The
Clinton campaign engaged in steps that would help ensure Trump was
the Republican presidential nominee. Their acts enabled the rise of
Trump, and they lost to the opponent they wanted to face because they
made the same mistakes Democrats make time and time again.
by
Kevin Gosztola
Hillary Clinton’s presidential
campaign, her network of super political action committees, and the
liberal establishment relished a matchup against Donald Trump.
However, her campaign failed to put forward an alternative for voters
that would combat a candidate that tapped into the vast amount of
disillusionment among citizens. Tsunamis of voters unaccounted for in
state polls, who do not identify with either the Democratic or
Republican Parties, made President Trump a reality.
Clinton’s concession speech
indicated the campaign and many of its supporters are unwilling to
confront the hubris of her presidential run. Yet, citizens,
especially those on the left, must in order to find the clarity to
move onward with fights for social, economic, racial, and
environmental justice.
The Democratic Party rigged parts
of the party’s primary for Clinton, and it helped stave off a
decisive challenge from Senator Bernie Sanders. The senator addressed
the material conditions of the working class, including people of
color. He warned the Democrats of wealth inequality, destructive free
trade agreements, and some of the negative effects of global
capitalism on the common man or woman. He connected with disaffected
people who the Clinton campaign effectively wrote-off and performed
well in states that Clinton lost in the general election.
However, the Democratic Party
elites survived and coerced Sanders and his supporters into falling
in line at their national convention. The party leadership enforced
unity in Philadelphia to make it appear as if all was well when that
was not the case.
Most progressive groups, like all
presidential elections, demobilized or essentially became mechanisms
for the Clinton campaign to mobilize voters from August to Election
Day. This allowed the message of “Never Trump” to dominate as the
only challenge to Trump, and without a real vision for lifting up the
many Americans enticed by Trump’s campaign, the nation ended up
with an end result similar to Senator John Kerry’s campaign, which
ran primarily on the fact that he was not President George W. Bush.
It did not help the Clinton
campaign that she had a reputation for supporting regime change wars,
which have greatly destabilized parts of the world. Her fingerprints
were all over the Libya disaster. She voted for the Iraq War, which
created the conditions for the rise of the Islamic State. And,
although it is questionable whether Trump really ever opposed the
Iraq invasion, he insisted he was against the Iraq War during debates
to undermine Clinton and fueled the perception that Clinton was
somehow responsible for ISIS. Trump held himself out as someone who
would not plunge the country into reckless military engagements.
Clinton’s closing argument
included the following, “Is America dark and divisive or helpful
and inclusive? Our core values are being tested in this election, but
everywhere I go, people are refusing to be defined by fear and
division. Look, we all know we’ve come through some hard economic
times, and we’ve seen some pretty big changes. But I believe in our
people. I love this country, and I’m convinced our best days are
ahead of us if we reach for them together.”
That may have sounded good in the
office of a campaign’s headquarters, but there was nothing specific
in this buzzword-laden pablum. Multiculturalism does not help anyone
pay their mortgage or find a job. As wrong as it is for millions of
white Americans to take out their frustrations on people of color,
the system failed them and keeps failing them. Additionally,
establishment politicians like Clinton wrote off many of these
people, believing if they focused on emphasizing diversity they would
overcome the painful intertwined realities of class and race in the
U.S. They were wrong.
Let us go back to the belief that
a candidate like Trump would be perfect for Hillary Clinton. In April
2015, a strategy memo for the DNC was drafted by the campaign two
months before Trump announced his candidacy. The goal was to “make
whomever the Republicans nominate unpalatable to a majority of the
electorate.”
“Force all Republican
candidates to lock themselves into extreme conservative positions
that will hurt them in a general election,” the campaign
recommended. “Undermine any credibility/trust Republican
presidential candidates have to make inroads to our coalition or
independents.”
It advocated against marginalizing
“more extreme candidates.” The campaign wanted to make “Pied
Piper candidates,” like Trump, Senator Ted Cruz, and Ben Carson,
into representatives of the Republican Party. “We need to be
elevating the Pied Piper candidates so that they are leaders of the
pack and tell the press to [take] them seriously.” (The memo
was attached to an email published by WikiLeaks.)
In the same month, Clinton
campaign manager Robby Mook pushed for a primary schedule, where the
red states held their primaries early. It would increase “the
likelihood the Rs nominate someone extreme.”
Essentially, the Clinton campaign
engaged in steps that would help ensure Trump was the Republican
presidential nominee. Their acts enabled the rise of Trump, and they
lost to the opponent they wanted to face because they made the same
mistakes Democrats make time and time again. They clung to failed
corporate Democratic policies that have devastated this country for
the past two decades, and in some ways, this election can be viewed
as a referendum on those policies. And they treated the candidate who
had answers for Americans as “unrealistic,” a “hapless
legislator,” an “Obama betrayer,” and a socialist independent
who was not a real Democrat. As in, he was not one of them, and they
did not want him in their club.
On June 26, Sanders warned
Democrats what happened with Brexit in Britain could happen. He
shared what he saw on the campaign trail. He noted the tens of
thousands factories closed over the past 15 years. “More than
4.8 million well-paid manufacturing jobs have disappeared” as a
result of trade agreements. Forty-seven million Americans live in
poverty. Millions have no health insurance or are underinsured. Just
as many struggle with student debt. “Frighteningly, millions of
poorly educated Americans will have a shorter life span than the
previous generation as they succumb to despair, drugs and alcohol.”
“Meanwhile, in our country
the top one-tenth of 1 percent now owns almost as much wealth as the
bottom 90 percent. Fifty-eight percent of all new income is going to
the top 1 percent. Wall Street and billionaires, through their “super
PACs,” are able to buy elections,” Sanders added.
“On my campaign, I’ve
talked to workers unable to make it on $8 or $9 an hour; retirees
struggling to purchase the medicine they need on $9,000 a year of
Social Security; young people unable to afford college,”
Sanders shared. “I also visited the American citizens of Puerto
Rico, where some 58 percent of the children live in poverty and only
a little more than 40 percent of the adult population has a job or is
seeking one.”
It is important to note the
Clinton campaign engaged in a calculated act of deception by
supporting the Service Employees International Union’s “Fight for
15” while refusing to support a $15 minimum wage. All the states
with minimum wage ballot initiatives passed wage increases yesterday.
The campaign could have mobilized so more states had this sort of
thing on the ballot. The possibility of more economic security may
have increased enthusiasm. But the Clinton campaign did no such
thing.
“The notion that Donald Trump
could benefit from the same forces that gave the Leave proponents a
majority in Britain should sound an alarm for the Democratic Party in
the United States,” Sanders concluded. “Millions of
American voters, like the Leave supporters, are understandably angry
and frustrated by the economic forces that are destroying the middle
class.”
“In this pivotal moment, the
Democratic Party and a new Democratic president need to make clear
that we stand with those who are struggling and who have been left
behind. We must create national and global economies that work for
all, not just a handful of billionaires.”
Efforts to process what unfolded
on Election Day must recognize the warning of Sanders and millions of
his supporters went unheeded. Clinton practically ran as an avatar of
the billionaire class, albeit a potentially benevolent caretaker of
the masses if they just stood with her. Had more in the establishment
media and institutions of power taken the time to reflect on what
transpired in the Democratic primary, they would have feared the
worst and taken more steps to prevent a Trump primary by trying to
shift the dynamic of her campaign.
Lest one forget, the Clintons are
New Democrats. They aligned with business forces in the early 1990s.
They stood with conservative Democrats, who broke with labor, civil
rights, and other liberal causes. They pushed the North Atlantic Free
Trade Agreement (NAFTA). They backed welfare repeal, bills which
fueled the rise of mass incarceration, and signed a 1997 budget that
slashed millions for social programs like Medicare and Medicaid. They
put corporate interests over environmental protections. They
encouraged the deregulation of industry, which greatly boosted Wall
Street. Altogether, the Clintons enabled the right as it decimated
the liberal class and expanded unfettered capitalism. (For more, read
Lance Selfa’s book, “The Democrats: A Critical History.”)
Finally, the outcome confirms what
many expressed months ago. The Democratic Party was willing to do
whatever it took to nominate Hillary Clinton, even if it meant
working against the very forces behind Bernie Sanders, which could
help them succeed against Donald Trump, because the last thing they
wanted was a major shift toward more socially democratic policies.
Also, Clinton was next in line. Whether voters viewed her as a weak
candidate or a dishonest and untrustworthy politician did not matter.
They would go to battle for her and gladly lose this war.
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