A special guest post by H. Flannery
I am a left-wing American. I am liberal on
social issues and progressive on economic issues. I believe that if we can move
our country more in the direction of a social democracy like Canada or Britain,
that would be a good thing.
I also used to pride myself on being a
strictly rational, pragmatic voter. Wearing my political science BA like a
badge, I was painfully intellectual about my electoral decisions. I held my
nose over and over again to vote for candidates I didn't believe in all that
much because I thought it was the smartest, most practical decision at the
time.
But after my Senator, Paul Wellstone, died in
2002, leaving a huge gaping hole in the fiery liberal national legislator
category, I knew that I had to start voting with my heart. I was sick of my
realpolitik behavior resulting in leaders who cared more about their own
careers than about the people they were representing, who got us deeper and
deeper into unending wars, and who paid lip service to, but did next to nothing
about, inequality, human rights, and environmental destruction.
The best candidate, though, of course, is
still one I can vote for with both my heart and my head at the same time. I
believe that Bernie Sanders is that kind of candidate.
I have strong opinions about the 2016
presidential race. I have difficulty articulating them in person and feel I can
do so more effectively in writing. But I also have found that pretty much
everything I want to say...someone else has already said, and often better than
I would have. I've read reams of well-written and/or well-argued articles about
various aspects of Bernie Sanders' career and platform, Hillary Clinton's
career and platform, and the Democratic nominees' race in general.
So many articles, in fact, that when I wanted
to find one in particular, it was almost impossible to remember where it was
and who wrote it. So, in the hopes that it speeds others' information-gathering
and the dissemination of crucial pre-primary voting opinion pieces, I have
cataloged several of my favorites here by topic.
Effectiveness and That Oft-Discussed but Ill-Defined Ability to "Reach Across the Aisle"
One of Clinton's most powerful tactics in the
run-up to the primaries has been to make voters (and the mainstream media)
question whether or not Bernie would be "effective" if he was
elected. The presumption is that since he is so radical, the Republicans would
block him at every turn, and he would get nothing done.
First, with all the talk about revolution and
effectiveness and whatnot, what gets lost in the shuffle is the fact that
Bernie Sanders has been in elected office since 1981, and has been in the U.S.
Congress for the past 26 years. During that time he has worked effectively with
both Democrats and Republicans to get bills passed. Sanders not only knows how
to make fiery speeches, but he also knows perfectly well how to play the
political negotiation game. As journalist Zaid Jilani said in an article on AlterNet:
The problem with this narrative is that it is completely false.
Not only has Sanders gotten a lot more things done than Clinton did in her own
short legislative career, he's actually one of the most effective members of
Congress, passing bills, both big and small, that have reshaped American policy
on key issues like poverty, the environment and health care.
Second, a Republican Congress will be just as
obstructionist against Clinton, if not more so. They have already proven this
in the past with other moderate Democrats, such as her husband and Obama, and
against Clinton herself when they sunk her health care plan. The idea that
Congressional Republicans will suddenly want to compromise with Hillary Clinton—someone
they have been spewing particularly nasty vitriol about for decades—is a little
hard to believe. As Bill Curry, a former adviser to Bill Clinton, said in a
recent piece in Salon:
The core of Clinton's realpolitik brief pertains not to
electability but to governance. Her point is that Sanders is naïve. She says
none of his proposals can get though a Republican Congress. She strongly
implies that he'd roll back Obamacare, a charge that is false, cynical and so
nonsensical she'll have to stop making it soon. She says she has a plan to get
to universal health care—she doesn't—and that she'll do it by working "in
partnership" with the insurance and pharmaceutical industries.
Who's being naïve here? A Republican Congress won't pass any of
her ideas either. The only way to get real change is to elect Democrats to
Congress and have a grass-roots movement strong enough to keep the heat on
them. Nor will insurers cough up a dime of profit without a fight. Vowing to
spare us a "contentious debate" over single-payer care she ignores
the admonition of Frederick Douglass; "Power concedes nothing without
demand. It never did and it never will."
Third, following up on the last point Curry
made, we will never get progressive goals achieved if we continue to start
negotiating from the middle. For the past thirty years, since Ronald Reagan was
president, the Republicans have pursued a unified, consistent, overt strategy
in which they introduce increasingly outrageously right-wing bills, and do
not compromise until they get them passed. They are not in the least
embarrassed to even go so far as to shut down the government if they need to.
Moderate Democrats have reacted to this
strategy by surrendering: moving to the center and often the center-right in an
attempt to get anything passed. We must stop playing this game. And I
believe that Sanders is far more likely to be able to pull the debate back
towards the left—both because of where he will start and where he will be
willing to fight to end up. As Ben Jealous, the former director of the NAACP,
said on Democracy Now:
There are some things that
she’ll be able to get done—simply because she’ll capitulate. But the reality is
that nobody says that the Republicans can’t—that their idealists can’t get
things done. And game recognizes game. We need our idealists there, so that
when they compromise, it’s an actual compromise.
To some extent, however, all of these
arguments are irrelevant. Because even if Clinton turned out to be the most
effective president of all time—meaning that she was able to get everything she
wanted unaltered through a Republican House and Senate—I do not believe that
she would bring up, much less fight passionately and resolutely for, the issues
I care about the most and believe are the most necessary for the health of our
nation and our world. Her record does not support it, and I believe that her
massive fees from corporations and campaign contributions from corporate
lobbyists would severely inhibit it. A few examples follow below.
Foreign Policy: Diplomacy and War
Another major Clinton hit on Sanders has been
that he doesn't have much foreign policy experience. It is true that he hasn't
seemed as well prepared to talk about it in the debates. But there is a strong
argument to be made that Sanders actually has quite a bit of foreign policy
experience from his work on the national stage in the House and Senate over the
past 26 years.
And even if a President Sanders came
into office with less foreign policy experience than some candidates, it
doesn't mean that he wouldn't be able to pursue a fair, strong, smart foreign
policy—one that I believe would be far more accountable and pragmatic, and far
less warlike, than what we have seen in the past three administrations.
Lawrence Korb, former Assistant Secretary of
Defense for Reagan, wrote a great article about this topic for Politico. In it,
he points out how (a) other presidents had even less experience when they were
elected (like Obama); (b) other presidents have been pretty vague on their
foreign policy plans when they were running (like Eisenhower); and (c) other
presidents with not that much foreign policy experience have nevertheless
become very effective in that department by gathering an experienced and
diverse group of advisers around them (like Obama and [Bill] Clinton). As Korb
says,
In my dealings with him, and in analyzing his record in Congress
over the past 25 years, I have found that Sanders has taken balanced, realistic
positions on many of the most critical foreign policy issues facing the
country. In the mold of realists like Brent Scowcroft, national security
adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, Sanders voted against
the invasion of Iraq in 2002, while wisely supporting the war against
Afghanistan in 2001 and the intervention in the Balkans in 1990s. And Sanders
certainly isn't a foreign policy lightweight: In fact, given his long tenure in
the House and Senate, he has more foreign policy experience than Ronald Reagan
or Barack Obama did when they were running for office the first time.
As far as Clinton goes…it is important to
remember that it is not just experience that makes a good leader. It is also
judgment.
During her tenure as Senator and then as
Secretary of State, Clinton demonstrated that she is a committed, consistent
hawk—in spite of the fact that her militarism almost always created more
problems than it solved, and led to diminishing respect of the United States by
our allies. In country after country, she pushed for CIA and/or military
intervention over diplomatic solutions, even when her own past experience
should have shown her that this approach was likely to lead to even greater
instability.
Conn Hallinan wrote an article on CommonDreams.org
that lists, by nation, the human and diplomatic costs of the various wars
Clinton pushed for and/or managed as Secretary of State. In it, Hallinan talks
about Hard Choices, Clinton's autobiography of that time:
Hard Choices covers her years as secretary of state and
seemingly unconsciously tracks a litany of American foreign policy disasters:
Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Georgia, Ukraine, and the "Asia pivot"
that's dangerously increased tensions with China.
At the heart of Hard Choices is the ideology of "American
exceptionalism," which for Clinton means the right of the U.S. to
intervene in other countries at will. As historian Jackson Lears, in the London
Review of Books, puts it, Clinton's memoir "tries to construct a
coherent rationale for an interventionist foreign policy and to justify it with
reference to her own decisions as Secretary of State. The rationale is rickety:
the evidence unconvincing."
…The one act on her part for which she shows any regret is her
vote to invade Iraq. But even here she quickly moves on, never really examining
how it is that the U.S. had the right to invade and overthrow a sovereign
government. For Clinton, Iraq was only a "mistake" because it came
out badly.
Jeffrey Sachs, an economic adviser to the UN
Secretary General, wrote a recent article for the Huffington Post that goes
into the consequences of some of her foreign policy "initiatives" in
even more detail:
Perhaps the crowning disaster of this long list of disasters has
been Hillary's relentless promotion of CIA-led regime change in Syria. Once
again Hillary bought into the CIA propaganda that regime change to remove
Bashir al-Assad would be quick, costless, and surely successful. In August
2011, Hillary led the US into disaster with her declaration [that] Assad must
"get out of the way," backed by secret CIA operations.
Five years later, no place on the planet is more ravaged by
unending war, and no place poses a great[er] threat to US security. More than
10 million Syrians are displaced, and the refugees are drowning in the
Mediterranean or undermining the political stability of Greece, Turkey, and the
European Union. Into the chaos created by the secret CIA-Saudi operations to
overthrow Assad, ISIS has filled the vacuum, and has used Syria as the base for
worldwide terrorist attacks.
To me, there was no better confirmation of how
far apart she and I are on foreign policy than when she was recently praised by
Henry Kissinger for her foreign policy expertise. Dan Froomkin of The
Intercept recently wrote about what Kissinger's support for Clinton
reveals about the Democratic hawk/dove divide:
Clinton and Sanders stand on opposite sides of that divide. One
represents the hawkish Washington foreign policy establishment, which reveres
and in some cases actually works for Kissinger. The other represents the
marginalized non-interventionists, who can't possibly forgive someone with the
blood of millions of brown people on his hands.
Economic Inequality, Campaign Finance Reform, and Wall Street
If you've heard one or two or five of Sanders'
stump speeches, you know by now that economic issues are right smack in his
wheelhouse. He cares deeply about the negative effects of economic inequality
on our country and has spent his entire political life trying to beat back the
forces that would increase that inequality to the point of oligarchy.
Sanders believes that the presence of
corporate money in politics corrupts elected officials, and that it results in
laws that protect the most wealthy while leaving increasing numbers of people
of color, working-class people, youth, the elderly, the disabled, and a whole
host of other less powerful demographic groups deeper in debt. Throughout his
entire career, he has been passionate, vocal, and, yes, effective in
fighting for policies that would reverse this.
And, as he loves to explain, he has refused
all big-money contributions from corporations and special interests, raising
money from individual human beings with an average contribution of $27.
Clinton, on the other hand, has received
massive campaign contributions from PACs, super PACs, and corporate lobbyists.
All campaign contribution data is publicly available, and you can research it
in detail at OpenSecrets.org; it is very interesting to see the amounts and
types of donations behind not only Sanders and Clinton, but all the candidates
running for president this year. Clinton's campaign has so far received the
most money from commercial banks, hedge funds and private equity firms, HMOs,
and pharmaceutical companies of any candidate for president in 2016 (including
any of the Republicans).
To me, as to Sanders, this is cause for
concern. When you receive enormous campaign contributions from pharmaceutical
companies, you might just be a bit tempted to temper your health care plan to
include higher prescription costs. When you receive enormous campaign
contributions from Wall Street banks, you might just be a bit tempted to be lax
in regulating them, and to be more lenient on their executives personally when
they commit crimes. And when you receive enormous campaign contributions from
fossil fuel industries, you might just be a bit tempted to weaken your
environmental agency's regulatory ability and to temper your energy policy to
emphasize coal and natural gas rather than solar and wind.
That is the purpose of lobbying. That
is why corporations pay the money.
Clinton has said in the debates that her
policies are in no way influenced by her corporate contributions. She says that
she confronted Wall Street banks about the activities that led to the housing
crisis and the Great Recession of 2007-2009, that she told them to "cut it
out," that she will prevent them from doing something like that again, and
that she is the only one who knows how to do so. But as Jeff Gerth writes in
Politico, that is something of a disingenuous characterization of what she
actually told the bankers (he links to a video of her speech to them in his
article). And as far as her follow-up legislation to curb Wall Street's
behavior goes, Gerth says:
During 2007 and 2008, when the housing market collapsed and
while she was also running for president, the Democrats controlled the Senate.
Of the 140 bills Clinton introduced during that period, five were related to
housing finance or foreclosures, according to congressional records, including
one aimed at making it easier for homeowners facing foreclosure to get their
loans modified. Only one of the five secured any co-sponsors—New York Sen.
Charles Schumer signed onto a bill that would have helped veterans refinance
their mortgages.
…No Senate committee took action on any of the bills, and they
died without further discussion.
Clinton also somehow managed to miss all of
the votes on Dodd-Frank (the one major bill that was passed to regulate Wall
Street after the crash), except for the last ceremonial vote to support it
after it had already passed.
It is also worth asking, if what she says is
true, why then is she not pushing for any of the executives at any of the banks
involved to be personally held to account in any way?
Sanders has also raised the issue of how
Clinton has enriched not only her campaign but herself personally through hefty
corporate speaking fees. Since she left the government in 2013, she has earned
$21 million from private lectures given to corporations. Eight of these
lectures were given to major Wall Street banks, including UBS, Morgan Stanley,
Bank of America/Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank, and Goldman Sachs, all of which
have been documented by CNN:
She has responded that raising this issue is a
"smear," that Sanders is insinuating that her positions have been
compromised by these payments, and that she has not changed one vote because of
her cozy relationship to Wall Street. Leaving aside the fact that she probably
did change at least one vote because of it…
…she never addresses the issue that this
practice is, indeed, an enormous conflict of interest. Accepting
millions of dollars from an industry makes you, at best, more aware of their
concerns, more willing to sit down with them and to hear them out, and more
likely to want to avoid conflict with them than you might be with their
opponents. At worst, it can lead to you altering your behavior to avoid
jeopardizing potential future streams of money.
On a related note, it can also be interesting
(and telling) to realize the relative financial situations of the candidates
themselves. Marc Priester wrote a great investigative piece on this for
Inequality.org, in which he says:
This public concern over Clinton's relationship with the financial
industry speaks to more than the issue of campaign contributions. Average
Americans are worrying today about the power and influence wealthy Americans,
especially wealthy white males, have over the political class. Our political
leaders themselves too often appear to be part of this same white male economic
elite.
The 2016 presidential candidates may be more diverse by race,
gender, and class than candidates in the past. But that's not saying much.
According to Forbes, six of the remaining 10 major contenders have
fortunes worth at least $20 million. … Outside of Sanders and Senator Rubio,
every candidate in the top tier has a personal fortune worth at least $3
million.
Black Lives Matter & Issues of Race
Sanders has been oddly ineffective in the
debates in articulating his long-standing support for civil rights and his
lifelong history of passing legislation that disproportionately benefits people
of color. Going back to the 1960s, Sanders has been on the right side of the
fight for racial justice, participating in protest marches and serving as
chairman of his university's chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE),
as Tim Murphy writes in Mother Jones:
Sanders' problem may be that he seems to be
impatient with policy that specifically addresses issues of race, rather than
addressing issues affecting the working poor in general. Sanders' approach is
what Ta-Nehisi Coates describes as "universalist." That is, in
Sanders' view, overt racism has led to a more subtle institutional racism in
which our economic system is rigged against people of color, who therefore
disproportionately suffer the results of that unequal system, so if we reduce
inequality in general, we don't need to address racial inequality with specific
legislation.
Although this may, in fact, be logically true,
it doesn't resonate with many Black listeners, who are asking for more explicit
awareness of racial issues (not just economic ones) in his talking points.
Coates addressed this frustration in an interview on Democracy Now in which he
said that he is voting for Sanders, and believes he is the best candidate, in
spite of Sanders' opposition to reparations:
One can be very, very critical of Senator Sanders on this
specific issue. One can say Senator Sanders should have more explicit
antiracist policy within his racial justice platform, not just more general
stuff, and still cast a vote for Senator Sanders and still feel that Senator
Sanders is the best option that we have in the race.
In contrast, Clinton has gotten comparatively
little criticism and a great deal of support from the Black community. What is
baffling about this is that the Clintons' legacy is actually quite
disappointing when it comes to what it did for Black Americans—from criminal
justice reform to welfare reform to education reform. As Michelle Alexander
wrote in an article in The Nation:
To make matters worse, the federal safety net for poor families
was torn to shreds by the Clinton administration in its effort to "end
welfare as we know it." In his 1996 State of the Union address, given
during his re-election campaign, Clinton declared that "the era of big
government is over" and immediately sought to prove it by dismantling the
federal welfare system known as Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC).
The welfare-reform legislation that he signed—which Hillary Clinton ardently
supported then and characterized as a success as recently as 2008—replaced the
federal safety net with a block grant to the states, imposed a five-year
lifetime limit on welfare assistance, added work requirements, barred
undocumented immigrants from licensed professions, and slashed overall public
welfare funding by $54 billion (some was later restored).
…To be fair, the Clintons now feel bad about how their politics
and policies have worked out for black people. Bill says that he "overshot
the mark" with his crime policies; and Hillary has put forth a plan to ban
racial profiling, eliminate the sentencing disparities between crack and
cocaine, and abolish private prisons, among other measures.
But what about a larger agenda that would not just reverse some
of the policies adopted during the Clinton era, but would rebuild the
communities decimated by them? If you listen closely here, you'll notice that
Hillary Clinton is still singing the same old tune in a slightly different key.
She is arguing that we ought not be seduced by Bernie's rhetoric because we
must be "pragmatic," "face political realities," and not
get tempted to believe that we can fight for economic justice and win. When
politicians start telling you that it is "unrealistic" to support
candidates who want to build a movement for greater equality, fair wages,
universal healthcare, and an end to corporate control of our political system,
it's probably best to leave the room.
Women's Issues
I have a hard time imagining what could be
more offensive to women than the way Clinton and her supporters have been
trying to get women to vote for her. It is as if she expects women to vote for
her just because she is a woman, not because she is the best candidate for the
job. It is amazing to me that Clinton, Madeline Albright, and Gloria Steinem,
of all people, would imply that women are not smart enough about politics to
figure out for themselves where their best interests really lie. As Sarah
Lazare explained for AlterNet:
Madeleine Albright, the first woman to serve as U.S. Secretary
of State, introduced Clinton in New Hampshire on Saturday by declaring,
"There's a special place in hell for women who don't help each
other!"
…Meanwhile, speaking with HBO's "Real Time" host Bill
Maher on Friday, feminist icon Gloria Steinem claimed that young women are
backing presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in order to meet guys. Women get "more
activist as they grow older," she said. "And when you're younger, you
think: ‘Where are the boys? The boys are with Bernie.'" Steinem later
apologized for the comment on her Facebook page, writing that she "misspoke."
Nonetheless, the statement rightfully provoked rebuke, including
from some who grew up respecting Steinem. "The good news is that more and
more of us are ready to change the whole system, and fewer and fewer are
willing to believe that imperial feminism is the best we can do," declared
Philadelphia-based writer Sarah Grey.
What troubles me about Clinton's feminism is
that it appears to be a feminism of the elite. It is a feminism that focuses on
important issues, yes—like abortion rights and breaking through the glass
ceiling—but issues that tend to be the top concerns of white upper- and
middle-class women. Clinton either pays lip service to or virtually ignores
issues that are of great concern to working class women and women of color,
such as achieving pay equity, raising the minimum wage, lowering health care
costs, and reducing college debt. (All of which are issues that Sanders has
fought for robustly.)
Journalist Liza Featherstone articulated all
of this in her article in The Nation and in a follow-up appearance on
Democracy Now. She talked about how Clinton was on the board of Walmart for
years and still will not comment about how that company's practices during her
time on the board were later the target of the largest sex discrimination suit
in history. Featherstone's reporting also reveals other ways in which Clinton's
record is not the most supportive of working-class women:
As first lady of Arkansas, [Clinton] led the efforts by her
husband's administration to weaken teachers' unions and scapegoat teachers—most
of them women, large numbers of them black—for problems in the education
system, implementing performance measures and firings that set a punitive tone
for education reform nationwide. Rather than trying to walk this back, Clinton
recently said that as president, she would close any public school "that
wasn't doing a better than average job." … And lest you think Clinton's
financial hawkishness is reserved for K–12, she also opposes free college
tuition, though the United States is the only country where students—57 percent
of them women—are saddled with decades of debt as the price of attaining higher
education. Defending this position, Clinton recently said that it was important
for people seeking a college degree to have "skin in this game."
It would be hard to imagine a bigger blow to the material
well-being of poor women in America than President Bill Clinton's move in 1996
to "end welfare as we know it" by signing the Personal Responsibility
and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act. As first lady, Hillary wasn't a mere
spectator to this; within the White House, she advocated harsher policies like
ending traditional welfare, even as others in the administration, like Labor
Secretary Robert Reich, proposed alternatives. Clinton defended her preferred
policies by demonizing mothers struggling to get by as "deadbeats"
who were "sitting around the house doing nothing." ... Asked recently
to comment on this legacy, Hillary declined. And while the last Clinton
administration claimed that it would offset welfare reductions with pressure to
raise wages (the majority of low-wage workers in this country are women), and
while a growing movement is demanding a $15 minimum wage, Clinton has made it
clear that $12 is just fine with her.
Electability in the General Election
"Non-electability" is another one of
those seemingly powerful issues that Clinton has hit Sanders with again and
again. But the numbers don't necessarily back it up. In the majority of
mainstream media polls, Sanders has, in general, a better chance against the
leading Republican contenders.
I Support Bernie Sanders, and I'm Not Stupid or Unrealistic
And, finally, after all the debating is over…
I believe that it is important to vote with information and intelligence.
I also believe that it is important to vote with idealism, with passion, and
with your heart. I will be doing both on Super Tuesday.
