In a column last fall, I predicted that Bernie Sanders would get the Democratic Party’s nomination for president this year. Putting aside the completely unforeseeable, it is getting hard to imagine a path to the nomination, given the delegate math and Hilary Clinton’s lead going into the upcoming California primary. She currently has a greater lead in delegates than Barack Obama had over her at this stage of the primaries in 2008.
I still plan to vote for Bernie Sanders in the primary in a couple weeks, because I think he deserves as much support as possible heading into the Democratic National Convention this summer. While the nomination is –realistically speaking– out of reach, I want to give him as much momentum as possible to have a say when it comes time to define the Democratic Party’s platform.
In a column almost exactly a year ago, I said that Hillary Clinton, “…is not, and has not been, a friend of progressives in either foreign policy or economics. She supported the Iraq War, and there is very little daylight on economic and labor issues between her and her NAFTA-supporting, welfare-ending husband. She would represent no substantive danger to entrenched Wall Street interests, and she is not showing encouraging signs that she would do much to address the pressing issue of income and wealth inequality. She’s a Democratic Leadership Council-oriented, ‘triangulating’ centrist, and Wall Street’s favorite Democrat.”
By the way, while I’m obviously not a huge fan of either of the Clintons (to put it mildly), I think an awful lot of the supposed “atmosphere of scandal” surrounding Secretary Clinton is based on little more than innuendo. Do any research into Hillary Clinton’s supposed corruption online, and you very quickly run into enormous numbers of conspiracy theories, most of which are transparently dodgy, and many of which are truly loony – if you listened to talk radio 25 years ago, do you remember how White House Counsel Vince Foster was supposedly murdered? (He actually died of suicide.) Or how the Clintons ran a cocaine dealing operation out of the white house?
To be blunt, the atmosphere of scandal and corruption around Hillary Clinton is (to a great extent) a creation of movement conservatism.
Clinton is neither more nor less corrupt than the vast majority of politicians at every level of government (and I don’t mean that as a compliment.)
The whole “Lady Macbeth” depiction of her as particularly crafty and conniving has never been established with actual facts. It has been a continuing project of the media arm of the movement right to flood the media zone with “stories” to establish a narrative that the Clintons were and are corrupt.
Consider this: Republican Congressman Darrell Issa has had six years of desperate looking (including using subpoena powers) to try and find something, anything with which to kneecap her, and (let’s be honest) has come up empty-handed. He’s not “liberal media refusing to investigate real corruption” – he’s a guy in Congress with a lot of power who hates Democrats with the heat of a thousand suns.
So, what’s my problem with Hillary?
I have a friend named John Medaille, who writes for an online organization called The Imaginative Conservative, which is a bastion (or perhaps more accurately, a remnant) of a more intellectual and principled brand of conservative. Medaille is a prolific author and very astute thinker. In a recent article, he wrote:
“This is not an election about the head, but about the heart, and at the heart of American politics is a burning rage. Rage that our livelihoods have been sacrificed to abstract economic theories; rage that our communities have been destroyed and scattered; rage that the ordinary citizen has been abandoned by our leaders, Republican or Democrat; rage that the concerns of all have been trumped by concerns of marginal groups, like the transgendered. But mostly, Americans feel rage that their interests have been ignored in favor the interests of the Rich, the powerful, the banker, the foreigner. And all of these concerns are summed up in one word: Globalization.
“Hillary cannot address this issue because she herself is a globalist. Her faux repudiation of the Trans-Pacific ‘Partnership’ does not convince anybody, not even her own supporters. She can move as far to the Left as she likes, but no one will take her seriously. Indeed, Trump will pull off that most complex of maneuvers, the double envelopment: he will flank her on both the left and the right, and often on the same issues. And no one will care about the contradictions. He will be Hannibal at Cannae; she will attack in the center, only to find herself engulfed on either side.”
The “Cannae” reference is to a battle that took place in 216 B.C. in_southeast_Italy, between the Carthaginian general Hannibal and a Roman army of as many as 75,000 men. The Roman army concentrated its attack on the center of the Carthaginian line, which fell back in an orderly way until the Romans found themselves in the middle of a “u” shaped formation of Carthaginians. The open end of the “u” was then closed by Carthaginian cavalry, surrounding the Romans, who were then annihilated in one of the most costly and lopsided battles in human history.
I’m not as pessimistic about Hillary’s chances in the general election this November as Medaille, but I think he is absolutely right about the rage. I’ll have further thoughts about that, and some ideas to constructively engage it, in next week’s column.

Matt Talbot is a writer and poet, as well as an old Benicia hand.

Sharing is caring!