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Hillary
Clinton, former U.S. secretary of state, speaks during the Clinton Global
Initiative CGI America meeting in Chicago, Illinois, U.S., on Thursday, June
13, 2013. Daniel Acker/Bloomberg via Getty Images.
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Democrats would be insane to nominate Bernie Sanders. By Dana Milbank. Washington Post, January 26, 2016.
Milbank:
I adore Bernie Sanders.
I agree
with his message of fairness and I share his outrage over inequality and
corporate abuses. I think his righteous populism has captured the moment
perfectly. I respect the uplifting campaign he has run. I admire his
authenticity.
And I
am convinced Democrats would be insane to nominate him.
Hillary
Clinton, by contrast, is a dreary candidate. She has, again, failed to connect
with voters. Her policy positions are cautious and uninspiring. Her reflexive
secrecy causes a whiff of scandal to follow her everywhere. She seems
calculating and phony.
And yet
if Democrats hope to hold the presidency in November, they’ll need to hold
their noses and nominate Clinton.
Ultimately,
I expect that’s what Democrats will do — because as much as they love Sanders ,
they loathe Donald Trump more. It seems more evident each day that Republicans
have lost their collective reason and are beginning to accept the notion that
Trump will be their nominee. And I doubt Democrats will make an anti-immigrant
bigot the president by nominating a socialist to run against him.
Sanders
and his supporters boast of polls showing him, on average, matching up slightly better against Trump than Clinton does. But those matchups are misleading:
Opponents have been attacking and defining Clinton for a quarter- century, but
nobody has really gone to work yet on demonizing Sanders.
Watching
Sanders at Monday night’s Democratic presidential forum in Des Moines, I
imagined how Trump — or another Republican nominee — would disembowel the
relatively unknown Vermonter.
The
first questioner from the audience asked Sanders to explain why he embraces the
“socialist” label and requested that Sanders define it “so that it doesn’t
concern the rest of us citizens.”
Sanders,
explaining that much of what he proposes is happening in Scandinavia and
Germany (a concept that itself alarms Americans who don’t want to be like
socialized Europe), answered vaguely: “Creating a government that works for all
of us, not just a handful of people on the top — that’s my definition of
democratic socialism.”
But
that’s not how Republicans will define socialism — and they’ll have the
dictionary on their side. They’ll portray Sanders as one who wants the
government to own and control major industries and the means of production and
distribution of goods. They’ll say he wants to take away private property. That
wouldn’t be fair, but it would be easy. Socialists don’t win national elections
in the United States .
Sanders
on Monday night also admitted he would seek massive tax increases — “one of the
biggest tax hikes in history,” as moderator Chris Cuomo put it — to expand
Medicare to all. Sanders, this time making a comparison with Britain and
France, allowed that “hypothetically, you’re going to pay $5,000 more in
taxes,” and declared, “We will raise taxes, yes we will.” He said this would
be offset by lower health-insurance premiums and protested that “it’s demagogic
to say, oh, you’re paying more in taxes.”
Well,
yes — and Trump is a demagogue.
Sanders
also made clear he would be happy to identify Democrats as the party of big
government and of wealth redistribution. When Cuomo said Sanders seemed to be
saying he would grow government “bigger than ever,” Sanders didn’t quarrel,
saying, “P eople want to criticize me, okay,” and “F ine, if that’s the
criticism, I accept it.”
Sanders
accepts it, but are Democrats ready to accept ownership of socialism, massive
tax increases and a dramatic expansion of government? If so, they will lose.
Michael
Bloomberg, the billionaire and former New York mayor who floated a trial balloon over the weekend about an independent run, knows this. As the New York
Times reported: “If Republicans were to nominate Mr. Trump or Senator Ted Cruz,
a hard-line conservative, and Democrats chose Mr. Sanders, Mr. Bloomberg . . . has
told allies he would be likely to run.”
President
Obama seems to know this, too — which would explain why he tiptoed beyond his
official neutrality to praise Clinton in an interview with Politico’s Glenn
Thrush. “I think that what Hillary presents is a recognition that translating
values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of
politics,” he said. He portrayed Sanders as “the bright, shiny object that
people haven’t seen before.”
It
doesn’t speak well of Clinton that, next to her, a 74-year-old guy who has been
in politics for four decades is a bright and shiny object. The #feelthebern
phenomenon has at least as much to do with Clinton as with Sanders: Democrats
are eager for an alternative to her inauthentic politics and cautious policies.
I share
their frustration with Clinton. But that doesn’t make Sanders a rational
choice.
