Bernie Sanders continues to attack Hillary Clinton while campaigning in Pennsylvania. I’m glad that he is not listening to party leaders who think he should back off. This is not a case of one Democrat with similar views running against another Democrat with similar views. There is a large ideological difference between the candidates, and the fight should continue regardless of how difficult it might be for Sanders to win the nomination.
Former Obama speech writer Jon Favraeu has been writing articles lately about how he learned to like Hillary, and why we should too. Today he wrote, “Primaries are often a clash of personalities and magnified policy differences.” No this is not about personalities (other than Clinton’s dishonesty) and the policy differences are rather major. I have opposed Clinton this year for the same reasons I opposed her in 2008. More significantly, I oppose her for the reasons I opposed the reelection of George Bush in 2004. Her militaristic foreign policy views, conservative views on civil liberties, and opposition to government transparency are little different from the views of the Bush administration, and are unacceptable, regardless of party.
Rather than leading us to learn to like Hillary, we learned, as Conor Lynch discussed, how the Democratic Party does not represent our values. He pointed out areas where Obama has continued the policies of the Bush administration, and Hillary Clinton is significantly to the right of him. He concluded:
How much will partisan Democrats be willing to forgive a Hillary Clinton administration? Many neoconservatives have already admitted that they prefer Clinton over Trump. At this rate, Clinton could fulfill most of Trump’s reactionary platform and still find widespread support among the Democratic faithful.
Earlier this week, the Clinton campaign accused Sanders “of trying to convince the next generation of progressives that the Democratic party is corrupt.” But do progressives really need to be persuaded that the Democratic Party is part of a corrupt political system, or that it is more reactionary than progressive on many issues? This is self-evident, and the Democratic party has done an excellent job over the past few decades making that case itself. The question is: how long will Democratic voters remain blindly loyal to their party?
Hillary Clinton probably could move the country much further to the right than Donald Trump or any Republican can. The same partisan Democrats who would loudly protest conservative actions from Republicans will defend the same actions if promoted by Hillary Clinton. We already saw how much Bill Clinton moved the country to the right when he was president.
Sanders recently warned that his supporters will not necessarily support Clinton. The Washington Post reports today that Sanders said he “would wait to see what Hillary Clinton includes in her platform before deciding how actively to campaign for her in the fall, if she is the party’s nominee.”
“I want to see the Democratic party have the courage to stand up to big money interests in a way that they have not in the past, take on the drug companies, take on Wall Street, take on the fossil-fuel industry, and I want to see them come up with ideas that really do excite working families and young people in this country,” Sanders said.
The problem is that, regardless of what the platform says, Clinton will probably do what she chooses if elected. When hearings were underway to confirm her as Secretary of State there were concerns about conflicts of interest. In response to such concerns, Clinton agreed to divulge the names of all contributors to the Foundation while she was in office. Clinton failed to provide this information, while making unethically making decisions regarding parties which were contributing to the Foundation, or paying Bill unprecedented amounts of money to give speeches. She has continued this pattern of unethical behavior after leaving office. In order to promote increased transparency after the Bush years, Obama instituted stricter rules to limit the use of private email, which Clinton then violated.
If Hillary Clinton failed to abide by rather limited agreements to act in an ethical fashion before she was confirmed as Secretary of State, why should anyone believe she will pay attention to any progressive planks she allows in the Democratic platform in order to obtain the support of Bernie Sanders? She has demonstrated too many times that she cannot be trusted–and certainly should not be trusted with the powers of the presidency.