Hillary Clinton and the Manipulation of Populism
By Paul Street“The Essence of American
Politics”
May 25, 2015 "Information
Clearing House" - "Znet"
- Fifteen years ago, the then still left Christopher Hitchens published a short
and pungent study of Bill and Hillary Clinton titled No One Left to Lie to: The
Values of the Worst Family (Verso, 1999, 2000). The book’s first chapter, titled
“Triangulation,” contained a memorable passage that summarized the duplicitous
“essence of American politics” as “the manipulation of populism by elitism. That
elite is most successful,” Hitchens noted:
“which can claim the heartiest
allegiance of the fickle crowd; can present itself as most ‘in touch’ with
popular concerns; can anticipate the tides and pulses of public opinion; can, in
short, be the least apparently ‘elitist.’ It is no great distance from Huey
Long’s robust cry of ‘Every man a king’ to the insipid ‘inclusiveness’ of [Bill
Clinton’s slogan] ‘Putting People First,’ but the smarter elite managers have
learned in the interlude that solid, measurable pledges have to be distinguished
by a reserve’ tag that earmarks them for the bankrollers and backers. They have
also learned that it can be imprudent to promise voters too much.”
Later in the same chapter, Hitchens noted that “At all times,”
the Clinton administration’s “retreat from egalitarian and even ‘progressive’
positions has been hedged by a bodyguard of political correctness.”
Hitchens provided a useful take on the militantly corporatist,
Wall Street-friendly core of the Clintons’ first two terms in the White House.
The “co-presidents” served the “bankrollers and backers” with such Big
Business-pleasing policies as the regressive and anti-worker North American
“Free Trade” (investor rights) Agreement (NAFTA), repeal of the New Deal’s
separation of commercial and investment banking, sponsorship of oligopolistic
hyper-conglomeration in the mass media (the 1996 Telecommunications Act), and
the non- and de-regulation of Wall Street’s growing financial derivatives
sector. Bill Clinton apologized to corporations for the high U.S. taxes they
supposedly endured. He warmed CEO hearts by proclaiming that “the era of big
government is over” and pursuing a “balanced budget” even while tens of millions
of Americans were still mired in poverty and economic inequality climbed towards
“Second Gilded Age” levels. Clinton kept the gigantic Pentagon system of
corporate welfare fully intact despite the disappearance of the Soviet nemesis
that had provided the critical Cold War pretext for massive “defense” (Empire)
spending. The Clintons did all this and more to satisfy the elite “donor class”
that put them in power while claiming to speak and act on behalf of everyday
working people and wrapping themselves in the outwardly progressive clothes of
politically correct multicultural tolerance and diversity. Never mind the
Clinton administration’s vicious liquidation of the disproportionately Black,
Latino/a, and Native American poor’s entitlement to basic family cash assistance
and its promotion and signing of legislation that accelerated the nation’s epic
mass hyper-incarceration of Blacks.
A Blunt Lesson About Power and Money
For what it’s worth, the Obama administration has been an
epitome of the same basic formula: fake-populist service to the wealthy few
wrapped also in the false rebels’ clothes of identity-politicized diversity and
tolerance. With the technically Black Obama in the White House, the corporate
Democrats have dampened protest from multiculturalist liberals and
“progressives” reluctant to question and challenge an actually “first Black
president” (Black comedian Chris Rock’s amusing description of Bill Clinton).
(Anticipation of such a “politically correct” windfall was always part of
Obama’s special appeal to the donor class.) Beneath the surface spectacle of
“change” (a black family in the White House, with a Muslim-sounding name to
boot) lay more of the plutocratic same, consistent with the elite liberal
political scientists Martin Gilens (Princeton) and Benjamin Page’s
(Northwestern) finding that the U.S. has become “an oligarchy” in which wealthy
elites and their corporations “rule” regardless of technically irrelevant public
opinion and of which party holds nominal power in Washington. The venerable
liberal-left commentator William Greider put it well in a March 2009 Washington
Post column titled “Obama Told Us to Speak But is He Listening?”: “People
everywhere learned a blunt lesson about power, who has it and who doesn’t. They
have watched Washington run to rescue the very financial interests who caused
the catastrophe. They learned that government has plenty of money to spend –
when the right people want it” (emphasis added). And little to spend on the rest
of us, the wrong people, soon to be known as “the 99%,” left to ask “where’s my
bailout?” During Obama’s first term, 95% of the nation’s income gains went to
the nation’s top 1 percent – a shocking statistic that provides some interesting
context for right-wing celebrity Sarah Palin’s question: “how’s that
hopey-changey thing working out?”
“Tell Me Something Interesting”
A technically female Hillary Clinton presidency promises a
similar dividend and disguise for the nation’s corporate and financial
oligarchy, this time with gender rather than race providing the main
identity-politicized sheen of historic correction and change. Hitchens’ volume
contained a chapter documenting Mrs. Clinton’s richly triangulation-ist history
along with much to suggest that she (like her husband) is a power-mad
sociopath. Especially memorable was Hillary’s response, in her role as head of
the White House’s health reform initiative, to Harvard medical professor David
Himmelstein, head of Physicians for a National Health Program. Himmelstein told
her about the remarkable possibilities of a comprehensive, single payer
“Canadian style” health plan, supported by more than two-third of the U.S.
public. Beyond backing by a U.S. citizen super-majority, Himmelstein noted,
single-payer would provide comprehensive coverage to the nation’s 40 million
uninsured while retaining free choice in doctor selection and being certified by
the Congressional Budget Office as “the most cost-effective plan on offer.”
“David,” Hillary commented with fading patience before sending
him away in 1993, “tell me something interesting.” Along with the big insurance
companies the Clintons deceptively railed against, the co-presidents decided
from the start to exclude the popular health care alternative – single payer –
from the national health care “discussion.” (Obama would of course do the same
exact same thing in 2009.) What she advanced instead of the Canadian system
that bored her was a hopelessly complex and secretly developed system called
“managed competition.” Mrs. Clinton’s plan went down in flames, thanks in no
small part to her inflexible arrogance.
New Democrat Pioneers
No One Left to Lie To and other left critiques of the Clintons
did little to dissuade liberal and “progressive” New Yorkers from backing
Hillary’s successful, cynical, and carpet-bagging 2000 campaign for the U.S.
Senate – a body wherein she would offer “liberal” support for George W. Bush’s
criminal invasion of Iraq. What about 2015-16, with the Clintons poised for a
return White House engagement? Will truthful, hard-hitting reporting and
commentary make any differences her chances? An excellent article by the
incisive Left commentator Doug Henwood in Harper’s last fall bears the title
“Stop Hillary!”
Henwood provides a clever and concise catalogue of Mrs. Clinton’s conservative,
corrupt, corporate-neoliberal, and imperial record from her years at Yale Law
and the Arkansas governor’s office (held by Bill for all but one 2-year term
between 1978 and 1992) through her stints in the U.S. Senate (2001-2009) and
atop the Department of State (2010-2013). Henwood’s essay is particularly
valuable on how the Clintons during their tenure in Arkansas helped “lay…the
groundwork for what would eventually hit the national stage as the New Democrat
movement, which took institutional form as the Democratic Leadership Council
(DLC).”
The essence of the DLC was dismal, dollar-drenched
“neoliberal” abandonment of the Democratic Party’s last, lingering commitments
to labor unions, social justice, civil rights, racial equality, the poor, and
environmental protection in abject service to the “competitive” bottom-line
concerns of Big Business. The Clintons helped launch the New Democrat/DLC
juggernaut by assaulting Arkansas’ teacher unions (Hillary led the attack) and
refusing to back the repeal of the state’s anti-union “right to work” law – this
while Hillary began working for the Rose Law firm, which “represented the
moneyed interests of Arkansas” (Henwood). Connection with one of the sleazier
players among those interests, a Savings and Loan charlatan named Jim McDougal,
got them involved in the Whitewater scandal, which involved the Arkansas
Governor’s spouse (Hillary) doing legal work at Rose (work about which Hillary
lied upon outside investigation) for a shady land speculator (McDougal) who had
enticed the governor and his wife (the Clintons) to foolishly invest in a badly
leveraged development project.
When the Arkansas-based community-organizing group ACORN
passed a ballot measure lowering electrical rates residential users and raising
them for commercial businesses in Little Rock, Rose sent Hillary into court to
argue a business-backed challenge. As Henwood notes, Hillary “helped to craft
the underlying legal strategy, which was that the new rate schedule amounted to
an unconstitutional ‘taking of property’…now a common right-wing argument
against regulation…” (Harper’s, November 2014)
“The Gold Standard in Trade Agreements”
There’s plenty more to say about Hillary’s intimate links and
service to the economic elite – connections that could yield a bumper crop of
reports on “conflicts of interest” between her claim to stand for everyday
working folks and her real-life proximity and allegiance to the super-rich. In
2001, Mrs. Clinton was one of 36 Democratic U.S, Senators to do the bidding of
the financial industry by voting for a bill designed to make it more difficult
for consumers to use bankruptcy laws to get out from crushing debt. As Secretary
of State, she repeatedly voiced strong support for the Trans-Pacific Partnership
(TPP). The TPP is a secretive, richly corporatist 12-nation Pacific “free
trade” (investor rights) agreement that promises to badly undermine wages, job
security, environmental protections, and popular governance at home and abroad.
It would be the largest “trade agreement” in history, potentially affecting 40
percent of the world’s gross product. Obama’s championing of this regressive,
authoritarian, eco-cidal, and anti-worker treaty has “set off perhaps the
biggest fight of his presidency within his own party, with trade unions,
environmentalists, and liberal activists lining up in opposition to the White
House. There is a strong possibility,” the New York Times reports, “that Mr.
Obama could lose the battle.” (NYT, April 18, 2015). In Australia in November of
2012, Secretary of State Clinton declared that “we need to keep upping our game
both bilaterally and with partners across the region through agreements like the
Trans-Pacific Partnership or TPP. … This TPP sets the gold standard in trade
agreements to open free, transparent, fair trade, the kind of environment that
has the rule of law and a level playing field.”
“The Choice is Clear: There is None”
In the years since she resigned as Secretary of State to
prepare – mainly to raise godawful piles of cash – for her next presidential
run, Mrs. Clinton has faced criticism for giving speeches to leading Wall Street
firms and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for more than $200,000 each – more
than four times U.S. median household income. Hillary depends heavily on the
elite financial sector and big corporate interests to pay for her campaign,
which is expected to spend at least $2.5 billion. “Hillary, Inc.’s” preemptive
“money machine” will smash previous fundraising records and prevent rivals from
mounting serious opposition in the caucuses and primaries. “It’s going to be
like nothing you’ve seen,” a top Democratic donor gleefully told The Hill, “The
numbers will be astounding.”
The “numbers” are driven by giant contributions from
super-wealthy donors who have no interest – quite the opposite in fact – in
seeing government serve the “everyday Americans” in whose name Mrs. Clinton is
running. Black Agenda Report’s Executive Director Glen Ford provides some
sobering context on what’s going on:
“[The United States is] a nation of
more than 300 million people in which politics has become the sole property and
domain of the rich. The rich decided some time ago that Hillary Clinton would be
the virtually unchallenged presidential candidate of the Democratic Party. The
48 percent of Americans that express an affinity with the Democratic Party have
not yet chosen Clinton. There has been no primary election in any state. But,
that does not matter because the selection process that counts occurs in the
boardrooms and mansions and private clubs and getaways of the rich. Hillary
Clinton and her husband, Bill, have spent virtually their entire adult lives on
the millionaires’ campaign circuit, the rich man’s primary. In the process of
pleasing the rich, they have become rich, themselves….Hillary hopes to spend two
and a half billion dollars of – mostly – rich people’s money in the 2016
campaign. Wealthy people will be just as generous with the Republican candidate.
The outcome on Election Day is absolutely certain: the rich man’s candidate will
definitely win, and the people will lose – because they have no candidate in the
major parties.”
Ford’s summary provides context for a Hillary-mocking bumper
sticker that is starting to circulate as the presidential caucus and primary
campaign begins to heat up in Iowa and New Hampshire. “Ready for Oligarchy. The
Choice,” the sticker reads, “is Clear: There is None.”
“A World Awash in Money and Connections”
There’s more than a few plutocratic skeletons rattling around
in Hillary Clinton’s campaign closet. According to a New York Times report last
April 23rd, the owners of a uranium company that donated $2.35 million to the
Clinton Foundation (Bill Clinton’s giant global “nonprofit” organization) sought
approval from the U.S. government during the time of Hillary’s tenure at the
State Department to sell the company to Russia’s atomic energy agency. Mrs.
Clinton’s agency signed off on the deal. The Clintons failed to report the
donations as they had agreed to in the agreement they made with the Obama White
House when Hillary became Secretary of State. On the same day, Reuters reported
the Clinton Foundation and another family charity were refiling at least five
annual tax forms “due to errors.” The foundation failed to include tens of
millions of dollars in donations from foreign governments. According to New York
Times reporter Carolyn Ryan, speaking on the Public Broadcasting System’s
Newshour, “the timing [of the Times’ and Reuters’ revelations] is not great [for
the Hillary Clinton campaign], because… she’s really trying to present herself
in a way to blunt the Elizabeth Warrens of her party as a sincere messenger for
the message of economic mobility, economic inequality….these stories…have a way
of underscoring the international orbit that the Clintons operate in…a world
awash in money and connections and a very privileged place” (PBS, 4/23/2015,
emphasis added).
“Inclusive Capitalism”
Hillary and her handlers, including long-time top Monsanto
lobbyist Jerry Crawford (recently tapped to run the “Ready for Hillary”
Political Action Committee), are conscious that Mrs. Clinton has a public
relations problem with the working class and middle class Americans. She enjoys
a net worth of $13 million and “a high flying lifestyle” (Politico, 4/15/2015)
while seeking popular support in a savagely unequal New Gilded Age U.S. where
(thanks in part to the neoliberal policies advanced by the first Clinton
administration) the top 1 percent now dangerously owns more than 90 percent of
the nation’s wealth. A Gallup poll taken last January found that 67 percent of
the US population is dissatisfied with the nation’s top-heavy distribution of
wealth and income.
Consistent with the Hitchens’ dictum on “the essence of
American politics,” Times reporter Amy Chozick aptly describes Hillary’s central
campaign “quandary” as “how to address the anger about income inequality without
overly vilifying the wealthy.” As Chozick ads, “She must convince a middle class
that feels frustrated and left behind that she understands its struggle, even as
she relies heavily on the financial industry and corporate interests to fund her
candidacy” (NYT, 2/7/2015).” Stated more fully, the dilemma is how to sound
populist enough to win tens of millions of working class votes without sounding
so populist as to alienate the privileged financial elite that pays for viable
presidential campaigns and owns the corporate media that confers or denies
legitimacy to candidates. The job, as usual, is to seem “in touch with popular
concerns” while keeping “the bankrollers and backers” assured that the candidate
will honor the capitalist “reserve tag” she will (if successful) carry into
office.
In a sloppy effort along those lines last year, Mrs. Clinton
preposterously told ABC’s Diane Sawyer that the Clintons were “dead broke” after
leaving the White House in 2001. It was a transparently preposterous and widely
mocked claim that only highlighted Hillary’s huge distance from the real lives
of “everyday Americans.”
But now the real populism-manipulating game is on. Last
February, the New York Times dutifully related the claim of “Mrs. Clinton’s
closest economic advisors” to embrace a “philosophy” of “inclusive capitalism”
that “calls for corporations to put less emphasis on short-term profits that
increase shareholder value and to invest more in employees, the environment, and
communities.” (The democratic socialist George Orwell would smile at this
oxymoronic formulation in a time when the profits system poses an ever more
apparent danger not merely to democracy, justice, and economic stability but to
life itself). Hillary’s spokesman Nick Merrill told the Times that Hillary’s
“economic plan” is “more populist and reliant on government than the centrist
approach of trade agreements, welfare reform and deficit reduction associated
with her husband, former president Bill Clinton” (NYT, 2/7/2015).
To Steal “a Footnote’s” Populist Thunder
Behind the claim of a left-leaning “populist” Hillary lay the
shadow of U.S. Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), a former financial regulator
whose “blistering critique of Wall Street” (in the word of the Times) was a big
hit at the last Democratic National Convention. Many liberals and progressives
in Iowa and New Hampshire wish that the more genuinely progressive Sen. Warren
was running for the Democratic presidential nomination. Sensing Warren’s
popularity and vulnerability on her left flank, Hillary Clinton went to the
pages of Time magazine last April to praise Warren as someone who became one of
“the world’s 100 most influential people” because “She never hesitates to the
hold powerful people’s feet to the fire.”
In the outwardly folksy and progressive, politically correct,
multicultural, and admirably gay-friendly online video that announced her
candidacy last April, Hillary claimed to be upset that “the deck is stacked” in
favor of the rich and powerful. “My job,” Mrs. Clinton said, “is to reshuffle
the cards.” (Here she was clearly channeling Warren, who regularly says that
“The game is rigged to work for those who have money and power.”) As Chozick,
the leading Times reporter on the Hillary beat, noted last April 21st:
“For anyone who wondered what kind
of an economic message Mrs. Clinton would deliver in her campaign, the first few
days made it clear: She is embracing the ideas trumpeted by Ms. Warren and the
populist movement – that the wealthy have been benefiting disproportionately
from the economy while the middle class and the poor have been left behind… Mrs.
Clinton was the original Elizabeth Warren, her advisers say, a populist fighter
who for decades has been advocate for families and children; only now have the
party and primary voters caught up….A 16-page dosser, titled ‘Hillary Clinton: A
Lifetime Champion of Income Opportunity,’ and assembled by a close friend and
adviser to Mrs. Clinton, calls Ms. Warren a ‘footnote.’ The document, provided
to The New York Times, presents 40 instances in which Mrs. Clinton took the same
stance as Ms. Warren on issues….”
Perhaps Mrs. Clinton should revise her assessment of Elizabeth
Warren and call her one of “the world’s 100 most influential footnotes.”
Consistent with her latest populist campaign makeover (her
last one was in 2007 and 2008), Mrs. Clinton is now somewhat “skeptical” about
the TPP (Bill was similarly skeptical towards NAFTA on the campaign trail in
1991 and 1992). “Any trade deal has to produce jobs and raise wages and increase
prosperity and protect our security,” Hillary has said since leaving the State
Department. Candidate Hillary is now openly bothered that Wall Street financers
profit from the “carried interest” loophole, which allows them to pay a capital
gains tax, lower than the ordinary tax rate, on large portions of their incomes.
She rode in a modest van to the automotive shop of an Iowa community college to
say that “There is something wrong when hedge fund managers pay lower tax rates
than nurses or the truckers that I saw on I-80 as I was driving here over the
last two days.” Mrs. Clinton also claimed to be upset that “the average CEO
makes 300 times what the average worker makes” and empathized with students
bemoaning the extreme costs of a college education. “People are struggling,”
Clinton said, adding that she “want[s] to stand up and fight for people so they
can not just get by, but they can get ahead and stay ahead.”
If this all sounds a bit like what Obama promised in 2008,
only to deliver a “blunt lesson” about oligarchy, Mrs. Clinton’s liberal
promoters want us to know that the current president had a noble “progressive
vision” but lacks Hillary’s hands-on experience and practical political skills
to “get [progressive] things done.” She will carry the mere vision of
progressive transformation out of the “hopey-changey” mist and into the real
world of politics and policy.
“Populist Rhetoric is Good Politics”
How is Mrs. Clinton’s latest leap into Hitchens’ “essence of
American politics” working? It’s too early to tell in Iowa and New Hampshire,
where the “progressive” sorts who tend to become most intensely involved in the
nation’s first presidential caucus and primary campaigns are still pining for
Warren. The good news for Hillary is that there’s nothing remotely around like
the big dollar Obama phenomenon (which began accumulating large amounts of
corporate and financial money four years before the 2007-2008 campaign) to
de-rail her ascendancy to the Democratic nomination this time around.
It’s time for serious progressives to undertake a quadrennial
reality check. Given her long power-serving past, her considerable personal
wealth, the Democratic Party’s long record of serving the rich and powerful
(from the Andrew Jackson7 through the Clinton42 and Obama44 administrations),
the ever more openly plutocratic nature of U.S. politics, and the deep
structural captivity of both of the nation’s dominant political organization to
the corporate and financial donor class and to the corporate media, two things
seem clear. First, a voter or activist has to be pretty naïve to fall for
Hillary Clinton’s effort to recast herself as a dedicated and lifelong populist
– as someone who seriously cares that “the deck is stacked” on behalf of the
wealthy few. Second, it’s just as naïve to think it would make all that much
difference if Mrs. Clinton really was the “fighting populist” her campaign
claims she is. As Laurence Shoup noted in Z Magazine in early 2008:
“Every four years many Americans
put their hopes in an electoral process, hopes that a savior can be
elected—someone who will make their daily lives more livable, someone who will
raise wages, create well-paying jobs, enforce union rights, provide adequate
health care, rebuild our nation’s infrastructure, and end war and militarism. In
actuality, the leading ‘electable’ presidential candidates have all been well
vetted by the hidden primary of the ruling class and are tied to corporate power
in multiple ways. They will stay safely within the bounds set by those who rule
America behind the scenes, making sure that members of the plutocracy continue
to be the main beneficiaries of the system…It is clear that, at best, U.S.
‘democracy’ is a guided one; at its worst it is a corrupt farce, amounting to
manipulation, with the larger population objects of propaganda in a controlled
and trivialized electoral process.”
Nobody understands this harsh reality better, perhaps, than
Hillary’s Wall Street backers. A recent report in the widely read insider
online Washington political journal Politico bears a perfectly Hitchensian title
and theme: “Hillary’s Wall Street Backers: ‘We Get It.’” As Politico explains:
“Populist rhetoric, many say, is
good politics – but doesn’t portend an assault on the rich…It’s ‘just politics,’
said one major Democratic donor on Wall Street, explaining that some of
Clinton’s Wall Street supporters doubt she would push hard for closing the
carried-interest loophole as president…’The question is not going to be whether
or not hedge fund managers or CEOs make too much money,’ said a separate Clinton
supporter who manages a hedge fund. …Nobody takes it like she is going after
them personally’…Indeed, many of the financial-sector donors supporting her
just-declared presidential campaign say they’ve been expecting all along the
moment when Clinton would start calling out hedge fund managers and decrying
executive pay — right down to the complaints from critics that such arguments
are rich coming from someone who recently made north of $200,000 per speech and
who has been close to Wall Street since her days representing it as a senator
from New York.”
“ ‘As a CEO and former Wall Street
executive, I applaud Secretary Clinton’s remarks, and I do not view
them as populist nor far left,’ said Robert Wolf, former CEO of UBS Americas
and a major Democratic fundraiser who now runs his own firm….In the words of
Democratic strategist Chris Lehane, a veteran of Bill Clinton’s White House who
now advises Tom Steyer, the billionaire environmentalist hedge-fund manager and
donor: ‘The fact is that any Democrat running for president would talk about
this. It’s as surprising as the sun rising in the east.’”
One Democrat at a top Wall Street firm even told Politico that
Hillary’s politically unavoidable populist rhetoric “is a Rorschach test for how
politically sophisticated [rich] people are…If someone is upset by this it’s
because they have no idea how populist the mood of the country still is. The
fact is, if she didn’t say this stuff now she would be open to massive attacks
from the left, and would have to say even more dramatic stuff later.” (Politico.
4/15/2015)
These reflections from “liberal” elites atop what Edward S.
Herman and David Peterson have called the nation’s “unelected dictatorship of
money” speak volumes about the nation’s descent into abject plutocracy and the
limits of progressive change permitted under elections and through parties
subject to “the hidden primary of the ruling class.” They are also a monument to
the continuing relevance of Hitchens’ properly cynical take on the manipulative
“essence of U.S. [electoral and major party] politics.”
Why Hillary Welcomes Bernie
What about the entrance of progressive Democrat and nominal
“socialist,” the former “independent” U.S. Bernie Sanders, into the Democratic
presidential primary? Does the “Sanders challenge” complicate or complement the
Clinton’s populism-manipulating game? Clearly it’s the latter
(complementation). It’s not for nothing that, as the New York Times reported
two Saturdays ago, “Mrs. Clinton cheerily welcomed Mr. Sanders into the race.”
Of course she did. It wouldn’t surprise me to learn that Sanders’ “good friend
Hillary Clinton” (that’s how Sanders described Mrs. Clinton in Iowa City last
February 19th) is pleased to hear that Bernie is throwing his hat in the ring.
The Clintons are very smart and calculating political actors. They know that the
only real threat to de-rail Hillary (as Obama did in 2007 and 2008) on the road
to the Democratic presidential nomination this time was Warren. But with Warren
appearing to mean it when she says she’s not up for a presidential run (not
ready for fighting Hillary’s daunting money machine, perhaps) and with little
else to contest her ascendancy on “the left” (Martin O’Malley and Jim
Webb…seriously?), Hillary now faces a rather different political and public
relations problem. She is in danger of enjoying an all-too obviously Wall
Street-funded dynastic coronation as the Democratic nominee. She probably sees
it as useful to face a progressive challenge from a progressive candidate like
Sanders who could never receive the funding or corporate media approval required
to make a serious bid for the nomination. That way her pre-selected nomination
can look less transparently plutocratic and more like a passably “democratic”
outcome of “a real debate.” Ashley Smith puts things very well in a trenchant
analysis on
SocialistWorker.org:
“Hillary Clinton certainly doesn’t
regard Sanders as a threat. She knows that the election business follows the
golden rule: Whoever has more gold, wins. Clinton is expected to amass a war
chest of more than $1 billion, mostly from Wall Street and Corporate America, to
pay for advertising, an army of paid staff and Astroturf support. This will
overwhelm Sanders’ fundraising goal of $50 million and his underdeveloped
volunteer infrastructure….In fact, Clinton regards Sanders as an asset to her
campaign. He will bring enthusiasm and attention to Democratic primaries that
promised to be lackluster at best. He will also help her frame the election in
populist terms that have widespread support. That benefits the Democrats and
undermines the Republicans, who have little to say about inequality, except that
they like it….No wonder Clinton celebrated Sander’s entry into the race.”
Anyone who doubts that Sanders will hand over his voters,
delegates, and money to Hillary once he’s through in the primaries hasn’t been
paying attention. “No matter what I do,” Sanders said last January, “I will not
be a spoiler. I will not play that role in helping to elect some right-wing
Republican as president of the United States.”[1]
Of course Sanders could have avoided the “spoiler” charge by
running for and very likely winning Vermont’s Governorship as the
standard-bearer of that state’s Progressive Party. There Sanders could likely
succeed in pushing through single-payer health insurance, recently and
shamefully abandoned by Vermont’s Democratic governor Peter Shumlin. That would
be a very significant progressive victory with very real social-democratic
substance. But Vermont working peoples’ loss is Hillary Clinton’s gain. A very
strange choice for an independent “socialist.”
Paul Street lives in Iowa City, Iowa, where he “enjoys” a
front row seat for the latest quadrennial electoral extravaganza. His latest
book is They Rule: The 1% v. Democracy (Paradigm, 2014)
Note
[1] For further critical reflections on Sanders’ decision to
run in the Democratic presidential primary race, see my most recent
previous essay on ZNet: “Bernie Sanders Enlists in the Hillary Clinton
Campaign.”