Hillary Clinton vs Bernie Sanders, Round Two
Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanderes 1993 [Public Domain]
OK, then. Hillary Clinton is the subject of a new documentary that will air on Hulu. And, well, let’s just say she doesn’t like Bernie Sanders or his supporters.
In the doc, you’re brutally honest on Sanders: “He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him, nobody wants to work with him, he got nothing done. He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it.” That assessment still hold?
Yes, it does.
If he gets the nomination, will you endorse and campaign for him?
I’m not going to go there yet. We’re still in a very vigorous primary season. I will say, however, that it’s not only him, it’s the culture around him. It’s his leadership team. It’s his prominent supporters. It’s his online Bernie Bros and their relentless attacks on lots of his competitors, particularly the women. And I really hope people are paying attention to that because it should be worrisome that he has permitted this culture — not only permitted, [he] seems to really be very much supporting it. And I don’t think we want to go down that road again where you campaign by insult and attack and maybe you try to get some distance from it, but you either don’t know what your campaign and supporters are doing or you’re just giving them a wink and you want them to go after Kamala [Harris] or after Elizabeth [Warren]. I think that that’s a pattern that people should take into account when they make their decisions.
The whole excerpt is just an exercise in what we’ve seen from Clinton since November 9, 2016: Bitterness, anger, blaming everyone for her loss. The problem with it is not that she’s necessarily wrong to feel that way, it’s that she’s doing this in the middle of a contentious primary she isn’t a part of.
There are many ways to go with this, but I’m not going to waste too much digital ink on a controversy that will fade by next week. But as with the Warren-Bernie spat, it’s a sign that we are moving toward a bitter fight between the populist wing of the party and the establishment wing. Whether that makes the eventual nominee weaker or stronger will have to be seen.
Whoever came up with “Bernie Bros” will have a job in political campaigning for the rest of their life, because that was amazingly effective.Report
This one was especially effective, but it’s also become a constant on the left: Bernie Bros, Brocialists, “Dude-bros”, “finance bros”, “tech bros”, etc. You start thinking you wouldn’t want to be the brother of some of these people.Report
I always have trouble keeping track of which gender-based slurs mark one as a troglodyte and likely fascist, and which gender-based slurs mark one as enlightened.Report
On Brodom:
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It could be her being bitter about 2016. Or it could just be that she, quite reasonably, sees Sanders and his toxic ideology and cult of personality as a threat to both the Democratic Party and the country.Report
If the Establishment Wing wants a Democrat in the White House they will need to suck it up. Their neoliberal economic policies are partly to blame for the current state of affairs, as is their disdane for under 30 voters and their issues. Plus I find it rich and yet infuriating that Sec. Clinton would characterize Bernie as a career politican when she’s made a career of politics.Report
The theory that the Clintons wanted Trump to win becomes a hair more credible.Report
I don’t think that’s true. I just think that Hilary is an exceptionally bad politician and her inability to gracefully bow out is a detriment to the party. How big of a detriment is unclear (maybe it doesn’t matter at all) but she is the last thing anyone should be talking about. And yet here we are.Report
I was prematurely anti-Hillary so I’m not sure that my perspective is *THAT* useful here.
But, seriously, what the hell? What the hell?Report
I think there is a certain subset of voter that finds revisiting her plight cathartic and that HRC bathes in that without regard for how it looks to other audiences.
I have my priors on her as well but I think it’s more than fair to wonder who, even among HRC fans, was asking for this.Report
“Cui Bono?” is one of those things that we used to ask.
So let’s ask it here and look at the nature of the benefit: Clinton benefits because it feels good to get crap off of your chest. Biden, Warren, maybe Buttigeig kinda benefit. Ironically, Bernie might benefit too. Trump may benefit as well because chaos among the Dems benefits him.
The question is where Clinton stopped caring. Did she only care about her own benefit that comes from airing out her dirty laundry without thinking about anything beyond that? Or did she also guess about who else would benefit from letting this air out?Report
I think it was the moment when polls came out showing Sanders ahead of Biden, with Warren still in a tie for third with everyone else and Harris out of the race. That’s the moment we can point to and say “this is when Hillary Clinton realized that she’d never be able to play Everyone’s Second Choice and use that to become President.”Report
If that’s really what’s happening it’s further illustration she’s learned nothing. The attack on Sanders supporters is similar to the whole ‘deplorables’ miscalculation.
You attack your opponent, not your opponents supporters. I can see how you might convince yourself otherwise when its the Republican but insulting a faction of actual voters you want to stick with your own side? Nuts.Report
“You attack your opponent, not your opponents supporters”
Yep… that’s the best part.
Its just so telling on so many levels.Report
Just to offer a different perspective with the same conclusion –
If Hillary had been gracious and magnanimous in defeat she would have won over a lot of people like me who would have been more kindly disposed to Democrats as a result. I didn’t vote for her (voted Johnson) because I thought she had a certain set of personality characteristics that made her a lot more like Trump than anyone really cared to admit. Personal vendettas, not able to let anything go, using her position for her own gratification/to continue grudges, speaking without thinking about the consequences or even understanding that there WERE consequences, that kind of thing.
Her doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on this stuff since the election has simply brought it home to me that she was exactly the person I perceived her to be, petty and small minded and self-obsessed, possibly even worse since she’s not willing to shut her damn mouth long enough to let a)Trump hang himself by being visibly worse than her and b)support the Democratic Party as a whole by being a good loser. Nope, she can’t do either, because she’s a personal vendetta person, always has been.
All she’s done time and again is prove to me the Democrats are rotten since they were telling me how great she was when I can see with my own two eyes she isn’t. So it even undermines the present messaging of the Dems in which I am supposed to trust them to effectively govern my “half'” of the country because this person who cannot let anything go was their standard bearer.
She is hurting the Dems badly with this.Report
Therefore, by this logic, you can never again vote for any Republican.Report
#standingovationReport
Agreed 100% Kristin. I voted for Clinton because I thought Trump was worse but I did it with my eyes open.Report
Epic comment.Report
The most disliked Presidential nominee in US history (other than Trump) criticizes a candidate for … being disliked? That’s Hillary in a nutshell. She’s just an awful politician. Transparently petty, mean-spirited, and devoid of self-awareness.Report
I can understand re-litigating 2016 throughout 2017. Hell, through 2018.
Allow me to channel John Oliver and say “It’s 2020!”Report
“Transparently petty, mean-spirited, and devoid of self-awareness.”
Here in America, we call that Presidential Material.Report
The most pragmatic difference I can think of is when those attributes get a candidate over the top and when they threaten to cause defection in a shaky coalition. Like, I’m Bernie curious, even if I have my issues with him and I doubt he’d in a million years win.
But I assume whoever gets the nomination will want his voters in the general, right? Even the corners that deride him and his supporters?
Why wouldn’t they? Or have we decided that Bernie fans are expendable, even in MI or WI?Report
I’m just riffing off the idea that those qualities are objectively evidence of being an “awful politician”.
Maybe they are, when the voting base wants someone who is broad minded, good hearted, and self aware.
But when the voting base wants someone who is transparently petty, mean-spirited, and devoid of self-awareness then they become assets.Report
On that I don’t disagree with you. The more apt criticism of HRC (at least in the horse race sort of way) is tone deafness.Report
HRC: Hate the Sin and the Sinner a little bit more.Report
Add this dry, aged beef to the Harris postmortems on the pile of reasons why Democrats will finish 2020 no closer to nominating a woman. Every failure, every campaign miscalculation and inability to pull together a winning coalition – gets wedged in to a just-so story about misogyny and “bros.”
Aside from being self-flattering and impossible-to-disprove armor against responsibility, this thinking helps you learn exactly zero about what to actually do next time. Just like Hillary, the Harris, Warren and Klobuchar teams will pack it in after the primaries, confident in the knowledge that they did nothing wrong, having gained nothing from the experience.Report
My Republican self looks at this spat as cancer doing battle with a flesh-eating bacteria. Either one will destroy the party, and the existence of one weakened the patient enough for the other to take hold.Report
As with the Warren-Bernie spat, it’s a sign that we are moving toward a bitter fight between the populist wing of the party and the establishment wing.
I’m not following. Warren and Sanders are both from the populist wing.
Also, I want to draw attention to the fact that you referred to Warren by her last name and Sanders by his first, and are not the first to do so. There were claims a few years back that referring to Clinton as “Hillary” was sexist, so it’s worth pointing out that the opposite happens, as well.Report