Laura Bradley over at Vanity Fair highlights a mini rant from Seth Meyers “Hey!” feature about Hillary’s blaming Bernie Sanders (among many other causes) for her loss to the Orange Menace last November.
“Hey! Hillary Clinton, don’t blame Bernie because Donald Trump called you names,” Meyers said Wednesday night. “I promise you he was going to do that anyway. It’s not like Trump watched Bernie at the debates and thought, ‘Criticizing Hillary? That just might work!’ And hey. You think Trump needed Bernie’s permission to be an asshole? Assholes don’t need permission. That’s what makes them assholes.”
Meyers makes a very good point here, drumpf did not wait until the general to begin being an asshole, here is one of his tweets from well before the DNC in Philly, calling Hillary stupid:
And here, as the 2016 Primary season was just getting underway is drumpf calling Bill a “degenerate”
There are scores of other examples that demonstrate that drumpf did not need Bernie, with his rather mild criticisms - which even Clinton stalwart Joan Walsh acknowledges were never so nasty as the one Bill and Hil leveled against Barack Obama in 2008 - to plow any ground for him in the field of attacking our candidate.
But I didn’t post this to start a pie fight, 2008 is in the books, and the perceptions we have of it are not likely to change.
Back to Ms. Bradley and Seth.
“Bernie, Meyers argued, is not the reason Clinton lost. “Do you know how I know that? You beat Trump by 3 million votes. If you want to blame something ancient, blame the Electoral College. We shouldn’t be running the most important elections on Earth on a system designed over 200 years ago to appease slave owners. If American Idol ran their voting like this, we’d all have a Sanjaya CD in our cars.”
Seth also makes a good point here, that in states where the force is with Democrats, Bernie’s criticisms hurt Hillary not at all, in fact she won by margins in those states that Barack Obama would have envied. It has been pointed out a lot here that some Bernie supporters in the states that actually cost us the election did not support Hillary on election day. Meyers addresses this too:
“He didn’t tell you not to go to Wisconsin. He didn’t tell you to do paid speeches to Wall Street. And he didn’t write this terrible joke for you,” Meyers said, rolling a clip of Clinton stiltedly quipping, "I don’t know who created Pokémon Go, but I’m trying to figure out how we get them to have Pokémon Go to the Polls.”
So, yes, some Bernie voters defected from Camp Clinton, some even went to Trump, which is very unquieting...would they had simply stayed at home. But can you doubt that had Sanders wrested the nomination from Clinton that some number of voters that she brought to the polls would have abstained, and some much smaller number, in pique, actually done the unthinkable and crossed to Trump? It has also been argued here that Bernie could not have won because he was a socialist. If that is the case would not have some adamantly capitalist Clinton voters pulled the lever for drumpf?
Meyers ends with this good advice for us all:
“And hey. We are living through a very dark time in America,” Meyers added, “but there is also an unprecedented opportunity to bring Democrats and liberals together in a stand against the hate and incompetence in Washington. The best way to do this is to get the people who voted for you and the people who voted for Bernie on the same page. This isn’t the time to complain because Senator Woodstock didn’t roll over for you. Hey, if anything, he helped make you a better candidate—you know, the candidate who beat Donald Trump by 3 million votes.”
Here’s the clip.
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have earned their right to write and say anything they like about the 2020 campaign.
If Bernie runs, Hillary has every right to promote the alternative of her choice, and even to attempt to deny him the Nomination.
Hey! That’s what Primaries are about, right?
But if Sanders secures the nomination, which I think is a long shot at this point, Hil and her supporters will be faced with a much harder choice.
Letting go of the fiction that Sanders did anything other than put up the good fight last year will help them, in that unlikely circumstance, to make the right one.