Tag Archives: Bernie Sanders

Hillary Clinton: Surprise Upon Surprise

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Which presidential candidates are Americans most enthusiastic about? According to a Gallup poll, 65% of Trump’s supporters are either extremely or very enthusiastic about his candidacy. That’s not a surprise. His supporters are nothing if not enthusiastic. What’s unexpected is which Democrat has the most enthusiastic supporters. Gallup found that Hillary Clinton’s supporters are more enthusiastic about her than Bernie Sanders’s are about him. Fifty-four percent of Clinton supporters say they’re extremely or very enthusiastic about their favorite candidate vs. 44% of Sanders supporters. Given how much publicity Feeling the Bern has received, that’s quite a surprise. 

But considering how well Clinton has done in primary elections this year (as opposed to the small-scale caucuses that have favored Sanders), we should expect that she has lots of enthusiastic supporters. Counting both primaries and caucuses, she has received 8.9 million votes vs. 6.4 million for Sanders. Winning by that margin in a general election would qualify as a landslide victory.

One might ask, however, why so many Americans are enthusiastically supporting such a devious and dishonest person? It’s probably because they don’t think she’s as devious and dishonest as the Republicans, many in the press and some Sanders supporters claim. Jill Abramson, a former editor of the New York Times, published an article yesterday with the title: “This May Shock You. Hillary Clinton Is Fundamentally Honest”. The article is worth reading in full, but here’s a little bit of it:

As an editor I’ve launched investigations into her business dealings, her fundraising, her foundation and her marriage. As a reporter my stories stretch back to Whitewater. I’m not a favorite in Hillaryland. That makes what I want to say next surprising. Hillary Clinton is fundamentally honest and trustworthy….

… Politifact, a Pulitzer prize-winning fact-checking organization, gives Clinton the best truth-telling record of any of the 2016 presidential candidates. She beats Sanders and Kasich and crushes Cruz and Trump…

Abramson says Clinton distrusts the press more than any other politician she’s ever covered and that she needs to resist her strong desire to protect her privacy.  If Clinton were less secretive, Abramson argues, fewer people would think she’s hiding something. But Abramson also worries that too many people expect “purity” from female politicians. No successful politicians are pure, not even female ones, but Hillary Clinton may be purer than most. What a surprise!

This Week’s Selective Political Roundup

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Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine presents two brief accounts of Republican hypocrisy (there’s a little-known but important fact: Republican politicians are required to solemnly recite a Hypocritical Oath before receiving any financial support from the party).

First, Congressman Paul Ryan has said that he wants to simplify the tax code and isn’t especially interested in cutting taxes for the wealthy.  When asked why he didn’t support a proposal made by a Republican congressman a few years ago that would have done exactly that, namely, eliminate loopholes and deductions without favoring one group of taxpayers over another, he’s unable to come up with an answer. All he can say is that it’s “ridiculous” to worry about which taxpayers would benefit the most from tax reform. It must, therefore, be mere coincidence that the reforms he favors would disproportionately benefit the wealthy (“No Tax Reforms Unless Rich People Get Paid“).

Second, Republican Senators who previously claimed it’s against the rules or common practice to confirm a Supreme Court nominee in the last year of a President’s term are now saying this last-year restriction only applies if Hillary Clinton (or Bernie Sanders) wins in November. If one of the Democrats is elected President, it will be perfectly fine to approve Obama’s nominee this year. Their fear, of course, is that President Clinton or Sanders would nominate someone more liberal than Merrick Garland, Obama’s nominee. Thus, “the people” should have a role in deciding who gets on the Supreme Court, but the people who vote in November should only have a role if they elect a Republican President. Otherwise, the people who elected Obama in 2012 should have their say after all. Yes, they do indeed swear a Hypocritical Oath (“[Republicans] Demand Supreme Court Vacancy Be Filled by Next President, Unless That President Is Hillary Clinton“).

Meanwhile, Matthew Yglesias of Vox says “There’s a Big Problem with Sanders’s Free College Plan“. “Free college” has been one of Senator Sanders’s most popular positions. According to the campaign’s site:

The Sanders plan would make tuition free at public colleges and universities throughout the country…The cost of this … plan is fully paid for by imposing a tax of a fraction of a percent on Wall Street speculators [i.e. on transactions in the stock and bond markets].

Yglesias, however, provides a link to a more detailed “Summary of Sen. Sanders’ College for All Act” on his Senate webpage: 

This legislation would provide $47 billion per year to states to eliminate undergraduate tuition and fees at public colleges and universities.

Today, total tuition at public colleges and universities amounts to about $70 billion per year. Under the College for All Act, the federal government would cover 67% of this cost, while the states would be responsible for the remaining 33% of the cost.

To qualify for federal funding, states must meet a number of requirements designed to protect students, ensure quality, and reduce ballooning costs. States will need to maintain spending on their higher education systems, on academic instruction, and on need-based financial aid. In addition, colleges and universities must reduce their reliance on low-paid adjunct faculty.

As Yglesias points out, Sanders is relying on the states, including those that refused to accept Federal money in order to expand Medicaid coverage for the poor, to spend more money on education, even though the same states, usually run by Republican governors and legislators, have been cutting their education budgets. In addition, the public colleges and universities in those states would have to institute other reforms in order for their states to qualify for Federal matching grants.

Free college sounds great, and Senator Sanders has a reputation for brutal honesty, but he isn’t telling his supporters the truth about how difficult it would be to abolish college tuition. In Yglesias’s words: “what Sanders has is a plan for tuition-free college in Vermont and, if he’s lucky, California, but not for the United States of America”.

Lastly, two political science professors have an interesting article in the New York Times called “Clinton’s Bold Vision, Hidden in Plain Sight?“. They argue that Hillary Clinton is a throwback to the days when pragmatic Democrats and Republicans worked together to achieve great things: 

Mrs. Clinton has put forth an ambitious and broadly popular policy agenda: family and medical leave, continued financial reform, improvements in the Affordable Care Act, investments in infrastructure and scientific research, measures to tackle global warming and improve air and water quality, and so on….

A few decades ago, Mrs. Clinton would have been seen as a common political type: an evidence-oriented pragmatist committed to using public authority to solve big problems…. In the middle decades of the 20th century, this pragmatic problem-solving mentality had a prominent place in both parties. Some issues were deeply divisive: labor rights and national health insurance, for example, and civil rights. Nonetheless, a bipartisan governing coalition that included leaders from both business and labor proved remarkably willing to endorse and improve the mixed economy to promote prosperity.

More important, the major policies that this coalition devised deserve credit for some of the greatest achievements of American society, including the nation’s once decisive lead in science and education, its creation of a continent-spanning market linked by transportation and communications, and its pioneering creation of product and environmental regulations that added immensely to Americans’ health and quality of life…. Americans’ income per capita doubled and then more than doubled again, with the gains broadly distributed for most of the era….

Mrs. Clinton is heir to an enormously successful bipartisan governing tradition. Yet this tradition has been disowned by the Republican Party and has lost allure within a significant segment of the Democratic Party; it also runs sharply against the grain of current public sentiments about government and politicians….

In the context of widespread amnesia about what has made America prosper, pragmatism has come to be seen as lacking a clear compass rather than (in the original meaning of the word) focusing on what has actually proved to work in the real world.

Bernie, Hillary, Emails, Decisions, Decisions

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New Jersey will hold its Presidential primary election nine months and fifteen days from now. By that time, we will almost certainly know who the Democratic nominee and the next President of the United States will be (she used to be Secretary of State). June of 2016 might sound like a long way off, but we in New Jersey, along with our friends in California and a few other states, always wait for everyone else to hold their primary elections first.

Aside from the fact that we’re naturally considerate (“Please, I insist.” “No, no, after you.”), this means we don’t have to spend much time deciding which Democrat or Republican should be President. Unlike Iowa, Vermont and South Carolina, we have more important things to do.

Anyway, if I had the opportunity to vote sooner than next June, like maybe tomorrow, I’m not sure who I’d choose. From a policy perspective, I’d go with Bernie Sanders, the democratic socialist Senator from Vermont. Voting for Sanders would make me feel good. I even think he could beat a Republican in the general election, because most Americans, whether they realize it or not, agree with his positions. (See “How Mainstream Is Bernie Sanders?” and “Why Surprising Numbers of Republicans Have Been Voting for Sanders in Vermont”).

Despite the popular appeal of Sanders’s positions, however, Clinton might do better in a general election. It would be harder for the Republicans to falsely portray her as a wild-eyed radical. And despite some of her hawkish views on foreign policy and military spending, Hillary Clinton might end up being a very progressive President. She seems more aware of our country’s increasing inequality and more likely to do something about it than she used to be. Further, she might be able to get more done than Sanders, since the politicians, bureaucrats and plutocrats she’d have to work with would be more likely to consider her “one of them”. 

(Every time I imagine President Sanders taking office, I’m reminded of A Very British Coup, in which the election of a proud Labor Party socialist as Prime Minister leads to army helicopters descending on Downing Street and Parliament. See also Seven Days in May. All fiction, of course.) 

But since I’m a proud resident of New Jersey, I don’t have to make a decision about this any time soon. Meanwhile, our national nightmare (i.e. our Presidential campaign) will continue.

That brings me to a perceptive article by Heather Digby Parton called “Anatomy of a Hillary Clinton Pseudo-Scandal”. She writes:

… the press can pass judgement about anything once it’s “out there” regardless of whether or not what’s “out there” is true. This allows them to skip doing boring rebuttals of the facts at hand and instead hold forth at length about how it bears on the subject’s “judgement” and the “appearance” of wrongdoing without ever proving that what they did was wrong.

You see, if the person being discussed were “competent,” it wouldn’t be “out there” in the first place, so even if it is based upon entirely specious speculation, it’s his or her own fault for inspiring people to speculate so speciously. It all goes back to their “character”… 

And even if the charges are patently false, they are always far too complicated to rebut in detail; and, anyway, the other side says something different, so who’s really to say what’s true and what isn’t?  [Note: that’s what Paul Krugman calls “Shape of Earth: Views Differ” journalism.]

It’s still the responsibility of the target of those charges because he or she shouldn’t have allowed him or herself to be in a position where someone could make false charges in the first place.

From this perspective, it’s irrelevant whether any of those famous emails were classified at the time (apparently they weren’t, besides which lots of stuff the government classifies shouldn’t be). It’s also irrelevant whether it was forbidden to use a private computer then (apparently it wasn’t). 

I agree about the irrelevance in one sense. It’s irrelevant as to whether Clinton or Sanders or some other Democrat should be our next President.