The Seattle Stranger, an alternative newspaper best known for its editorial director Dan Savage, has endorsed both Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton for the Democratic nomination for President. The current headline on the website is “Support the Real Progressive.” Clicking on it yields a choice: are you between 18 and 30, or 31 and 118? The former leads to an endorsement of Bernie, the latter to an endorsement of Hillary (try both links). Both endorsements include positive descriptions of the candidate, as well as half-joking criticisms of the other. Explaining the decision, Savage writes
We wanted to drive home an important message about this year's Democratic contest: a good, affirmative case can be made for either of these candidates. (You really can't say that about any of the douchebags running for the GOP nomination.) So you can feel good about supporting whichever one gets the nomination. (That's why this week's spineline reads, "DON'T BE AN IDIOT: VOTE FOR THE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE THIS NOVEMBER.")
I couldn’t agree more. From the endorsement of Hillary:
You must caucus for Hillary.
At a time when the American right is captivated by a dangerous, racist demagogue with zero political experience, Hillary Rodham Clinton is the only Democratic candidate with the ability to take him down and the backing of a diverse coalition that actually looks like the America that Donald Trump wants to deport, degrade, and dismiss.
Hillary is a walking refutation of Trumpism: a woman who has beat back bullies of all kinds over more than four decades of public service; a determined progressive whose first job out of law school was doing civil rights work for the Children's Defense Fund (the organization's founder, Marian Wright Edelman, is supporting her 2016 candidacy); an experienced leader who has fought for liberal ideals as first lady, US senator, and secretary of state
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Hillary's experience and depth of knowledge will allow her to wipe the debate floor with Donald Trump's orange face. She knows how to grind conservatives down to the bitter nubs of rage and resentment that they now represent. And despite what you may have heard, Hillary wants to overturn Citizens United, get us to health-care coverage for all, and block Keystone.
From the endorsement of Bernie:
You must caucus for Bernie.
Only Bernie Sanders can stand up to Donald Trump on Trump's terms and defeat him. Americans left, right, and center are saying, "You're right, everything is fucked!" The sense of how fucked it is drives disenfranchised whites to Trump and disenfranchised millennials to Bernie. Even suburban soccer moms are driving around with 99-percent bumper stickers on their Subarus, watching their kids graduate from expensive colleges into functional poverty.
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Sanders, however, has spent the last quarter century taking positions the country has since caught up with and agreed with him on: voting against war in Iraq, voting against the Patriot Act, voting against the erosion of the Glass-Steagall Act (bank regulation), voting against NAFTA (which even Hillary now disavows). Eighteen years before Hillary decided it was no longer politically expedient to deny gay people rights, Sanders decried a Republican congressman for dissing "homos in the military." Surprisingly even to us, he's effective at forming left-right coalitions, too—like when he passed amendments limiting bailout fund standards to protect American workers and forcing white-collar criminals to notify victims who are eligible for restitution
Dan Savage on the Seattle Times endorsement of Sanders:
Does it feel good to finally be to the right of those hippies at the Seattle Times?
We talked about the Seattle Times endorsement of Bernie Sanders—their surprise, out-of-left-field Sanders endorsement—during SECB meetings. It's no secret that Republicans want Bernie Sanders to get the Dem nomination; it's also no secret that the Seattle Times almost always endorses Republican candidates. Rather than evidence of some newfound progressivism at the Seattle Times, we saw their Sanders endorsement as a dirty trick—an effort to help the candidate the GOP would like to run against in the general election. The Seattle Times has one agenda, and one agenda only, and that's slashing taxes—particularly the estate tax. So what seems likelier: the Seattle Times pulled a complete 180 on the issue they care most about.—and they want to see Frank Blethen's taxes go way, way up—or they're bullshitting. Our money is on the latter.