When Bernie Sanders wins Iowa and New Hampshire, the tidal wave of media attention will cause a paradigm shift within the American political establishment. Suddenly, Bernie Sanders won't get 1/23 the television coverage of Donald Trump. Also, Hillary Clinton's continually evolving stances on key issues will be addressed by voters, as I explain in my latest YouTube segment.
Because of two initial losses, the Clinton campaign will be likened to a December 18, 2007 Gallup poll titled Clinton Maintains Large Lead Over Obama Nationally. In fact, a November 2007 Gallup poll stated emphatically, "In every poll since [August], Clinton has maintained at least a 20-point lead over Obama, with her support fluctuating between 45% and 50% over this period."
Sound familiar?
I explain why I'm only voting for Bernie Sanders, not Clinton or Trump, in this YouTube video, and after Iowa and New Hampshire wins, the Democratic Party as a whole will address the value system I highlight in that segment.
CNN recently published an article titled New Hampshire remains a Sanders stronghold, and considering Sanders had surpassed Clinton in both Iowa and New Hampshire in September, the public relations blitz surrounding "inevitability" should be taken with a grain of salt.
Clinton's favorability numbers are worse than eight years ago. Quinnipiac University reported that over 50% of voters have an "unfavorable" impression of her, in addition to a startling 61% of voters finding Clinton "not honest and trustworthy."
In addition, the notion that African American voters throughout the South will overwhelmingly vote for Clinton, in light of her "abysmal" racial justice record (according to Boston's Black Lives Matter President), prison lobbyist donors, 3 a.m. advertisement against Obama in 2008, and use of Islamophobia against Obama, could prove to be wishful thinking.
More relevant than landline based polling results is the recent Iowa Youth Caucus. Composed of 984 young Iowans and organized by the Iowa Secretary of State's office, the Iowa Youth Caucus had Bernie Sanders winning (53%), followed by O'Malley, and then Clinton. Like I predicted for the eventual Iowa Caucus in a recent Huffington Post piece, Martin O'Malley finished second (24%) and Hillary Clinton (15%) finished third.
In 2008, Clinton finished third in the Iowa Caucus.
This dynamic will be repeated on February 1st, 2016 especially since Clinton might have "dissed" the caucuses in a government email. Hillary Clinton once referred to the Iowa Caucus as an example of the Democratic Party's "extremes," as stated in a recent NBC News article titled Did Hillary Clinton Diss the Iowa Caucuses in Private Email?:
The latest State Department release of Hillary Clinton emails contained this message from Clinton to friend Sidney Blumenthal: "If Mittens [Mitt Romney] can't beat Grinch [Gingrich] in Florida, there will be pressure on state Republican parties to reopen or liberalize ballot access especially in the caucuses, which as we know are creatures of the parties' extremes."
There's nothing like a recently disclosed government email to get the true feelings of a candidate.
Conversely, the world and the entire United States will remember Iowa and New Hampshire as catapulting Bernie Sanders into the presidency after two monumental victories.
What many supporters of Clinton forget, in their blind allegiance, is that Clinton's foreign policy will be "something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that," as stated by Robert Kagan in The New York Times.
Vox has also echoed this view and states, Hillary Clinton will pull the Democrats -- and the country -- in a hawkish direction.
The Paris attacks showed America what another Clinton presidency would bring in terms of foreign policy. On November 19, The Guardian ran a piece titled Hillary Clinton calls for more ground troops as part of hawkish Isis strategy, quoting Clinton saying America must "press forward on both sides of the border, in the air on the ground."
On November 30, POLITICO published a headline titled Hillary Clinton: No troops in Syria or Iraq, quoting Clinton saying ground troops are a "non-starter."
On December 1, the International Business Times asked Hillary Clinton Flip-Flopping On Ground Troops To Fight ISIS? and wrote "Clinton's latest opinion on the topic was an abrupt departure from her previous stance."
As a result, US News & World Report published a prescient article before Clinton's ground troop statements stating "Clinton's go-to campaign tactic is the same it was in 2008: flip-flopping."
This also goes for the two major prison lobbyists that donated to her campaign, and everything from gay marriage to the TPP.
In a span of less than a month, Clinton went from a hawkish strategy against ISIS that involved ground troops, to a game plan that didn't involve "thousands of ground troops" but a more palatable (to Clinton supporters) lesser number.
What critics of my thoughts process on 2016 ignore is that a president today has the Authorization for Use of Military Force. Presidents can't prevent mass shootings (these atrocities have increased under Obama's tenure) and many other issues that Clinton supporter confuse for presidential powers.
Certain followers blindly ignore that Hillary Clinton voted for Iraq, pushed for a disastrous booming of Libya as Secretary of State, and still holds neoconservative advisers and support. As Jacob Heilbrunn writes in The New York Times, "It's easy to imagine Mrs. Clinton's making room for the neocons in her administration."
Since the AUMF gives a president virtually unilateral authority to wage war, as we've seen with President Obama's over $2.4 billion fight against ISIS, I don't trust Hillary Clinton with the power to bomb or send troops anywhere in the world.
Hillary Clinton supported arming the Syrian rebels, yet we just scrapped a $500 million program arming these rebels, because as Time explains, the program "has not been found to be effective in combating the terrorist group" ISIS.
As for the notion that Clinton was duped into an Iraq vote, Senator Clinton once claimed that the Iraqi insurgency was failing in 2005; going so far as to state much of Iraq "was functioning quite well." She evolved as always before 2008, but Obama's opposition to Iraq was a major factor in winning the White House.
Once Secretary of State, her advocacy for the Libya bombing resulted in a devastating civil war that both The New Republic and The Week claimed should be tied to Clinton's judgement.
Then of course there's the Brian Williams moment (funny how he was suspended, but Clinton expects to become president) where Hillary Clinton once claimed to fly into Bosnia under "sniper fire." A 2008 CNN article explains the factually incorrect claim:
She said when she arrived in Bosnia on March 25, 1996, "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."
POLITIFACT rated the claim as "Pants on Fire" stating "that's not what happened, as demonstrated by CBS News video that shows Clinton arriving on the tarmac under no visible duress, and greeting a child who offers her a copy of a poem."
Perhaps because of endless evolution and false statements like "landing under sniper fire," Quinnipiac University found that voters correlate the word "liar" to Hillary Clinton. Quinnipiac found that "Liar" is the "first word that comes to mind more than others in an open-ended question when voters think of Clinton."
Also, Jim Webb recently criticized the validity of Clinton's Marine recruitment story.
In contrast, Bernie Sanders says "I'll be damned" to sending more Americans into quagmires, calling for Saudi Arabia and others to do their share in fighting ISIS. The drastic difference between Clinton and Sanders on foreign policy, like Obama and Clinton in 2008, will allow Bernie Sanders to win Iowa and New Hampshire. He also won the Congressional Award from the Veterans of Foreign Wars and has fought for veterans throughout his career.
In 2016, New Hampshire and Iowa will save the nation from a future of endless quagmires, especially since Bernie Sanders offers a fresh approach to foreign policy and so many other key issues. History will be written by human beings, not skewed polls. Iowa and New Hampshire will help Bernie Sanders defeat Clinton and win the presidency because American voters still control the fate of our democracy.