I write in response to a very reasonable diary that warned against anyone doing “anything to hurt Democrats’ chances come November.” This presupposes that “oh no! If anyone says anything negative about the eventual nominee, it’ll be curtains for us!”
I think this line of thinking is incorrect. It is striking to me how many of the Hillary supporters here who were not confident, but simply BRAYING about how she was the winningest winner who ever won a win for the last year straight, and how Sanders is so losing that he’ll never even be the world’s worst loser because that would be winning at something, have pivoted to this paranoia about how nobody had better say a single critical word about her or else it’ll “hurt us in November.” (Not the diarist I was quoting—I don’t know if s/he was braying that Hillary Must Win—but many such posters have.)
People, please get this: if someone stands ANY chance of being “hurt” against this bunch of CLOWNS on the GOP side in November, IT IS NOT THEIR DEMOCRATIC OPPONENT’S FAULT. IT IS THEIR OWN.
If one’s candidate can’t stand up to a bunch of people we take even LESS seriously than we took Sarah Palin (indeed, one of whom uses Sarah Palin herself for her endorsement), that is not because someone pointed out “Mrs. Clinton was in favor of welfare reform and sending kids back to Central American murder capitals to ‘send their parents a message’ and called the TPP the ‘gold standard’ and suddenly did an opportunistic 180 against those policies,” or because someone else pointed out “Mr. Sanders has voted for 13 anti-gun-control votes, but only 12 pro-gun-control ones, just to pander to his white rural voters, and he said he was going to meet the Pope but wasn’t, and he does very poorly with African-American voters.”
It’s because your candidate isn’t a good enough candidate to be an effective bystander at a train wreck. Get that. The GOP candidates are ridiculous. Their frontrunner is, in the words of The Economist, “unfit to lead a great political party, let alone America.” Yet the same newspaper warns that “apathy” about Mrs. Clinton from voters “looks bad for Mrs Clinton’s chances in a general election. The Democrats need a big turnout if they are to win a rare third straight victory.” Such worries about voter turnout in November simply aren’t going on because her opponent in the Democratic primaries was critical of her. If Sanders had NEVER run, is anyone seriously claiming that she’d have had MORE Democratic or left-leaning turnout in November? Sanders has been GREAT for our turnout.
This line of reasoning, that there is something Bernie Sanders is going to say that is going to “hurt” Mrs. Clinton, seems reasonable on the face of it—if one views a political campaign as nothing but a propaganda campaign, then any message that emerges from that propaganda war can hurt, just like any other weapon can hurt. However, that is belied by the very same Hillary supporters’ OTHER rhetoric: do Hillary supporters, and even Hillary herself, not point out (and correctly, at that) that she hasn’t been mortally wounded by any of the scandals (many of which, such as Benghazi, I view as trumped-up bullshit) that people have brought up?
If, on the other hand, something is said that is NOT a trumped-up scandal, but it a legitimate policy disagreement from an opponent who may not be likely to win the nomination (I NEVER thought he was likely to), but still has the right to campaign through June, then that SHOULD NOT BE AGAINST ANYONE’S RULES. Also, such perfectly reasonable, factually well-founded criticisms are NOT likely to “hurt us in November.” Any voter capable of such reasoning will also be capable of reasoning against the clowns in the GOP.
This line of argument seems simply to be an attempt to strip Bernie of contrasting his own record and proposed policies with those of Hillary. We SHOULD make such a contrast. If it weakens her that much for November, then I’m afraid you have simply forwarded too weak a candidate. Gore’s loss in 2000 was HIS fault, not Nader’s, nor Nader’s 3 million voters. We shouldn’t create a hothouse to protect our candidates from challenges. We need to breed stronger candidates instead, who are able to take that heat.