Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
California’s
Presidential primary election is officially scheduled for March 3, 2020, but
I’ve already voted. And it won’t particularly surprise anyone who knows my husband Charles and I that
we both voted for Bernie Sanders.
I turned in
mail-in ballots for both of us on the early evening of February 26, 2020 at the
Mission Valley Public Library on my way to a grocery run at Costco. But Charles
and I had filled them out the night before at home, after watching that
train-wreck of a Democratic Presidential candidates’ debate in Charleston,
South Carolina. As I joked to one of my home-care clients, a retired
schoolteacher, if his students had behaved the way the Democratic candidates
behaved in that debate, he’d have rapped them across the knuckles with a ruler
and sent them to their corners for a time-out.
Needing a
respite from politics, Charles and I spent the next hour and 45 minutes watching
The Lego Batman Movie — which turned out
to be a highly engaging and entertaining spoof of the whole superhero genre — before returning to the political wars to mark our
ballots. Charles had been for Bernie Sanders from the get-go; I had been on the
fence between Sanders and Elizabeth Warren until her mean-spirited, scurrilous
and desperate attack on Sanders as a sexist for a private conversation in which
he supposedly questioned whether a woman can be elected President of the U.S.
in 2020.
I’m voting for
Bernie Sanders knowing full well that electing an open socialist — albeit a
“democratic socialist,” two words many Americans, especially those 40 or over
with direct experience of the Cold War, believe are contradictory — as
President is going to be an uphill battle. I’m voting for Sanders despite my
ongoing frustration that he could keep exactly the same positions on every
issue he cares about and do better if he just wouldn’t saddle himself with the
S-word.
I was amused
when Sanders said that Franklin Roosevelt was a democratic socialist — which he
wasn’t. Though FDR advocated many of the same programs Bernie Sanders supports
now, his position on capitalism was more like Elizabeth Warren’s. He believed
in capitalism, but felt it needed strong government regulation to save it from
itself. Actually, Sanders isn’t the sort of “socialist” that believes in
abolishing the private sector, either; when I had the chance to do a phone
interview with him in 1998 I asked him if he’d eliminate private businesses altogether,
he said, “Of course not. That would be ridiculous.”
I voted for
Bernie Sanders knowing full well that he suffers from “electability” problems. All the Democratic Presidential candidates suffer from
“electability” problems. The seven candidates on the February 25 debate stage
all are running ahead of President Trump in head-to-head match-up polls, but
this is February and the election is eight and one-half months of Republican
propaganda and disinformation away. All the Democratic candidates have serious vulnerabilities the
super-funded Republican campaign will seek to exploit.
We know about
Sanders’: the “socialist” label, the calls for “Medicare for All” single-payer
health care and free college tuition at public universities, the price tag on
his programs (yes, single-payer health care and free college will more than pay
for themselves over time, but the transition costs are pretty steep), and his
stump speaking style which makes him come off more like an Old Testament
prophet than a figure of decency and stability.
Elizabeth Warren
doesn’t saddle herself with the S-word, but her programs are almost as radical
— and almost as expensive — as Sanders’. What’s more, if he comes off like an
Old Testament prophet, she comes off like a professor (which she used to be
before she entered politics) getting exasperated lecturing a particularly thick
set of students. Though she’s considerably more Left than Hillary Clinton, she
has something of the same image problem: she comes off as a know-it-all, loudly
proclaiming that she has a “plan” for everything — and she’s a woman in a still
deeply sexist society that regards assertiveness and decisiveness as
“masculine” qualities, to be embraced when a man shows them but shunned when a
woman does.
In other years
and other political environments, Amy Klobuchar or Pete Buttigieg might have
been able to pull off the balancing act that helped elect the last three
Democratic Presidents: Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama. They could
have seemed young, fresh and progressive enough to appeal to young voter
without turning off the giant corporations and wealthy donors that fund the
Democratic Party as much as they do the Republican Party. But in this year, and this political environment, they’ve
responded to the double-pronged progressive challenge of Sanders and Warren by
tacking so far to the Right
they’ve given away virtually any chance of winning the young Left-leaning
voters the Democrats are going to need not only as a voter base but a volunteer
base as well.
Then there’s Joe
Biden, a rotting corpse of a politician who on more than one issue is living in
the past. There’s his bizarre penchant for public gaffes, including his
announcement in South Carolina that he’s running for U.S. Senate; his odd claim
that he’s part of the African-American community (sorry, Joe, but working for a
Black guy for eight years does not make
you Black yourself); and his and his son’s involvement in the Ukraine political
scandal over which President Trump was impeached by the House and acquitted by
the Senate on almost totally party-line votes.
Though no one
has shown credible evidence that the Bidens had any corrupt intent or got
underhanded financial gain, can you really
believe that of all the people in the world, the shareholders of Ukraine’s
Burisma company thought Hunter Biden was the greatest and most helpful
businessperson they could tap for their board in 2014? They wanted access and
influence to his dad, then the vice-president of the United States, and they
got it. It’s a perfect example of the so-called “swamp” Trump promised to
“drain” in his 2016 campaign (only to fill his own government with its dregs),
and if Biden is the nominee (which, barring a huge comeback win in South
Carolina, is almost certainly not
going to happen, thank goodness) Trump will endlessly remind voters that Biden
pressured the Ukrainian government to fire a prosecutor who was going to
investigate his son’s company.
Finally, there
are the three mega-rich guys who this year tried to buy the Democratic Presidential
nomination the way Trump effectively bought and bullied his way into the
Republican nomination in 2016. One, Andrew Yang, has already given it up as a
bad investment, folded his tent and gone home. One, Tom Steyer, probably could
have claimed pre-emptive front-runner status if he’d declared two years
earlier, at a time when so many Democrats were shell-shocked by Trump’s win
they may well have decided the only way to beat a billionaire (so-called) with
no political experience was with another billionaire with no political
experience.
But Steyer
waited too long and played too much by the rules — instead of self-financing
his campaign he staged money-losing online “fundraisers” to get enough
individual donors to qualify for the debates — and in the meantime someone far
richer, less rule-bound and more unscrupulous, Michael Bloomberg, decided to
outbid him. Bloomberg is a truly weird candidate, a sort of less flamboyant
version of Donald Trump: he really is a billionaire (there’s quite a lot of
room for doubt as to whether Trump is), he can lay at least a credible claim to
having made it on his own (Trump got a $63 million gift from his dad), and he’s
already held political office as Mayor of New York for 12 years.
But Bloomberg
has his liabilities. As Mayor of New York he signed on to a blatantly
unconstitutional “stop and frisk” policy that targeted young Black and Latino
men on the streets for random searches without any regard to that pesky
Constitutional requirement of “probable cause.” He’s since issued a lame
so-called “apology” that ran something like, “I didn’t realize the effects
‘stop and frisk’ would have on the Black and Brown communities” — which is sort
of like Adolf Hitler saying, “I didn’t realize the effects the Holocaust would
have on the Jewish community.” Elizabeth Warren also dredged up published
comments by Bloomberg denigrating certain women as, among other things, “fat
Lesbians” — sounding an awful lot like Trump — and Bloomberg’s defense was that
those remarks were “Borscht Belt humor.” (That probably had Harvey Weinstein’s
lawyers saying to themselves, “Damn! Why didn’t we think of that?”)
Bloomberg has a
deeper problem than what he’s said or done specifically to Blacks or women.
He’s a multibillionaire who made his money in Wall Street speculation and built
a media empire that promotes and advocates the concerns of the business
community. As both Sanders and Warren have pointed out in the two debates
Bloomberg has been on, he’s a living contradiction of virtually everything the
modern-day Democratic party, and particularly its young base voters and
volunteers, claims to stand for. Bloomberg’s is a Libertarian success story,
and his whole appeal is to voters disgusted by the socially Right-wing agenda
of the Republican party — particularly their attacks on women’s reproductive
choice and Queer rights — but quite O.K. with an economy and a society in which
the rich continually get richer at everybody else’s expense.
I don’t think
Donald Trump is guaranteed re-election, but I do think the task of unseating him is going to be a lot harder than most
Democrats believe (or fantasize). Trump goes into 2020 with a lot more
advantages than he had in 2016. He has the full powers of the Presidency to
reward his friends, punish his enemies and make life as difficult as possible
for anyone who dares to oppose
his re-election. He has an economy that overall is doing reasonably well. More
importantly, he has a carefully cultivated Right-wing voter base of between 40
and 45 percent of the American electorate that will turn out for any Republican Presidential candidate that appeals to
their sense of grievance, their racism, sexism and hatred of Queer people, and
their reverence for the rich.
That base has
been carefully built up over decades by talk radio, Fox News, Right-wing
churches and an overall propaganda infrastructure the Left can’t even begin to compete with on an equal level. The Republican
party also has a huge base of wealthy donors, and there’s a basic problem the
Democrats have that the Republicans don’t. The priorities of Republican
mega-donors and Republican voters are basically the same: a Libertarian
economic agenda of “small government,” an end to the welfare state and an end
to government protection of workers, consumers and the environment, co-existing
surprisingly comfortably with a radical-Right “Christian” social agenda calling
for a Big Government that micro-manages people’s personal lives, especially
their sex lives.
The Democrats
face a deep and profound split between what their big donors want and what
their base voters want. Their base voters want a huge expansion of government
and major new taxes on the rich to pay for more social welfare programs, a guarantee of access to health care as a
right, free college education for all who can benefit from it, and strong
regulation of the private sector to protect workers, consumers and the
environment. The big Democratic donors want none of those things; they may be appalled by the Republican
Right’s demand for a government that micro-manages how people use their bodies
and deal with the consequences, good and bad, therefrom, but they’re perfectly
happy maintaining an economic system in which the rich continually get richer
and everyone else gets poorer.
I suspect (and
hereby predict) that after the South Carolina primary on February 29 and the
so-called “Super Tuesday” on March 3, the Democratic Presidential race will
devolve into a one-on-one battle between Michael Bloomberg and Bernie Sanders.
The parts of America’s ruling elite who support the Democratic Party, who
regard the nomination of Sanders as an existential threat to the Democratic
Party as well as to their own privileges, will see Biden fall, Klobuchar and
Buttigieg stay in also-ran status, and will therefore unite around Bloomberg as
the only pro-corporate Democrat who can keep Sanders from getting the
nomination.
I understand the
concerns about what might happen to Democrats across-the-board if Bernie
Sanders is the nominee. The very first Presidential election in which I was old
enough to vote was 1972, when the presumptive front-runner the Democratic
Establishment had anointed (Ed Muskie) faded early — helped go down by a letter
written by one of Richard Nixon’s dirty-tricks operatives that attacked
Muskie’s wife and led him to cry in public — and George McGovern, who was
progressive but far less radical than Bernie Sanders, mounted a grass-roots
campaign and grabbed the Democratic nomination … only to be swamped by a
divisive, unscrupulous Republican opponent, Richard Nixon, who won a 49-state
landslide.
That’s one
possible scenario if Bernie Sanders is the Democratic nominee. It’s not
necessarily the only scenario — one can also imagine Sanders turning on
working-class voters who went for him over Hillary Clinton in the 2016 primaries
in Michigan and Wisconsin (both key states for Trump in the general election).
One can imagine Trump beating Sanders in a landslide, or Trump becoming the
first person in U.S. history to win the Presidency in the Electoral College
while losing the popular vote twice.
Certainly nominating Sanders is a risk if you think that voters are looking for
is an end to Mr. Trump/’s Wild Ride and a return to what Republican Warren G.
Harding famously called a “return to normalcy” in 1920. (The word he meant was
“normality.”)
But I voted for
Bernie Sanders in the 2020 California Democratic primary for the same reason I
voted for him in the 2016 primary: I agree with him on the issues. Like
Sanders, I call myself a “democratic socialist.” Like him, I think the U.S.
government should guarantee all its
citizens — indeed, all its residents, whatever their immigration status — equal
access to health care. The worldwide coronavirus crisis is just underscoring
the crucial importance of taking care of all people’s health; bacteria and viruses don’t care
about people’s race, gender, sexual orientation or immigration status. As
alternative cancer and AIDS researcher Peter Duesberg said, “To a virus, we are
just 73 kilograms of meat.”
I also agree
with Sanders that public college should be available to all Americans free of
charge. (This isn’t a radical idea, nor is it particularly new; the University
of California was tuition-free until Ronald Reagan got elected governor in
1966.) And I agree with an idea that got touched on in the February 25 debate:
we need a law to require large corporations to have workers’ and consumers’
representatives on their boards of directors. Sanders was attacked for that
proposal and told it would destroy the very basis of capitalism, which it wouldn’t;
it’s already the law in Germany, and the German economy still has a robust and
successful private sector.
I voted for
Bernie Sanders for President because, in the immortal words of America’s first democratic socialist candidate for President, Eugene
V. Debs, “I would rather vote for what I want and not get it than vote for what
I don’t want and get it.” Besides, this is a primary, and in a primary you’re supposed to be able to be idealistic. After the Democratic
National Convention nominates a candidate, I will vote for whoever that person
is, even if it’s Michael Bloomberg — just as I, albeit reluctantly, cast a
lesser-of-two-evils vote for Hillary Clinton in November 2016. But this time
around, I voted for a person I’ve long admired, whose issue positions I agree
with, and who would be the sort of President I want the U.S. to have.
