Saturday, April 09, 2016

Hilary the inevitable is starting to sound kinda desperate

Reader Supported News reports that the Clinton campaign is losing patience with Bernie Sanders. Losing patience? Sanders' campaign manager Jeff Weaver wrote this article to explain what is happening. Apparently, Clinton is changing her campaign strategy as follows:
"Disqualify him, defeat him, and unify the party later."
This is a movement of millions of people. To say that you're losing patience with Sanders is beyond patronizing. If she disqualifies Sanders in her own mind, she's are also disqualifying millions of people who support Sanders. Those same people see him as more qualified than Clinton to be president.

The first two items, to disqualify him and defeat him, are what we can expect from a campaign that is not supported by 6.5 million donations. Clinton's campaign is supported by billionaires and millionaires and all their bundlers meeting at $2700-a-plate fundraisers. The Clinton campaign seems to think that after they're done with Clinton they will unify the party later. Sure, if there is anything left of it.

45% of the voters in this country are independents and millions of them have registered as Democrat just to vote for Sanders in the primaries. Independents are now a bigger demographic than either major party on their own. Clinton isn't polling well with independents and we know this because lately, she's been losing big time in open primaries and caucuses. Now we see that she's losing ground in California, the biggest prize for delegates.

Clinton says that she's not even sure if Bernie Sanders is a Democrat. It's very well documented that Sanders has caucused with the Democrats. Democrats have even elected Sanders as head of a few committees in Congress and have discouraged other Democrats from running against him. That's probably because he votes with Democrats 95% of the time. They have worked with Sanders to write and pass bills. They have worked with Sanders to deal with Republican obstruction.

I think the question we should be asking is if Clinton is a Democrat considering her funding sources and voting record. She's been getting a lot of money from Republican donors that contributed to Mitt Romney's campaign. In fact, she'd be the 7th largest recipient of Republican money this election cycle and beat out 11 other Republican candidates for money from the same donors.

Sanders would not need to run as a Democrat if the Democrats and Republicans had worked so hard to close their publicly funded primaries. Only 19 states have open primaries, that means that more than half the states in the union that now have closed primaries.

In addition to closed primaries, Sanders chose to run as a Democrat because the mainstream media doesn't really care about independent and third party candidates. It should also be noted that Sanders is at a disadvantage in the media compared to Trump and Clinton. They're getting the lion's share of the free press where Sanders gets lucky if he gets live coverage at one of his rallies.

This rhetoric about unifying the Democratic Party after defeating Sanders is what I would expect from someone who voted for the Iraq War. Hilary just loves regime change until it's her own regime. The justification for the war was to destroy Iraq and rebuild it in our own image. Clinton thinks that she can split the party and rebuild it after destroying Sanders' bid for president. Bush said the same thing about Iraq and we all know how that worked out.

Hilary is not willing to admit that there is a huge movement afoot, a political movement to remove the oligarchy we now live under, an oligarchy that Hilary has supported with her votes. With the release of the Panama Papers, Hilary now has to answer for her vote for the Panama Trade Agreement. Why would she allow greater freedom for the wealthiest people in the world to hide their income? It is a legitimate question to ask: Is Hilary a true Democrat based on her behavior?

When Sanders proposes radical change and says that we can do it, Hilary says "No, we can't." The money that was hidden in the recently released Panama Papers says "Yes, we can". We can afford the changes that Sanders is proposing. Incremental change, as Hilary is proposing, would only buy time for the 1% to blunt the political revolution. God forbid that the wealthy should actually have to work for their money instead of seeking rents.

Given the evidence, I'd say that Bernie is closer to being a true Democrat than Hilary has ever been. Maybe that's the cause of her apparent despair in this election.

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