by Andrew
Levine
To the
dismay of Democratic Party apparatchiks, the plutocrats behind them,
and corporate media, New Hampshire Democrats struck a mighty blow at
Hillary Clinton and at Clintonism (Democratic Party-style
neoliberalism and liberal imperialism) last Tuesday. Bernie Sanders
beat her by twenty-two percentage points in the New Hampshire
primary.
Hillary is
down, but far from out.
One factor
to watch is that with Donald Trump’s way to the GOP nomination now
seemingly secure, the corporate money that would normally go to the
Republican candidate could find a way into her already well-stuffed
coffers. Trump and Ted Cruz are non-starters, and the other
Republican candidates are sure losers too. Hillary may therefore be
the best (least bad) option for Republican donors.
Marco Rubio
tanked. I knew this would happen, but I am surprised at how quickly
his bubble burst. Now it is John Kasich’s turn to carry the ball
for the GOP establishment. How long will that last? Maybe for the
duration; he is certainly reactionary enough. But he is a loser, like
all the others – in his case because, through no fault of his own,
the poor man was born without a personality.
Republican
donors are not exactly brain surgeons, as people used to say before
Ben Carson shot that old saw to hell, and they have a knack for
flushing their money down the toilet. Think of all the Geld Sheldon
Adelson squandered on Newt Gingrich. But Kasich is no prize. The
“billionaire class” understands this well. Therefore, don’t
count on many donors throwing their money away on him.
It is more
likely that Hillary will benefit from their largesse.
However,
thanks to countless small donations, the Sanders campaign has more
than enough money to carry on. But if a lot of Republican donors
decide to save their own hides by letting Hillary service them, this
could change.
Whether it
does or not, Bernie will still have the Democratic Party against him.
With the
South Carolina primary looming, the Party’s movers and shakers have
now gotten the Congressional Black Caucus PAC to rally African
Americans to the Clintonite cause. We’ll soon know how much juice
that wing of the Party establishment still has.
What is
already clear is that this is just the beginning. Establishment
Democrats have lots of artillery in reserve; and, to hold fast to
their Clintonite course, they won’t be shy about using all they’ve
got.
Sanders
knows it too. He famously said, even as the dust in New Hampshire was
still settling, to expect “them” to throw the kitchen sink at
him. He didn’t quite say that, by “them,” he meant the
Democratic Party establishment – Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer,
Debbie Wasserman Schultz and others of their ilk. If that is not what
he had in mind, it ought to have been.
If Mike
Bloomberg enters the race as an independent, the Republican wing of
the donor class will have someone to fund who is more to their liking
than Hillary; they will have one of their own. I hope he does run –
not just because it will keep some money out of Hillary’s hands,
but also because it will be yet another nail in the coffin of the
GOP.
Republican
voters, two-thirds of them anyway, wouldn’t give Bloomberg the time
of day because, by their lights, he is even worse than Clinton on
matters they care about –gun control, abortion rights, global
warming, gay rights, restrictions on self-destructive and anti-social
behavior, and so on. Worst of all, as Ted Cruz said of Trump,
Bloomberg embodies “New York values.”
Most people
who live in the Northeast don’t quite grasp how, to many Americans
living in other parts of the country, “New York” means “Jew”;
I know I didn’t until I spent time in Wisconsin. Evangelicals and
other right-wingers love Zionism as much as the ethnic cleansers in
the Occupied West Bank do, but they don’t much care for Jews or New
York values.
In any case,
Bloomberg is basically a manager, a technocrat, whom no one could
actually enthuse over, even if he is the Republican establishment’s
last best hope. Republican “moderates,’ the few who are left,
could support him, but no one else would. If it comes to that,
though, a Bloomberg campaign could still do the GOP in.
Thanks to
Trump, the Republican Party’s cultural contradictions have already
brought the Party to its breaking point; the addition of Bloomberg to
the mix could deliver its coup de grace.
None of this
matters for the outcome of the election; the Republicans have already
lost that. But it does matter for the War on Clintonism, because, for
that project to advance, it is crucial now that Hillary lose
decisively.
This is why
what the country needs now is two, three many New Hampshire
primaries.
Sanders is
still all about civility – demonstrating yet again how private
virtues can be political vices. But militant anti-Clintonites, in or
out of the Sanders campaign, can be less kind and gentle.
If Bernie
wants to broaden his base, bringing African Americans and Latinos
into the fold, through the force of ideas and arguments alone, more
power to him. But there is no reason why anti-Clintonite militants
need to pull their punches on his account.
Socking it
to Hillary is harder than might appear because , like the Donald
(though less skillfully), she goes whichever way the wind is blowing.
This is, and always has been, the Clinton style.
Hillary is
therefore now trying hard to squeeze into Bernie’s space. Her
concession speech in New Hampshire sounded almost as if Sanders had
written it. But this is a losing strategy. She can fool some of the
people all of the time, but she cannot run away from her record.
And so, the
first order of business now, for all good women and men, should be to
bring that record to light, and to rub Hillary’s nose in it.
There are
transcripts of the talks for which she received hundreds of thousands
of dollars a pop – six hundred thousand, reportedly, from Goldman
Sachs alone. Now is the time to insist that those transcripts be made
public. Based on what is already known about them, it is a good bet
that Hillary’s newly concocted “populist” persona would have a
hard time surviving that blast of light.
There is
also the Clinton record in the nineties – on black male
incarceration, on “ending welfare as we know it,” and so on. And
there is the utter servility of the Clinton administration to Wall
Street for all the years of husband Bill’s presidency.
Strictly
speaking, most of this is on Bill’s shoulders, not Hillary’s.
But her role
in the years when her husband was putting into practice what Ronald
Reagan could only dream of, the behind the scenes work she seems to
have done, was the only basis there was for justifying parachuting
the First Lady into New York State to run for the Senate in 2000. Her
duties as an official wife were hardly basis enough; and the few
non-wifely projects she attempted early on in her husband’s first
term — health care reform, for example – ended disastrously.
So it was as
an unelected co-President that the “experience” of which she and
her apologists boast came to be acquired. She cannot have it both
ways. She may not have been the more culpable of the two Clintons
twenty-five year ago, but, if she wants to add her First Lady days to
her résumé, she owns what her husband did.
There is
another consideration too that bears deeply on the most asinine of
all the pro-Hillary arguments now being bandied about: the idea that
she is an ace “pragmatist,” a genius at getting things done.
She did get
things done – not so much as First Lady or in the Senate, where her
accomplishments were few and far between, but as Secretary of State.
However, nearly all of her vaunted accomplishments, there and
elsewhere, were deleterious.
The truth is
out there; it has been from Day One. But judging from what voters
say, it still hasn’t registered. Hillary can thank corporate media
for that.
The focus of
most media outlets in the United States that reach a mass audience
has always been local, not global. This is one reason why Americans
know little and care less about the world. It isn’t all the fault
of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans. Most Americans know little about
Canada too, and less still about Mexico.
In election
years, the problem is worse than usual because the horse race sucks
up all the air in the room.
Meanwhile,
there is a world out there. Don’t expect the cable news networks to
tell Americans much about it, however. Those who are curious have to
scour the Internet, read foreign newspapers, or watch French, German
or Russian news channels (on cable or satellite) to know what is
going on.
The other
day, tired of looking at talking heads going on about Marco Rubio’s
debate performance, I tuned into France-24 to learn that important
political news actually was unfolding — in Haiti and along Turkey’s
southern border.
Hillary’s
– and Barack Obama’s – footprints are all over these and other
tragedies in process, so it would not be out of line, even for
election obsessed media in the United States, to pay heed. But, of
course, they don’t.
They don’t
even report on the horse race well. With the New Hampshire vote
looming, France-24 sent someone to cover a Trump rally. She got it
about right. She told viewers to imagine a used car salesman leading
a meeting of the National Front. Rachel Maddow couldn’t have said
it better – though she would have taken ten times as long to make
the point and viewers would have had to endure a dozen commercials
waiting for her to get around to it.
Therefore,
forget about “liberal media”; they are useless.
But
Wikileaks isn’t useless.
There are so
many awful things that the Obama administration has done that its
persecution of whistleblowers and others who embarrass the President
and the Clinton State Department pale in importance.
But for
spreading the word about Hillary’s cluelessness and incompetence,
the world cannot be reminded often enough about what Obama and
Clinton et. al. have done to, among others, Edward Snowden, Chelsea
Manning, and, of course, Julian Assange.
Assange, who
has never been charged with any crime, was accused in Sweden, on
dubious grounds, of refusing to use a condom during sexual
intercourse. Even if true, this would not be an actionable offense in
the United States or the United Kingdom or in most other countries.
But the
Swedes provided a good enough pretext for the United States to get
Sweden to demand Assange’s extradition from the UK, where he was
living at the time the accusations were made, so that he could be
questioned in Sweden, and then be forwarded on to the Land of the
Free, where he would likely be tried for espionage on charges that
could carry the death penalty.
Because tiny
Ecuador had the courage to come to his rescue, Assange was given
asylum in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, which he has been unable
to leave, except on pain of arrest, since August 2012.
A week ago,
the United Nations’ Working Group on Arbitrary Detention ruled that
his detention is arbitrary, according to the prevailing legal
standard; and that he should be free to leave the embassy, with “his
physical integrity and freedom of movement respected.” They also
concluded that he had “an enforceable right to compensation.”
However, in
defiance of international law, both Britain and Sweden, under
pressure from the United States, have so far refused to abide by the
Working Group’s decision. The main culprit behind this outrage is,
of course, President Obama, but this insult to the rule of law has
Hillary Clinton’s imprint all over it.
How
wonderful – and deliciously ironic — it would therefore be if
State Department memos already released by Wikileaks, and others
still in its possession, were mined for evidence of Clinton’s
ineptitude.
Her
embarrassment would not erase the harm she has done to Assange and to
countless others around the world, but it just might put the issue of
her vaunted competence in a different light in the minds of American
voters. What a boon this could be to the United States and to the
world!
There is
probably no one on earth whose purported ability to get things done,
as opposed to blundering along incompetently, could more easily be
exposed.
Haiti would
be a place to look; Turkey too. But there is not anywhere in the
world where her untimely and clueless interventions have not done
more harm than good. There is no more egregious misconception in
American politics today than the myth of Hillary Clinton’s
“pragmatism” and diplomatic savvy.
The time is
past due that this nonsense be exposed and defeated; so that an
informed electorate can see to it that Hillary Clinton is soundly
defeated in the primary contests to come; and that Clintonism is
dealt a mighty blow.
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