meal was coming from. Her family were right-wing conservatives, and so was she: in 1964, she was a fervently anti-communist “Goldwater girl.” She was named a partner of a law firm at age 32. You know the rest of the story.
Smooth sailing, financially if not necessarily romantically.
It wasn’t like that for Bernie Sanders (current net worth $700,000) while he was growing up.
Sanders is a product of America’s huge, rarely discussed, working class — people one paycheck away from eviction and homelessness. Bernie’s father, a salesman who came here from Poland alone (his entire family was later wiped out by the Nazis in the Holocaust), struggled to make a living throughout his life. He and his wife, Bernie’s mom, constantly fought over (lack of) money. “There were tensions about money, which I think is important,” Sanders told me when I interviewed him for my biography, “Bernie.”
“There was no sense of long-term security,” Sanders recalled. “A salesman, things can go up and things can do down.”
Ultimately, marital tensions fueled by money problems drove young Bernie to move out of the family home, an overcrowded apartment in the hardscrabble Flatbush section of Brooklyn.
Bernie doesn’t like to talk about his past. Partly, he views personal biography as a distraction from what he cares about: issues, policies. I suspect there’s another reason. Much of Bernie’s early life was painful.
“My father came to this country with nothing. Economically, what motivated him was security, that is, not losing what he had.” Bernie’s mother Dorothy was American, from The Bronx. “My mother wanted more money and wanted him to get a different job or expand what he was doing. He was very frugal. But if he tried to do that, he would have lost everything.” His parents couldn’t reconcile their worldviews. If they’d been earning a proper living, of course, they wouldn’t have had to.
In poor families — poor families that read and follow the news — left-wing activism is baked in from the start. While Hillary was campaigning for the most right-wing presidential nominee in history, Bernie was marching, and getting arrested, for civil rights. Stretched though he and his family were, he worried about those worse off than himself.
Dorothy Sanders suffered from a weak heart — a health condition aggravated by stress, something the Sanderses had in abundance. Shortly after Bernie graduated from high school, Dorothy died.
Bernie went on to college in Chicago, following the hippie trail to Vermont. But he never forgot where he came from. Poverty, Bernie understands, is a blight. And in a country as spectacularly wealthy as the United States, it’s one that’s completely optional, unnecessary and destructive.
Hillary’s incrementalist “we can do real healthcare later” argument reminds me of people who shoot me a quizzical expression when I explain that, after I broke my knee and my skull in a car wreck in 1985, it took me a year to find out because that’s how long it took me to land a job with health insurance. They’re not evil. They just don’t get it.
Clinton and Sanders represent two worldviews: one for whom wealth and privilege have long been assumed as her due, the other whose sympathies lie with those who suffer and die simply because they had the bad luck to be born into the vast majority of Americans, who are broke.
(Ted Rall is the author of “Bernie,” a biography written with the cooperation of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. “Bernie” is now on sale online and at all good bookstores.)
SYNDICATED COLUMN: How Bernie Can Pay For His Ambitious Agenda? Slash the Military
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Late last year, I interviewed Bernie Sanders while working on my biography “Bernie.” I asked him if he planned to reduce the defense budget if elected president. “We will take a hard look at that,” he told me, agreeing that there’s an awful lot of bloat in America’s military spending that ought to be cut.
Why doesn’t he say that now?
A statement detailing his intent to reduce military spending — not just the on-the-books budget of the Pentagon, but also the “off the books” taxdollars that go to wars like the occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as the National Security Agency and other parts of the surveillance state that have expanded radically since 9/11 — would help answer one of Sanders’ critics’ most potent criticisms: that he’ll be an irresponsible Santa Gone Wild, giving away free college tuition and Medicare for all without a care in the world for how to pay for it.
Hillary Clinton’s campaign, already reeking of desperation, is turning ugly. Bill Clinton, of all people, accused Bernie of lying, and his supporters of sexism. Clinton surrogate Madeleine Albright called female Sanders supporters traitors to their gender. The once-respected Gloria Steinem called them sluts, implying they were hanging out at Bernie’s big rallies to get laid by hunky Bernie bros.
Pathetic. But Hillary remains a potent force. She’s the mathematical favorite. When she casts herself as the realist (“a progressive who likes to get things done”), her argument that Bernie’s promises are politically unrealistic and fiscally irresponsible carries weight with Democrats who are still on the fence.
If Bernie can answer this two-part question, he wins the nomination: how will he get his far-left programs (by American standards, not those of the rest of the world) through Congress? How will he pay for them?
The first question, I think, isn’t as big a hurdle as the corporate punditry seems to think. Most voters can imagine a sustained progressive movement centered around street activism — Sanders’ “political revolution” — that pressures Congress so that, as Sanders puts it, Mitch O’Connell sees hundreds of thousands of people marching outside his window whenever he plots to thwart the people’s will.
Like Occupy Wall Street, except that the president is encouraging the movement rather than ordering the cops to beat up its members.
Anyway, liberal Democrats are angry. Hillary’s “half a dream” sales pitch isn’t half as enticing to them as Bernie’s ambitious agenda. Come on, Hill: did you take half a bribe from Goldman Sachs? Even if Bernie’s idealism gets dashed on the rocks of Republican intransigence, progressive Dems don’t care; they want to see Bernie try. Democrats haven’t watched a Democratic president push for radical change since LBJ.
The second question of the skeptics is: show me the money! Where is the cash to pay for free public college tuition and a single-payer healthcare system?
Sanders has said he would cover the $75 billion per year cost of his college reform program by imposing a tax on Wall Street speculation. He would almost certainly increase taxes on corporations and wealthy individuals as part of moving the tax code back to a more progressive, pre-Reagan structure. Everyone would pay a higher tax rate to cover Berniecare, though working-class people would pay less than they’d save.
At the risk of sounding like a Republican, there’s waste throughout the federal budget. There is, for example, no evidence that the NSA has ever done its job by preventing a single terrorist attack. Meanwhile, as Edward Snowden informed us, they’re spying on all our phone calls and emails. Shut them down; save $10 billion a year or more. Similarly, the Department of Homeland Security could be trimmed to a fraction of its current size or eliminated, with its tiny portion of useful activities transferred to other agencies, including law enforcement.
Last year’s defense budget was nearly $600 billion, or 54% of discretionary federal spending. That’s more than the next nine countries combined, including China and Russia. Conservatively, at least half of that is spent on waste and fraud by DOD contractors, so there’s $300 billion right off the bat. I bet we could cut it 90% and still not have to worry about a foreign invasion, something that hasn’t happened since 1812.
These cuts could easily cover the several hundred billion shortfall between Bernie’s tax increase on the rich and the cost of his healthcare plan.
Nothing says fiscal conservatism like pacifism. As of 2015 the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq, the most expensive in U.S. history, cost more than $1.5 trillion. More than $1 billion a year is still going down those ratholes. Bernie has said ISIS must be “crushed,” but he may want to revisit that. As of November, the anti-ISIS air and jihadi-training campaign had cost $5 billion and counting.
And obviously don’t start any new wars of choice.
Studies have shown that high student loan debt hobbles economic activity, delaying the age at which college graduates can afford to buy their first cars and homes. Freeing college graduates and their parents from exorbitant tuition bills would stimulate the automobile and real estate markets in particular, as well as the overall economy.
The same is true for healthcare costs. Every dollar you don’t spend on health insurance premiums, deductibles and co-pays is one you have for something else. That’s a lot of potential stimulus.
I don’t know why the Sanders campaign hasn’t issued a detailed plan explaining how President Sanders would cover the costs of free college tuition and Medicare for All. Maybe they’re worried about getting attacked as weak on national security by the hawkish Secretary Clinton and, in the general election, by the Republican nominee (probably Trump or Cruz).
Though a valid concern, it should take a back seat to plugging the Bernie-is-just-a-dreamer narrative Hillary’s camp is framing him with. He’ll never be able to out-militarist Hillary or the Republicans, who will try to brand him as the second coming of Vladimir Lenin anyway. Why bother to try?
(Ted Rall is the author of “Bernie,” a biography written with the cooperation of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. “Bernie” is now on sale online and at all good bookstores.)
Ted Cruz Primer
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Ted Cruz upset Donald Trump in the Iowa Caucus. Who is he? What do you need to know about our possible next president?
SYNDICATED COLUMN: My Critique of Hillary Clinton’s Campaign
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Last week, I handicapped the Bernie Sanders campaign. He since pulled off an upset in the Iowa Caucus, where he overcame a 40-point lead by Hillary Clinton (the day before, polls said he’d lose by two or three points) to a virtual tie so even that coin tosses and bureaucratic incompetence may have made a difference.
It’s a two-person race, with Hillary still in the lead nationally. But Bernie has momentum and enthusiasm. Can the Independent Senator from Vermont catch up? Democratic primaries are a referendum on the status quo, so Sanders’ chances depend at least as much on Secretary Clinton’s weaknesses as on his strengths.
Here’s what Hillary has going for her — and not.
The Good
As in her (losing) 2008 run against Barack Obama, Hillary’s strategists are selling competence and experience. “A progressive who gets things done,” she is calling herself.
Scratch a little, however, and there’s precious little evidence of substantial things she actually got done. Googling phrases like “Hillary Clinton’s biggest accomplishments” yields lists that include “most-traveled Secretary of State” and “gave a speech in Geneva standing up for gay rights.”
Hillary’s “achievements” are activities, not accomplishments.
Fortunately for her, most voters don’t question the Been Everywhere, Done Everything meme. She does have one hell of a resume: First Lady, Senator, Secretary of State. Though, for the life of me, I don’t understand why Bernie’s Mayor, Congressman and Senator resume (longer in total, more reelections) doesn’t count.
When you talk to people who are seriously considering casting their votes for Clinton, many say they like that she’s a woman president straight out of central casting — tough and strong, with the slightly dystopian Corporate Leader wardrobe to boot. Here’s to you, Jodie Foster in “Elysium.”
Clinton knows everyone in DC. She knows world leaders. She won’t need months to settle into the White House.
The Bad
The trouble for Hillary is, this is an antiestablishment year. Donald Trump, Ted Cruz and Bernie Sanders are benefitting from an electorate whose simmering disappointment over the replacement of Hope and Change in 2008 with the Too Big To Fail bank bailouts of 2009 is finally being articulated into rage at the ballotbox. As Obama’s cabinet member, that’s on her.
Clinton can’t run away from her Beltway insiderdom. To her credit, she isn’t trying. To the contrary, she’s hugging Obama, incrementalism, head-over-heart rhetoric as hard as she can. She’s just the wrong candidate for this year. Which means that, if she wins the nomination, she’ll go into the general election campaign as bruised by Bernie Sanders as Jimmy Carter was in 1980 after facing off against Ted Kennedy. Many Bernie Sanders Democrats will sit on their hands in November if she’s the nominee.
Hillary isn’t stupid. She knows her formidable organizational advantages — cash, a SuperPAC, party backing, endorsements by establishment organizations including trade unions and corporate media, which have enforced a blackout of Bernie coverage — no longer guarantee her once “inevitable” campaign. So she’s coopting Bernie’s positions on healthcare and other issues of interest to progressives.
Problem is, voters usually pick pure steak over mystery meat.
The Ugly
Obama’s famous 2008 slight that Hillary was “likeable enough” turns out not to be so true. On the campaign trail and on TV, Hillary is charmless. Which is why, the more Americans get to know her, the more of her supporters migrate to other candidates. She can’t up her personality game.
With the liberal/progressive base of Hillary’s party agitated at 1960s levels, she can’t explain away her conservative record. She’s never met a free trade deal or a war she didn’t like; millions of jobs and people are dead as a result.
She says she’s been fighting for progressive causes for years, but when? Where? Even on the micro-bore social “wedge” issues that her husband relied upon as president, she’s in trouble. Gays won’t forget her support of the Defense of Marriage Act. Straights think she’s a reed in the political wind.
But Hillary’s biggest flaw as a candidate isn’t policy. It’s her failure to internalize two truisms of politics.
Number one: Candidates win by projecting an optimistic vision of the future. When she criticizes Bernie Sanders for advocating changes that would be hard to get through Congress and expensive to pay for — free college tuition, Medicare for everybody — she projects a radical pessimism that makes many ask, why not? Why can’t the country that invades everyone, that sent a man to the moon, provide the same social benefits as most other nations?
And number two: Elections aren’t about the candidate. They’re about the people. This goes back to when tribes elected chiefs. Vote for me, and buffalo will rain from the sky! We’ll be fat! Water everywhere! That’s a winning campaign — not, hey, as the first elder from the Whatever Clan to become chief, I’d make tribal history and wouldn’t that be cool.
Obama didn’t win in 2008 by running as Future First Black President. He projected a sunny, winning disposition and a sense of the future we could buy into. Hope! Change! Yes We Can! Hillary’s campaign is all about her, not us.
That’s political suicide.
(Ted Rall is the author of “Bernie,” a biography written with the cooperation of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. “Bernie” is now on sale online and at all good bookstores.)
Pre-Winning
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In an aggressive move that recalled the Bush campaign in its Florida 2000 judicial coup d’etat, Hillary Clinton declared victory in the incredibly tight Iowa Caucus a full day before the state officially announced the results and before any TV network issued a projection.
SYNDICATED COLUMN: My Critique of Bernie Sanders’ Campaign
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Full disclosure: If New York’s primary were held today — not that it typically has a significant electoral impact, since it’s relatively late on the calendar — I’d vote for Bernie Sanders.
Why Bernie? Because he’s the best this system has to offer: a flawed candidate whose overall message is important enough, and his record free enough of corruption and evildoing, that I can overlook the things I don’t like about his record and fill in the bubble next to his name on the ballot without feeling like a terrible person.
Hillary Clinton is nowhere close to acceptable. She has no message, other than the dead end of liberal identity-politics tokenism: sure would be neat (for her) if there were a first woman president. Her corruption is spectacular: served on the board of Wal-Mart, where she signed off on union-busting, was paid by Goldman Sachs, ran a charitable foundation like a money laundry. Voted for both of Bush’s wars, which killed hundreds of thousands of people, then destroyed Libya and Syria.
A vote for Hillary is a vote against working people, for the plutocrats, and for genocide.
However, just because I plan to vote for Bernie — even though I wrote the book on him— doesn’t mean I can’t see ideological and tactical flaws in his campaign. With that in mind, here’s my report card on the insurgent from Vermont’s bid to date.
The Good
Paris and San Bernadino aside, any political scientist will tell you that pocketbook issues — voters’ feelings about the economy, whether or not they’re prosperous, and how they perceive their future career prospects — usually determine the outcome of American presidential elections. Assuming there isn’t another 9/11-scale national security threat, the 2016 race will be about Americans’ sense that they’re working harder while earning less, and their anger that they’re still digging out of the 2008-09 financial crisis while the banks who created it are making bigger profits than ever.
No other candidate, left or right, can touch Bernie’s credibility on the economy. For decades, while no one paid attention, he shouted that the American economy was rigged in favor of the billionaire class at the expense of everyone else. Now most people agree.
Bernie owns the number one issue in the campaign.
That, as Donald Trump would say, is yuuuuge. Neither The Donald’s newfound openness to tax people like himself, nor Democratic rival Hillary Clinton’s awkward attempt to co-opt Sandersism with words instead of policies, stands a chance at denting the Bern on the number. One. Issue.
The other major metric for voters is character. Love him or hate him, everyone knows Sanders has integrity, which is why the Clinton camp’s cut-and-paste attempts to portray him as an NRA shill are falling flat. “Sanders may be a dreamer, but he’s not dishonorable. Trying to sully him in this way only sullies her,” columnist Charles Blow of The New York Times observes.
For an American politician, being widely perceived as honorable is virtually unheard of. It’s worth a billion dollars in attack ads.
The Bad
The biggest danger to Sanders’ campaign isn’t failing to get enough black votes in Southern states. (If he wins Iowa and New Hampshire, voters down South who haven’t paid much attention to the race yet will check him out — and he’ll do fine.)
Sanders’ third rail is being perceived as a Johnny One Note candidate obsessed with economic justice at the expense of everything else.
I’ve read everything written about and by Bernie Sanders. But his foreign policy prescriptions are as thin on the ground as U.S. troops in ISIS-controlled Iraq. Whether he’s disinterested in foreign affairs or simply cares more about all matters domestic, he doesn’t talk much about America’s role in the world. Big mistake. Voters expect a robust foreign policy agenda from their president.
As far as I can tell, a Sanders Doctrine is neither militaristic nor isolationist, deploying ground troops and aerial attacks more sparingly than either George W. Bush or Barack Obama. He told me he’d even continue Bush-Obama’s drone assassination program, which is illegal since it has never been authorized by Congress.
If I were running his campaign, I’d spin Sanders’ views as “real pragmatism” to take some air out of Hillary’s hawkish tough-broad sails. But I long for something more.
By 2016 measures Bernie’s foreign and domestic policy agendas are inconsistent. A self-described Scandinavian-style “democratic socialist” doesn’t usually favor wars of choice like Afghanistan (which Sanders supported) or drone killings. Voters assume he’s a pacifist or wish he were — why not become one? I wish he’d align his laudable desire for justice and equality at home for Americans with a push for freedom and self-determination abroad for citizens of other nations. Like: we don’t attack any other countries unless they go after us first.
Sanders is hobbled by some major communications problems. Hillary has exploited his failure to fully explain his healthcare plan by accusing him of wanting to increase taxes, outright lying. “If I save you $10,000 in private health insurance and you pay a little bit more in taxes in total, there are huge savings in what your family is spending,” Bernie tried to rebut at the fourth debate. Not clear enough.
Here, let me help: “Under my plan, your health insurance will be free. Free! The average American will save $10,000 a year. Your taxes will go up, but that tiny increase will be so much less than you’ll save. It’s the same deal almost every other country has, people all around the world love it, and you’ll love it too.”
The Ugly
Capitalism is less popular than most pundits know; socialism and communism are more popular too. In a general election campaign, however, it is true that Republican SuperPACs will air so many anti-Bernie attack ads featuring hammers and sickles you’ll think you’re at an old May Day parade in Moscow.
Bernie has to do more than explain his “democratic socialism.” Post-Hillary, he has to own it. And sell it to the American people.
“[Democratic socialism] builds on the success of many other countries around the world that have done a far better job than we have in protecting the needs of their working families, the elderly, the children, the sick and the poor,” Bernie said in November. Nice start, but can he erase a century of anti-communist propaganda in 10 months?
To me, the term is political self-mutilation. Sanders isn’t a socialist. He’s a old-school liberal Democrat, like George McGovern was in 1972. It’s ridiculous to have to defend something that you said about yourself when it isn’t true.
Next week, I critique Hillary Clinton’s campaign.
(Ted Rall is the author of “Bernie,” a biography written with the cooperation of Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders. “Bernie” is being released today.)
