Yeah, I know. California didn’t go the way we’d hoped. But then neither did New York. Or Ohio. Or Pennsylvania. Or Massachusetts. Freaking Massachusetts! Still, Bernie Sanders did an amazing thing. The last true progressive candidate, Dennis Kucinich, won maybe 20% in one state (I think Oregon) and that was cause for jumping up and down (or at least up). That was eight years ago, and back then we could never have imagined something like the Sanders campaign. This is a rising movement, as I’ve said before – it’s political, it’s generational, it’s policy-focused … it’s freaking amazing. And it came within a whisker of stealing the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination away from the biggest name in party politics.
Anyway, Hillary Clinton has won; that’s what the voters have said. I won’t quibble with the numbers – the horse race is over. However, the real project of 2016 continues – that of pushing a more energetic progressive agenda forward and finding effective ways of holding Hillary accountable to the activist wing of her party. My hope is that my fellow Sanders supporters will not resort to cynicism; a fear underlined by the ridiculous decision of the AP and NBC News / MSNBC to declare Clinton the “presumptive nominee” of the Democratic Party hours before the polls opened in California. That irresponsible act will, for many, throw doubt on the outcome of the California primary. We need to maintain the activist energy of the Sanders campaign and mobilize it behind a set of policies while working to defeat Trump in November. We can’t afford a radical Republican presidency. We just can’t.
I’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again: my disagreements with the Clintons are profound. I am opposed to her foreign policy positions, with very few exceptions. Her closeness to Wall Street augurs well for them and not so hot for the rest of us. And I am not convinced that she is the strongest candidate to defeat Trump this fall. But leave us face it – she will be the Democratic standard-bearer, barring disaster, and we need to take the five minutes (in favorable states) needed to cast our vote for Hillary where needed, then get back to the real work of politics – namely improving the prospects for our neighbors and our planet. That’s the work that made the Sanders campaign in inevitable. That’s the hope for a livable future.
That’s our choice. Choose wisely, friends.
luv u,
jp
What I have to say about the “Bernie or bust” tendency, however, differs from what a lot of people on the hard left are saying these days. Working to defeat Trump by, among other things, supporting Clinton if she’s nominated is simply not that hard a pill to swallow for me – a person for whom a vote for Bernie was a kind of compromise. I want to take a moment to look at some of the main contentions I have heard from Bernie or Busters, none of which (spoiler alert!) I feel has any real merit.
The most disconcerting part of this likely scenario is the prospect of living through one, maybe two terms of rule by either an egotistical man-child-billionaire or a corporatist Democrat. Of course, I far prefer the latter, mostly because there is some opportunity to push Clinton from the left, but either way we are likely to see a more bellicose stance towards issues of war and peace. Either way we will be moving to the right of Obama along certain political vectors. And Obama is not even a standard progressive; he is a centrist, and very cautious at that.
What is kind of discouraging, however, is the mess that New York State elections often turn out to be. We actually have fairly restrictive voter laws. No early voting, no same day registration, excuse-only absentee balloting, and a lot of weird business, like all of those voters shut out in Brooklyn this time around. I’m not claiming any conspiracy. It’s just a kind of studied incompetence that I see in my own district. (For instance, my first presidential election as a voter was 1980 – I was away from home, at SUNY New Paltz, had applied for an absentee ballot, and they sent it to my parents’ house up in the Utica area. Stuff like that.)
This is a media driven process. The horse-race coverage of the primary campaigns has pretty much swallowed up MSNBC, for instance. They basically pushed Melissa Harris-Perry out the door because she didn’t particularly want to be a campaign correspondent. Hard to blame her for that. Horse-race politics coverage is basically like sports journalism. The marketing approach is practically indistinguishable from that of sporting events – same kinds of music, graphics, etc. And this debate is a bit like Pacquio vs. Bradley. Except that it’s shrill white people.
The most important component in the argument against “Bernie or Bust” is simply that we cannot afford eight years of one-party rule under the Republicans. This would have a hugely negative impact on the most vulnerable in our society, on the environment, on our brothers and sisters in other countries around the world, and more. The fate of the Supreme Court alone is enough reason to vote for the Democratic nominee, no matter who it is. Scalia’s replacement is only just the first slice; three or four more justices could step down in the coming years. If Donald Trump or Ted Cruz ends up being the person replacing them, say goodbye to any hope of social justice for decades to come. A Cruz court would make Roberts seem like Earl Warren.
Things are more complicated on the right. The Republican races inspire a mixture of joy and dread. The possibility of a Trump presidency is not something I want to contemplate. That said, I couldn’t stifle a chortle of joy to see the institutional G.O.P. leadership get what they so richly deserve. After decades of stoking the most virulent reactionary sentiments imaginable, they are reaping a bitter harvest in Trump. They are watching him win primary after primary, and resolve to stop him at any cost. Then they look at second place and see someone they perhaps despise even more than Trump – Ted Cruz. Best of all, every vessel the neocons chose to carry their message forward has hit a wall, trounced by a man who calls the Iraq war “a big fat mistake”, who says he will protect Social Security, and who sees Planned Parenthood as a valuable asset on some level. Heresy!
Okay, I did hear some encouraging words from Senator Sanders on war and peace. Not enough, in my opinion, but certainly better than last time. I am glad that he gave some historical perspective to a position that is just as relevant today as it was in the 1950s: the conviction that the United States should not be acting like an empire, overthrowing disobedient regimes whenever we feel like it, bombing wherever we please, always opting early for the sword. Clinton did what she always does – offer a set of proposals that extend the bad policy we are currently implementing. Could Sanders have disagreed more with the underlying premises of her positions? Oh, yes … but you have to pick your fights in a television debate.
Okay, that was a sobering sign, to be sure. Even more infuriating than the sideshow atmospherics was the framing of the questions, delivered for the most part by Anderson Cooper. While the Democratic field is decidedly to the left, at least from a rhetorical perspective, of where they were even eight years ago, the corporate media questioners proceeded through the lens of Reagan’s America. The signal example of this for me was Cooper’s comment to Bernie Sanders about his support for the Sandinista government in Nicargua in the 1980s, as if that was a particularly controversial position in retrospect. (This can be equated with opposition to the Contra terror war against that government being pursued by the Reagan administration at the time – a war so broadly opposed by the American people that Congress had explicitly banned funding for the Contra forces.)