begin quote from:
Bernie Isn't Hillary's Problem
| Wall Street Journal | - |
As
more polls show that Hillary Clinton could lose to Donald Trump,
Democratic media and political elites have decided that the problem is—
Bernie Sanders.
- 839
Bernie Isn’t Hillary’s Problem
Democrats are bashing Sanders, but they should worry more about their presumptive nominee.
ENLARGE
Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders on May 18 in Vallejo, California.
Photo:
Getty Images
We’d humbly suggest that these Democrats are looking through the wrong end of the campaign telescope. Bernie’s continuing string of victories is the symptom of the political demand for change after eight years of Democratic rule. The real Democratic problems this year are the Obama record and the Clinton candidacy.
“I will be the nominee,” Mrs. Clinton declared this week, and barring an act of God or the FBI director she is no doubt right. Mr. Sanders has a narrow window to get a majority of delegates, even without Mrs. Clinton’s overwhelming lead among declared superdelegates. Unlike the GOP establishment, Democratic elites are getting the nominee they have wanted from the beginning.
Yet Mr. Sanders continues to win primaries even if he has little chance at the nomination. He has won three of the last four major contests, and he lost Kentucky this week by fewer than 2,000 votes. A major chunk of the Democratic base is showing buyer’s remorse at Mrs. Clinton’s looming coronation and is encouraging Mr. Sanders to fight to the bitter end. Few Bernistas will vote for Mr. Trump, but some might decide to demonstrate their unhappiness at the Democratic convention in Philadelphia or stay home in November.
Democrats can blame themselves for much of this political alienation. President Obama was only too happy to indulge the Occupy Wall Street movement when it served his purposes against Mitt Romney in 2012. He and his fellow Democrats played up resentment against “the 1%,” which Mr. Sanders and his voters have decided to take seriously and use as a cudgel against Mrs. Clinton.
Democrats are especially sore at Mr. Sanders for the blowup last weekend at the Democratic state convention in Nevada, which included some ugly protest scenes. But most Democrats have also been happy to celebrate the Black Lives Matter movement despite its periodic calls to violence.
No less than Mr. Obama praised the group at his recent commencement address at Howard University. “It’s thanks in large part to the activism of young people like many of you, from Black Twitter to Black Lives Matter, that America’s eyes have been opened—white, black, Democrat, Republican—to the real problems, for example, in our criminal justice system,” Mr. Obama told the graduates.
No one should be surprised if this same politics of grievance and confrontation is now being aimed at Democrats too. All the more so when the party’s presumptive nominee represents the very heart of the “rigged” political system that Mr. Sanders and the progressive left have long been describing.
Hillary and Bill Clinton have used politics to become members of the richest 0.1%. She and her husband are walking conflicts of political interest—see the Clinton Foundation and its foreign donors with business before the State Department. And Mrs. Clinton represents big money and Wall Street—see her Goldman Sachs speeches.
Above all Mrs. Clinton represents the policy status quo that for seven years has failed to deliver on its central promises of 2008 and 2012. Health-care costs haven’t fallen, wages have barely risen, income inequality has worsened, and whites and blacks say that racial tensions have increased. This is the reality that the Sandernistas are implicitly rejecting when they say the system has failed them.
Mr. Sanders’s supporters are also figuring out that their man might have a better chance of beating Donald Trump than Mrs. Clinton does. Clinton Democrats won’t say this explicitly, but they believe that an honest socialist can’t win. Yet recent head-to-head polls show Mr. Trump ahead of or close to Mrs. Clinton, while Mr. Sanders leads the Republican.
The latest Fox News poll shows that Mrs. Clinton is viewed as more corrupt than Mr. Trump, 49% to 37%. She is also now viewed negatively by more of the electorate than is Mr. Trump—61% to 56%. This takes some doing given Mr. Trump’s incendiary primary campaign and the continuing doubts about him among millions of Republicans.
The 2016 campaign has a long way to go, and Mr. Trump has major vulnerabilities. But as the general election comes into focus, Democrats should wonder if they erred in clearing the nomination path for Mrs. Clinton. It was her turn, they thought. She’d mobilize the party’s identity groups as the first woman nominee, and the Clinton political machine would do whatever it takes to win. The reality is that she may be the only Democrat who could lose to Donald Trump.
