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
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