Bernie: The beginning of the end

Hillary Clinton’s crushing defeat of Bernie Sanders in the South Carolina primary signals the end of his noble quest to become, as the title of his book states, “an outsider in the White House.”

I say this, with much sorrow and pain, for several reasons. One, the South Carolina primary showed that politics is still a game of allegiances more than one of ideology. Hillary Clinton has the allegiance of the hardest core of voters in the Democratic party—African Americans—despite the fact that Sanders’s policies would benefit most blacks more than Hillary’s. Sanders also has an impeccable civil rights record including getting arrested in the 1960s for protesting against segregation. He has talked the talk and walked the walk.

No matter. Hillary over the years has built a formidable set of alliances with black leaders and has real appeal to the black rank and file both because of her own advocacy and by her association with Bill Clinton, who the black the novelist and Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison once called our first black president.

Hillary Clinton also has broad appeal within and strong alliances with leaders in the Latino community, another core constituency. Sanders meanwhile is an unknown commodity among Latinos—Vermont is a whole different world from California, New Mexico and the rest of the Mexican American heartland. And Hillary has been smart in hitting back hard at Donald Trump for his insults against immigrants and Mexicans.

Clinton’s Latino support is solid. In fact, during the 2008 campaign between Clinton and Obama, I found to my chagrin that most progressive Chicanos that I worked with on a research project favored Hillary over Obama. And Bernie, unlike Obama, is not a person of color.

The second reason Hillary will win the nomination is that a lot of Democrats desperately want to nominate someone who can beat Donald Trump, Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio. They sense that Clinton is that person. They can foresee that Sanders—who self-identifies as a democratic socialist—will be shamelessly smeared and painted red by the Republicans. The slime thrown at John Kerry—a decorated war veteran–in 2004 would pale in comparison, exceeding even the vilification of Barack Obama.

Third, the sort of red-baiting campaign the Republicans are sure to deploy against Sanders would resonate with and scare a lot of voters, especially older Democrats stuck in the Cold War mentality. Never mind that what Sanders is proposing is no more radical that what was in place in Europe, from Great Britain to Scandinavia, including Germany, during the Cold War and to some degree to this day. Yet Sanders will be painted as the second coming of Mao, and some people will buy that, although Bernie is more reformist than revolutionary.

I write all of this in pain and sorrow. Sanders is just what the United States needs to begin freeing itself from plutocracy and delusions of global domination. I will vote for him in the Florida primary to send a message to Hillary. And I confess I have a war spot in my heart for Bernie that is just not there for Hillary.

But as an old graduate school professor told our class, professing sociology, which includes teaching, researching and writing, requires a warm heart and a cool head. This column is being written by my cool head, not my warm heart. I hope that in this case I am being wrong-headed rather than cool of head. But I don’t think that’s the case.

Should my prediction prove right, however, it’s crucial that Democrats, including progressive supporters of Sanders like myself, unite to support Hillary Clinton. That she is far preferable that any of the Republican candidates goes without saying. But the fact is that, why she will not face the kind of red-baiting that would be heaped on Sanders, Republicans have already begun to vilify Clinton even as they anticipate she will be elected president.

South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham, who passes as a moderate in the Republican party, recently called Clinton “the most dishonest woman in America.” Really? Clinton can be chameleonic but off the top of my head I can think of dozens of women in this country that have been really dishonest at the cost of many lives. Take, for one, former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Rice, by invoking the specter of a nuclear mushroom cloud should we not go to war in Iraq helped the George W. Bush administration scare Americans to support an illegal, bloody, and ruinously costly war. Moreover, what does gender have to do with it? The number of dishonest men in Washington or Wall Street dwarfs the female list.

Speaking of Iraq, for many Democrats, including myself, the fact that Clinton voted for the war while Sanders opposed it is one of the main reasons that to vote for Clinton in November will be a bitter pill to swallow. The bigger reason, however, is that if Clinton wins the nomination it would once again demonstrate the power of vested interests to block the fundamental changes needed in this country.

Obama tried and could not make some of those changes. Clinton already has said that she is a progressive “that wants to get things done.” Translation: she will not even try to make systemic changes Obama wanted to make and Sanders has promised. Rather, she would work within the narrow limits that plutocracy and the military-industrial system would tolerate. Yet any Republican alternative to Clinton would be too awful to contemplate staying home come November.