by MARK GABRISH CONLAN
Copyright © 2016 by Mark Gabrish Conlan for Zenger’s
Newsmagazine • All rights reserved
Hillary Clinton
and Bernie Sanders may not be a real family, but they’ve certainly got good at
playing one on TV. In the Democratic Presidential debates, especially now that
the field of candidates is down to just the two of them, Hillary comes off as
the nasty, controlling mother, setting strict limits on what the kids can hope
for or even dream about. No matter how much you want that new toy, piece of
candy, guaranteed access to health care, or free public-college tuition, you
can’t have it! In fact, says Hillary in
every inflection of her voice, every nod of her head, every stern, unsmiling
facial expression, you wouldn’t really want it even if you could have it — which you can’t, so stop even thinking about it!
Bernie, in this
little situation drama — and it’s indicative of how “familial” the debate has
become that just about everybody calls the candidates by their first names — is
the super-indulgent dad. What do you mean,
you can’t have it? he tells the kids. Look at the neighbors’ kids, he says; they have it, and their parents make less than we do! It
shouldn’t be surprising that in the Democratic primaries thus far — this is
being written four days after Bernie’s spectacular, if narrow, victory in
Michigan — Bernie has overwhelmed Hillary among young voters by unbelievable
margins of 30, 40 or even 50 percent.
It’s not just
because Bernie has promised them a free college education if they do well in
school — though I’m sure a lot of his
appeal to younger voters is that if he wins and gets that proposal through
Congress, they’ll have access to a quality education and have the ability to
donate whatever skills they acquire to positive social change instead of being
burdened their entire adult lives with crushing six-figure student loan debt.
It’s because Bernie, the cool dad, has not only retained the idealism of his
own youth (remember that he went
to a free public college in New York and got the kind of education on the terms
he’d like to offer anyone else) but is openly seeking to rekindle a sense of
hope and imagination in America’s modern young.
Hillary, by
contrast, seems to be doing everything she can to squash any hint of idealism in the electorate in general and the
Democratic electorate in particular. In one debate, she tried to squash
Bernie’s plan for universal health care by reminding her audience that they
couldn’t even get the so-called “public option” into the Affordable Care Act —
and that was when the Democrats still had a majority in both houses of
Congress. The world is the way it is, and you can’t even think of making anything more than just incremental
changes, Hillary says, raising her voice to its maximum level of schoolmarmish
seriousness and looking like she’s about to crack a ruler over the knuckles of
any kid in her presence daring to dream of anything more than that.
I’ve somehow got
on the e-mail sucker lists for both
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders. (Full disclosure: the day after Bernie’s
win in Michigan I logged on to his Web site and donated $27 — his
much-proclaimed figure of his average donation — to the Sanders campaign.)
Hillary and her supporters keep sending me e-mails saying that she’s the only hope we have of keeping Donald Trump from becoming
Barack Obama’s successor as President in 2017. I couldn’t disagree more. I’ve
become convinced over the past few months that if the Democrats nominate
Hillary Clinton and the Republicans nominate Donald Trump, Trump will not only
win, it will be a landslide. Why?
Hillary
Clinton is a lousy politician. She’s even
admitted it herself. In the last Democratic debate she said, “I’m not a natural
politician, like my husband or President Obama.” The thing that should scare
every Democratic activist and voter about a Hillary Clinton nomination is her
utter and repeated inability to connect with ordinary people — especially ordinary
white people. While her inexplicable popularity among voters of color (she
carried Michigan’s African-American community by 62 to 35 percent) continues,
Hillary’s standing among white working-class voters is so weak that in
Michigan, in just two weeks of campaigning, she was able to convert an 18- to
25-percent margin in the polls to a 2-percent defeat at the
ballot box.
In just about
every public appearance, Hillary’s disgust with the whole process of
campaigning is almost too palpable. She’s one of those frustrating political
figures who, given the limits of her pro-corporate “Third Way” moderate world
view (every time she introduces herself as a “progressive” in one of the
debates, I want to yell at the TV, “You are not! You’re a moderate! You
said so yourself!”), would probably make a quite good President. But her
visceral hatred of the process you have to follow to get there — especially
once you’re out of the cozy back rooms where you can quietly talk to big
donors, party leaders and the so-called “superdelegates” (essentially party
bosses and hacks who, in the so-called Democratic Party, constitute about
one-eighth of the delegates and were put there in the mid-1970’s to make sure
no genuinely progressive outsider — no George McGovern or Jesse Jackson or Howard Dean or Bernie
Sanders — could ever get the nomination) and have to talk to real
flesh-and-blood voters — helped
do her in in 2008 when she ran in the primaries against Barack Obama, and it’s
working against her this year as well.
Hillary Clinton
comes into the campaign with an extraordinary set of negatives. Polls reveal 51
percent of respondents have a negative view of her. She says that’s the result
of a quarter-century’s worth of attacks on her from the Right-wing axis of the
Republican Party and its media outlets, talk radio and Fox News. She’s got a
point, but she’d be better able to answer those attacks if she were stronger at
getting people to like her, the way “natural politicians” like her husband and
Obama have done. A lot of people ridiculed Bill Clinton when he said, “I feel
your pain,” but he managed to convince many Americans that he had some emotional connection with their problems and he
would do his best as President to help solve them. It’s impossible to imagine anyone — with the possible exception of other married women
whose husbands can’t or won’t keep their dicks in their pants — who would ever
believe Hillary Clinton felt their pain.
That’s one
reason why only 37 percent of respondents in those polls say that Hillary
Clinton is honest and trustworthy. Unlike her husband, she didn’t have a hardscrabble upbringing. She didn’t rise from
a town called Hope (actually Bill was born in the neighboring town of Hot
Springs, but the mythology his P.R. people built around the “man from Hope” has
stuck); she was born to wealth and privilege in Illinois. Maybe not anywhere
near as much wealth or privilege as Donald Trump — who’s been able to sell
himself to America as a “self-made” multibillionaire even though he got a major
leg up from his dad’s fortune — but wealth and privilege nonetheless.
F. Scott
Fitzgerald famously wrote that “the rich are different from you and me,” by
which he meant not only that they had more money but they’d been trained from
birth to consider themselves an elite, entitled not only to money but power as
well in whatever field they chose to go after it. Hillary Clinton wears that
sense of entitlement like the ill-tailored but intimidating pantsuits she puts
on for all her public appearances. It’s been her whole defense against the
ridiculous controversy the Republicans and their media lackeys keep trying to
gin up about her e-mails. Regarding her use of private servers for official
business and her refusal to disclose — until the FBI and the courts forced her
to — what was in those e-mails, she complains, “Colin Powell did it before me!”
— as if that made it right.
It’s also why
she thinks she can take speakers’ fees totaling $675,000 for three speeches to
the elite financial firm of Goldman Sachs — who have supplied Secretaries of
the Treasury to the last three Presidents,
Democrats and Republicans, including Hillary’s husband — and not have to tell
the American people just what was in those speeches. And it’s what gives her
the sheer gall to take Goldman’s money — almost three-quarters of a million
dollars of it in speaking fees as well as whatever their executives have given
to her campaign — and then pose as a progressive who has a plan that will rein
in the excesses of financial firms like Goldman Sachs.
Hillary’s only
chance in a two-person race against Trump will be to get people to vote for her
because, as much as they can’t stand her, they can’t stand him more. The same
polls that put Hillary’s negatives at 51 percent put Trump’s at 64.
The white
working class. Once upon a time —
basically from 1932 to 1964 — the white working class was a bulwark of the
Democratic Party’s governing coalition. Then the 1960’s happened. The
Democratic and Republican parties flipped their historic positions on civil
rights in general and African-American rights in particular. The party of
racism, reaction and the Ku Klux Klan pushed through the Civil Rights Act of
1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, while the “party of Lincoln” became the
party of Strom Thurmond, the “Southern Strategy” and white reaction in general.
Also, the counterculture happened — and the Republicans, led by Ronald Reagan
when he was governor of California in the late 1960’s, saw another opening to
the hearts of so-called “Middle America” by coming out against rioting college
students and spaced-out hippies.
Richard Nixon
won the Presidency in 1968 by tapping the fears of whites that the advances of
Blacks and the counterculture directly threatened both their own well-being and
the social stability of the entire country. It’s an appeal that still works for
Republicans. Not only has the “Solid South” shifed from solidly Democratic to
solidly Republican — right-wing pundit Ann Coulter has pointed out the
uncomfortable truth (if you’re a Hillary supporter) that all those Southern
states like South Carolina, Mississippi and Arkansas that gave her lopsided
margins in Democratic primaries are virtually sure bets for the Republicans in
November — so has the white working class elsewhere in the country.
Working-class
whites form the bulk of the audience for Right-wing talk radio (is there any
other kind anymore?) and Fox News. Since 1968 they have voted overwhelmingly
Republican even when Republicans have pursued anti-labor policies targeting
unions, rewarding corporations who relocate jobs overseas, encouraging the
de-industrialization of the U.S. and pushing so-called “free trade” agreements
whose real effect is to push town American workers’ wages by forcing them to
compete with ultra-cheap labor in countries like Mexico, China, Viet Nam and
Bangladesh. Along with evangelical Christians and gun-rights advocates, they’ve
provided the votes that elected Nixon, Ronald Reagan and both George Bushes to
the Presidency.
And they’re even
more enthusiastic about Donald Trump — which is one big reason why Hillary
Clinton would have a reasonable chance against an ordinary cookie-cutter
Right-wing Republican but will be totally crushed by Trump. Though he’s a
multi-billionaire, he’s mastered the art of playing the super-rich populist
pioneered by Nelson Rockefeller and also done by H. Ross Perot — “I’ve already
got more money than God, so I can’t be corrupted or bribed.” What’s more —
unlike fellow 0.01-percenter Mitt Romney, with his unashamed disdain for the
estimated 47 percent of Americans “who just want the government to give them
stuff” — Trump knows how to connect with the white working class.
It’s not only
the racism — though white working-class racism has been a potent political
force ever since George Wallace “primaried” Lyndon Johnson in 1964 and won in
Wisconsin on the basis of working-class whites who feared their jobs would go
to Blacks. It’s not only the sneering sexism and religious bigotry, which Trump
wears proudly as a sign of his willingness to be “politically incorrect” and say
the things white working-class voters think but have been told they should be
ashamed of and shouldn’t say in public. It’s that Trump, alone of the
Republican candidates this year, is saying the things white working-class
voters yearn desperately to hear and haven’t been hearing from the candidates
of either major party in quite some
time.
In his article
“Donald Trump Is Dangerous” (The Nation,
March 14, 2016) John Nichols quotes Trump at one of the Republican debates
saying, “This country is dying. And our workers are losing their jobs.” He
lamented the decision of the Carrier air conditioner company to move their
production from Indianapolis to Mexico and said the departure of American jobs
to lower-paying foreign shores was directly due to “trade pacts that are no
good for us and no good for our workers.” Trump ended that particular comment
by threatening to enact a retaliatory tax on companies who “offshore” good
American jobs.
No other
Presidential candidate in 2016 is talking like that — except one: Bernie
Sanders. Trump’s Republican opponents are still locked into the party’s
libertarian economic orthodoxy that whatever “The Market” decides is good — if
the U.S. loses its once-vaunted position as the world’s industrial
manufacturing powerhouse, a status which was key to its victory in World War
II, so be it. If that means most Americans are consigned to low-paid employment
— when they can get jobs at all — while the rich get ever richer, so be it. The
growing disconnect between the Republicans’ ability to get working-class whites
to vote for them by using the “dog-whistle words” of racism and hatred of the
counterculture (which, in 2016, translates as hatred of Queers) and the actual
effects of their policies on working people is a vulnerability that would seem
ready-made for the Democrats to exploit.
But not for
Hillary Clinton. Not when it was her husband who pushed an initially reluctant
Congress to approve the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the first
of these horrendously one-sided “trade” agreements that benefit wealthy
individuals and corporations and harm everyone else in every country that’s a
party to them. Not when it was her husband who pushed for the repeal of the
Glass-Steagall Act from the 1930’s, which drew a wall between commercial
banking and investment banking and thus prevented the kinds of financial
manipulations that destroyed the economy in 1929 and again in 2008. Not when,
after opposing a bill making it harder to declare bankruptcy when she was First
Lady, she voted for the same bill when she was a U.S. Senator from New York and
George W. Bush signed it into law (to his credit, Bill Clinton had vetoed it) —
and she rationalized her vote by saying that as a Senator from New York, Wall
Street’s home state, she was obliged to represent its interests.
It won’t be easy
for Bernie Sanders, a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist” from Vermont (even
though he was born in New York City and his roots are with its socially aware
Jewish-American community) with a long record of supporting Leftist causes both
here and abroad, to connect with an increasingly racist and xenophobic white
working class. But at least he has what Hillary Clinton does not: a track
record. Sanders can boast that he opposed every one of those damned “trade”
agreements, from NAFTA to the currently pending Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP)
— while Hillary Clinton has supported them all until very recently. Two years
ago she called TPP a “gold standard” for trade agreements; now, with a
Sanders-inspired pivot to the Left that only reinforces the public image of
Hillary as someone who will say or do anything to get elected, and is therefore not to be trusted, she opposed it. In
a general election between Clinton and Trump, Trump will wrap every one of
those God-awful “trade” agreements and every American job that’s been
“offshored” as a result of them around Hillary’s neck and drown her with them.
The
historical factors. The 2016 Presidential
election was going to be a hard sell for the Democrats from the get-go. Since
the passage of the 22nd Amendment, limiting the President to two
terms, in 1947, only once has a party won three Presidential
elections in a row: the Republicans, with Ronald Reagan in 1980 and 1984 and
George H. W. Bush winning largely on Reagan’s coattails in 1988. (When he had
to run four years later on his own record, he lost.) Obama not only doesn’t
have the kind of coattails Reagan had; if anything, he has negative coattails.
Obama took
office in 2009 with a substantial Democratic majority in the House of
Representatives and close to the magic 60-vote supermajority needed to
accomplish virtually anything in the
Senate. But the much-vaunted “Obama Coalition” has proven itself able to elect
only one person: Obama himself. Otherwise, the Obama years have been one
political disaster for the Democrats after another. They lost the House in 2010
and the Senate in 2014. The Democrats now have fewer House members than they’ve
ever had since 1928.
Even worse, the
Democrats have fallen far behind the Republicans in the numbers of
governorships and state legislatures they control. In at least 25 states
Republicans hold the governorship and both houses of the legislature. Democrats
control the governorship and both houses of the legislature in just seven states
— and aside from California (where governor Jerry Brown rules more like a
moderate Republican anyway), they’re all small. This is important because it’s
state governments that control how the district lines for House members are
drawn — and Republican legislatures and governors have moved aggressively to
gerrymander those lines to keep Republicans in control of the House even if
more voters support the Democrats than the Republicans in House races.
State
governments also set the rules for who can vote, when they can vote, when they
can register, what the qualifications are for registering (including whether
they have to show I.D. and what forms of I.D. are acceptable), how late the
polls stay open, where the polls are and all other laws regarding elections. Here
the Republicans have moved to limit access to the polls as much as possible so
that people likely to vote against them — particularly young people, poor
people and people of color — won’t be able to vote at all. That’s why the
Republicans are unafraid of the much talked-about “demographic shifts” in the
U.S. population that are supposedly turning the country more Democratic
long-term. And it’s why they’re so dead set against any comprehensive
immigration reform that includes a path to citizenship: more Latino citizens
means more Latino voters, and likely
more Democratic voters.
The
“intensity gap.” One reason the Obama
years have been such a political disaster for the Democrats is that his
Republican opponents have done so much better a job than his Democratic
supporters in getting their people not only to vote but to care about politics
and be activists. The Tea Party movement started almost as soon as Obama took
office; its closest Left equivalent, Occupy, didn’t begin until September 2011,
after Obama had been President for 2 ½ years. Republicans have been fired up
since Obama took office, when Republican Senate leader Mitch McConnell said at
the start of 2009 that his goal was to “make Obama a one-term President.” He
didn’t succeed, but he achieved the next best thing from a Republican point of
view: he made it virtually impossible for Obama to do anything.
Since regaining
control of the House in 2010, the Republicans in Congress have repeatedly
served notice on Obama that they will not permit him to govern except on their
terms. They have shut down the government in an effort to force him to defund
his own health-care program. Former House speaker John Boehner refused even to
let the house vote on the proposed
immigration reform bill that passed the Senate in 2013. Most recently, the
Republicans in Congress are not only refusing to consider anyone Obama appoints
to replace the late Justice Antonin Scalia on the U.S. Supreme Court —
continuing a pattern of resistance to Obama’s judicial appointments that has
led to an unprecedented number of vacancies in the federal courts — now they
won’t even consider Obama’s latest proposal for a federal budget.
And as they’ve
done all this, the rabid Republican voters don’t think they’ve gone far enough.
The Affordable Care Act is still receiving government money. So is Planned
Parenthood. Abortion is still more or less legal, even though the Right’s
anti-choice crusade has left 85 percent of all U.S. counties without a single
abortion provider. Marriage equality for same-sex couples is the law of the
land. Trade unions and the Environmental Protection Agency still exist. The
U.S. government still owns an awful lot of land in the western and southwestern
states. And the private sector still hasn’t been “unleashed” from the shackles
of government regulation. Senator Ted Cruz (R-Texas), who is going to be the
Republican Presidential nominee this year if it isn’t Donald Trump, damned
Chief Justice John Roberts, a George W. Bush appointee and ordinarily a
thorough-going Right-winger, as insufficiently “pure” because he voted to
uphold the Affordable Care Act twice.
If anything, the
Republican electorate — especially that section of it that votes in primaries —
is even more rabidly Right-wing than the Republican party leadership. People
who’ve interviewed audience members at Trump rallies and led focus groups of
Trump supporters say that they start out criticizing Obama but then aim even
more of their vitriol against the Republicans in Congress who are letting Obama
get away with running the country. The much-touted “anger” of Republican
primary voters this year has to do with the fact that, even after ham-stringing
Obama with Republican majorities in both houses of Congress, they haven’t got
him to cave and let the Right run the country their way.
Therefore,
according to the conspiratorial thinking that drives a lot of the American
Right, they must be part of the problem, part of a corrupt bipartisan political
establishment that is blocking the Right-wing revolution they think this
country needs. Trump’s supporters believe only a powerful outsider with a proven track record of business success
(actually Trump’s business record is considerably spottier than he likes to
pretend, but the image he’s sold to America is of one unstoppable success after
another) can come in and clean house from the mess both major parties have made.
And, as I noted
in my first article about the Trump candidacy, that’s the same promise would-be
dictators of both the Right and Left —
Napoleon, Lenin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, Juan Perón, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chávez
— have made to the people to gain power. One need only look at the climate of
thug-like violence around the Trump rallies — not only the audience members who
beat up protesters on the floor but the encouragement Trump himself shouts at
them from the podium — to see Trump as the neo-fascist he is, not only copying
Hitler’s tactics of riling up his nation’s people to support him but using
quite similar arguments: if it weren’t for the Jews, Mexicans, Muslims or
whoever the scapegoat de jour is,
the rest of us would have great jobs and everything would be “fantastic.”
The Sanders
voters. One of the biggest — and
least-discussed — factors that will affect the outcome of the 2016 Presidential
election will be what Bernie Sanders’ supporters will do if Hillary Clinton
gets the Democratic nomination. What Sanders himself does will have an effect
on that, of course — and he’s already signaled his willingness to support her
when he said in one of the debates that Clinton on her worst days would be a
better President than any of the Republicans at their best. It’s likely Sanders
will not only endorse Hillary Clinton but will aggressively campaign for her —
unlike Eugene McCarthy in 1968, who after he lost the Democratic nomination
hemmed and hawed about whether he’d support the winner, Hubert Humphrey, and
finally gave him a lukewarm endorsement just three days before the election.
But my analysis
is that there are basically three types of Sanders voters, and they will react
quite differently if Clinton beats him for the nomination. They are:
The Sanders
Democrats. They are progressive but also
pragmatic enough to realize what a disaster a Republican President — any Republican President, and especially Trump or Cruz —
would be for progressive ideals and values. They may do it with some degree of
reluctance, but they’ll vote for Hillary Clinton.
The Sanders
progressives. Many of these are Leftists
who long ago gave up on the two major parties and only came back to the
Democrats because Sanders was running. Indeed, a lot of Sanders’ supporters are
people who ordinarily regard electoral politics as useless and don’t vote at
all. If Sanders loses the Democratic nomination, these people either won’t vote
for President or will vote for a minor-party candidate like Dr. Jill Stein of
the Green Party — which, in America’s abominable system of winner-take-all
politics, is unfortunately the same thing as not voting at all.
The Sanders
independents. These are non-ideological people
basically disgusted with the American political system as it stands. They see
both the Democrats and the Republicans as hopelessly corrupt and in thrall to
the 1 percent. They want to see an “outsider” President who isn’t beholden
either to the grandees of Wall Street or the bosses of the big parties — and if
Sanders doesn’t get the Democratic nomination and Trump wins the Republican
one, a lot of these people will vote for Trump over the consummate “insider,”
Establishment candidate Hillary Clinton.
My analysis is
that Hillary Clinton will have a great deal of trouble winning Sanders’ voters
over in a two-person race between her and Donald Trump. She’ll have an easier
general election if Ted Cruz, who has most of Trump’s weaknesses and few of his
strengths, is the Republican nominee.
It’s true that
at least some Republicans have threatened to boycott the party in November if
Trump is the nominee. Peter Weiner, who served in the administrations of Reagan
and both Bushes, has an article called “The Party’s Over” in the current (March
21) Time magazine lamenting the
Republicans’ transformation from the party of Reagan to the party of Trump —
though his quarrel with Trump seems more about style than substance. “Many of
us who are children of the Reagan revolution will not go gently into that good
night,” Weiner writes. “We will not vote for Trump under any circumstances,
even if he is the nominee; what’s more, we will do everything in our power to
reclaim the Republican Party from this demagogic and authoritarian figure.”
But I suspect
very few Republicans will share Weiner’s fastidious quibbles over Trump. Even
if they don’t like him — even if he wasn’t their first, second or even third
choice for the nomination — they’ll vote for him anyway. After all, what will
the major-party alternative be? Either a self-proclaimed “democratic socialist”
or a woman whom Republicans have been taught to regard as the virtual
Antichrist of politics for the quarter-century she’s been in the public eye.
(The Right-wing American Spectator
magazine used to send out subscription solicitations adorned with a crude
drawing of Hillary Clinton as a witch.) The Democrats will lose far more
potential voters if they don’t nominate Bernie Sanders than the Republicans
will if they nominate Donald Trump.
Say what you
will about Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders — and this article has turned out
a lot more negative towards Clinton than I thought it would when I started
writing it — at least they are serious, intelligent people with a genuine desire
not merely to be President but to use
the Presidency to make ordinary Americans’ lives better. Among the four
remaining Republican candidates — Donald Trump, Ted Cruz, Marco Rubio and John
Kasich — only Kasich fits that description. The others, Trump and Cruz in
particular, are bellicose thugs whose level of immaturity and utter unfitness
for national power is all too apparent every time they “debate.”
But just because
people aspiring to rule countries are immature, obnoxious and even evil doesn’t
mean they don’t succeed. Even the most blatant rabble-rouser all too often
finds a rabble to be roused. If you think it can’t happen here, remember that
there were an awful lot of Germans in the early 1930’s who didn’t think it
could happen there either!
