For decades, Bernie Sanders was too pure for the Democratic Party, until he needed it to make him president of the United States.
It was in New York that the essential solitude of his campaign was finally exposed. In the most liberal and diverse city in America, Sanders' constituency was mainly confined to white men and the very young voters.
Hillary Clinton crushed him everywhere else. She won, and won big, with African Americans, Latinos, Italians and Jews. She won in Chinatown, in every income category, among women, LGBTQ and voters over 30. She rolled over Sanders in all five boroughs, in Buffalo, Rochester and Syracuse. She even took the hipster stronghold of Williamsburg, and Sanders’ childhood neighbourhood in Flatbush.
As Al Giordano noted, her largest majority of 75.5 per cent, was delivered by Co-op City in the Bronx, the largest co-op housing development in the world.
So much for the corporatist mantra.
In the end, supporters of Sanders, the longest serving independent member of Congress in US history complained that Independent voters weren't eligible to vote for the Democratic Party presidential nominee.
Irony is dead, apparently.
During all those decades, while Sanders eschewed the grimy business of party politics, the Clintons were meeting Americans in church basements, coffee shops, pre-schools and union halls in every state, and then going back and meeting them again. The party that came out for Hillary are the folks who’ve religiously knocked on doors, sat in phone banks and driven voters to the polls for congressional representatives, senators, governors, state legislators, mayors, councillors and school trustees.
These are the community organizers who know every unit in Co-op City, and virtually every loyal Democratic household in the country. While Bernie Sanders enthralled crowds at mega-rallies, Hillary Clinton’s volunteers were phoning, phoning, phoning every Democrat in the state, mining richer and more reliable veins of votes.
The wonder isn’t that Hillary won New York so resoundingly, but that the political junkies supporting Sanders understood so little about how the real game is played.
Bashing Hillary Clinton over corporate fund-raising appearances is a luxury only available to a candidate who’s never had to get hundreds of his own party’s Congressional representatives and senators across the finish line.
As George Clooney said of his “obscene” fundraising efforts for a Clinton event, "The overwhelming amount of money that we're raising, and it is a lot… is not going to Hillary to run for president, it's going to the down-ticket.
"It's going to the congressmen and senators to try to take back Congress. And the reason that's important (is) ... we need to take the Senate back because we need to confirm the Supreme Court justice, because that fifth vote on the Supreme Court can overturn Citizens United and get this obscene, ridiculous amount of money out so I never have to do a fundraiser again.”
For all the wall-to-wall social media talk about Wall Street and foreign policy, politics on the ground is about something else entirely. It’s about persuading janitors, shopkeepers, teachers, parents, children, students, construction workers, employers, working professionals, immigrants, minorities, and pensioners that a candidate doesn’t just have the intention to improve their lives, but the ability to get it done. And can get them to the polls to seal the deal.
That’s how parties win. It’s grueling, mind-numbing, and painstakingly hard work. Some of it, like fundraising, is flat-out distasteful and ugly, but Hillary Clinton didn’t invent this system. It's how parties and leaders get to appoint Supreme Court judges, introduce health care, protect the environment, or get a whole host of important measures passed.
Bernie Sanders couldn’t compromise his principles enough to join the Democrats, until he wanted something from them he couldn’t get on his own. Once he did, he smeared Hillary Clinton as a corporate toady for doing the same heavy lifting that every other Democratic presidential nominee has had to do.
Yet Bernie Sanders' legacy is in some respects more important. Through increasingly irresponsible and inflammatory rhetoric now fully on display, the American Republican party has shifted the political centre far to the right. By energizing progressives with a credible and unapologetic left-wing vision for the future, Sanders created an enormous public appetite for reform that Clinton can't ignore. Sanders and his stadiums of supporters are onto something that matters.
But in the 2016 presidential campaign, the Bern is gone.
It’s a lock for Hillary.
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