April 2016 Archives

Dear America,

We vote here in Connecticut today, and my family is all in for Bernie Sanders, but I can't help feeling a sense of despair relative to the process as a whole.  I like Sanders, and for that matter, I even find Clinton appealing, albeit to a lesser degree.  But the contest between them has descended to the Republican level.  And as to the Republican field...well, as to Republicans in general I always feel despair.  What makes me most despondent is the similarity of style and lack of substance to which the Democrats have reduced themselves, separating themselves by more and more slender margins from the Republicans as each election occurs.  I expect Republicans to be crass, hyperbolic and ad hominem in their discourse, but I always hope for more from my party.  I suppose that Hillary Clinton is just reverting to form, although she becomes more and more restrained, it seems, as the race between here and Sanders gets closer to being over.  But Sanders' slide into the Republicans' low-integrity mode bothers me, not that it really makes a difference.  Correct me if I'm wrong, but when he announced his candidacy, his professed goal was to elevate the debate within the Democratic Party, and to bring the systemic changes that have crept into American economic and political life to the fore.  The sub rosa text of his announcement was that he had no illusions about winning, but that a vote for him in a primary was a vote for redirection of the party back toward its traditional progressive creed.  He wanted to be the populist who didn't necessarily govern, but who embodied the impetus toward true egalitarian social structure in this country--a modern gadfly like Socrates--what the Republicans say they are while they actually do all they can to foster the opposite with their supply-side polemics, attacking the Democratic ethos rather than defending their free-market uber alles fixation; one can say that he wants everyone to have an equal chance for success, but if he thwarts every effort to control rapacity and kleptocracy in our society, his actions speak louder of maintenance of the deplorable status quo than they do about noble change.  But Sanders seems to have forgotten his initial purpose and plunged head first into the politics of the past and present on the advice of his campaign professional staff: negativity is what sells, they hiss, and the serpent once again prevails.  That's the problem with trying to win: you'll eventually do anything, even what you profess to abhor, to do so.

Don't get me wrong.  I don't regard Bernie Sanders to be one of those odious career politicians who will say anything to get or stay in power.  It's not that Sanders is a demagogue or a charlatan.  But for the past month or two, he has stooped to conquer, so to speak.  He has resorted to vituperation of his current opponent rather than fulmination in favor of his own ideas without concern for the deleterious effect such tactics might cause in the general election, endorsing the thinking of his own politicos that you have to knock the other guy down to win; standing tall isn't enough.  Clinton has done the same, what with her constant reference to Sanders' positions on guns and gun control, but as I said, she is just reverting to form.  But Sanders purported to be something different, and now he has tainted himself by being just more of the same...at least in the strategic sense.  He listened to experts whose only goal is to win instead of cleaving to his own creed and being guided by his inner good man.  In his defense, he seems to have recognized the electoral denouement that is upon all of us and come to his senses.  He still alludes to what he decries about Clinton and the other establishment candidates, but he has stopped calling her out by name and he has instead resumed directing his attention to big banks and unseemly wealth, which is where he started out to go.  To his credit, Sanders has obliquely acknowledged that his role is to elevate the dialectic that will occur in the general election by sensitizing his opponent, Hillary Clinton, to the need to get back to basics and stop compromising before anyone has asked her to.  He now focuses on reiterating the points he has wanted to make all along...just to remind Clinton about the impetus by which she should also be motivated: true egalitarianism, not some semblance of it that serves only to mask social injustice now with the pretense of intending to address it when it's convenient.

My guess is that Clinton will be nominated without much more rancor, and that Trump will prevail because moral corruption masquerading as piety is what sells to Republicans.   Then, Clinton will win in the general election, though not by the margin that seems to prevail now, and we will go on to another Clinton White House.  That's when the real worry will begin.  Everyone loves Bill Clinton, but when you truly analyze his "accomplishments"--welfare "reform," NAFTA, a balanced budget--you see that he was governed by pragmatism rather than principle.  Thus, if the second Clinton administration follows the path of the first, we are just in for more of the same.  The real key will be who prevails in all the congressional races in November, so that's what I fret about the most.  I always have to have something to fret about, and thanks to politics in America, I am never lacking it.

Your friend,

Mike  

Dear America,

I still plan to vote for Bernie Sanders in the Connecticut primary, but I have to say that I am disappointed in his recent defection to the dark side of politics, which have forced Hillary Clinton to respond in kind, though I must admit, with greater restraint than Sanders has demonstrated.  Sanders has pulled back some, disavowing his claim that Hillary Clinton is not qualified to be president by "Trumpizing" his original remark: converting claims that she disqualified herself with her Iraq vote and using her PAC to the simple assertion that her judgment is suspect.  I agree with him on that point because I have thought all along that her decision to use a private server, purportedly just for her emails, was pointless at best, but more aptly an invitation to exactly what has eventuated: a Republican talking point that won't go away.  I still don't understand her motivation, and apparently even those in her political camp didn't either...not from the very start.  Yet, if Sanders had just said that at the first debate between Democratic candidates instead of exclaiming that he was sick of hearing about Clinton's "damn emails,"  he could have made political hay and then let it lie without looking like the cliché negative politician that he has been advised to be.  That's the problem.  Just like some other Democrats in the past and all Republicans, he has been seduced by what is now his ambition to be president...what used to be just an attempt to offer the American people an alternative to the politically commonplace and get his issues--our issues--out into the public forum.  And Sanders fall from grace is a function of just one thing; he hired political professionals to run his campaign instead of relying on his own counsel.

When a candidate gets professional political advisors involved in his campaign, he can't be surprised by the advice they give him.  Unfortunately--inexplicably I might add in that everyone you talk to bemoans the bad-mouthing that politics always devolves to these days--negative works with the American people.  It isn't enough to stand for something today; you have to be against what the opponent is for, and you have to not just decry it, but desecrate it.  Thus, when some of Sanders' campaign staff were interviewed and bespoke their frustration with the fact that their boss is a nice guy despite the fact that he is a politician, they blithely opined that he should have been more of a politician and less of a nice guy.  And unfortunately...and this seems to have been just a moment of weakness...Sanders took their advice.  He is retrenching now, but frankly, I am a little disillusioned.  But in the end, just as in every other respect, I would rather have a Democrat like Sanders or Clinton than any of the Republicans in the race now or in the past, and negativity is the reason.

Think back to the beginning of the Obama administration.  Mitch McConnell, then just the minority leader in The Senate, stated publicly that his and his party's goal was to make President Obama a one term president, and they then openly set about the task.  They thwarted every attempt to do anything, best interest of the American people be damned.  The Republicans killed the single payer option in the Affordable Care Act, which more than 60% of the American people wanted at one point during the W. Bush administration, and they almost prevented the Affordable Care Act from becoming a reality at all.  Then, once it was passed, they poisoned public perception of The Act, and ignored that more than 48 million people didn't have insurance or other access to health care, and now they ignore the fact that more than 11 million of them have.  They decry the Obama approach to foreign affairs, but they have yet to suggest any plausible alternative to, for example, The President's insistence that a coalition of nations prosecute the war against ISIL, declining to immerse Americans in yet another ill-advised war in the middle east as the chief protagonist who will be colored as the chief antagonist by the jihadists.  They already vilify us in order to recruit.  Can you imagine what they would do if we did what Ted Cruz thinks we should and "carpet bombed" Syria?  Iran has stopped developing its nuclear capacity pursuant to the Iran nuclear treaty, but the Republicans criticize it because the treaty is only binding for a time certain...fifteen or twenty years depending on who is describing its terms.  They claim that Mr. Obama has wrecked the economy while they ignore the facts that unemployment is at 5% when it was almost 10% when he was inaugurated, and that we produce more than 200,000 new jobs every month now while we were losing over 700,000 every month in January 2008.

It's no wonder that decent people like Bernie Sanders get drawn into the bleak American style of politicking.  Negative works, as the Republicans, who advocate lower taxes for the very few rich people and have yet to propose a way in which to make doctors accessible to those who have been unable to afford them for decades, demonstrate over and over again.  It just proves a point that I have made over and over again.  On election day, the American people get just what they deserve.  God forbid it be a Republican president.

Your friend,

Mike

Dear America,

With Ted Cruz's victory in Wisconsin last night, it looks like the internecine campaign of the Republican Party is finally paying off for us Democrats.  There may not be a path to the nomination for Cruz, but there is finally a path toward the ultimate defeat of Donald Trump.  And while the likelihood of a Trump popular victory in the general election has always seemed remote, so did his nomination by the Republicans at one point.  Of course, while Ted Cruz isn't the vapid moron that Trump is, he is a sanctimonious demagogue, and that is just as dangerous.  Whether it is intentional or hapless, someone blowing up the world or curtailing the freedom of every secular American is a form of devastation, and both Trump and Cruz stand for those things.  But it is the Democratic way to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, so I am not fully reassured by the Republican finger on the old foot-shooting pistol.

It seems clear that the ultra-conservative minority in the Republican camp has overestimated its appeal and the breadth of the popular subscription in the nation as a whole to its we're good and everyone else isn't message.  They can call those state statutes banning ordinances that protect LGBT people whatever they want, but denominating them anti-discrimination laws doesn't change what they are, nor convince anyone but the Tea Party/Red Neck faction that their purpose is noble.  Guaranteeing business people the right to discriminate against people they don't like is not protecting those business people from being discriminated against themselves.  They certainly have the right to believe what they want, religiously or otherwise, but when you run a business that is open to the public, you have to serve the whole public, with the possible exception of those who would break the law as a consequence of receiving that service, and our Supreme Court has already said that LGBT is just a description, not a disenfranchisement, and that being LGBT is not illegal either.  So, that tactic along with the pull of the gerrymander-empowered reactionary right on the Republican Party is no better than a strategy undertaken by a minority to procedurally subvert and control the majority, and those who have partaken of it will come to their just deserts soon enough.  At least I hope so, but the Democratic Party has demonstrated a propensity for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, so I am still a little uneasy.

This battle between Sanders and Clinton is troubling.  I am a Sanders supporter because...well, there are several reasons.  First, he has adumbrated a principled platform without ceding concessions to those who oppose it even before he makes an effort; he advocates campaign reform to get money out of politics, Medicare for everyone, a foreign policy that requires of the rest of the world that it participate proportionately in its own defense, leveling of income and wealth disparities, and the progressive agenda in general.  His philosophy is, I'll pursue those goals and leave it to someone else to thwart their advent.  Clinton, on the other hand, starts from the premise that most of those things can't be done----she'll try, but she isn't promising anything.  Instead, she concedes that those things are desirable, but she says only that she will do what is practical about them.  In the past, that has meant that a candidate will do next to nothing about it when elected, and I have no reason to believe that she is any more reliable in that respect.  So, what's a progressive Democrat...a democratic socialist, if you prefer...to do?

In my case, I'm going to vote for Bernie in the Connecticut primary.  But it may well be the case that I will be in the minority here as well as in the total count of Democratic primary votes when the primaries are over.  The problem that represents not just for we minority Democrats, but for all Democrats, is that, while Hillary Clinton beats Donald Trump handily in a national election, she loses to Cruz and Rubio.  Sanders, on the other hand, beats all Republicans by at least ten percentage points in a national election.  This is where the Democratic tendency to give it all away comes into play.  The Democrats, both because of the party's system of delegate awarding and because we tend to be just as much committed to convention as the Republicans across the aisle are, will almost certainly nominate Hillary Clinton.  The Sanders voters will vote for her, but not the Cruz voters who would have voted for Sanders, and Cruz looks like the only viable alternative to Trump right now.  Not to put too fine a point on it, if we Democrats don't nominate Sanders, we might be at risk for suffering under a President Cruz, or even a President Rubio...a martinet or a marionette.  What a choice.

My suggestion to Democrats is this.  There is only one sure bet--as sure a bet as exists in politics, that is--for a non-Republican president giving an inaugural speech in January 2017: Bernie Sanders.  So, let's take the sure bet instead of the conventional one.  Keep running, Bernie.  That's what you're good at, and that's what's best for all of us.  Help us, Obi Wan.  You're our only hope.

Your friend,

Mike