“An Uncertain Record In Three Major Policy Areas”: Bernie Sanders Is Not Nearly As Progressive As You Think He Is
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) has been doing some serious sub-tweeting about Hillary Clinton.
Following her ever-so-narrow win in Iowa, Clinton touted her bona fides as a “progressive who gets things done,” much to Sanders’ distaste. “Most progressives I know were against the war in Iraq,” Sanders tweeted, without specifically naming Clinton. “One of the worst foreign policy blunders in the history of the United States.”
Indeed, measured against Clinton, Sanders is right to claim the mantle of progressivism. The former secretary of state is (and should be) dogged by her close and profitable ties to Wall Street and big business, and her foreign policy is consistently hawkish in a style Dick Cheney would admire.
But evaluated on the basis of his own lengthy record, Sanders is not as progressive as he makes himself out to be on at least three big issues: guns, criminal justice reform, and — despite the Iraq vote — foreign policy.
Sanders’ mixed history on guns is a chink in his progressive armor that Clinton aims at whenever she has the chance. “If we’re going to go into labels, I don’t think it was particularly progressive to vote against the Brady Bill five times,” she said at the latest debate. “I don’t think it was progressive to vote to give gun makers and sellers immunity.”
Sanders often sounds like a gun control hardliner. “The president is right: Condolences are not enough,” he said after a shooting this past fall. “We’ve got to do something … We need sensible gun control legislation.” But Clinton’s claims are still basically accurate. Per this Politifact tally of Sanders’ significant gun votes in Congress, he backs additional control about half the time, albeit with a trend toward more gun regulation in recent years. Sanders’ staff has tried to explain his comparative conservatism here as part and parcel of representing Vermont, a left-wing but gun-friendly state, but either way, his is hardly a super-progressive record on guns.
Then there’s criminal justice reform, an issue which has netted Sanders the endorsement of several well-known figures in the Black Lives Matter movement. Speaking in New Hampshire the same day as the subtweets, Sanders vowed, “There will be no president who will fight harder to end institutional racism” than he will.
“We have got to reform a very, very broken criminal justice system,” he added. “It breaks my heart, and I know it breaks the hearts of millions of people in this country, to see videos on television of unarmed people, often African-Americans, shot by police. That has got to end.”
The rhetoric is right. But Sanders’ record says otherwise.
For instance, Sanders sounded a similar note back in April 1994, decrying America’s ballooning prison population and its ties to poverty. But just one week later, he voted to pass the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994, a centerpiece of Bill Clinton’s “tough on crime” shtick, which, among other things, mandated a life sentence for anyone convicted of three drug crimes; expanded the list of death penalty crimes; lowered the age at which a juvenile could be tried as an adult to just 13; and appropriated billions to expand the prison system and hire 100,000 new police officers.
That’s the biggest blot on Sanders’ criminal justice record, but it’s not the only one. In 1995, he voted against a measure which would have prohibited police acquisition of tanks and armored vehicles like those he critiqued in Ferguson. Likewise, in 1998, Sanders prioritized gun control over prison reform and voted for mandatory minimum sentences for crimes where the offender carried, brandished, and/or fired a gun. The gun in question doesn’t have to be used for the criminal act, so, for example, a nonviolent crime like smoking pot while carrying a legally owned weapon would trigger the mandatory minimum.
Now that criminal justice reform is en vogue, Sanders has shifted — but it’s an uncomfortable fit. His responses to Ferguson highlighted poverty more than police brutality; and the bill to ban private federal prisons he introduced this past fall had a clearer connection to his socialist economic policies than anything else. Alex Friedmann of the Human Rights Defense Center, whom Sanders consulted in crafting the proposal, says, “It appears to be more for political purposes than to actually address the many problems in our criminal justice system.”
Finally, foreign policy. Sanders regularly touts his vote against invading Iraq in 2003, and that is unquestionably to his credit. But then there’s the rest of his record on matters of war and peace, which figures heavily into the wariness many actual socialists maintain toward Sanders’ campaign.
As Stephen M. Walt writes at Foreign Policy, Sanders is hardly “a reflexive dove.” He intends to retain President Obama’s drone program if elected. He voted in favor of Clinton’s pet intervention in Libya, in favor of the interminable war in Afghanistan, and even in favor of multiple funding measures to maintain the war in Iraq — a repeated “yes” to bankrolling the very conflict he so often boasts of opposing.
Sanders also speaks enthusiastically of coalition-based wars. “I would say that the key doctrine of the Sanders administration would be no, we cannot continue to do it alone; we need to work in coalition,” he said at the last debate. In practice, though, that doesn’t mean no more wars; it means non-Americans fighting and dying in pursuit of American goals.
Writing at the socialist Jacobin Magazine, Paul Heideman contends that though “Sanders is willing to criticize many of the most egregious over-extensions of American empire” — like the invasion of Iraq — “it seems he has no interest in contesting the American suppression of democracy across the globe.” The candidate cheered King Abdullah II of Jordan for his opposition to ISIS, of which Heideman snarks, “It is never a good look for a socialist to praise a monarch.”
More broadly, it is never a good look for a progressive to have such an uncertain record in three major policy areas. Running against Clinton, Sanders can rightfully lay claim to progressive voters’ support. But they could be forgiven for suspecting he is less one of their own than his tweeting suggests.
By: Bonnie Kristian, The Week, February 9, 2016
“Clinton: I Will Fight For Flint”: The Children Of Flint Are Just As Precious As The Children Of Any Other Part Of America!
It was around the time that the Rev. Kenneth Stewart said he hoped a woman would be the next president that the faithful at Flint’s House of Prayer Missionary Baptist Church stood and cheered.
Maybe the crowd was more boisterous because the people at the church knew that a possible future president was in the building Sunday morning — Madame Secretary, Stewart called her. But it is difficult to imagine the pastor’s soulful performance as anything but normal for a Baptist church in a town failed by its leaders and virtually forgotten by the country until this recent tragedy struck.
“I don’t know what kind of crisis you are in … but be not dismayed,” he screamed.
There are few words to properly do justice to what Stewart laid down on Sunday morning. It was beyond powerful. It caused him to sweat profusely and run out of breath following a 15-minute rap in which he scoffed at the water crisis troubling this city of nearly 100,000 — what is a lack of clean drinking water compared to the power of God?
It was a tough act for Hillary Clinton to follow.
Originally billed as a “community meeting,” as Stewart’s sermon went on it became clear that Clinton would simply be addressing the congregation from the pastor’s pulpit.
Prepared to tell Flint exactly what it wanted to hear, she performed well.
“The time for action is now.”
“One child with lead poisoning is one child too many.”
“It’s not just the infrastructure, it is a problem for human beings.”
Expand Head Start, and support home nurse programs, more money for special education — “All things that address the problems that lead poisoning can cause.”
Clinton tied in her experience as a senator for New York dealing with lead poisoning there — of the paint chip variety — and she made a promise.
“I will fight for you in Flint no matter how long it takes,” she said, garnering one of the louder applause breaks of her remarks.
With her own sermon stretching on, Clinton was looked on by many in Stewart’s church as a second savior. And without stepping too far into the mannerisms and voice inflections of a black preacher, she was more than willing to play that role.
“If what had happened in Gross Pointe, or Bloomfield Hills,” she said in reference to two mostly white, wealthy communities outside of Detroit, “I think we all know we would have had a solution yesterday.”
“The children of Flint are just as precious as the children of any other part of America!”
And the crowd cheered.
Clinton may have served as Flint’s savior on Sunday, but when she leaves the people here will be on their own again, looking to themselves or the original messiah to watch over them and fix this mess.
But having no safe drinking water is the weakest of challenges for the faithful, Stewart reminded his followers. And if you were in the purple pews of his church on Sunday, damned if you didn’t believe him.
“While you tryin’ to figure it out, God already done worked it out!” he proclaimed.
“If a city’s water supply died, can it live again?” he asked.
The answer is yes, because it is always yes as long as you recognize your lord and savior Jesus Christ. Faith cures all. It absolves sin, redeems the sinner, makes pure the wicked, cures the sick, and provides answers when they are in short supply, according to Stewart. Flint’s leaders failed its people, but what the government can’t do, the church and the community can.
Clearly a committed Clinton supporter, Stewart and many in the crowd believe she can help too.
Clinton, Stewart said, is “The one that we been waitin’ on.”
By: Justine Glawe, The Daily Beast, February 7, 2016
“It All Comes Down To Electability”: The Most Important Battle In Terms Of Who Will Actually Prevail
If you’re trying to choose between two candidates to represent the Democratic Party as their presidential nominee, there are some filters you can use to help you decide. I’ll just list out a few of them.
1. Is one more electable than the other?
a. because of their identity (region/age/gender/religion/race/ethnicity/sexual preference)
b. because of their record
c. because of their proposals
d. because of their ability/inability to unite the party
e. because of their ability/willingness to raise money
f. because of their potential to bring in new voters/get crossover votes
g. because of their willingness to play hardball and do whatever it takes
h. because their opponent will do more to energize the opposition?
2. Does one’s proposals and policies align more with your values than the other?
3. Does one have more relevant experiences than the other?
a. because they’ve had executive, cabinet level, or other managerial responsibilities, or more of them
b. because one has been at the center of power within the party for a long time and the other hasn’t
c. because one has a broader and more pertinent base of knowledge?
4. Does one seem to have better judgment than the other?
a. if they’ve differed on any big, contentious issues, who turned out to be right, or more nearly so?
b. has one ever made a really big error or offered advice that could have been catastrophic?
c. does either show a stronger tendency to learn from their mistakes?
5. How do you evaluate their moral character?
a. do they have a religious belief system that troubles you?
b. have they committed any serious ethical lapses?
c. are they consistent over time, when appropriate, or do they shift with the winds?
d. do you trust them to do what they say?
e. how honest do you think they are? What’s your estimate of their core integrity?
6. Can they govern?
a. have they governed effectively in the past, on any level?
b. do they understand how Congress works, and also how to get big, difficult bills through Congress?
c. how are their relationships with the media and on Capitol Hill?
d. what kind of powerful enemies and friends do they have?
7. Are their proposals and policies sound?
a. Irrespective of whether they can be implemented, do their policies make sense?
b. Are their policies aspirational or pragmatic and designed with a mind to a difficult Congress
c. How do you feel about their foreign policies, or the things they can do using executive power alone?
8. Finally, does either have a theory of the case for how the Democrats can break the deadlock in Congress and win back majorities on the local, state and federal level?
I think, if you’re honest, when you apply this test to Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders, you’ll see that they each “win” or look better on a lot of questions and “lose” or look worse on a lot, too.
If you’re like me, it’s almost split down the middle.
But there’s a big question in here, and it’s the first. Is one candidate more electable than the other?
If Hillary Clinton wins that argument, she’ll win the nomination easily. And, while this could change as more results come in during the primary or other shoes drop related to the email investigation, at the moment Clinton seems to have the better argument.
Sanders has an argument, too. But it’s much more theoretical. He says he can reshape the electorate by inspiring masses of new voters to participate and also by dominating among the youth vote in a way that Clinton cannot. If he keeps winning 80% of the under-30 vote in the more diverse states to come, we may have to start taking his theory very seriously. But, if he can’t convince people that he can actually win, all the areas where he’s strong look much less important.
In a real way, this battle over whether Sanders can or cannot win is the most important battle between these two candidates in terms of who will actually prevail. So, we should expect them to fight ferociously over this question. Fortunately, it will eventually become less of a he said/she said argument. If Sanders wins primaries by bringing out masses of new voters, winning crossovers and independents, and dominating among the youth vote, he’ll start to win people over to his theory of the case. If he can’t do that, and soon, the Democratic voters will go with what they see as the safer bet.
By: Martin Longman, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 8, 2016
“Agent Of (Message) Change”: Hillary Clinton Went After Bernie Sanders’ Strengths In New Hampshire
Would it be impolitic (this being a Democratic debate and all) to say that Hillary Clinton came out with guns blazing? She may be on course to a Granite State thrashing, but she showed up at the University of New Hampshire loaded for Bern.
She tempered a broad hug of Sanders’ liberalism (“We have a vigorous agreement here,” she said at one point when discussing financial reform) with the assertion that she is better positioned to advance that agenda.
Beyond that, go through the issues that have animated the Democratic race recently or are central to the Sanders case: Is he running a more inspiring campaign? Only because it’s a more fantastical one: “Let’s go down a path where we can actually tell people what we will do,” she said. “A progressive is someone who makes progress.” (That’s better phraseology, by the way, than the “progressive with results” formulation she had been using, which sounded like a rip-off of George W. Bush’s “reformer with results” message from 2000.)
And is she indeed a real progressive? She had a whole soliloquy prepared in answer: “I have heard Senator Sanders’ comments, and it’s really caused me to wonder who is left in the progressive wing of the Democratic Party,” Clinton said. “Under his definition, President Obama is not progressive because he took donations from Wall Street.” Ditto Joe Biden (Keystone XL) and the late Sen. Paul Wellstone of Minnesota (Defense of Marriage Act). Then a pivot to Sanders’ progressive weak underbelly: “I don’t think it was particularly progressive to vote against the Brady [gun control] bill five times.”
Bonus points to moderator Chuck Todd for pressing Sanders on whether President Barack Obama is a progressive; the Vermonter’s answer seemed to be that Obama is progressive despite failing some litmus tests because he’s actually made progress. (Which is rather like the argument that Clinton is making.)
Is she in the establishment? Hell no – she’s a woman running for president which by definition means she’s not establishment. This answer was glib if, as Ezra Klein noted, nonsensical:
If Clinton is not part of the establishment than there is no such thing as the establishment. And there is such a thing as the establishment
— Ezra Klein (@ezraklein) February 5, 2016
Is she part of the corporate-money-corruption problem that is central to Sanders’ political message? That’s a “very artful smear,” an “insinuation unworthy” of the Vermont progressive, she fumed.
Did she vote for the Iraq War while he voted against it? “We did differ,” she said. “A vote in 2002 is not a plan to defeat [the Islamic State group].”
Indeed foreign policy was easily Sanders’ weakest portion of the evening. A question about Afghanistan sent him on a verbal tour through Syria, Iraq, Jordan and the battle with the Islamic State group, prompting Todd to follow up: “Can you address a question on Afghanistan?”
Saying we need allies is not foreign policy. Example: We can’t get Sunni allies w/o taking on Iran. What does Sanders suggest?
— Walter Russell Mead (@wrmead) February 5, 2016
I hated the Iraq War as much as anyone, but “I made the right call on a vote 13 years ago” is really not a foreign policy vision for now.
— Paul Waldman (@paulwaldman1) February 5, 2016
If there’s one takeaway from this debate it is that Sanders is woefully unprepared, on foreign policy, to be president
— Michael Cohen (@speechboy71) February 5, 2016
For his part Sanders was standard-operating-Bernie. It’s a compelling message but it’s limited and he did little to address the arguments against it. Take the entirety of his agenda: How will he get something passed? “No, you just can’t negotiate with [Senate Republican Leader] Mitch McConnell,” Sanders said. “Mitch is gonna have to look out the window and see a whole lot of people saying, ‘Mitch, stop representing the billionaire class. Start listening to working families.'” The revolution will come and Mitch McConnell will cave.
Sanders believes a sufficiently large crowd outside McConnell’s window would make him support campaign finance reform. I do not.
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) February 5, 2016
Chait’s right; Sanders is basing his would-be presidency on the kind of tea party thinking that informed Ted Cruz and the shutdown crew. And it won’t work any better for the left than it did the right.
By: Robert Schlesinger, Managing Editor for Opinion, U.S. News & World Report, February 5, 2016
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