The Democrats and Republicans have had their nominating conventions, both parties have held their primaries and less than three months remain until the November 8 general election. If the election season were a horse race, then we have rounded the last turn and we’re starting down the home stretch.
It would be a fair critique to say that, at least since 1992 (with the presidency of Bill Clinton), the Democratic Party has been captive to the same corporate interests as the Republican Party. Democrats have had different social policies, but if you’re a working-class family, for all intents and purposes, their economic policies are nearly indistinguishable.
Then along comes a political anomaly named Bernie Sanders who changes the context and direction of Democratic politics. Over the course of a little more than a year, Sanders went from nearly zero support to 40 percent of the delegates to the Democratic National Convention, garnering 12 million votes. He rejected special interest money and raised $227 million with over $134 million (59 percent) remarkably coming from small donors, averaging $27 per donation.
This feat of political organizing was on par with the historic 2008 Barak Obama campaign. The question is: How did a 72-year-old Democratic Socialist Jewish grandfather pull it off? Amazingly, he stood on principle. Now, if you’ve been in the game as long as I have, you’d say that couldn’t happen, but it did.
Sanders’ political views were formed while growing up in a post-WW2 working-class Brooklyn family. His political philosophy took root as a student activist at the University of Chicago in early ‘60s. What separates Sanders from most ‘60s radicals that successfully transitioned into electoral politics is he made no fundamental change in his political philosophy or perspective.
It is this steadfastness that Sanders brought to the 2016 Democratic Presidential Primary campaign. He used this “revolutionary zeal” to storm the Bastille and return the Democratic Party to its New Deal and Great Society roots. In the process, he forced Hillary Clinton to abandon the triangulated, corporate-centered politics and policies of her husband.
Anyone who spends 25 years in the national political arena with the objective of having a legitimate chance to become POTUS (like Hillary Clinton) must have ambition beyond the comprehension of the average person. Like Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy, “There’s a load of compromising on the way to my horizon.” That compromising is a major part of Clinton’s trust issue.
Consider President Lyndon Baines Johnson. LBJ was the consummate political animal; his ambition and instinct for power were unmatched. His political cunning was only exceeded by his political ruthlessness. As Senate Majority Leader, LBJ, a Texas Democrat, was an active and effective opponent of civil rights. But a twist of fate made Johnson the POTUS, and the Southern supporter of segregation became the greatest champion of civil rights in the history of the American presidency.
Let’s go back to the Rhinestone Cowboy. The very next line is: “But I’m gonna be where the lights are shining on me,” followed later in the lyric with “and I dream of the things I’ll do.” When he assumed the presidency after the assassination of JFK, Johnson revealed the real LBJ, a poor boy from hardscrabble West Texas who taught even poorer Native American children. That Lyndon Johnson hated poverty and what it did to people. When he got to where the lights were shinning on him, he declared a War on Poverty, created the Great Society and passed the most revolutionary civil rights legislation since the Civil War.
Before she was Hillary Clinton, she was Hillary Rodham, a young striver who earned a law degree from Yale University. When she left Yale she could have gone anywhere, but instead of turning right to Wall Street, she turned left and went to the Children’s Defense Fund. In January 2017, with the lights shining on Hillary Clinton, maybe she’ll remember the dream of the things she could do. If that happens, we will owe a debt to an old ‘60s radical from Vermont who kept the faith.
Mike Jones, who has held senior policy positions in St. Louis city and county politics, is a member of the State Board of Education and the St. Louis American’s editorial board.
