Hillary Was The Worst Choice The Democrats Could Have Run-- And She's Not Done Yet

by Nancy Ohanian

Dan Merica's CNN report yesterday-- New Clinton book blasts Sanders for 'lasting damage' in 2016 race, castng Bernie "as an unrealistic over-promiser." Merica wrote that in the book being released next week Clinton claims Bernie's "attacks against her during the primary caused 'lasting damage' and paved the way for '(Donald) Trump's Crooked Hillary campaign.' [Hillary claims that Bernie] 'had to resort to innuendo and impugning my character' because the two Democrats 'agreed on so much.'" Her and her corrupt corporate-Dem supporters are still living in a fantasy world refusing to take responsibility that she couldn't beat the worst candidate who ever ran for president in history. The book, from what I've read, is filled with all the old Clinton slanders and self-delusion:

"Some of his supporters, the so-called Bernie Bros, took to harassing my supporters online. It got ugly and more than a little sexist," she wrote.

"When I finally challenged Bernie during a debate to name a single time I changed a position or a vote because of a financial contribution, he couldn't come up with anything," Clinton wrote. "Nonetheless, his attacks caused lasting damage, making it harder to unify progressives in the general election and paving the way for Trump's 'Crooked Hillary' campaign."

...Clinton's decision to step back into the spotlight with the book will likely be met with wide praise from many [many? like Debbie Wasserman Schultz and Rahm Emanuel?] in the Democratic Party, including some of the millions of Democrats who backed her over Trump. But it also could tear at wounds that are still open between the wing of the party Sanders animated and those who backed Clinton.

While Clinton remains a powerful force among Democrats-- and will be in the coming elections-- there are some who have publicly said they would rather the party move on from the 2016 election.

I have asked around 2 dozen viable congressional candidates if they would want Hilalry campaigning with them in their districts and only one said yes. Every single one said they would like to have either Michelle or Barack Obama, Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. No one wants Hillary, Pelosi, Schumer, Hoyer, Crowley... What does that say about the wretched state of a party leadership stinking to high heaven of corruption. This morning a candidate for Congress in New Jersey said he doesn't want "Clinton coming into my district anymore than I'd want to be seen campaigning with Robert Menendez, who's probably going to go to prison during the election season."

At one point in her book, Clinton concludes, "I am proud to be a Democrat and I wish Bernie were, too." Although she was an aggressive and active Republican for the first third of her life she finally started listening to people like Bernie and eventually became an opportunistic corporate Democrat.

Earlier this summer, before her stinking book was on anyone's mind, Jon Schwartz interviewed Ralph Nader for The Intercept, Nader taking a swing about how the Hillary power mongers who have polluted the Democratic Party, sucked it dry, and have continued to make it so hard-- or impossible-- for Democrats to defend the country from the "most vicious" Republican Party in history.

SCHWARZ: I’m interested in the history of the Democrats caving, being more and more willing to do whatever the right wants, for the past 40 years. Take the recent stories about Jared Kushner. Whatever the ultimate underlying reality there, I think it’s fair to say that if a Democratic president had appointed their son-in-law to hold a position of tremendous power in the White House-- if Hillary Clinton had appointed Chelsea’s husband Marc Mezvinsky-- and stories had come out in the Washington Post and New York Times about him trying to set up a back channel with Russia, he would have been out the door before the day was over.

NADER: Do you want me to go through the history of the decline and decadence of the Democratic Party? I’m going to give you millstones around the Democratic Party neck that are milestones.

The first big one was in 1979. Tony Coelho, who was a congressman from California, and who ran the House Democratic Campaign treasure chest, convinced the Democrats that they should bid for corporate money, corporate PACs, that they could raise a lot of money. Why leave it up to Republicans and simply rely on the dwindling labor union base for money, when you had a huge honeypot in the corporate area?

And they did. And I could see the difference almost immediately. First of all, they lost the election to Reagan. And then they started getting weaker in the Congress. At that time, 1980, some of our big allies were defeated in the so-called Reagan landslide against Carter, we lost Senator [Gaylord] Nelson, Senator [Warren] Magnuson, Senator [Frank] Church. We had more trouble getting congressional hearings investigating corporate malfeasance by the Democrat [congressional committee] chairs. When the Democrats regained the White House [in 1992] you could see the difference in appointments to regulatory agencies, the difficulty in getting them to upgrade health and safety regulations.

The second millstone is that they didn’t know how to deal with Reagan. And the Republicans took note. That means a soft tone, smiling... You can say terrible things and do terrible things as long as you have [that] type of presentation.

[Democrats] were still thinking Republican conservatives were dull, stupid, and humorless. They didn’t adjust.

Increasingly they began to judge their challenge to Republicans by how much money they raised. You talk to [Marcy] Kaptur from Cleveland, she says, we go into the Democratic caucus in the House, we go in talking money, we stay talking money, and we go out with our quotas for money...

As a result they took the economic issues off the table that used to win again and again in the thirties and forties for the Democrats. The labor issues, the living wage issues, the health insurance issue, pension issues. And that of course was a huge bonanza for the Republican Party because the Republican Party could not contend on economic issues. They contended on racial issues, on bigotry issues, and that’s how they began to take control of the solid Democratic South after the civil rights laws were passed.

Raising money from Wall Street, from the drug companies, from health insurance companies, the energy companies, kept [Democrats] from their main contrasting advantage over the Republicans, which is, in FDR’s parlance, “The Democratic Party is the party of working families, Republicans are the party of the rich.” That flipped it completely and left the Democrats extremely vulnerable.

As a result they drew back geographically, to the east coast, west coast and so on.

And that created another millstone: You don’t run a 50-state [presidential] campaign. If you don’t run a 50-state campaign, number one you’re strengthening the opposing party in those states you’ve abandoned, so they can take those states for granted and concentrate on the states that are in the grey area. That was flub number one.

Flub number two is what Ben Barnes, the politically-savvy guy in Texas, told me. He said, when you don’t contest the presidential race in Texas, it rots the whole party down … all the way to mayors and city council. So it replicates this decadence and powerlessness for future years.

When they abandoned the red states, they abandoned five states in the Rocky Mountain area, and started out with a handicap of nine or ten senators.

You may remember from your history, the two senators from Montana were Democrats, Senator Church from Idaho was a Democrat, Senator Frank Moss, great consumer champion, Democrat from Utah. Now there’s almost nobody. The two senators from Wyoming are Republican, the two senators from Montana are Republican [John Tester, the senior Montana senator, is a Democrat], the two senators from Utah are Republican. I think the Democrats have one seat in Colorado. Then you get down to Arizona and that’s two Republicans.

So they never had a veto-proof majority even at their peak in the Senate. And of course later when they weren’t at their peak it cost them the Senate again and again. And now they’re in a huge hole, with the debacle in the Senate races in 2016, they’re facing three times as many Democrats up for reelection in 2018.

The [third] millstone is they decided to campaign by TV, with political consultants influencing them and getting their 15-20 percent cut. When you campaign by TV you campaign by slogans, you don’t campaign by policy.

Next millstone, the labor unions began getting weak, weak in numbers and weak in leadership. They began shelling out huge money to the Democrats for television. And as they became weaker they lost their grassroots mobilization on behalf of the Democrats.

The Democrats began the process of message preceding policy. No-- policy precedes message. That means they kept saying how bad the Republicans are. They campaigned not by saying, look how good we are, we’re going to bring you full Medicare [for all], we’re going to crack down on corporate crime against workers and consumers and the environment, stealing, lying, cheating you. We’re going to get you a living wage. We’re going to get a lean defense, a better defense, and get some of this money and start rebuilding your schools and bridges and water and sewage systems and libraries and clinics.

Instead of saying that, they campaign by saying “Can you believe how bad the Republicans are?” Now once they say that, they trap their progressive wing, because their progressive wing is the only segment that’s going to change the party to be a more formidable opponent. Because they say to their progressive wing, “You’ve got nowhere to go, get off our back.”

And this went right into the scapegoating of the last twenty years. “Oh, it’s Nader, oh, it’s the Koch Brothers, oh, it’s the electoral college, oh, it’s misogyny, oh, it’s redneck deplorables.” They never look at themselves in the mirror.

Republicans, when they lose they fight over ideas, however horrific they are. Tea Party ideas, libertarian ideas, staid Republican ideas. They fight. But the Democrats want uniformity, they want to shut people up. So they have the most deficient transition of all. They have the transition of Nancy Pelosi to Nancy Pelosi, four-time loser against the worst Republican Party in the Republican Party’s history.

If you put Republican politicians today before the ghost of Teddy Roosevelt, Dwight Eisenhower, and “Mr. Conservative” Senator Robert Taft, they’d roll over in their grave. That’s how radically extremist, cruel, vicious, Wall Street, militarist the Republican Party is. Which means that the Democrats should have landslided them. Not just beaten them, landslided them in legislatures around the country, governorships, president and the Congress.

But no, it’s always the scapegoat. Maybe Jill Stein, the little Green Party, they took Pennsylvania and Michigan from Hillary the hawk.

by Nancy Ohanian

As Aaron Blake pointed out in yesterday's Washington Post Clinton and her idiot, mercenary supporters are on the warpath against progressives and will poison the well just as the midterms are amping up. "This," wrote Blake, "needless to say, isn't likely to help the Democratic Party heal any time soon. I've argued before that Clinton's decision to dwell upon the many allegedly unfair reasons for her general-election loss-- Russia, James B. Comey, misogyny, debate questions, etc.-- are likely to distract from the truly difficult work Democrats face in determining how they lost the Rust Belt to a historically unpopular nominee in Trump. Clinton seems to have far more interest in pointing the finger at everyone but herself. Perhaps her reasons are justifiable. But it also suggests that her and her party's serious shortcomings were unimportant."

She's not just suggesting [Bernie's]s not a Democrat; she's suggesting he doesn't truly care about the party or that he may have played a hand in electing Trump. She's suggesting he doesn't appreciate the party. She claims his attacks were out-of-bounds and unprincipled.

...Clinton is not-so-gently questioning that entire conceit, saying Sanders's reasons for causing that upheaval weren't justified. She's suggesting his campaign was about political expediency and getting elected and doubts there was truly much difference between them.

Yet today, Clinton is busy writing and promoting a deceitful revenge book that will further line her pockets while Bernie is promoting single payer healthcare-- that she fund would never be enacted-- and helping progressive Democrats get elected to office. She's worthless and disliked by most Americans. It drives her crazy that Bernie is the most popular politician in the country. I know several campaigns her team has felt out about her coming to their districts to campaign with them. The responses must have crushed her. No one wants her around and she should think about writing a book about that instead.