Ranting On...Hillary's Book

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (D-NY) with
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT)

The thought of reliving the 2016 election is, well, horrifying to me, feeling akin to reliving one of the worst moments of your life.  It's the reason that I can't watch this season of American Horror Story even though it's the most interesting premise I've seen on the show since Jessica Lange left, and it's why even the next season of Veep (which will pit an ambitious but flawed woman against an unqualified oaf) may be too much for me to watch even if I've seen every episode so far, since I have trouble believing that Selina Meyer wins back the White House and they don't end up humiliating her one last time by making her be Jonah's VP.  But I will be buying Hillary Clinton's book, because A) I own and have read all of Hillary Clinton's books and B) because I'm intrigued, and only more so as I hear dozens of Democrats (mostly men) shout that she needs to "shut the hell up."

I find this amusing in the way you find the hypocrisy of your uncle at Christmas who is on Medicare but complaining about people ripping off the government amusing.  These are the same men who spent the entire election telling Hillary exactly what to do, and then criticizing her for not being herself.  They're the ones who persistently, constantly tried to tell her how she needed to bend over backward to placate Bernie Sanders, and yet while Sanders is allowed to perpetually insult and degrade Clinton, saying "you can't run just on being a woman" to the most accomplished presidential candidate in decades, she can't say one word about his vanity run for president where he consistently lied about what was driving her delegate lead (it was votes, Bernie, not the fucking superdelegates).

Pundits and writers say this isn't what is healthy for the party, that this isn't the right time, but I have to politely disagree, because I saw what happened to the Republican Party when it ignored one of its fringe wings, and I can see the writing on the wall when it comes to the "Bernie Bros" contingent of the party.  More pointedly, I think that ignoring sexism and hoping that it just goes away is not going to solve the problem.  You saw that recently with the escalation of criticism of Sen. Kamala Harris, who is emerging as a potential rival to Sanders in the 2020 presidential primaries, and one who could pick up Hillary Clinton's mantle (anecdotal evidence: most of the Clinton-primary backers I have spoken with are looking seriously at her as a candidate, as I am myself).  The quick-and-easy way of painting ambitious women as cold and disingenuous is hardly new in politics, but it's worth noting because they're using the guise of "not being liberal" enough in the same way that Republicans have for years written false campaign ads for "not being conservative enough" to drive away opponents, particularly women.

I know no one wants to hear this, but Bernie Sanders did not help Hillary Clinton in the 2016 presidential race at all, and while he is not the sole reason she lost, he is A reason.  I'm only throwing in a "yes, Hillary also was a major factor why she lost" because I'll likely have to address it in the comments, but Sanders was a reason; this is not an unfair criticism from Hillary Clinton.  It was very, very obvious in April of 2016 that Sanders had no shot at the nomination.  The race wasn't even as close as 2008, there was no hope of the superdelegates throwing the election to the Vermont senator.  He had every bit of leverage at that point to get pretty much anything he wanted from the DNC (platform changes, a primetime slot), and all he had to do was throw out a hearty endorsement of Hillary Clinton, someone whom he would endorse anyway and probably, even in the quiet of a ballot box, he ended up checking the box next to her name.  A ringing endorsement of Clinton at that point would have likely won the Democrats the Senate as well, as Sanders could have quickly parlayed his campaign into working not only for Clinton, but also progressive Senate candidates like Deborah Ross, Russ Feingold, Jason Kander, and Katie McGinty; a unified Democratic front compared to the defections on the GOP side would have sent a powerful message to supporters from the left to the center.   With a majority, Sanders would become Budget Chair, and would be able to push Clinton from that position to stake out the liberal stances she'd promised on the campaign trail.  It wouldn't result in President Sanders, but it was surely more than the Vermont Independent ever could have dreamed of at the beginning of his campaign.

By prolonging the campaign unnecessarily, by not quelling his supporters who booed Clinton and other supporters at one of the most humiliating DNC first night's I've ever seen (I wasn't alive in 1968, so don't bring it up), Sanders gave Trump fodder.  It's forgotten now, but think of how often Trump praised Bernie Sanders during the campaign, saying he was "robbed"-it helped to feed his victim status, and how he still claims he was cheated out of millions of votes now "just like Bernie."  That all stemmed from Sanders claiming similarly preposterous things to help feed his narrative.  It might feel like hyperbole to compare Sanders, a competent and well-regarded senator who went off the rails in a presidential campaign, to our sociologically-lying POTUS, but both men did consistently lie about Hillary Clinton's standing in the election to ensure the loyalty of their core constituencies.

As a result of this, and his inability to do the right thing for the country by heartily endorsing Clinton when it mattered, Bernie Sanders was a factor in Hillary Clinton's loss.  Same as James Comey, same as Russia.  The fact that the press cannot handle that, that they want to insist on it being only, completely Clinton is staggering to me because there is never the same sort of criticism heaped on Al Gore when he blames Ralph Nader or John McCain surrogates when they blame Sarah Palin or George W. Bush.  Multiple factors contribute to an election night loss, and like-it-or-not, Bernie Sanders ended up being a factor in Clinton's loss.  She lost by 80,000 votes in three consistently blue states where Obama-Trump supporters cost her the election-that's close enough that most things could be argued that it cost her the election, but Sanders is one of the reasons she lost.  It's hard to grasp that because the result of her loss is still so painful to comprehend even now, but it's time to deal.  This is a conversation worth having so that everyone realizes what is at stake in November, the midterms, and in 2020.  Being a diva the way Bernie Sanders was post-April is not an option when the world is at stake, and Clinton's book reminds people of that.  Pretending that Sanders didn't do things he did doesn't help the party grow, as ignoring history just means you're doomed to repeat it.  We should listen to Clinton, the first woman ever to have a major party nomination, and if she, a witness to many a presidential election, says she experienced things her husband and boss didn't, we should try not to mansplain that away, but find a way to ensure that our 2020 presidential nominee doesn't experience the same sort of attacks.