I hope my outrage is
premature and I intend to give Vice President Biden every benefit of the doubt.
Hillary Clinton is sinking. She is clearly a victim of her own misdeeds,
untrustworthiness, and lack of inspiring policy. She is blinded by her
incredible expanding ego and self anointed inevitability. Though the corporate
media, counting super delegates who do not vote until the convention, have
already crowned their presumptive queen, the tide may be turning.
We are all familiar with
Secretary Clinton’s ever more obvious deficits:
legal problems from her negligence (or worse) as custodian of classified
information as Secretary of State; high disapproval numbers that rival those of
Trump; an uninspiring lackluster campaign; clear affinity for the corporate
billionaire group over the American people; a disturbing downward trend in
polls at the state and national level vs. the Donald in a general election.
Bernie Sanders clearly has
the momentum and enthusiasm needed to win the nomination and crush Trump in
November. He has come from behind to a
dead heat in the California primary and may indeed win on June 7. The likelihood is great that neither Clinton
nor Sanders will have enough pledged delegates to clinch the nomination at the
convention. The nomination will be
contested. Sanders will appeal to super
delegates to honor the will of the voters in states where he won the primary or
caucus only to see his delegate lead wiped out by super delegates, many of whom
aligned with Clinton before Sanders or anyone else had even declared their
intent to run. He will argue that he is
the strongest Democrat positioned to defeat Trump. Clinton’s legal problems may remain unsettled
or become even deeper as more information surfaces.
There are ominous hints in
the mainstream media that Hillary just may not make it, heaven forbid. Debbie Wasserman-Shultz is likely on her way
out and the people are sick and tired of DNC dirty “backroom machine” politics. Establishment Democrats may soon resemble the
proverbial rats deserting a sinking ship.
The wringing of hands is almost audible.
What are the Democrats to
do? Bernie Sanders enjoys a surging
enthusiasm as great or greater than that of Barack Obama in 2008. He clearly out polls Trump by wide margins and
has not even had, unfortunately, the opportunity to debate the orange menace
yet. Bernie has millions of loyal
hardworking true believing supporters who will labor tirelessly to get out the
vote. As Bernie is fond of pointing out,
Democrats win when turnout is high. Have
the Democrats lost the will and desire to win the white house and reclaim the
congress and senate? Or are they just
too stubborn or blind to see the obvious winning campaign already at hand in
the Sanders political revolution?
What has got my goat is
the paragraph in the media which inevitably follows a report on Clinton’s
woes: the new “white knight” of the
Democratic Party, Joe Biden. In this new
and unexciting narrative, the convention is hung and Biden (or John Kerry) is
drafted by the party to be the insurgent winning nominee against the evil
maniac Trump.
What is wrong with this
picture?
Neither Biden nor Kerry
chose to run for President in 2016. Biden
decided for valid personal reasons last fall to not enter the race. Kerry is busy with his duties as Secretary of
State and to my knowledge has not expressed any interest in the presidential
race. Only Bernie and Hillary actually
campaigned and competed in primaries and caucuses. Sanders has debated Clinton and brought issues vital to the American people such as income inequality and campaign finance
corruption to the forefront.
I want to stress that I am
in no way impugning Biden, Kerry or anyone else for barging into the
process. Neither has offered to do so or
given any indication of interest in that direction. I view both men as far too honorable to try
to take away something for which neither has worked or fought. In my opinion, Joe Biden and John Kerry have
loftier morals and ethics than the pundits who suggest either usurp an
undeserved nomination.
To these analysts and
pundits I say this: How dare you suggest
that Bernie Sanders and the millions of people who have voted, campaigned,
knocked on doors, made phone calls, attended rallies in numbers dwarfing attendance
at Clinton or Trump events, donated, written, spoken and believed in this
political revolution be denied what they have rightfully earned. Are Democrats really that ignorant?
If Clinton is somehow able
to overcome her mounting negatives and win the nomination then so be it. We may all have to suffer the nightmare of a
Trump presidency. But if Bernie
successfully makes his case at the convention, why in the world would anyone
want to bring in a non running non candidate just to foil the Sanders
revolution? This is a particularly
poignant point when you consider Sander’s substantial edge over Trump in a
general election match up.
Why is it such a terrible
thing to consider reviving Franklin Roosevelt’s economic bill of rights as
Bernie is attempting to do? Is it not
time for the pendulum to swing back to the people after 40 years of corporate billionaire
good times? Is the desire for
demilitarization in favor of rebuilding our failing infrastructure a bad
idea? Why is giving the American people
access to health care, education, living wage, and returning to them the human
dignity that the billionaire class has sucked out such a hard sell to the Democrats, who after
all, conceived these ideas in the first place.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt
would find the current Democratic Party abhorrent. Why do we even have to discuss Biden or Kerry
or whomever when we already have Sanders.
For FDR, it would come down to Bernie
or Bust.
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