Another great opinion/analysis piece from Bill Curry, published the other day at Salon: It Should Be Over for Hillary: Party Elites and MSNBC Can’t Prop Her Up After Bernie’s Michigan Miracle. A few choice excerpts follow:
You wouldn’t know it from watching TV last night or reading the national papers this morning but Bernie Sanders’ Michigan win ranks among the greatest upsets in presidential primary history.
Should he win the nomination it will be go down as the biggest upset of any kind in American political history.
If he wins the election it will change the fundamental direction of the nation and the world. (emphasis mine)
Curry gets it.
There’s a name for the bipartisan consensus of party elites: neoliberalism. It is an inconvenient name for many reasons but mostly because it seems odd that the worldview of the Republican elite would be an ideology with the root word ‘liberal’ in its name but it is true, nonetheless. and may even shed a little light on the open, bitter breach between GOP elites and the party base. Democrats stayed loyal longer to their elites for two reasons. One is their love of two very talented politicians, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, whose charm and verbal dexterity masked deep differences with the base. The other is their fear of Republicans. (emphasis mine)
I often talk to Democrats who don’t know Obama chose not to raise the minimum wage as president even though he had the votes for it; that he was willing to cut Medicare and Social Security and chose not to prosecute Wall Street crimes or pursue ethics reforms in government. They don’t know he dropped the public option or the aid he promised homeowners victimized by mortgage lenders. They don’t know and don’t want to know. Their affection for Bill and Barack — and their fear of Republicans — run too deep. (emphasis mine)
Wow. Does this sound familiar, or what?
Voters sense she’s just moving pawns on a chess board in part because she can never explain her change of heart and often doesn’t even try.
<snip>
She remains woefully out of touch with the public mood in other ways. This week she began telling voters she and Bernie were pals and that it was time to wrap up their little primary so she could focus on the Republicans. As anyone outside her tone deaf campaign could have told her, she came off as entitled, presumptuous and condescending. The voters aren’t done deciding yet. When they are, they’ll let the candidates know. (emphasis mine)
Suffice it to say that what happens during the next eight months of our election cycle here in the United States, regardless of who becomes our next president, is very likely to affect the future of our country, and our world, in ways so critical and so profound we can scarcely imagine from our current vantage point. The times really are that urgent, and the choices really are that paramount.
What’s at stake is the nature of that affect. Will our next national leader be Donald Trump — a narcissistic reality show clown whose pomposity, poor impulse control and incompetence makes George W. Bush look like Adlai Stevenson? Will it be Hillary Clinton — an all-in, Neocon/Neolib tool of the military-industrial complex, who enables our continuing slide toward banana republicanism, while distracting us with the Kabuki theater of culture wars with the Right, as our neglected planet heats up to the point of no return? Or will it be Bernie Sanders — a flawed and fallible, yet principled and determined voice of reason, compassion and sanity, who can serve as the catalyst by which we reclaim our democracy from the clutches of the plutocrats & robber barons, as we begin to pull our world back from the brink of destruction?
Only one of these three is the correct choice, folks. I pray we get it right this time. If we don’t, there will be no opportunity for a do-over.