The Sanders Play (Part 2---Infinitely Better Edition)

Results of the Democratic Primary as of 11 April 2016 . Clinton counties are blue, Sanders are green. From New York Times.

Up until recently the Democratic Presidential Primary this year has been inherently less interesting to me than the Republican one. This is mostly because the insurgent candidate (Sanders) has had much less of a shot at winning.

Partly this is because the Democrats are a cycle or two behind the Republicans in terms of the revolt of their base and the disintegration of the Party Establishment. Until recently the Sanders movement has seemed more a like a traditional "sheepdog" phenomenon (see The Sanders Play).

But lately Sanders seems tantalizingly close to getting to the Promised Land. His followers sense it is within reach, and thus they pushing onward with all their might. Many feel they have a historic opportunity not only to take over the Party, but to reshape America and the world on a grand scale. This is the hour of history to do it. They are full of ideas of things they are eager to change.

The problems Sanders faces going forward:

1. He got off to a slow start in the committed delegate count because of lopsided early wins by Hillary (mainly in the South), and now he has to make up a bunch of ground with lopsided wins the other direction. Unfortunately for him, the Democrats don't have winner-take-all primaries like the Republicans. The delegates in the state contests are awarded in a proportional distribution all the way to the end. This makes it hard for anyone to pull away, but it also makes it hard for anyone to catch up.  Sanders recently narrowed the gap substantially, mainly because a blow out win in Washington State. But outside of Oregon, he is not likely to have that scale of landslide victory in most of the states ahead, even if he continues his win streak against Hillary. Thus unless Hillary collapses completely, he is likely to keep creeping closer in the delegate count but only very slowly making up ground over the coming weeks.

2. Even if he does overtake Hillary in pledged delegates (say by winning big in California and other states on June 7), he will certainly not have enough delegates to get the nomination by an outright majority in the convention in July. Neither will Hillary, of course, but she would be able to do so with her superdelegates. Without a switch of huge numbers of them from her to him, she will still get the nomination. This large-scale switch is unlikely to happen for several reasons, not the least of which is that the Party owes Hillary for almost exactly the reverse scenario in 2008.

3. Hillary has nothing to lose in fighting, in that she knows that in the end the vast majority of the passionate Sanders voters will suck it up and vote for her. Most will do so with great enthusiasm by November, because they will see too much at stake in letting the Republicans win the White House. She is, after all, an infinitely better choice than anyone in the GOP. Among other things, Hillary can actually promise to give them pretty much everything they want in the area of social justice, etc. This costs her nothing to promise and even to deliver, and for a great many Democrats, this is all they need. This part of the Democratic platform is not really in conflict with the Establishment program and oftentimes quite in line with it. She can speak the rhetoric of social justice with the best of them without even disbelieving it. Moreover, she knows how the winds blow, and she updates her opinions in the correct way over time that Progressives admire. She will be on top of the social justice issues that haven't yet arrived. She can discard any previous inconvenient position, and no Progressive will hold it against her. She is one of the best ever at this.

As I've said, Sanders' people don't want to overthrow the Establishment. They want to infiltrate it, take it over, and steer it for good, as they see it. They want to purge it of the bad people. The fact that Hillary is an insider is not a terrible thing to them in itself.  It's actually useful in many ways. She has power, and she can deliver on many things.

Part of her problem has been that the Progressives expect their champion lately to have a certain economic rhetoric. The Sanders people want a candidate who will criticize Wall Street, etc., and essentially promise to make the rich pay their taxes, among other things. The ones that care about the TPP want her to pretend to be against it for a while (and then she can change her mind again because it became a "fair process" under her leadership). [The TPP  is an issue on which the Establishment simply cannot compromise.]

But this is a style of rhetoric on which Hillary simply cannot deliver because of her background and history. It would be too awkward for her. She looks awful doing it, even if her backers gave her carte blanche to trash talk them. No one believes her on this.

But as hopeless as it seems, there is an excellent and easy way for Hillary to make this type of populist economic rhetoric part of her campaign in the general election, and still appear very genuine.

She can recapture nearly all of the Sanders support. She just needs a strong VP surrogate out on the trail to give these" Sanders" kinds of speeches, and to stir these types of large crowds.  She needs someone on her ticket who speaks of Revolution but also has a track record of working within the Establishment to achieve goals. The solution is simple:

It began at the Moda Center...

The Clinton-Sanders ticket will make history---part female, part socialist, part Jewish---from New York and Vermont, and heavy on the New York part. It could be, as the song says, a Wonderful World.

Would Sanders accept? How could he not? Would he rather see the VP slot go to someone else, and lose the bully pulpit at this historic comment? Would not all his supporters agree that it is infinitely better than his not being VP?

It could certainly be an awkward speech at the Democratic Convention, when Vice Presidential nominee Sanders officially endorses Hillary Clinton as President. But folks will get over it.

Some Sanders people will turn away in disgust, but most won't. The unity ticket will bring nearly all the passionate support of the current Democratic Party coalition (except perhaps Black Lives Matter. The Clintons have a history of throwing the black base to the wolves once their votes are locked down, and it never hurt them before).

Sanders partisans who "fought in the trenches" can feel like their earlier intense efforts paid off. They can look forward with justification to the idea that their champion will have a strong voice in policy in the new Hillary Clinton administration.

In public at least, Clinton is capable of learning how to "feel the Bern." She will embrace the idea of "Uncle Bernie" at her side, and joke that he is there to make sure she she remains honest and on track towards certain types of Progressive goals. Why not? Hillary's got equal pay as an issue, all to herself.

Meanwhile Clinton's actual opinion of Sanders, like so many other things about her and her husband, would be an undiscussed open secret, one which Democrats would know about but would ignore out of convenience, in the way they are used to doing.

Electorally, Sanders on the ticket would completely blunt any Nader-like third party movement that could cost the Democrats critical votes in a close election. It's the strongest Democratic ticket by far against Trump-Kasich or something close to it. That's why it's going to happen. [The intelligent among the Sanders supporters realize that in the end he is probably not going to be on the top of the ticket, so they avoid and openly discourage too much criticism of Hillary Clinton. They don't want to poison well too much for when the inevitable reconciliation must happen.]

On the other hand, Hillary is still acting as if she will have a completely free hand strategically to choose someone like this obscure guy as VP at the convention. He is no doubt part of a general strategy to appeal to a certain segment within the Democratic base. He's an junior Establishment insider-in-the-making (for they must always be planning for the next wave). In her mind, if she chose him, she would be all-but appointing him as future president in the year 2028 or 2032.

If so, she would not want to change such a long-term plan. Her campaign strategy plan is no doubt a collection of the most beautiful PowerPoint presentations ever created by man, woman, or otherwise. Many hours of thought and meetings have been condensed into the wisdom they contain. Moreover, the Establishment is short on new generation talent and needs to grow some heirs ASAP. Biden was a dead-end, almost literally. They can't waste the VP slot on a doofus like Sanders who only leads to bad things. [Not to mention his supporters wouldn't care a whit if she were impeached. They would cheer it on!]

Like all true insiders to the Establishment, Hillary Clinton is brutal of temperament and unforgiving of dissent. By accounts of people who have been around her, including her bodyguards,  she treats her underlings like dirt. That's actually one of the ways insiders know each other, namely by this ability to act like a Pharaoh.

Much more than money, this attitude is what determines class. It comes across as psychopathy, but the elite believe it is a necessary evil, to be this way. To the Establishment, this is the only way to become the kind of person who can concentrate all his or her energies on being a guardian in the global age. Mere mortals, who have undergone the struggle to live a decent life, have too much empathy for people who serve them. They can't cut it as Pharaoh.  One must be bred and trained in this attitude for a long time. In their mind, they make the sacrifice of looking like assholes to us, so that they can keep the world running for us to enjoy. It's the way things have to be.

Statue of Hatshepsut, fifth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty. She was chief wife of Thutmose II and succeeded him to the throne in 1478 BC. Statue on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
By Postdlf from w, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=895004

Sanders' problem is that Hillary is especially thin-skinned, even for a globalist. To her, it matters greatly that he has insulted her. She no doubt hates his guts. She no doubt would decree that he will never be allowed to be an insider, even if he wanted. To her,  it is a sign of bad character that he doesn't want to be an insider.  It means he is uninitiated to the way things really are. It means he's a freakin' rube.

It would be humiliating for her to offer him the slot, when she already has a plan to give it to someone else.

In any case, if he is chosen as her VP or not, his supporters will eventually suck it up and vote for her in November. They will rally to the Progressive Pharaohess.

But will she suck it up at the convention and give her one meaningful vote to the man who could actually give her a fighting chance against Trump/Mr.X in November?

What an election it's going to be!***



***in this or any other scenario of how it actually winds up playing out.