By David W. Overbey, PhD
23 March 2016
The complacent and brain-dead media have repeated the same unquestioned claim about the Democrat primary for months, and it’s long overdue that this claim be examined and rejected: Bernie Sanders persistence and on-point message have moved “front-runner” Hillary Clinton further to the left. This claim by the media has at least two implications. One, of course, is that Clinton actually has become a more liberal candidate because of Sanders’ liberal platform. The second, and more sinister implication, is that Sanders serves no purpose as a candidate other than to motivate Clinton to adopt a more left-wing stance during the debates. This second implication is sinister because it is an example of the media not reporting the news but making the news. The idea that Bernie Sanders is the better candidate in the Democrat primary and that he could very well be our next President is an unacceptable idea, period. Start talking as though he is and suddenly that public may reconsider the assumption that Clinton is the better candidate for the Democrat Party nomination and certainly the more pragmatic choice for the candidate who could actually win in the general election.
But after the most recent Democrat primary debate in Miami last week, it is obvious to me that Sanders’ persistence in the primary contest—especially his upset victory in Michigan—has moved Clinton further to the right, not the other way around, both in terms of how she debates and her classic Republican rebuttals to Sanders’ arguments.
“He doesn’t say how he’s going to pay for it,” Clinton replies every time Sanders insists that the United States should have free health care for all and free college for all. This response is as in-your-face Republican as it gets. Such a response is anything but evidence Clinton is the least bit open to the prospect that Sanders may have some good ideas and that his platform is better than hers in some respects. For decades, every time any proposal has been brought forward in American politics in favor of a program that would benefit the people by reducing the mounting financial pressure most of us face, specifically free health care and free college, the inevitable right-wing response is that these ideas sound nice and may look good on paper but in the “real world” they won’t work because there is no way to pay for them. And what response does Clinton have when Sanders says that all other first-world countries on the planet guarantee free health care for all and have free or at least much more affordable college education? She attacks Sanders for being against Obama as though Sanders is another version of Mitch McConnell. Then she says we must continue to make the Affordable Care Act work, never mind the annoying question of what “affordable” actually means.
It is a fact, not a utopian delusion, that all other first-world countries have free health care, and there can be no argument that “free” is indeed affordable. The idea that more Americans have health insurance than before the ACA does not equate to free healthcare for all as a guaranteed right. Clinton’s insistence that the two are effectively the same makes no sense. If someone wants health care to be “affordable,” how can one do better than “free?” So why defend the ACA but argue against an opponent who wants free health care for all? Such a reply is anything but a “move to the left,” and instead gives her away as someone who really has no message or platform other than “I want to win, so vote for me.”
But Clinton’s right-wing DNA spilled out of her on-stage persona in Miami when she in effect compared Sanders to Fidel Castro. This move was as typical-ugly and dishonest as Republican politics gets. Every time someone says taxes need to be raised and should be spent on improving the lives of the tax payers instead of interventionist, regime-changing wars, the dumbed-down bogus retort has been to align such a position with being socialist, which is the same thing more or less as being communist, which is, of course, un-American and therefore plain wrong.
I’m not going to listen to rebuttals that Clinton didn’t equate Sanders with Castro, the Communist dictator of Cuba from whom many Miamians fled because of his oppressive governing. When a Latin, Spanish-speaking journalist showed footage of Sanders in the 1980s arguing that Cuba had a good health care and education system, the message was that Sanders was sympathetic to—if not a disciple of—Fidel Castro as an oppressive dictator. Clinton could have taken the high road—as Sanders has with regard to the Clinton email soap opera—and denounced such a comparison. She didn’t. The media fed her an opportunity to disgrace Sanders as a Communist and an oppressive dictator in-waiting because he has campaigned on free health care and free college education for all. Republicans have dominated American politics by associating such policies with dictator governments and tax-and-spend “big government” that Americans don’t want. Clinton is banking on the expectation that the American public will once again agree with this version of reality, based on the ignorant and self-centered assumption that the “real world” consists of only one country, and that the other countries that really do have these programs may as well be fantasy worlds.
Meanwhile, Sanders has been measured in his criticism of Clinton’s vote for the Iraq war, a fact that cannot be denied. The Iraq war was, of course, orchestrated by the Bush-Cheney administration, and Clinton’s support of that war makes for a strong case that she is at the core a Republican conservative. There was nothing “moderate” about the Bush-Cheney era, and either Clinton supporters secretly still believe that war was justified or they dismiss her vote in favor of it as merely one of many things she has done in her political career, a view that betrays a cavalier attitude about the cost of war and the “real world” destruction it inevitably wrecks on human lives.
Furthermore, Clinton’s argument that she is the better candidate because of her experience, particularly in foreign affairs, is also a tried-and-true Republican tactic: America is the leader of the free world, and foreign policy always trumps domestic policy. Americans get what they deserve, and to argue the American government ought to work for the American people is a weak-minded complaint of lazy people, not a sensible position. It is maddening that after the 2008 economic collapse and the never-ending futility of America’s interventionist foreign policy that someone who insists the status quo is still the way to go is considered to be a liberal who over the course of the debates has moved even further to the left. If, in fact, Clinton is compelled by Sanders’ platform, how can she be his opponent? And how in the world can the media depict someone who argues against free health care for all and free college because “there’s no way to pay for it; he doesn’t say how he’s going to pay for it” as someone who leans further to left with the conclusion of each debate? The media have covered the Democrat primary as though they were state-controlled appendages of an oppressive society that values the ability to deceive over a well-informed citizenry.
As for the results of the primaries and caucuses thus far, there is further evidence that Clinton is a Republican conservative who appeals to the values of that ideology. Clinton has won 12 states to Sanders’ 9. But a look at the geography shows that Clinton wins, or rather dominates, in the South, the stronghold of the Republican Party, and without question the least progressive region of a chronically conservative nation, with a few exceptions. Sanders has won in New England and the North, places that are politically more liberal than the South, and in the West, where independents and libertarians are more prominent than fundamentalist conservatives whose views will, apparently, never change, no matter what. Thus, it is consistent with the argument that Clinton is a conservative who appeals to Republican-minded voters that she would be popular in the South, while Sanders wins in the other regions, his most notable win being the upset in Michigan, which borders Canada, that is, not in the South, for those of you who think education is a waste of time.
There is an obvious explanation for Clinton’s politics, her debate tactics, and the media’s representation of her as a liberal who has moved further left due to Sanders’ token existence as a Presidential candidate. Both Clinton and the media are owned by big-money corporations, and the last thing they want is someone like Sanders and his message to be taken seriously, let alone become agreeable. A President Sanders is something the corporations, Wall Street, investment banks, and even the power players of the Democratic National Committee are determined not to let happen. Characterizing Clinton as a liberal who has moved further to the left during the primary campaign is a strategy of deception aimed at conning Sanders supporters to see her as more similar to their favored candidate rather than the polar opposite which she actually is. The media, meanwhile, as always, tell the story that the rich and powerful want to be told: someone like Sanders is un-American in his views, and his platform is an incalculably expensive utopian fantasy that is impossible to achieve, the reality of how all other first-world countries have governed for decades be damned.
Clinton obviously appeals to a large number of Americans whose dumbed-down idea of a “liberal” is anyone who is not a while male, and people who will always think that one can vote for a war George W. Bush and Dick Cheney sold to the American people, oppose free health care and free college, and still somehow qualify as a liberal and an unequivocal superior choice to the Republican nominee. But even the pragmatic argument that Clinton is more electable in a general election than Sanders is contradicted by polls that show otherwise and the geographic concentration of Clinton’s victories in the one region in the country the Democrats have zero chance of winning in a general election.
While Sanders has been diplomatic and measured in his debates with Clinton, a characteristic of a more liberal, enlightened mind, Clinton has resorted to explicit attacks of Sanders that cannot be construed as anything but Republican. Sanders, according to Clinton, wants “big government” and advocates a utopian system that is too expensive to pay for. America is so great, as conservatives always say, that it is disloyal to characterize it in need of a “revolution.” Foreign policy and experience in foreign affairs—in other words always being up for another war and rigidly defensive about those that grind on tirelessly—are the trademark of someone most qualified to be President, not someone who thinks the American government ought to work for the American people, a position Republicans always take in defense of a system where “anyone can achieve anything,” as though that idea doesn’t sound utopian.
Most maddening of all is the apparent success of Clinton’s campaign and her debate strategy and the media’s characterization of her as a liberal who has moved further left during the debates. Clinton’s success and seemingly indestructible status as primary front-runner make at least me wonder why people who so outspokenly denounce the GOP as puerile bullies and “the party of no” support a candidate who in recent weeks has shown herself to be a Republican conservative, someone who thinks America’s purpose is to fight wars and whose national identity would implode should this nation actually admit other countries do a better job of taking care of her own than we do.
After a not terribly impressive start to the 21st century, the Democrat primary has essentially been reduced to the semi-finals of the Republican general election. I take no solace in the notion that Clinton is the best Republican to choose from.
Dr. David W. Overbey is an essayist, fiction writer, and playwright who has a PhD in rhetoric and media studies. He is co-host of the Modus Operandi Podcast and the MoSports Podcast. He also has fifteen years teaching experience at universities in different regions across the country. He can be contacted at badteacher515@gmail.com.
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