HARTMANN Decision Time Why Democrats are feeling a different kind of burn this year with Biden BY RAY HARTMANN
I
’m a capitalist who voted for Bernie Sanders in the 2016 Democratic presidential primary. I have no regrets. At the time, I was captivated by Sanders’ passion and idealism, like so many other supporters. Unlike most, I expected he could enact just a fraction of his egalitarian ideals into law (still the case today), but I was good with him moving the needle in the right direction toward a government that had more fairness and compassion.
Also, I didn’t think Hillary Clinton, an establishment candidate, could buck the nation’s tendency to limit political parties to two terms in power. That tradition was broken just once since FDR, in 1988. President Barack Obama, the best of my lifetime, had served eight years. It seemed Clinton lacked the fire to buck history. Turns out, it was more than that. The shrouded sexism factor, which continues to plague women presidential candidates to this day, was worse than most imagined. So were Clinton’s challenges with authenticity and empathy and that awful campaign strategy and even the Monica thing. It’s academic to wonder whether Sanders might have defeated Donald Trump — he would, after all, have been plastered with the false label of “Communist” in breathtaking ways — but it is likely that Bernie and his energized army would have at least shown up in places like Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania, each of which Clinton lost by less than one
percent. This year, though, it’s different. Enough with the ideological struggle. Exorcising Donald Trump from the White House is all that matters. This is about democracy and the rule of law. It’s about a devotee of Russian dictator Vladimir Putin openly craving to be America’s Putin. Trump does so with the open and unapologetic help of Putin, who Trump flattered on the world stage as more credible than U.S. intelligence and law-enforcement agencies after they proved he aided Trump’s election. That’s coming again, to a polling place near you. We have a president who snuggled with dictators around the globe, demeaned our allies, uttered more than 16,000 empirical lies (including, most recently, some dangerous whoppers about the coronavirus), ravaged the environment, attacked science calling climate change a “hoax,” declared presidential powers “to do anything I want,” flouted laws on foreign policy, emoluments, obstruction of justice and more, called
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the press “enemies of the people” and Nazis “fine people,” put kids in cages and demonized Muslims, Hispanics and others, uttered racist and xenophobic slurs against political opponents and nations, derided Republican critics as “human scum” and tarred public servants who dare cross him as “deep state” traitors and spies. Trump demands personal loyalty to himself at all cost. On cue, Republican politicians in both houses of Congress genuflect before Trump in a manner that would make Putin blush. That’s scary stuff to students of history. So, I’m done listening to Democrats and others argue the finer points of policy. Guess what? A President Biden and a President Sanders would accomplish roughly the same things on these larger, burning issues, which is not much. For reference, search “Obama, 2009, Affordable Care Act, public option.” Both men would make a great contribution to our world by throttling Trumpism. They’d appoint better
MARCH 11-17, 2020
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