The Chris Moeller Archives

What Bernie Sanders has given us

Bernie Sanders is doing the impossible. I truly did not believe, one year ago, that anybody would be able to force reform upon the Democratic Party to even the extent that he has. As any observer could have predicted, he has run up against a torrent of opposition from the corporate, pro-war infrastructure that is the party itself. Most states do not have open primaries so, believe it or not, the extraordinary support that we’ve seen for Sanders has actually been quite muted. (Due to the lack of open primaries, the size of his rallies have been more representative of his widespread support than have ballot results.) When independent progressive voters are factored in, the results are the surprising and fantastic polls we’ve seen. Sanders has at least a 20% higher approval rating among all Americans than either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton. He polls significantly better against Trump as the hypothetical Democratic nominee than does Clinton. Making this difference is Sanders’ army of independent voters.

The Democratic National Committee rigged the game against him. This is indisputable. Due to the ridiculous concept of "superdelegates,” which makes the Electoral College look like the pure definition of democracy, Clinton had more than 400 pledged delegates on her team even before Sanders, or anybody else, entered the race. The votes of these super individuals, in some cases, are equal to the votes of thousands of citizens pooled together. In some instances, Clinton controls entire blocks of state superdelegates-- even in states that Sanders won with 75 to 80 percent of the overall vote. Former presidential candidate Howard Dean is an example of a superdelegate-- from Sander’s home state of Vermont-- that’s pledged himself to Clinton even though Sanders won better than 80% of the votes in the state’s primary. That’s not the worst of it. It’s a common misconception that these superdelegates are all elected officials of some kind-- the state’s governor, perhaps, or congressional representatives, or state-level representatives. Some are actual lobbyists. The party allows this. It has found a way to cut out the middle man and just let the monied interests vote directly, representing nobody but themselves.

But Sanders has pierced through the façade. Perhaps above all other achievements, he has exposed the lies and the hidden mechanisms that subvert the democratic process in the party that most pretends to represent the common man. His critics in the party are correct about one key thing-- he’s an interloper. I like to think of him in grander terms than that-- he’s a Trojan horse. He’s an independent running for the nomination of a party he doesn’t belong to because he wants to claim (re-claim?) that party for progressivism. Part of his grand design became clear yesterday. Permitted now to choose five members of the committee that will draw the party platform, Sanders chose, among others, James Zogby, who has been an outspoken critic of Israel’s military tactics, and Dr. Cornel West, who has been a valuable writer and educator for decades, marched with Black Lives Matter, and engaged as a profoundly pivotal public critic of President Obama. Of the president, the jazz-obsessed West once said, “I voted for John Coltrane, but instead got Kenny G.” (Contrary to some media reports, this line was not a reference to Debbie Wasserman-Schultz’s haircut.) I fully expect the passion of Zogby and West to sear through those committee meetings. If only they were televised.

I still believe that Sanders’ electoral strategy has flaws. Choosing to run as a Democrat in a crooked game tempers his political voice well before November arrives, and there will come a point when Sanders will be expected to endorse Clinton, which will be a deeply unsettling sight for a lot of us. The fear that the corporate Democrats have about him, though, is palpable. They expected to be done with him in March. His refusal to end… or as they like to say, “suspend” his campaign before the convention is driving some Clintonites to distraction. (Incidentally, it’s the height of arrogance for anybody living in a state that’s already voted to deny residents of later states the same voting options they had, especially when one of the states is California, with 39 million people.) In July, after Clinton has won California because she has refused to debate Sanders in the state, and when the party is nominating what we can only assume will be either a Clinton/Kissinger ticket or a Clinton/Netanyahu ticket, there will be Bernie-- and his supporters-- speaking out for justice and for the powerless.

Is Sanders damaging Clinton by staying in the race? Of course he is. Anybody that voices the details of her public record is damaging her. But Sanders has been remarkably soft on her, compared with what some of us expected. It has kept his campaign focused and positive, but can be frustrating in real time.

Sanders should be talking about Clinton’s email scandal. He has denied that it’s an important issue in the election. His position contradicts what even the inspector general of the State Department said yesterday about its own former secretary. Clinton attempted to conduct nearly all of her important business at State out of the public eye-- and she succeeded wildly. Putting aside the issue of potential hacking, there are any number of public documents related to Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State that are not accessible today through Freedom of Information Act requests because she circumvented the system. And that was her intent. She committed a crime in doing this, as she did when she covertly employed U.S. diplomats as spies, reporting on our allies at the United Nations. The only reason we know about this offense is because of the WikiLeaks cables. We wouldn’t necessarily know it from other government documents. She was running the department from a private server.

Sanders should be talking about Bill Clinton’s sex crimes. Donald Trump won’t hesitate to do it, indeed he’s already started. Democrats have acted this week as if it’s beyond the pale for Trump to be name-dropping Monica Lewinsky, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broderick, and Gennifer Flowers (wow, that’s a long sentence), even as they trash him over accusations that have less legal standing than do Bill’s accusers. Bill lied about Monica Lewinsky, but she saved the dress. He lied for years about having a sexual relationship with Gennifer Flowers, then was forced to admit it in a deposition. Nominating Hillary, with that spouse of hers in tow, puts the Democrats in the worst possible position to make the case to the electorate that Trump is a misogynist that abuses women through a position of power. What, was Camille Cosby unavailable to run?

The Democratic Party has been morally-bankrupt since the dawn of Reagan. That’s when the DNC’s envy over the Gipper’s ability to raise money from private business began completely clouding their judgement. Instead of a three-decade push for public campaign financing championed by one of the two major political parties, the Democrats started calling corporations for bribes and trying to out-Republican Republicans. This year the cluelessness of the party’s leadership reached new heights, however. The bosses, and that’s still what they should be called, had their nominee picked out four years early. She was-- and is-- an awful presidential candidate, a staggeringly-unlikable and politically-compromised choice that now gets outpolled in a hypothetical head-to-head race against the least popular major party presidential candidate in American electoral history.

Sanders provided for them the perfect candidate, nearly as pure as Ralph Nader in both his public and private life, personally popular with unimpeachable character, a long track record of service with integrity, and no skeletons. Instead, they’ve chosen to stick with the playbook, doubling down on the Senator from Goldman Sachs, a woman that’s done more to damage feminism than anybody else in the second wave. And if that’s not enough, the operatives are also succeeding in alienating the next generation of progressive leaders, activists, and change agents, and plenty more who simply plan to be voters when they get older.

These are people that may really believe that America has been transformed by the Obama presidency. Kenny G plays a pleasant melody. Israel is not an apartheid state, they believe. Unisex bathrooms are a human right, but health care needs to be run by private industry for profit. They fancy themselves progressive, but they can't bring themselves to indict the nation that has made them so comfortable. They believe what Republicans believed a generation ago: The system is fair. Living in poverty means you aren’t working hard enough. Of course they believe this crap. Listen to how they sneer at people that work minimum wage jobs. Go to the comment threads of stories written about the Clinton-Sanders race. Sanders’ supporters are described as out-of-touch “hippies” that are secretly misogynist and prone to violence-- and racist also, since Sanders represents a predominately-white state. A death threat made by supporters against corrupted party officials in New Mexico somehow reveals widespread misogyny that Sanders should be forced to own and then denounce, but nobody demands that Clinton do the same thing when one of her supporters, actor Wendell Pierce, physically assaults a female Sanders voter. The comments we hear, instead, are of the stripe: Well, we weren't there. Everybody involved probably drank too much. Even though there’s no evidence that the woman was drinking to excess. (Only one party involved in the altercation was arrested.) I thought we were supposed to believe all women when they make accusations of violence being perpetrated against them, but we also know that, for “liberals,” that standard ends just before we get to the victims of Bill Clinton.

The fight for the soul of the Democratic Party, and of progressivism, in general, doesn’t end with the California primary. The party convention may ultimately lead to a nomination of Clinton, but there will be a battle before that happens. And the accomplishments of Sanders’ successful run at the presidency are already apparent. He has thrust the vital issues of income and racial inequality, trade imbalance, and imperial state-building into the limelight. His presence in the race has not improved the candidacy of Clinton. Don’t let anybody try to convince you of that. She is thoroughly corrupted, and moving her rhetoric to the left isn’t the same as her actually moving to the left. It’s ridiculous to say that Sanders was in this race for her benefit. The lives he has inspired will be his public legacy. The causes he has championed have been the big winners. The movement didn’t begin with him, though, and it won’t end with him either.

posted by CM @ 9:10 PM