Occasionally you hear people intoning that everyone knows that politicians say anything to get elected, but then once they're in office it's a different story. Paul Krugman often points out that this doesn't seem to be true, referring to this piece by Jonathan Bernstein: Campaign Promises. Really, when presidential candidates make promises, they really do usually attempt to follow through on them-- e.g in the case of Obama, you can argue he really tried to close Guantonomo, but had too many problems with an uncooperative Congress.
What this means for us is that Hillary Clinton's apparent move move leftward (and back toward the actual center) really is an encouraging sign.
And it suggests to me that the Bernie Sanders primary challenge has an important role to play...
And that's true, even if -- as I suspect -- Bernie Sanders really doesn't have much chance of defeating Hillary Clinton. So yes, I do think we're stuck with St. Hillary the Inevitable and I realize that saying that is likely to annoy the folks here who are getting excited about Bernie Sanders latest polls, but you know, while you can be too cynical, you can also be too optimistic...
But the thing is, a strong showing for Bernie Sanders is perfect, it's just what's needed to get him taken seriously, and even if Bernie Sanders doesn't push his poll numbers much higher, it's great that we've got him in the race. If he can force Hillary Clinton to confront critical issues and get an opinion on the record about them, there's some hope that she'll feel the need to live up to what she's said.
Hillary Clinton will not get through a debate with Bernie Sanders without having to express an opinion on trade issues (or "trade" issues, as with the TPP).
And wouldn't it be nice if it turned out Hillary Clinton had learned something from Jeb Bush's waffling on the Iraq war? If she'd shed some of her hawk feathers, I'd stop complaining about her... Perhaps Bernie could put the question to her.
Bernie Sanders is the guy who gets to put Hillary Clinton on the record about the important stuff-- once she's facing off against the Republicans the quality of the political discourse is going to get cranked way past Right all the way over to Stupid.
So me, I'm going to be donating to the Bernie Sanders campaign. He's doing us all a favor.
Act blue makes it easy to kick-in cash, and you might also become a volunteer
My prediction is that in retrospect it's going to be clear that having Bernie challenge Hillary isn't going to make Hillary weaker, it's going to make the Democrats stronger.
We really don't need to be at each others throats on this one-- "Hillary or Bernie" is actually a pretty good problem to have. Would you rather be a Democrat right now, or driving the clown car?
Though I have to say, this is already looking like a long season coming up...
- Hillary needs to be more Bill and less Obama!
- Hillary needs to be more Obama 2008 and less Obama 2012!
- Bernie needs to be less Karl and more Groucho!