You could say it’s a false dichotomy but let’s pretend that this is the choice presented to you. You stand before the secret tribunal of powerful lizard people that controls the results of every United States presidential election. They tell you that if you want Bernie Sanders to win the election he will have to compromise his principles, at least during the campaign. He’ll have to play dirty. He’ll have to run negative attack ads, he’ll have to play fast and loose with the words that come out of his opponents’ mouths to create a negative impression where a fairer reading would not, he’ll have to promise political favors and appointments behind the scenes in exchange for support from influential people, he’ll have to solicit big corporate dollars.
Or he can stay true to himself and lose.
This is a real choice. Perhaps realer than any other political choice. Sanders’s chances aren’t great to get the Democratic nomination and it has nothing to do with superdelegates or corruption. No doubt his supporters are among the most passionate the process has ever seen. But passion doesn’t always beat simple numbers. He just doesn’t have the votes.
If voters vote as state-by-state polling suggests they will, Clinton could roughly double her current advantage over Sanders and wind up winning the nomination by 400 to 500 pledged delegates.
These are the results of the Democratic primary and caucusing system which depends very much on the will of the people. We vote in those systems to choose who we want to be the Democratic nominee. Sanders, for whatever reason, hasn’t appealed to enough people or hasn’t convinced him he can win in the general election.
Would Sanders be in a better spot if he had raised spent more money? If PACs had done more work for him? In comparison to Hillary Clinton he’s far behind on both measures.
Looking at the chart below for Sanders, it paints a pretty clear picture of his campaign and his principles. The PAC spending is negligible. You can pretty much ignore it completely. The vast majority of his funds are individual contributions and small ones at that coming in at 66%.
Compare that to Hillary Clinton. Only 18% are from small donors and she definitely has some PACs working for her cause. She takes the money wherever it comes from.
If you’re of the belief that campaign spending makes a difference you should be thinking that Bernie has crippled his own campaign.
And to what end?
Sanders and his supporters have a lot of things they’d like to see changed. But to be able to effect that change they first need to win. If Sanders isn’t elected, what exactly is he going to do to rein in Wall Street or raise the minimum wage or expand health care coverage? How will he do anything? Those changes are done politically and in politics you must wield political power. The voters do it by voting for a politician they think will work for their interests. What happens if that politician is no longer a politician?
Try to imagine you’re a progressive candidate in rural country, say, somewhere in Kentucky or Tennessee. You personally think guns should be more tightly regulated. You personally think gay marriage is a basic Constitutional right. But you think the biggest issue confronting your potential constituents is poverty, economic inequality, and a lack of opportunity. You also know that if you say exactly what you think about guns and gay marriage your chances of winning drop precipitously. Do you keep quiet?
What if someone asks you about them while you’re on the campaign? Do you maintain your honor and your principles and tell them what you think or do you spin and avoid the question? This is different from just not talking about it. Now you must choose between active deception and honesty. If you’re honest you all but drop out of the race. You are essentially finished. And for an issue that you’re not really that concerned about and on which you probably couldn’t change anyway. The cost of your honesty would be the office and the ability to change policies on the issues you did care about like the poverty and economic justice. Is that worth it?
Personally I don’t think it is. And even Sanders understands this calculus. He’s made us of it in answers surrounding his religious beliefs. He is more than likely an atheist. He describes himself as a “secular Jew.” He’s been asked in interviews and town halls about his beliefs.
When late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel asked Sanders in October whether be believes in God and if that matters to the American people, the senator seemed to avoid a direct response: “I am what I am,” he said. “And what I believe in, and what my spirituality is about, is that we’re all in this together.”
A beautiful thought, no doubt. But hardly a direct answer to a simple question. “Do you believe in god?” is a yes or no answer. He gives the answer of a consummate politician and dodges, giving a response which allows the listener to fill in what they want. He knows that being an atheist is about as unpopular as being a socialist in the United States. And he knows it’s not a battle worth fighting when he has bigger fish to fry like economic inequality.
It’s not even hard to rationalize in my opinion. Listening to some of Bernie’s supporters you’d get the impression that Hillary Clinton represents the GOP in all but name. I won’t go into Trump’s flaws but Sanders’s fans surely know them, or at least believe he has them. Both Clinton and Trump appear completely unpalatable to Bernie voters. Bernie’s strategy is not working and by not working he has made it more likely that either Clinton or Trump wins the election this year. In some ways that seems a bit selfish. He holds onto his honor and dignity while the rest of the country suffers under Clinton or Trump.
You might say that Sanders is only doing so well because he’s playing clean. Well…. that might be true but it’s likely not. Despite voters claiming they don’t like attack ads, they are consistently shown to be effective.
“We’re not saying positive ads aren’t good,” Phillips says. “It’s just that negative ads are effective.”
Would Sanders be doing better if he had chosen not to take the high road on Clinton’s emails? It might be her biggest weakness. It’s possible that she might actually face criminal charges. What happens in the general election if she becomes embroiled in an actual investigation and trial? Do Democrats just give up and give the election to the Republicans, do we get a do-over and run Sanders as the runner-up? Even if he doesn’t want to call her an outright criminal he could have torched Hillary on the fact that she’s just too volatile and too risky to be the nominee.
Some of his advisers and allies have been pushing for this and he has rebuffed them, mostly.
[Sanders] gave [Clinton] a pass on her use of private email as secretary of state, even though some allies wanted him to exploit it. And he insisted on devoting time to his job as a senator from Vermont last year rather than matching Mrs. Clinton’s all-out effort to capture the nomination. Some advisers now say that if he had campaigned more in Iowa, he might have avoided his critical loss there.
But he’s not even quite as principled as his supporters claim.
Despite the urging of some advisers, Mr. Sanders refused last fall and early winter to criticize Mrs. Clinton over her $675,000 in speaking fees from Goldman Sachs, an issue that he now targets almost daily.
He’s willing to compromise his principles, just not too much. One has to wonder though, on why he might bother with that strategy? If he stuck to his guns the entire way at least he’d be able to lay claim to that. Now he’s tainted, albeit slightly, and is still looking like he’ll lose. Might as well go whole hog, in for a penny in for a pound.
Let’s say that Sanders, somehow, comes up with the nomination and then wins the general election. How will he accomplish his big goals? There is and will be monstrous opposition to his policy agenda. We saw that tough pills Obama had to swallow in order to get his Affordable Care Act passed. Thus far, that is the nature of doing business in Washington. Call it compromising, call it selling out, it makes no difference. Is Sanders willing to do that? Is he willing to give 40% to get the 60% he wants?
His plan, ostensibly, is to get his voters to keep the pressure on senators and representatives to push through his legislative agenda. But that’s a new strategy which hasn’t yet been shown to work. Moreover it depends on the voters continuing to be engaged for at least Sanders’s first full term. American voter apathy is infamous so that seems unlikely to say the least. Besides, they’d have to carry through on their implied threat: “Vote for Bernie’s proposals or we’re replacing you.” Congressional representatives typically have a 90% incumbency rate. I don’t see that changing soon.
When Hillary Clinton’s supporters talk about her practicality and feasibility this is what they mean. She’s willing to do what it takes to win, even if those “its” are less than honest. But at the end of the day she’s winning. It may not inspire as much devotion and passion as Bernie Sanders does but I imagine that will be small comfort if Hillary continues to win and Sanders continues to lose.
Come November, Sanders’s followers might wonder was it worth it?
Ad Astra 