I respond to points made in a letter in March 30 Gazette regarding Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton (“Democrats handcuffed to political millstone”).
When Hillary used the word “deplorables,” she immediately defined it: “the racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic — you name it.” Which didn’t prevent its meaning somehow being distorted into “white working-class voters.”
An unwise choice of words, it turned out, but did Bernie’s supporters feel differently about the bigotry being dredged up from the swamps of the American psyche?
Recall that it was Hillary, not Donald Trump, who laid out a serious program of concern and aid for the white working class. Should she have tried to outdo Trump in bigotry as well?
The writer claims Trump adopted his anti-globalist positions “disingenuously.” But if so, he’s been consistent, with his tariffs, attacks on the North American Free Trade Agreement, and bullying of trading partners.
Perhaps the word as used here reflects some uneasiness about the similarity to Bernie’s own anti-globalist rhetoric. When Trump finally announced the death of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, didn’t Bernie’s former supporters greet the news with at least a twinge of ambivalence? (Incidentally, shouldn’t Bernie have been denouncing Barack Obama, rather than his first-term secretary of state, as the evil mind behind the TPP? Or would that have risked losing too many potential voters?)
Hillary as “political millstone?” She won by nearly three million votes — larger than the winning margins of John F. Kennedy, Richard Nixon (1968), Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush (2000). (Without James Comey’s bizarre late-stage intervention, the margin would have been much larger.) Were these winners thereby “political millstones” for their parties?
Would Bernie have beaten Donald Trump? The hypothetical is impossible to test, but Republican strategists always saw Bernie as weak. Thus, Karl Rove was running anti-Hillary (effectively pro-Bernie) ads as early as the Iowa caucuses, and the Russians and Cambridge Analytica pursued their own pro-Bernie skulduggery.
Why? Consider a 2015 Gallup Poll that asked voters if they’d vote for a qualified nominee of any of 11 different types: “Catholic,” “a woman,” etc. Which category brings up the rear, straggling in behind “Muslim” and “atheist”? “A socialist.”
Mark Stevens
Amherst