It’s rather ironic — at least semantically– that Hillary Clinton is being painted the most unpopular Democratic candidate in history, considering it is the popular vote she handily won. The explanation for this disconnect is that many of her voters disliked her, but disliked Trump more. If that is true, then the strategy Clinton’s campaign took of focusing on what a dangerous vulgarian Trump was made perfect sense. Certainly the attempts on Clinton’s part to articulate a positive and coherent vision for the country — a reason to vote for her instead of against him — were besieged from the beginning. First by Sanders, who relentlessly damaged her with his Goldman-Sachs attacks; then by the drip, drip of Wikileaks continually putting her on the defensive. In this context, it’s small wonder her team chose to continually remain on offense against Trump. And for the want of 80,000 votes in 3 states, this same strategy might have engineered a win about which pundits would still be waxing rhapsodic.
This week, under the guise of a “Unity Tour,” we see Bernie Sanders ostensibly attempting to transform the Democratic Party in his ideological image, all the while insisting he himself is still an independent. Tom Perez seems utterly anxious to accommodate Sanders, and yet has been booed by audiences clearly unforgiving of the DNC label affixed to him. Bernie, once again, seems to believe he can have his cake and eat it too. He wants to galvanize the energy that comes from criticizing the party while seemingly confident of his ability to ride that tiger if and when it suits him.
Gee, where have I seen this not working before? #NeverHillary sound familiar? #BernieorBust? After the convention, Sanders endorsed and campaigned for Clinton, but there is precious little evidence that he convinced any of the hardcore rejectionistas he helped create in the first place to actually vote her, and even less evidence that any of the Trump voters who claimed Sanders had been their first choice migrated over to vote for Clinton when he asked them to.
Sanders would have us believe that the great sin of the Democrats in 2016 was their lackluster economic populist message — a narrative Perez (and the DNC chair runner-up, Ellison) have echoed since Election Day. And yet there is a substantial amount of evidence that the main driver of enthusiasm for Trump was not economic discontent, but racism, xenophobia, and misogyny. If “jobs” had been the actual driver of his support, these voters would have rewarded the party who’d reduced the unemployment rate by half and brought many of them health insurance. But let’s face it, “repeal Obamacare” — another guaranteed applause line– was just code for repealing Obama himself, in the sense of rolling back America to a time in which one’s accidents of birth — language, nationality and skin color — could be restored their once-automatic status. Hillary Clinton was such a potent target not because of all of her baggage, but because she represented the irrevocability of the change begun in 2008 — change damning above all in its promise of continued complexity. Trump, on the other hand, in all of his obnoxious, nonsensical incoherence, at least told a simple story. Bad Hombres are to blame for whatever makes you unhappy. I will banish them for you, because I am so bad I’m good. Now, don’t you feel better? Vote for me and I’ll make you feel better forever!
I happen to align with Sanders on most of his policy positions, and I could never even imagine not voting for him had he received the nomination. But last year he dropped the ball every bit as much as Clinton did. He had a truly singular opportunity to educate all of those packed arenas about how political change actually occurs — and how it is actually obstructed. Yet I never heard him speak about such unsexy but essential realities as the filibuster, cloture, or the nuclear option. More importantly, he never said back in July:
“I urge you emphatically to vote for Hillary Clinton. But even if you can’t, I am pleading with you to focus your volunteer efforts on Congress, specifically the four states where we have a chance to swing the Senate away from GOP control. These are efforts that I will support with the considerable amount of money we have raised. If Clinton wins and your support is seen to have delivered the Senate, it puts me in a much better position to push for the kind of appointments and legislation that are far more progressive than centrist. And even more importantly, if Trump is elected, having 51 seats in the Senate is the only bulwark we have against a war on the environment, and a Supreme Court that could seriously curtail your rights as an American citizen for a generation.”
Perhaps it wouldn’t have made any difference, but had Sanders even attempted this show of support for a Democratic majority, his current tour wouldn’t smack of the same half-heartedness his campaigning for Clinton did. At the very least, the post-mortems currently hitting the bookstores reek of a double standard. Where’s the exposé about the egregious failures of the Sanders campaign in losing the nomination to Clinton? Who is blaming Bernie for failing to attract those angry working class voters to her side on November 8?
As long as we’re assigning blame for the nightmare of the White House, let’s be fair about it. Because what’s good for the goose should be good for the Sanders.