WHEN VERMONT SEN. BERNIE SANDERS RECENTLY ANNOUNCED his candidacy for the Democratic nomination for president in 2016, I couldn’t have been more thrilled.
I mentioned a while back that I was not particularly thrilled with Hillary Clinton, the only other Democratic candidate who is currently in the race. As I wrote of Hillary in January of last year:
“She is not, and has not been, a friend of progressives in either foreign policy or economics. She supported the Iraq war, and there is very little daylight on economic and labor issues between her and her NAFTA-supporting, welfare-ending husband. She would represent no substantive danger to entrenched Wall Street interests, and she is not showing encouraging signs that she would do much to address the pressing issue of income and wealth inequality. She’s a Democratic Leadership Council-oriented, ‘triangulating’ centrist, and Wall Street’s favorite Democrat.”
While Clinton has since made some progress — at least in her rhetoric — in moving leftward, I have no confidence that she is truly committed to progressive reform. I went to her campaign website and looked for some indication of what she stands for — what she actually wants to do if elected — and found precious little to go on.
What I found instead was the pitch that Hillary Clinton has a compelling story, plus vague and not reassuring I-feel-your-pain platitudes but precious little specifics on how she plans to relieve that pain.
I’m sorry, but I don’t want a “compelling story” in the Oval Office — I want someone with concrete and specific plans to help the 90 percent of the country that hasn’t had a raise in 35 years. I want someone who is committed to using the organized power of government to restrain the oligarchy who have been gaming our economic system to benefit only themselves. I want someone who will fight for the ordinary American worker — and Bernie Sanders is that person.
In Sanders’s announcement speech, he left no doubt about what he stands for and who he stands with:
Today, we live in the wealthiest nation in the history of the world, but that reality means very little for most of us because almost all of that wealth is owned and controlled by a tiny handful of individuals. In America we now have more income and wealth inequality than any other major country on Earth, and the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the 1920s. The issue of wealth and income inequality is the great moral issue of our time, it is the great economic issue of our time and it is the great political issue of our time. And we will address it.
Let me be very clear. There is something profoundly wrong when the top one-tenth of 1 percent owns almost as much wealth as the bottom 90 percent, and when 99 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent. There is something profoundly wrong when, in recent years, we have seen a proliferation of millionaires and billionaires at the same time as millions of Americans work longer hours for lower wages and we have the highest rate of childhood poverty of any major country on Earth.
No Democrat of national consequence has talked like that for at least 50 years, and really more like 60 years — not since the end of Harry Truman’s presidency.
Speaking of Truman, it occurs to me that the general election of 1948 might be analogous to the present Democratic primary election.
Like Hillary Clinton in the present, Republican nominee Thomas Dewey was widely expected to win that election 67 years ago. The Democratic Party was seriously split; a significant faction of conservative Southern Democrats had formed the States’ Rights Democratic Party and nominated Strom Thurmond(!) on an anti-civil rights platform, while the Progressive Party nominated Henry Wallace to run to Truman’s left. Dewey’s strategy was to simply avoid making egregious mistakes and coast to a seemingly inevitable victory. His rhetoric was correspondingly vague and Delphic: “Our streams must abound with fish,” was one favorite line of his; “You cannot have freedom without liberty” was another; “Our future lies ahead” is proverbial among political historians for its sparkling emptiness.
In response, Truman ran a fiercely populist campaign that left no doubt whose interests he was fighting for. He savaged the “Do-Nothing” 80th (Republican) Congress for its obstructionism (sound familiar?) and promised to protect and expand the economic gains made by labor and America’s growing middle class that had begun during FDR’s presidency. Voters responded to his scrappy underdog campaign, and he won the election with a margin of over 2 million votes.
I’m going to make a bold prediction: Bernie Sanders is going to be the Democratic nominee in 2016, and will win the general election decisively.
I say this because the defining issue of this election is going to be the decline of the middle and working classes, and which candidate will be most likely to reverse that decline. I went to Hillary Clinton’s campaign website and looked for a link to her plans to address the many challenges facing working people in the country, and I found nothing whatsoever.
Bernie Sanders’s site (berniesanders.com/issues/) was, by contrast, specific and detailed when it came to these issues. The three major headings are Income and Wealth Inequality, Getting Big Money Out of Politics, and Climate Change and Environment. Clicking on any of these topics yields a detailed discussion of the issues — and there is no doubt where, and for whom, Sanders stands.
Now, it should go without saying that if Hillary is the nominee I will vote for her, but I think that will be a vote to, at best, slow down the damage being done by the malefactors of great wealth. I would much rather pin back the malefactors' ears, and then set about destroying their privilege. Bernie Sanders is the only candidate wit6h a commitment to that project.