Always with the hand gestures. Bernie Sanders is like the Wizard of Oz. He operates behind a curtain of gravitas and white male privilege, but there is nobody home. There is no “there” there.
The financial meltdown that began in 2007 begat a whole slew of changes, none of them good. The so-called “Great Recession” led to the rise of Donald Trump on the right and Senator Bernard “Bernie” Sanders (I-VT) on the left. The “Occupy Wall Street” movement of 2011–2012 was a response by young liberals to the specter of their future being mortgaged by the recession and its effects on the likelihood of obtaining a decent job and paying off their student loans. Bernie’s campaign was a direct outgrowth of the Occupy Wall Street movement.
“[H]e was part of a concerted effort, the outgrowth of a social movement that began a few years back in Zuccotti Park in New York. The Sanders campaign has direct links to the Occupy Wall Street movement.” Michael T. Heaney
As the election season for 2016’s president began, Senator Sanders threw his hat in the ring. He never expected to win, or even to attract many votes. He was starting a protest candidacy against the excesses of greed in financial institutions that led to the Great Recession. In ordinary times, Bernie would not have attracted much support, as he along with most voters figured that his self-avowed “democratic socialist” label would not be very popular among most American voters. But a funny thing happened on the way to his early rallies. Even Bernie didn’t expect to attract such crowds. Anecdotally, he was riding in his vehicle on the way to speak at one, and he saw all the people and the lines and said to his wife, “Is there a game in town or something?” But as he realized that he had, in effect, caught lightning in a bottle, he became determined to knife-fight his way to victory, no matter the cost to the Democratic party, which he was plenty happy to use for its ability to publicize his efforts and to get him a place in the intra-party debates.
During the debates, Sanders was consistently waving his hands and shaking his finger at Hillary Clinton. It struck me as sexist to the core. He was so dismissive of her, and it seems to me as though the press gave him a pass on his behavior, all the while relentlessly focusing on Hillary Clinton’s email “scandal” which was a nothingburger created by partisan Republicans during the many Benghazi hearings. And Senator Sanders, for his part, mercilessly flogged Secretary Clinton as a “Wall Street tool” because she gave paid speeches for some financial firms. Here’s a little fun-fact for you: Many politicians and celebrities give speeches to the Wall Street firms. It is common. And just because she gave speeches doesn’t necessarily mean that she was on board with financial firms’ conservative politics. Here is an excerpt from a speech Clinton made to a Canadian firm in January, 2015:
“We’re in a learning period as we move forward with the implementation of the Affordable Care Act. And I’m hoping that whatever the shortfalls or the glitches have been, which in a big piece of legislation you’re going to have, those will be remedied and we can really take a hard look at what’s succeeding, fix what isn’t, and keep moving forward to get to affordable universal healthcare coverage like you have here in Canada.” Vox
I don’t see that speech as the reeling-in of Wall Street money by stabbing Main Street America in the back.
Hillary Clinton graduated from some of the finest schools and got her law degree. She could have gotten a job in one of the Big Law firms and carved out a fine living for herself and her family. Yachts, mansions, everything. But she had other ideas and heeded the call to public service. I remember seeing an article in Time magazine about her when I was about 19 years old. She was a student at Wellesley College in Massachusetts and she was already making news. I remember it because, as a hormone-crazed teenager, I thought how attractive she was in those plaid bell-bottoms. I think it’s a remarkable testament to her character that she has not become cynical and jaded over the years, as she has been attacked by the Republican party since she was First Lady in Bill Clinton’s administration. She had the colossal nerve to come up with a health plan on her own. And, somewhat inelegantly, she maintained that “I could have stayed home and baked cookies”instead of working on the issues with her husband. Then, with the rise of Senator Sanders, Ms. Clinton had to endure the same bullshit from the left, falsely painting her as dishonest and crooked. For what it’s worth, Hillary was judged the most honest candidate in the 2016 race.
Senator Sanders, in contrast, never had a steady job until he began his career of sucking at the public teat as mayor of Burlington, VT in 1981. Up until then, he had supported himself by working odd jobs as a carpenter and not a very good one, according to a former friend and coworker. And he made a little money by penning soft-core pornography from a man’s misogynistic viewpoint. Once he found his calling, he knew he was set. No more working for a living. All he had to do was to be himself, a far-left democratic socialist gadfly. He was elected to a seat in the U.S. House in 1990. He became a Senator from Vermont in 2006. During that time, he was unable to win many allies. He was notoriously prickly and self-righteous, wasting taxpayer money on his salary by proposing bills that were unlikely to pass, and railing against the Republican party, and when it suited him, the Democratic party, calling the differences between the parties as “tweedle-dee and tweedle-dum”.
Once Sanders became the primary challenger to Secretary Clinton, the gloves came off. He relentlessly maligned her as a “tool of Wall Street”. His supporters threw a shitfit when it was discovered that the DNC was “rigging the primary against him”. Why in heaven’s name would they do that? Could it possibly be because he wasn’t a Democrat, didn’t respect the Democrats, had no intention of remaining a Democrat if he didn’t win the election? Jeezus. He expected everybody to bend to his will. I guess when you are unemployed until middle age, you maybe get funny notions about what you are owed by the world. And Sanders and his followers were up in arms over two pledged delegates in the 2016 race, overturning chairs and defacing walls with graffiti. I guess they felt entitled too. He was like that the entire election. If things went his way, they were “fair”. If rules and regulations went against him, they were evidence of a “rigged system”. Gee, that sounds an awful lot like somebody who has been in the news lately. I can’t remember his name at the moment, he couldn’t be very important.
Bernie’s main proposal, Medicare for All, is typical of him. He has no realistic way of paying for it, and it will cause all kinds of upheaval in the health-care and employment sectors, likely costing the hospitals billions and forcing rural hospitals to close. And he has no interest in any kind of incremental plan that would expand on Obamacare (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act) and would offer a public option. He wants to go all the way right out of the gate. I don’t know what he thinks President Obama was doing back in 2009. Playing tiddly-winks? Obama did the best he could. It fell far short of what he wanted, but there are so many players and so many moving parts in the health care industry that it took a Herculean team effort to get what they got. And ever since then, the Republicans have systematically set out to destroy the ACA, once failing by only one vote in the Senate. And it never has been implemented as intended. All the states were supposed to adopt the Medicaid expansion, and the individual penalty for failing to sign up for insurance needed to be much higher. “Obamacare”, as it was laid out, has never been truly implemented. And most people have private insurance from their employer, and are loathe to give it up in favor of public insurance run by the government.
The bottom line is that Bernie Sanders is a bum. A holdover from Sixties-style leftism. He would be better than the rolling dumpster fire we now have in the White House in the person of Man-Baby Trump, but in many ways he would be a mirror image taken from the left side of the political spectrum. The best outcome for Senator Sanders and the rest of the world is for a more responsible, yet-to-be-named Democrat to be elected President in November of 2020.
And to have Senator Bernard Sanders retire to his summer home in Vermont, and spend the rest of his days with his family in the pastoral beauty of the Green Mountain State.
