By Mike Reid
Originally written in July 23, 2016
Updated November 9, 2016
Most of my friends are politically liberal and some are fervent Bernie Sanders supporters. Some of them have tried to get me to jump on the Bernie bandwagon and are frustrated that they could not persuade me to do so. I’m supporting Hillary Clinton. She’s not my ideal presidential candidate, far from it, but she is competent, qualified, disciplined, rational, and understands national and global politics. And at her worst, she would still be an infinitely better president than any of the Republican candidates would be, particularly their nominee. So what about Bernie Sanders? He’s genuine, passioned, and stands up to the ruling elites. These are laudable qualities, but I have never regarded him as a viable general election candidate. And even if by some miracle he were to win the White House, I believe he would be an ineffective president.
First of all, he’s unelectable. “Wait!” you say. “Polls taken during the Spring of 2016 have shown Sanders beating Trump by double digits in a hypothetical general election. He does substantially better against him than Hillary does. He would be the stronger candidate!” Yes, polls have shown that. And no, they do not indicate that Sanders would be the stronger candidate against the orange buffoon. Those polls, frankly, don’t mean anything. We know from past experience, that polls taken more than a few months before an election are not predictive of the eventual outcome and in this election, there’s even less reason to give any credence to those polls. Here’s why:
We have to start with an unfortunate reality: most Americans are politically clueless and pay little attention to politics until the final weeks before a presidential election. I know this seems incredible, but a very high percentage of the American electorate still knows little or nothing about Bernie Sanders. They don’t know that he’s a “socialist” and they don’t know what a “democratic socialist” is. To them, he’s just some obscure politician (or something) from some little state somewhere. In contrast, Hillary Clinton and The Donald have been public figures for many years and are both well-known even to the politically disengaged general public. Both are deeply unpopular. (In my opinion, the antipathy that so many Americans hold towards Hillary Clinton is mostly undeserved, but that’s another matter.) When the pollsters called a broad swath of the American people and asked them whom they preferred as a presidential candidate, Clinton, Trump, or Sanders, many of the people they called simply reacted negatively to the names that they knew, those of Clinton and Trump. To them, Sanders was the “none-of-the-above” option. They were not expressing support for him. They were expressing distaste for their two other choices. They simply didn’t know much about him and didn’t have a strong opinion about him one way or the other. To him, he was “the other guy”. I believe that this is why in those polls, he seemed to be the more popular candidate.
Sanders’ supporters often say, “But I went to a Bernie rally and the venue was packed! Haven’t you seen how many are supporting him on social media? Just about everyone I know is supporting him! That shows how super popular he is!” Um, no. Sorry, Bernie supporter, but it doesn’t. The community of people with whom you interact, both in person and on-line are a self-selected subset of the country. This community may be large, but it is still a selected group. This group does not in any way represent a statistically meaningful cross-sampling of the voting population at large. Yes, millions of Americans support Bernie Sanders, but there are tens of millions of voters. Trump’s supporters also look around within their in-person and on-line communities and see that nearly everyone they know is enthusiastically supporting Trump. This has convinced many of them that the only way Trump could lose is if the election is rigged. Like many Sanders supporters, they are mistaking depth of support for breadth of support.
An even larger problem is that Sanders has never faced the full scrutiny of the news media like Clinton and Trump have. His political skeletons, and he does have some, have not yet been brought out of the closet. Those political skeletons include his past flirtations around the edges of Marxism, his expressed sympathy for some very anti-American leftist regimes, and some very un-politique lifestyle comments. The fact that he honeymooned in the Soviet Union is another. You might look at those and say, “So what? Those were all decades ago. He’s grown up since then!” I don't disagree. That was then and this is now. He may well have matured as a person and as a politician. I give him the benefit of the doubt on that. However, regardless of whether you or I think these old malefactions are relevant today, you can bet that the news media will dredge them up and have a field day with them. These as of yet unexploited vulnerabilities will hurt Sanders deeply with middle America when they become widely known.
Now, let’s turn to his biggest problem of all. The Right Wing Attack Machine (RWAM) has never turned their guns on him. I define the RWAM as the collection of right-wing media such as Fox “News”, Breitbart, Drudge, etc., conservative political organizations, and the Republican Party attack dogs. In my opinion, the primary reason Hillary is so unpopular is that she has been subjected to the full wrath of the RWAM for a quarter century. She has endured a relentless and continuous barrage of negative propaganda from right-wing media and an unending parade of frivolous and politically motivated, hyperpartisan Congressional “investigations” of phony, manufactured “scandals.” Every successful propagandist knows that old axiom, “If you repeat a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” And the RWAM has no scruples about repeating lies. Where there's smoke there's fire or if there is no fire, create a lot of smoke and people will assume there's fire. No one, no matter how honest, could withstand the withering character assassination campaign that Hillary Clinton has been subjected to and emerge with his or her reputation intact, not even Bernie Sanders. Hillary Clinton has survived these ruthless and often sexist attacks, but they have drawn blood and left scars.
Were Bernie Sanders to be the Democratic nominee, the media would drag his old leftist peccadilloes out of the closet and the RWAM would go after him in full force. These forces would shape the opinions of that half of America who now knows little about him. The RWAM would paint him as a tax-and-spend raging Marxist. Many Americans will confuse Sanders’ European-style democratic socialism with old Soviet socialism. Yes, I know the difference, but many Americans don’t and the RWAM would deliberately reinforce their confusion. To most Americans who came of age during the Cold War, those of us over age 45, the very word “socialist” is toxic. To them socialism is un-American and emblematic of government tyranny. And this demographic is the one that has the highest voter turnout. Well-crafted propaganda labels can stick. Do you remember the infamous and deeply deceptive “Willie Horton” ad of the 1988 campaign targeted at Michael Dukakis or the mendacious “Swift Boat” ads of 2004 targeted at John Kerry? Both ads were preposterous and slanderous, but they were effective. Expect much more of that in 2016. Sanders would be deeply vulnerable to these.
“But Bernie is inspiring younger people to vote! They finally have someone to vote for!” It’s true that Sanders has his greatest support among younger voters and they have been enthusiastically packing his rallies. However that enthusiasm has not translated into actual votes. If you look at the polls by demographic, younger voters have not been turning out to vote in the Democratic primaries in extraordinary numbers. Their turn out rate is no better than it was in 2008 when Obama ran the first time. They express support for him when called by pollsters, but apparently that support is not enough to motivate them to actually get off of their apathetic butts and vote. Primary election turnout data show that the enthusiastic young Americans packing his rallies are a minority within their demographic. Sanders is very popular among that subset of the younger demographic that is politically engaged, but he is not enlarging it. Repeat after me: Depth of support does not necessarily indicate breadth of support. The larger part of their cohort are as apathetic as ever. This election, like all before, will be decided largely by middle-aged and older white voters. When this demographic, my demographic, hears the word “socialist”, most of us panic and run for the hills — or to the Republicans.
The next factor to be considered is campaign contributions. It is said that “Money is the lifeblood of politics.” This old aphorism sounds cynical, but there is a lot of truth in it. Campaign funds come primarily from wealthy individuals and economic interest groups. Most of these donors dislike Donald Trump and few of them are donating to his campaign. Many of them don’t like Hillary Clinton either, but they see her as someone they could stomach if they had to. So, many of the big political donors are simply sitting out this election or focusing on down-ballot races. However, they could not stomach Sanders. He wants to greatly raise their taxes, regulate their industries, raise the minimum wage, and he opposes their beloved international free trade agreements. I fear that many of them would hold their noses, but still come out and donate millions of dollars to Trump just to keep “the socialist" out of the White House and out of their pockets. With their money, they could buy a lot propaganda and the election. Unfortunately, the American public writ large is undereducated, unsophisticated and can be swayed by well-financed propaganda.
The polls that showed Bernie Sanders leading do not reflect these factors and should not be viewed as being at all predictive of how a general election would turn out. Were he the nominee, these factors would come into play and his standing in the polls would collapse. Experienced political operatives, such as the people who get to be superdelegates, know this, which I think is why they have largely not supported him. For these reasons, I do not believe those polls are meaningful and I believe that Bernie Sanders would lose to Donald Trump in the general election.
Let’s suppose that by some miracle, Bernie Sanders did win and become president. The POTUS is not a dictator and cannot enact major initiatives on his own. Exactly what is he going to accomplish without support in Congress? He’s been in Congress for a long time, why hasn’t he pushed his progressive agenda from the Senate floor? Perhaps he has tried, but we haven’t heard much about it. This is because his agenda has so little support from his colleagues that any such bills never even make it out of committee. And as president, he would run into the same stone wall of Republican obstructionism that President Obama has. Even the purple state Democrats would keep their distance. Congress would enact none of his progressive agenda — none of it! His agenda would be dead on arrival. Without Congress, there would be no $15 per hour federal minimum wage, no universal health coverage, and no free public colleges, even if Sanders were elected President. He surely knows this, which makes me wonder what his agenda really is.
We do need honesty and sincerity in our government, but those qualities alone do not a successful president make. A successful president projects gravitas in public and a ruthless political craftiness behind the scenes. Jimmy Carter may have been the most honest and well-intentioned man ever to sit in the Oval Office, but he lacked those qualities and was a weak and feckless president. The Camp David Peace Accord between Israel and Egypt was his only memorable accomplishment and that success was largely due to the fact that he could proceed with it without Congress. President Carter simply lacked the gravitas, public salesmanship, and behind the scenes political skills needed to advance an agenda. Even with his own party in control of both houses of Congress, he accomplished little. And at that time, their was still a sane and moderate wing to the Republican Party that was much more willing to compromise. By the end of President Carter’s term, many people even in his own party saw him as in over his head. Unlike most incumbent presidents running for reelection, he faced a serious challenger for his own party’s nomination and after barely surviving that, failed to win reelection. Jimmy Carter is a truly good person, but he was not a good president. I expect that we would see a replay of this with a President Sanders.
Hillary Clinton’s many haters on the Right see her as a corrupt near Marxist who will turn our country into the old Soviet Union and hand it over to the Islamic Caliphate or whatever enemy du jour. Her haters on the left see her as a corrupt, bought-and-paid-for corporate shill who cares little about the working classes. You can choose to believe one of these two contradictory portraitures of her if you wish, but there is a third option which I think is closer to reality. Hillary Clinton is neither. She’s actually a centrist career politician who has mostly progressive views that are tempered by a keen understanding of political reality. Single-payer national health insurance, free or inexpensive college, and a $15 per hour minimum wage like what most of the rest of the First World countries have and what Sanders is advocating would be wonderful. They are also politically infeasible in the United States today. Clinton knows this and unlike Sanders, is not making promises that she knows she would not be able to deliver on. Perhaps in a generation from now America will be ready for such ideals, but it is not yet.
As for Hillary Clinton’s integrity, she’s no Jimmy Carter. But I don't think that she’s the she-devil that haters on both the right and the far left portray her to be either. I don’t know her personally and neither do any but a tiny fraction of the Americans who hold strong opinions of her. I think that her reputation for untrustworthiness and dishonesty is more a reflection of the aforementioned decades-long character assassination campaign which the RWAM and a sensationalist media have directed at her rather than of her actual character or anything that she’s done.
Yes, Hillary Clinton is a consummate political insider and she has ties to many segments of American society, including the corporate one. But that’s not inherently a bad thing. Sure, she supports her campaign contributors, but any effective politician has to do that. She’s not the progressive firebrand that Bernie Sanders is and she has been late to the game when it comes to supporting social issues like LGBT rights. She works from the political center and out of political expediency, but that’s what effective politicians do in a democracy. I think that deep down, she is mostly progressive, but is restrained by an acceptance of political reality. This country is moving forward, albeit slowly. At least a President Hillary Clinton would keep us moving in that direction, in fits and starts perhaps, and inevitably with a few stumbles along the way, but still forward. I believe that the nomination of Bernie Sanders would result in a landslide Republican victory in November. Even if he were to be elected, an overreaching President Sanders would become mired in political intransigence and would take us nowhere. He would be a failed one-term president. A President Trump would be a disaster.
I certainly don’t agree with everything Hillary Clinton stands for. I have a particular problem with her hawkish and interventionist foreign policy, but no politician is perfect. And please let us not pretend that third party candidates are an option. They are relevant only when they act as spoilers who siphon votes away from one of the two major party candidates. The nature our first-past-the-post voting system and the Electoral College make it nearly impossible for any third candidate to be elected. Sorry, but in our electoral system, a third-party protest vote really is a vote thrown away. Hillary Clinton is not be an ideal presidential candidate, but unlike Sanders, she is electable and has a realistic political agenda. This year we are in a particularly dangerous situation. Never in American history has one of our two major political parties nominated for President of the United States a person who is as monumentally unfit for the office as Donald Trump is. He must not ascend to that office! This is why I have been supporting Hillary Clinton all along and look forward to watching her take the presidential Oath of Office in January.
UPDATE Nov., 9, 2016: Trump won. This is bad, really bad.
