{"id":245524,"date":"2016-05-24T02:52:43","date_gmt":"2016-05-24T02:52:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=245524"},"modified":"2016-05-24T02:52:43","modified_gmt":"2016-05-24T02:52:43","slug":"democratic-party-hardening-clintonsanders-split","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/democratic-party-hardening-clintonsanders-split\/","title":{"rendered":"Democratic Party Is Hardening Over Clinton\/Sanders Split"},"content":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse<\/span><\/p>\n

One of the best-ever news reports I\u2019ve seen on the Democratic Party Presidential contest was Tierney McAffee\u2019s\u00a0\u201c\u00a0BernieOrBust: Why 20 Percent of Sanders Supporters Say They Would Vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton\u201d<\/span><\/a>\u00a0at people.com, the website of People<\/i> magazine \u2014 hardly a place where one would normally expect to find such crackerjack well-researched reporting on politics.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

That article, on May 23rd, summarized several recent polls to estimate the percentage of Sanders supporters who would vote for Trump over Clinton if the election were held today; and the gist of it is actually even more negative for Clinton\u2019s chances than just “20 Percent of Sanders Supporters Say They Would Vote for Donald Trump over Hillary\u00a0Clinton\u201d; that was only the most favorable finding for Clinton; by contrast, the\u00a0NBC\/WSJ poll released on May 23rd<\/span><\/a>\u00a0found “just 66 percent of Democratic primary voters preferring Sanders\u00a0support Clinton in a matchup against Trump (compared with 88\u00a0percent of Clinton primary voters who favor Sanders in a\u00a0hypothetical general-election contest).\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What all of the evidence taken together (and so well-summarized there by McAffee) shows is that both Clinton and Trump are disliked by the American electorate but Sanders is liked by the electorate and is therefore far easier for Clinton\u2019s supporters to vote for on Election Day than Clinton is easy for Sanders\u2019s supporters to vote for on Election Day.<\/span><\/p>\n

Furthermore, an article at Huffington Post, on the same day, May 23rd, by the team of Howard Fineman, Jason Linkins, and Lauren Weber, adds yet further depth to this picture of a substantial percentage of the Sanders electorate who really detest Clinton: the HuffPo team headlined\u00a0“Here\u2019s What Bernie\u00a0Sanders Should Ask\u00a0For At The Convention\u201d<\/span><\/a>, and listed ten recommendations for Sanders, all of which assumed that Sanders\u2019s voters trust what Clinton says, and that they trust the symbolic actions she takes during her campaign, such as to \u201cGIVE BERNIE A SERIOUS ROLE IN THE \u2018VEEPSTAKES\u2019,\u201d and “PRIMETIME SPEECH SLOT,\u201d and “PUT SANDERS IN THE PARTY PLATFORM,\u201d and “WALL STREET PROMISE PART TWO,\u201d and other things which, to the extent Hillary is promising something, just won\u2019t be trusted by Sanders\u2019s voters; and, to the extent Sanders would be agreeing to them (such as to run on the same ticket as she) would turn off Sanders\u2019s voters so hard and so fast that his high net favorable rating would collapse \u2014 he\u2019d suddenly become viewed as having been just a fake during his prior campaign.<\/span><\/p>\n

Nearly all of the hundreds of reader-comments to that piece are from die-hard Clinton voters who say such anti-Sanders things as this one did:<\/span><\/p>\n

While Sanders should get some concessions, giving him too much would\u00a0be an affirmation that his negative behavior enabled him to get his way.\u00a0Giving him a prime time speech may be a mistake considering he hasn’t\u00a0been able to be positive at all about the DNC. It IS the Democratic\u00a0convention after all and a lot of Dems are really mad at Bernie for the\u00a0disruption and negativism that has done nothing but help Trump.<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

The Sanders supporters who were commenting there were more like this:<\/span><\/p>\n

The downticket Dem $ that Hillary is supposedly raising is going directly\u00a0back to DNC, being passed on to Hillary. Kentucky recent FEC filings and\u00a0others show that. . .get informed and research!<\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

In other words: most of the comments were pro-Clinton and anti-Sanders, and many of the rest were pro-Sanders and anti-Clinton. How likely is it that the individuals who posted those two representative comments, just cited, will be anything but enraged<\/i> at being on the same team \u2014 especially the Sanders supporters? How many of them (especially<\/i> of the Sanders voters) will even want to be on the same team<\/i>? Very few. And, as far as whether they\u2019ll even vote<\/i> for Clinton: the mutual hostility is likelier to be building each and every day of the general-election campaign. The disgust that\u2019s felt toward Clinton by many of Sanders\u2019s supporters would only increase, not<\/i> decrease. This isn\u2019t really a Party that\u2019s coming together; it\u2019s one that increasingly will be splitting apart.<\/span><\/p>\n

Such real hostility can\u2019t be eliminated by any of the tactics that the Huffington Post team were recommending.<\/span><\/p>\n

Clinton and Sanders represent very different value-systems: pro<\/i>-aristocracy (respecting Wall Street\u2019s mega-bankers and the corporate executives they represent) on Clinton\u2019s side, and anti<\/i>-aristocracy (respecting Main Street and detesting Wall Street) on Sanders\u2019s. Whereas Clinton is trickle-down Democratic Party, Sanders is the old percolate-up FDR Democratic Party \u2014 something that Bill Clinton with his NAFTA and with his ending FDR\u2019s Glass-Steagall and other Wall Street regulations has ended, and that Hillary has worked even more feverishly than her husband to<\/i> end. Plus, Clinton ended AFDC and sent millions more children into even deeper poverty. Hillary is very strongly trickle-down \u2014 even more so than her husband; Sanders is equally strongly percolate-up<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bill Clinton built the new, Republican, Democratic Party, and Bernie Sanders had tried to restore it to its former FDR Democratic Party. (Meanwhile, of course, the Republican Republican Party has to veer even farther toward the right, in order for its candidates to be able to win their own<\/i> primaries.) That\u2019s a basic difference of values, and when Sanders recognizes and publicly acknowledges that the Clinton-Obama, or Republican, Democratic Party needs to be replaced, he\u2019ll quit it, and all that will remain of it will be the former shell of it, filled with the billion-dollar-plus mega-donations from its beneficiaries, and with the liberal suckers who still buy into it. (The only way to prevent that from happening would be an indictment of Hillary on the emails matter, in which case Sanders would simply be handed the \u2018Democratic\u2019 nomination by the super-delegates, whose primary concern is to protect the Party from electoral catastrophe.)<\/span><\/p>\n

For Sanders to become the leader of a new anti-Republican-Party, anti-Democratic-Party, pro-authentic-democracy political movement, in the United States will be easy, but leading it against the deep and pervasive corruption of today\u2019s American government will be extremely hard, for anyone<\/i> to do. But he just might have to try.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014\u2014<\/span><\/p>\n

Investigative historian Eric Zuesse is the author, most recently, of\u00a0 They\u2019re Not Even Close: The Democratic vs. Republican Economic Records, 1910-2010<\/i><\/span><\/a>,<\/i> and of<\/span> \u00a0<\/i>CHRIST\u2019S VENTRILOQUISTS: The Event that Created Christianity<\/i><\/span><\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Eric Zuesse One of the best-ever news reports I\u2019ve seen on the Democratic Party Presidential contest was Tierney McAffee\u2019s\u00a0\u201c\u00a0BernieOrBust: Why 20 Percent of Sanders Supporters Say They Would Vote for Donald Trump over Hillary Clinton\u201d\u00a0at people.com, the website of People magazine \u2014 hardly a place where one would normally expect to find such crackerjack well-researched […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1254,"featured_media":241846,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[968,30,1036,1035,698,753,804,524,949,754,6257,523,49,40,1024],"class_list":{"0":"post-245524","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news","8":"tag-bernie","9":"tag-big-brother","10":"tag-breaking-news","11":"tag-daily-news","12":"tag-hillary-clinton","13":"tag-police-state","14":"tag-politics-2","15":"tag-russia","16":"tag-sanders","17":"tag-syria","18":"tag-trump","19":"tag-ukraine","20":"tag-usa-news","21":"tag-white-house","22":"tag-ww3"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245524","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1254"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245524"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245524\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245524"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245524"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245524"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}