I’m warning you in advance: Some of this is going to piss off a bunch of you, and for the right reasons, not the wrong ones. My ask of you as you read this is simple. I like both of our candidates and have given this a lot of thought. I have read multiple diaries on this site, and you did impact my decision (but more on that later).
This is a reasoned, logical and thoughtful decision, based on my age and experience, my knowledge of history, and the fact that I know both of these candidates and who they truly are, and what they have done. I’ve been watching them for a long, long time. I picked Barack Obama in 2008, and I did it the same way. That certainly didn’t mean that I didn’t trust or didn’t like Hillary Clinton then. And my choice of Hillary Clinton certainly doesn’t mean that I don’t trust or don’t like Bernie Sanders. I just think he is the wrong choice.
So here it goes:
Priorities: The priority is not get the most progressive (or liberal) President possible. The priority is to defeat this particular group of Republicans so badly that they become a true minority — because only a true minority will be the spanking they deserve for being not just a party we disagree with, not just a political machine hell-bent on rolling back hard fought for gains, but today a political group the is actually crypto-fascist and dangerous to our democracy.
Who Hillary Is: Maybe some of you don’t know this, but Hillary Clinton has a hell of a progressive record. Seriously. Is she in the establishment? Yes, of course. Or else, how could she get things done? So you think she’s a liar? Have you considered why you think that, or where that comes from?
Some history: Back when Bill Clinton won in 1992, Hillary Clinton shattered a long-holding glass ceiling, that of the activist First Lady. She became the first activist First Lady ever, and 50+ years from the time that Eleanor Roosevelt put some real cracks in it. She was pilloried for it: Republicans attacked her from the get go — they accused the Clinton White House of breaking constitutional law by allowing her in the inner circle (like no other President beforehand ever discussed everything with his wife).
Then the Big Dog went further — he made her a point person on a raft of legislative initiatives, most importantly the attempt to give health care to every American. That’s right, before there was Obamacare, there really was Hillarycare. It failed, of course, and not before the right wing unleashed a series of vicious, personal attacks the likes of which we have never, ever seen against a first lady. They accused her of all sorts of horrible crimes. Bill Clinton might have been the draft-dodging, philandering, pot smoking Commander in Chief, but Hillary? She was a murderer, a thief, a seditionist, an embezzler, in a marriage of convenience, a lesbian (only the right wing could make that a fault). She was ugly, had awful hair, legs like tree trunks, she controlled Bill, she controlled the White House, she controlled everybody.
I can even remember Rush Limbaugh attacking poor pre-teen Chelsea as ugly, stupid and worse. So they said she was the liar. They said she couldn’t be trusted. And when you echo that, you are echoing the Republicans.
In reality, Hillary Clinton has a very strong progressive record, and one that goes back a long way. She’s taken hit after hit after highly personal hit from the Republicans, but she keeps coming back for women, for children, for minorities, for gay people, for unions, for the real America.
And they are still doing it — with Benghazi, with the emails, and on and on it goes. Do you honestly believe that the GOP would be doing this to her if she was in the pocket of Wall Street? Seriously?
Who Bernie Isn’t: I believe that Bernie is the leftist he says he is — his record proves that. But anti-establishment? Outsider? Bernie has been in Congress for decades. He’s not an outsider by a long-shot. Anti-establishment? Well, he went to those lavish fundraisers for Democratic lobbyists, right? It’s not about the money he did or didn't raise. It’s that he played the game. The guy is running on an absolutist message, which he clearly doesn’t adhere to. I’m sure we will also find out that he voted for some bills he didn’t particularly like as a trade off to get others he supported passed. That’s a fairly normal part of the game. And there is nothing wrong with him doing any of it — he’s our establishment guy, and the left establishment is so way, way better than the GOP establishment any day of the week. In fact, I see no point in attacking the Democratic establishment at all.
The problem is that he can’t be attacking others for doing the same thing. The high horse doesn’t work out so well unless you are actually on it.
Then there’s the campaign, the insurgent, non-traditional campaign. It’s run by Tad Devine, a long-time Democratic strategist who worked for blue dog Democrat Jimmy Carter, followed by establishment candidates Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Lloyd Bentsen, Bob Kerrey, Al Gore and John Kerry.
And a very experienced strategist means your campaign does some really traditional, not-so-nice things like infiltrating labor unions to drum up support and hacking into databases to steal the opposition’s data. That’s pretty standard fare, and it’s pretty hypocritical of this insurgent, outsider campaign. And that bothers me well more than the fact that the Sanders campaign is doing things that campaigns normally do.
Electability: Sorry about this, but it is very unlikely Bernie can win. I know that conceptually he could, but I want you to think about this: If you are a Sanders supporter, you are applying a purity test to the Democratic party. If the Republican party does this and nominates Ted Cruz, what do you think his chances of winning would be compared to Jeb Bush or John Kasich (or even Marco Rubio)? Squat, right? That’s because the middle — the independents — who decide Presidential elections would never vote in enough numbers for a right-wing wack job to get him the White House.
Now, none of us are independents, right? Well, if Bernie gets nominated, he’s going to be hit hard on being a socialist, raising taxes, etc., all of which is fine from where we sit. But he will be made to look dangerous to the middle. And we will get wiped out. Ask the people who served in President McGovern’s administration. And he was running against a guy people already knew was a criminal.
And for those of you who think that it would be good for us to lose one to purge the more moderate progressives from our midst? You’re kidding right? I mean you understand that the damage this current crop of Republicans would do, right?
Constitutional Reality: If Bernie wins there will be no revolution. There can’t be. Unless the Senate has at least 67 unwavering Democrats and we also control the House of Representatives — by a lot. And that is not going to happen this year, period. Bernie talks a lot about doing this by making people see his way, but we know what Republicans do — they just say “no” anyway. Do you think they will be nicer to an avowed socialist and our first Jewish president than they were to our first African American president? To get what he wants, a President Sanders will have to compromise with a somewhat hostile Congress. That’s not the revolution he’s promising.
Implied Denial of the Progress of the Obama Administration: I think President Obama has done some amazing, ground-breaking things, and with very little support from Congress. He has moved the country forward where it really counted — and as much as possible — on a host of issues important to so many different Americans. By attacking “the establishment” Bernie Sanders implies that the Obama Administration has not done remotely enough, and has somehow failed. I just don’t see it that way or support that idea — and no Democrat really should.
All of You Feeling the Bern: Finally, there is the issue of how the Sanders supporters on this site are behaving. Hillary Clinton’s experience stands head and shoulders above anybody else running, in both parties. She has taken more scars for standing up for progressive values again and again, and she still does, mostly from the Republicans. And after all the attacks, after all these years — there is no there, there. There is no excuse for her to take it from anybody on this website.
What kind of Democrats are you? You can support Bernie Sanders. You can be angry about Wall Street donations or the Iraq War vote or even how she campaigns, but the tone and vitriol of many of you makes you sound like you support Ted Cruz or Donald Trump. There is no leader in our party alive that supports going backwards the way the Republicans do. Do you think Hillary Clinton supports Citizens United? Do you think she wants to move even more toward oligarchy? What evidence — real evidence in her record do you see of either of those things.
Do I need to tell the cretins on this site that say they won’t vote for Hillary no matter what about what happens when we rip the Democratic party apart and we don’t care to swallow the loss and see the greater good? We get Ronald Reagan. We get George H.W. Bush. In short, you have pissed me off royally because you do not see the forest for the trees.
I might be on my high horse here, but listen, when I was 25 I was that passionate, too. But we didn’t have the need to personally eviscerate the primary opposition. Save that emotional vitriol for the general election — because that’s when we are really going to need it, no matter who our nominee is. Peace out.