A Monmouth University poll taken
before Tuesday’s Democratic debate appeared to show Joe Biden enjoying a very
comfortable lead over his nearest challengers, with more support than the next
two challengers—Bernie Sanders and Tom Steyer—combined. This likely will not
change post-debate, especially for those candidates who chose not to pander to
black voters, and stay on “message” assuming that their “progressive” views
would resonate with those voters on their own merits—although frankly, I don’t
know why Elizabeth Warren thinks that making charges of “sexism” as a
privileged white woman would help her in a state where racial identity is
paramount, especially when she again lied about her own experiences of “discrimination”
and has a history of trying to fob herself off as much a “minority” as blacks
are. If anyone “misjudged” the audience, it was Warren.
But as a Sanders supporter in
2016 who was angered by the fact that the media would be pushing the nomination
of a person with a long history of corruption, telling falsehoods—and as Bill
Clinton’s “co-president,” often publicly advocated for laws and policies such
as on criminal justice, social welfare programs, public housing, immigration and
banking regulation whose effects clearly pleased those right-of-center. The
Clintons were clearly comfortable with working with House Speaker Newt
Gingrich, who was primarily responsible for the hyper-partisanship of today’s
political discourse. The signing of the banking “reform” law that repealed the
Glass-Steagall Act, which had successfully prevented the financial abuses that
led to the Great Depression, was largely responsible for the Great Recession
less than a decade later.
People who attack Sanders on his
supposed gun rights positions (despite his poor “rating” by the NRA) forgot
that he voted against the Iraq War, which Hillary Clinton did vote for—despite the
fact that international weapons inspectors who were allowed to scour Iraq
insisted there were no WMDs for American forces to “eradicate,” while alleged
Al-Qaeda “links” simply didn’t exist. The collapse of the Sunni regime in Iraq
only “eradicated” the principle bulwark in the region against Shiite Iran, with
a Shiite regime in Iraq now very much in league with the U.S.’ principle enemy
in the region. The result was that more than 4,000 American soldiers were needlessly
killed, and many thousands more maimed, in Iraq. Add to that the thousands more
needlessly killed and maimed because the Bush administration failed to focus
its resources on the Taliban when they were on the run.
Such details were not on voters’
minds when the primary season reached South Carolina in 2016, and I was
disabused of the notion that black voters would be “impressed” by Sanders’
civil rights activities on behalf of blacks during his younger days, or his
endorsements of Jesse Jackson for president against the Democratic
establishment, or his progressive record in general. Black voters in the South just wanted someone to give them “special attention,” because in their
own states they had little power or say in policy making that effected their
lives. Sanders was just some “old white guy” from a “white” state up somewhere
in the boondocks. Ideology or past record didn’t matter: black voters in the
South were in many ways as conservative as whites in those states. One suspects
that Donald Trump’s immigration policies do not bother them even in light of
his recent banning of immigration from Sudan and Nigeria—two of his “shithole”
countries—given such commentary we have heard in the past from MLB players like
Torii Hunter, who claimed that Latin American baseball players of African
descent were “imposters” and are not really “black.”
In the 2016 primaries, while Sanders was
beating Hillary Clinton in supposedly “blue” states like Wisconsin and
Michigan, he was getting wiped-out in the South as black voters flocked to
Clinton. The irony, of course, is that Clinton lost Wisconsin and Michigan in the general election, and
she was “wiped-out” in all the Southern states save Virginia, with its
increasingly “moderate” urban population adjacent to the DC suburbs. The arrogant
pro-Clinton media and the Democratic powerbrokers failed to read the mood of
the country which had tired of the inactivity that the last six years of the
Obama administration was mired in, and the black voters on whose back Clinton
rode to the nomination were plainly used to counter a move from the “status
quo.” The fact that Clinton tapped a vanilla-white Southerner with no personality
and even less progressivism as her running mate only further demonstrated the
Democratic establishment’s drift from reality—and there are clearly those voters
in unwinnable states who would continue to aid and abet this drift with the
desire to nominate someone who will not go toe-to-toe with Trump with a
drastically different vision of this country.
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