The fervent stream of hyperbolic Clinton hate just continues to build up, to exhausting levels of Bullshit. Now let me, who was an early supporter and avid early advocate of Barack Obama outline why I’m supporting Hillary Clinton this time just as avidly.
But first
Let me just outline a few things about myself. I firmly consider myself in the left wing of the Democratic party, and my answers to various political leanings quizzes verify this. I’m a proud activist. I love activism and think it serves a super important role in our party. I’m a bisexual southern liberal, Anthropology MA, International Studies BA, I’m staunchly pro-choice, pro-gay rights, pro-criminal justice reform (including legalizing Marijuana), against privatizing education, against privatizing medicare or social security, and a supporter of moving towards a long-term downsizing of our military. That said, I consistently score 91% Clinton and 91% Sanders in the ISideWith quiz, which is kind of a crappy quiz regardless.
But I guess the crucial thing you can say about me is that I’m more of a grit at heart than a democratic socialist. A Grit, is a slang term for a political liberal. I’m a pro-environment, pro-state, pro-personal freedom, Keynesian Capitalist. The distinction is that, like Grits, I’m not enamored with the populism of Democratic Socialism, nor its unrelenting focus on modes of distribution (which have become a problem and do need to be addressed), at the expense of other dynamics and also tend to favor market-side reforms and approaches to deal with issues of distribution. I’m also a pragmatist. A staunch pragmatist. Pragmatism has come to define me more than even political ideology does. Watching rabid activism and ideological fanaticism in the Republican party has only driven me even more firmly into my convictions of pragmatism and my favorite thing about Obama is his cool-headed, professorial chill and the pragmatic way he has come to way his options.
On to the Bullshit
I do understand the reasons for supporting Sanders. I like and respect Sanders a lot. I get his appeal. I see why people come to him. It’s a big aggressive pounding of a few keynote issues in a way few Democrats have pushed economic justice in decades. He’s quirky, outside the political mainstream, seemingly uncompromised by the big interest groups and powers of politics. He’s genuine, he speaks to me personally on a lot of important economic issues. And most importantly, he's driving the discourse of the entire Democratic primary and the party solidly to the left. My issue isn’t with Sanders. It’s with the very vocal, anti-Clinton fanatics clogging DailyKos up with hyperbolic tirades about the differences between Clinton and Sanders.
Sanders and Clinton, while they were in Congress together, voted the same way on 93% of roll call votes, and given how Congress works, of 7% of the time they disagreed, likely less than half of that was ideological. Even now, on virtually all the big issues Clinton and Sanders are in agreement, and on some issues, like gun control, Clinton is undeniably a better leftist. The Bill Murray meme is saying that the bullshit “This is the future of the party” or “You are picking being conservative Democrat in Name Only and our one true Savior and Great hope of the party” type comparisons are incomprehensible (other than the shadowy logic we’ve seen for years, amounting to basically, “Welp, you never know about Hillary. You just can trust her you know”).
This ignores a lot of things. Like how one. Hillary 2016 is running well to the left of Hillary 2008, has lots of Obama people with her, and has jettisoned the worst of the 1990s Clinton apparatchik drift wood that no longer had a grip on today’s politics. Who is the candidate running on the Obama legacy and running based around a multi-ethnic coalition of educated urban white voters, and different minority groups? Hillary Clinton and her polling reflects that, including her astounding leads in South Carolina and pretty much any state with a large minority population. Which made me scoff all the more at that one Sanders supporter nitpicking one very favorable poll for Sanders in Iowa and NH and saying “Look how well he does with the youngest respondents in this poll in this overwhelmingly white state. Sanders is the future of the party.”
Basically a lot of it just comes down to Bill Clinton hate...
Which is surprising, considering Bill Clinton managed an upset win over George H.W. Bush by running a spirited, aggressive campaign and ended a 12 year streak of conservative elites Controlling the white house, and became the first Democrat in 32 years to be reelected President. Bill Clinton improbably turned 1998 into a wave election against overzealous Republican prosecution. He left office with high approval ratings, his personal popularity likely contributing to Democrats retaking the Senate in 2000 and carrying the limp-dick disorganized clueless campaign of Al Gore to victory were Florida not snatched away through a range of legal and quasi-legal maneuvering and a bogus Supreme Court case.
Here is where pragmatism comes in line. Basically, I say, “I’m not rewriting my own fanciful alternate histories.” IF something Bill Clinton did wasn’t the best I look at a few things: 1. Would any other President not named Bill Clinton have done the same thing in the political environment of the 1990s? 2. Did Clinton spearhead it or was he dragged unwillingly with it? 3. Was it something that would have passed even without his support and even with his veto?
The thing about Bill Clinton is that he wasn’t always a good Democrat. And there are some mistakes. But it’s really wrong to look at Bill Clinton as the source of these mistakes, as bearing sole ownership for something that was really a systemic failure of 1990s politics; Clinton as symptom of the illness rather than the vector of the disease. Tough on crime legislation that both he and Hillary have expressed regret over? Check both 1 and 2. DOMA? Check 1, 2, and 3, and include a Presidential Signing statement basically saying “This is a bad law and I don’t want to sign this, but I feel the courts will eventually overturn this law.”
What Bill Clinton was good at though, was reading the public, seeing exactly how much he could get, and always taking just a little more than that. Even with the much maligned Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, Clinton was taking a huge move in favor of gay rights at the time, after 12 years of Presidents who would barely acknowledge gay people, the AIDS crisis, and certainly had absolutely no interest in dealing with gay activists and political leaders. Prior to DADT, the military openly asked recruits if they were gay and they could either lie, or be rejected. Clinton wanted to go further, but was forced to compromise, and even so DADT was considered a very leftist move and invoked a great deal of right-wing evangelical furor and backlash in the military and contributed some to 1994. DADT pushed the military partway out of the bedroom by forbidding them from actively inquiring into applicants sexuality; its clear Clinton never viewed it as the final step, and the only real travesty is that it took two decades to finally go the rest of the way. You can view DOMA as a similarly strategic move, as not only would it passed over any veto and deeply injured his reelection chances, but DOMA served to take the steam out of the drive to pass a U.S. Constitutional amendment to ban gay marriage (which would have been much harder for activists to overcome as they have), and which prevented that movement from ever really capitalizing on public opinion and taking off.
I think that is the definitive trait; taking what is available from the political reality at any one time and trying to do as much as possible with that. Paul Ryan is almost certainly going to be Speaker of the House come 2017, due to gerrymandering and consecutive midterm wave elections. A bunch of nice, at times angry rhetoric, is going to get nowhere. The type of leader we will need is a cunning pragmatist, some who deftly maneuvers through different political camps, checks the far-right, and gets what political reality offers, with a slight but determined push to the left. It’s in that sense that though I like activists, and think they work well in legislatures, they make poor executives. I don't want an activist President, I want an experienced, multi-dimensional candidate who I can have principled disagreements with, but whom I still respect and trust to fight big conservative forces. Even if ideologically and spiritually I am more in tune with Sanders, it’s Hillary Clinton who is undeniably a better candidate for President to me. I don’t mind having principled disagreement with someone I respect; I don’t demand egotistical (or fragmented European style leftist fiefdoms) pure ideological submission and agreement. Being President is about working around institutional barriers and making strategic compromise to further the agenda where possible, not being an activist or ideologue, even the type that I agree with.
And to reiterate: It’s not Bernie Sanders who I am scorning. Nor is it the respectful supporters of his who support him, but also are unabashed in saying they will support Hillary if she is the nominee. Those respectful Sanders supporters who also like Hillary just fine. It’s the fanatical anti-Clinton hate and those supporters whose recommended diaries do nothing but levy personal assaults on Clinton and spurious ideological complaints that are magnified to be of titanic significance for the future of the Democratic party (which has always been a diverse mix with a strong if not majority liberal sector, and a vocal but less dominant democratic socialism sector), or that it will have any real significant policy impact on America.