Clinton v. Sanders

Despite Sanders’s surprising victory last Tuesday in Michigan, where polls showed him trailing by an average of some twenty points, his odds of winning the nomination are slight.

  New Yorker

Does that reasoning make sense to you? Only in a world where the party leadership completely disregards the popular opinion. But then, I guess that's what Superdelegates were created for in the first place.

As Sanders noted in the debate in Flint, on March 6th, when Hillary was First Lady she publicly supported NAFTA, while he “was on a picket line” protesting it. Today, both candidates oppose the agreement—and many other aspects of Bill Clinton’s record.

Did she actually change her mind because NAFTA has had such ruinous results, or is this a temporary move to align with public polling?

Lately, Hillary has sounded less like a Clinton Democrat and more like a Sanders Democrat. Since the campaign began, she has modernized her positions on trade, the economy, and criminal-justice reform.

"Sounds like." "Modernized." The consummate politician. What do I have to say to get elected?

Sanders doesn’t buy the transformation. “It doesn’t matter what her policies are,” he told me last Tuesday, as he waited for the primary results from Michigan and Mississippi to come in. [...] Look, anybody can give any speech they want tomorrow—somebody writes you a great speech—but the day after you’re elected you say, ‘Well, you know, I talked to my Republican colleagues and they think this is not acceptable.’ ”

He's looking at YOU, Obama.

“We have two ‘change’ electorates,” Neera Tanden, a longtime adviser to Hillary and the president and C.E.O. of the Center for American Progress, told me. “One is just smaller than the other. The problem on the Democratic side is that the strong support for Barack Obama hid it from everybody.”

And by "everybody", she must mean everybody on Team Clinton. Occupy Wall Street was pretty noticeable.

Last year, [Senator Elizabeth Warren] called on the Democratic Presidential candidates to support a bill that would make it illegal for Wall Street firms to award golden parachutes to employees who leave to work for the federal government. Sanders expressed support for the legislation almost immediately; Hillary Clinton hesitated for weeks. The bill could affect any Clinton advisers who now work on Wall Street if they were to join a future Clinton Administration; Warren had in mind precisely this scenario. In late August, she met privately with Vice-President Joe Biden, as he considered entering the race. Reports of the meeting set off speculation about whether Warren might ultimately become Biden’s running mate. Days later, Clinton wrote an op-ed endorsing Warren’s bill.

[...]

Most notably, Clinton abandoned her support for the free-trade initiative known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which she negotiated as Secretary of State and once described as the “gold standard” of trade agreements.

Changed her tune under duress. Things done under duress don't often remain when pressure is no longer an issue.

Barney Frank said. “ [...] Hillary Clinton went from being somewhat pro-trade to being somewhat anti-trade. You can’t go back. You can change once; you can’t change twice.”

Hide and watch, Barney.

There are two reasons for Sanders to soldier on. One is to exact concessions, as Warren was able to do on legislation restricting Wall Street employees.

Doesn't sound like it was Warren's legislation, but rather the threat of Joe Biden entering the race with Warren as his running mate.

The other reason for Sanders to stay in the contest is one that most Democrats, even Sanders, are reluctant to discuss. Polls show that Clinton’s greatest vulnerability has to do with trustworthiness and character. She is navigating three federal investigations resulting from her handling of classified data while she was Secretary of State. However these turn out, it is unusual for a presumptive nominee and some of her current and former aides to be under investigation by the F.B.I.

Well, famously, there was Nixon. And I can't think of anyone who was under FBI investigation and didn't win. The unusual part is being under investigation, certainly. But the precedent is that the person wins.

“[Sanders] will come out of this with a prominent voice, with a committed e-mail list of people united around his issues,” Anita Dunn, who worked for Bill Bradley’s unsuccessful campaign against Al Gore, in 2000, and was one of Obama’s top strategists during the 2008 race and later in the White House, said. “That is the beginning of a potential movement, if he chooses to build on it. It’s not as though these issues are going to go away."

[...]

Ben Tulchin, Sanders’s pollster, told me that millennials support Sanders “because their generation is so fucked, for lack of a better word, unless they see dramatic change. What’s their experience been with capitalism? They have had two recessions, one really bad one. They have a mountain of student-loan debt. They’ve got really high health-care costs, and their job prospects are mediocre at best. So that’s capitalism for you.”

[...]

Through March 8th, Sanders won voters between seventeen and twenty-nine years old in thirteen of the fifteen states for which there were entrance or exit polls. In that age range, he beat Clinton by an average of sixty-seven per cent to thirty-two per cent. His biggest victory among this group, in his home state of Vermont, was ninety-five per cent to five per cent. Millennials supported Sanders even in Arkansas, where Clinton was First Lady.

So, there is hope, after all?

But, what about that mob of building burners with pitchforks following the current GOP favorite?  They're not just going to go away, either.