Here’s a roundup of what a Trump/Clinton match-up might look like. Fair warning: it wouldn’t be pretty.
Clinton's southern 'firewall' of support no sure thing come general election
Richard Wolffe
“If it’s Hillary versus Trump, then it’s going to be a matter of fear versus pandering. Donald Trump majors in fear and Hillary Clinton majors in pandering,” said Johnson. [Francys Johnson, state president of the Georgia NAACP]
[snip]
“Hillary Clinton has nearly 100% name recognition among African Americans here, and additionally she enjoys the establishment blessing, which is largely the group that benefitted from her husband’s policies. They rose in affluence and prominence in his administration,” says Francys Johnson, state president of the Georgia NAACP.
“But younger people who came of age during or after his administration have suffered the most from his policies. They gave rise to the prison-industrial complex, the breaking of the safety net in so-called welfare reform, and the conditions that set the stage for a global race to the bottom when it comes to wages in this country, in terms of his free trade agreements, which largely eviscerated the manufacturing economy of this country.”
[snip]
“That doesn’t speak well for a presidential election where we are electing the leader of the free world and setting the tone for the next generation in this country. I am concerned about that. It’s testimony to where we are in politics in this country.”
Thanks, America! Our broken political system is about to give us a terrifying campaign between a vapid huckster and a war hawk
Two corrupt parties and an angry, fearful and ignorant electorate are about to create the worst election ever
Andrew O'Hehir
Thanks for not really paying attention and for misunderstanding pretty much everything and for voting out of fear and incoherent emotion, and for permitting and enabling an engineered, anti-democratic political system. OK, it’s true that the two parties brought this on themselves because they are corrupt and shortsighted and at least one of them is evil. If we’ve learned anything from the 2016 campaign so far, we have learned that a lot of people understand that. One could view that as an encouraging sign, even if the general response has not been entirely rational or constructive. In all honesty, I can sympathize: What have rational or constructive done for us lately?
[snip]
I recognize how maddening it is to skip over the whole part of the primary campaign where actual citizens get to vote in large numbers. But who ever said that was the point? Both major parties engineered their primary processes to avoid a drawn-out ideological battle and create a near-certain nominee by the middle of March, and in both cases the law of unintended consequences has come into play. That brilliant plan has blown up in the faces of the Republican Party leadership, to hilarious effect, although the time for laughter is pretty nearly over. On the Democratic side it is about to work to perfection and yield the long-expected outcome, but even Hillary Clinton supporters may find the aftertaste unpleasant.
The Democratic Party establishment has given up on the policies that would attract disaffected workers.
In a remarkable New York Times story, former Pennsylvania governor Ed Rendell has revealed the strategy of the Hillary Democrats as they face the challenge of Donald Trump:
“For every one of those blue-collar Democrats he picks up, he will lose to Hillary two socially moderate Republicans and independents in suburban Cleveland, suburban Columbus, suburban Cincinnati, suburban Philadelphia, suburban Pittsburgh, places like that,” he said.
In other words, they’re hoping to terrify the moderately conservative into voting for their candidate. Forget having any positive message that might attract disaffected “blue-collar Democrats,” meaning the white working class. The appeal is going to be to the center-right. Forget too the enthusiasm for Bernie Sanders among the young, an appeal based on hope for a better future. As Obama-adviser-turned-Uber-adviser David Plouffe put it in the same article: “Hope and change, not so much. More like hate and castrate.”
Right in the middle of Hillary’s warmed-over-leftovers-of-Bernie’s-platform Super Tuesday speech she gave us a little sneak preview of what a general election speech against Trump would look like:
America is strong when we're all strong. We know we've got work to do. That work, that work is not to make America great again. America never stopped being great. We have to make America whole. We have to fill in what's been hollowed out./link
Yep, you guessed it — a slightly reworded snippet of Trump’s stump speeches before swiftly pivoting back to slinging more Bernie hash.
Speaking of Bernie, let’s get a taste of the real thing:
Hillary Clinton Won Super Tuesday, But Bernie Sanders Won the Future
The millennials have spoken
BY Joel Bleifuss
In the short-term, with Clinton moving closer to the nomination, it looks like we're sitting down to a pretty lean victors banquet. Where is “change” on the menu? Next to “crumbs”?
But in the long-term, who is the real winner? Who has put ideas on the table that herald a future that transcends the status quo? As he has done before, on Super Tuesday, in state after state, Sanders won a majority of Democratic voters under the age of 30. Clinton may yet win the nomination, but the future of the party belongs to Sanders.
The kids in the Sanders’ movement are not clueless dreamers. The harsh realities of employment precarity, debt, low wages, inequality, climate change, etc., have forced young Americans to reassess their circumstances in a cold, harsh light.
If life in America is basically peachy keen, then the small-bore reforms proposed by Clinton and the neoliberal technocrats who helm the Democratic Party make a lot of sense.
If, on the other hand, the status quo is intolerable—as it is for millions of Americans—then what Sanders calls “political revolution” becomes a moral imperative.
Clinton and Sanders offered America’s millennials two futures. They made their choice.