The man so popular nobody likes him
Last night, at a college basketball game in Lawrence, Kansas between two state rivals, an all-out melee broke out on the court, pushing and shoving and wrestling. It featured, most cinematically, a player grabbing a chair and lifting it up over his head in an attempt to strike at someone, before an assistant coach grabbed control of him. This scene was nothing compared to what is about to happen in the Democratic Party.I want you to consider this scenario that’s playing out in front of us. A lifelong socialist and political independent is leading the presidential polls for the Democratic Party in each of the early states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and Nevada (and for good measure, California—by 4 percentage points!). He’s an 80-something former mayor of crunchy Burlington, Vermont, who briefly and unexpectedly interrupted the party’s coronation of Hillary Clinton in 2016, sparked a revolution made up mostly of young people that morphed into an entirely new breed of political figure called Democratic Socialists, and today actively encourages those activists to openly “primary” corporate Democrats. He openly espouses the beliefs-- right out in public-- that insurance companies should be cut out of the process of providing health care to Americans and that a tax should be placed on each and every stock, bond or derivative sold in the U.S.-- with the proceeds of the levy going to fund higher education. If you don’t think a political brawl has been inevitable, you’re a cheery optimist.
Yesterday, Hillary Clinton, who was retired by the American voting public in 2016 after losing the presidential race to a racist reality show clown, slithered out of the grass with fresh criticism of Sanders the politician-- and shockingly this time, Sanders the man. “He was in Congress for years,” Clinton says, “He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” Sanders quickly fought back by telling reporters, “On a good day, my wife likes me.”
Clinton’s comments appear in the latest Hollywood Reporter and come surrounding a new four-hour Hulu documentary on the subject of Clinton that the American public has apparently been desperately waiting for. (Jesus Christ, four hours? I don’t foresee an Oscar nomination here for editing.) My favorite part of the quote above is the last line. As with Trump and his “deplorables” or Jill Stein, “the Russian asset,” you were fooled if you deigned to withhold your vote from Her Royal Highness, victimized by your own ignorance. And when she says Bernie got nothing done, I assume she’s talking about when he failed to stop the bipartisan war on Iraq that she championed. Her timing is interesting too-- the first day of the impeachment trial in the senate of her electoral conqueror, President Trump. After twenty years of her ilk warning us about the dangers of splitting the party in two, twenty years of financially-starving Ralph Nader citizen groups, demonizing progressives, and taking bribes from Wall Street and Corporate America, we find out Hillary is simply the captain of the PUMAs. Heard of that new group meant to replace the defunct Democratic Leadership Council and counter the rise of Democratic Socialists? PUMA stands for Party Unity, My Ass.
The attacks on Sanders are coming in waves. Elizabeth Warren, previously engaged in a progressive cease-fire with her fellow New England senator, opened the door for the corporate wing to attack with a desperate and unverifiable campaign claim that Sanders told her in a private conversation in 2018 that a female candidate couldn’t beat Trump. Sanders vigorously denies having ever said anything of the sort, and his campaign produced evidence of multiple conflicting public comments over the years, but I’ll go on record as stating that I personally find a hard time even finding daylight between someone theoretically saying that a female candidate would have a hard time winning the presidency and Clinton’s further comments Tuesday that she believes women have to work twice as hard on the presidential campaign trail for the same results.
When you’re the front-runner, you get extra pointy arrows shot at you, and that’s where Bernie understandably finds himself, but this is a critical moment in history for Wall Street, and for the health care-for-profit, and war-for-profit industries. It wouldn’t be easy to run a third-party candidate against Sanders in the age of Trump. The mood for solidarity in opposing Trump is at a peak. There would be a major backlash from progressives against any attempt to-- once again-- subvert the grass-roots efforts and success of the Sanders camp. The risk also lies in alienating a generation of young people energized in a historic way by Sanders. We’re closer than ever to the implosion of the party, the inevitable one long-predicted by this blog.
The timing is everything for Clinton. She’s nothing if not calculating. Consider what a Sanders victory would mean for her. Not only would it be Sanders knocking off Trump in the here and now, but it would add fuel to the theory that Sanders could have also beaten Trump in 2016. That deflates an enormous narrative that’s been created and capitalized upon-- the one that says Clinton didn’t lose the election, but that it was stolen from her-- by Sanders, by supposedly-misogynist “Bernie Bros,” by Stein, by Jim Comey, by easily-misled voters, by Vladimir Putin.
Sanders’ original sin was stepping out of the wilderness of Washington incorruptibility and having the gall to oppose her in a primary that was theoretically open, but had been pre-ordained for her by the Democratic National Committee, an organization she had fully staffed and had literally cleared from debt with her corporate campaign money. Then, of course, he endorsed her, spoke for her at the Democratic convention, and appeared with her three times on the campaign trail between the convention and November. For good measure, Sanders says he has a letter from her thanking him for his help in her campaign, but we must now unfortunately doubt the authenticity of her sentiment. “Nobody likes him,” she says, but he’s the most popular senator in the U.S among his own constituents, according to Morning Consult, and he has an average national favorability rating seven percentage points higher than Clinton’s.
When Clinton was elected to the U.S. Senate in 2000, she quickly became one of the biggest warmongers in the chamber. As senator and then secretary of state, no nation was too Muslim not to bomb, no ginned-up intelligence too suspicious, no Bush/Cheney official in the Pentagon too militaristic, no despot too vicious to be patronized for a donation to the Clinton Foundation, no Middle Eastern child too valuable to the Earth to be spared the constant buzz of a drone bomb flying overhead or suffering from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder for the rest of his or her life. For Hillary, the game seemed to be: I want to drop as many bombs as the boys do. That will prove my foreign policy bona fides. That’s how you project strength in Washington, she believed, especially if you’re wearing a pantsuit.
Now Trump seems to be the politician she’s emulating. When seemingly surprised by the negative backlash to her comments yesterday, she replied with a laugh, “I thought everyone wanted my authentic, unvarnished views!” I’m not 100% sure what the joke is supposed to mean, but I project it as more of the common jealousy among Democrats about what Donald Trump is allowed to say by the Washington press corps. I'm sure she views this as yet another double-standard. She dreamed of being the careerist in Washington that so many more men have gotten to be. And since she never ran for the presidency with a thought other than to benefit herself, it would make sense that she’s now more concerned with score-settling than the party unity she used to most-righteously champion. In fact, I venture to say she couldn’t be more helpful to Donald Trump right now if she were a Russian asset.
Her comments yesterday would no doubt appear in a Trump attack ad against Bernie if he were to secure the nomination, and perhaps this is the new plan. The timing of this week also corresponds with Donald and Melania’s 15th wedding anniversary. It was on today’s date in 2005 that the president and first lady wed-- with Bill and Hillary Clinton in attendance at Mar-A-Lago.
But it’s not just Hillary. She’s just one of the water-carriers for her exclusive country club-- the Washington establishment. All members have to eventually take their turn. There have also been leaks from his own team that Obama would intervene with a similar anti-endorsement if Sanders-- not a true Democrat, you see-- were to fly too close to the nomination. (He’d be vilified by them if he ran against the Democrats, but he’s also vilified if he runs inside their system.) The old tropes about socialism are being repeated now more often and more vigorously, Bernie's supposed unelectability will be an increasingly-popular topic with the pundits. There will be more Clinton-like smears that the most genuine national politician we have in the U.S. is somehow not the man he projects to be. I'm telling you, I saw it coming. There’s no other playbook to use for these architects and administrators of the kingdom of corruption that’s threatened to be dismantled-- though I’ll admit I didn’t exactly see “nobody likes him” as one of the attacks.
Bernard Sanders, long the lone voice crying in the wilderness in Washington, the non-partied independent that merely “caucuses” with the Democrats, the man so often the single or rare dissenting vote, the man talking to an empty chamber in the middle of the night, isn’t alone any more. He’s built a mass movement, an army of the peaceful that features the support of nearly one of every two (45%) Democratic voters between the ages of 18 and 29. He has the largest rallies, easily the largest donor network, and shows up best against Trump in states like Texas and Wisconsin-- and all this despite not taking money from corporations or from millionaires and billionaires. He's threatening to become what he has been telling his campaign audiences he will be—our president and America’s organizer-in-chief.
posted by CM @ 9:45 PM
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