Spoiled Milk
Banned
Or: How I Learned to Start Worrying and Hate my Cassandra Complex
This is my insignificant take on the two remaining Democratic candidates for the presidency, and why I am both unsurprised and yet also slightly upset by the accelerating flight of Democratic voters from longtime favorite Hillary Rodham Clinton to the populist and democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. This is also a small message to Bernie Sanders supporters on this website to reconsider in fact why they are feeling the Bern.
I am an under-30 millennial who immediately jumped on the Sanders bandwagon as soon as he announced his campaign last summer, due to long-standing familiarity with his name and policies, having been brought up in a staunchly progressive populist household. The appeal was obvious: here was a candidate who was going to tax the wealthy, break up the big banks, enact single payer healthcare, protect American labor, keep us out of middle eastern quagmires, etc. Hillary was only a good choice in a vacuum, as the "Not-a-Republican" candidate. After all, isn't that what we were told in 2008? She was less authentic as a progressive, too, having supported the Iraq War, being against gay marriage (for "deeply held moral convictions"), flipping or remaining reticent on Keystone XL and TPP, personally advocating for a policy that essentially destroyed Libya, etc.
Most people that support Sanders are deeply convinced of his authenticity, and people across the board are actually convinced of Clinton's inauthenticity! "Bernie Sanders will fight for the people." This is what I believed.
But the moral integrity and authenticiy of a candidate, despite being highly effective and important factors in wooing the electorate, are not actual, objective reasons to vote for someone. The reality is that politicians have consistently betrayed their campaign promises and moral compasses as a matter of course. Why is Guantanamo Bay's detention center for enemy combatants and terrorist suspects still active? Why did Bush raise taxes, after asking people to "read his lips"? The mind is willing, but the flesh is weak (to the political calculus).
No, the fairest way to compare candidates is to compare record and policy, not arbitrary notions of having one's heart in the right place. And on the matter of policy, you might accurately say that Clinton and Sanders are 95% identical!
Where do they differ? You might be able to describe Sanders as a Clinton-Plus Package, where the Plus consists of $15 minimum wage, breaking up big banks and reinstating Glass-Steagal, expanding single payer healthcare, free college for everyone, and an increase in most federal programs like Medicare and Social Security. And it turns out that on most of these issues, Sanders is wrong (and conversely, Clinton is right).
Most economists agree that raising the minimum wage as high as $12.10 an hour would not produce any significant change in employment around the country, but would have the very real effect of increasing the standard of living for millions of Americans. This is Clinton's position. But raising it as high as $15 is an unheard of socioeconomical experiment that has no equivalent anywhere in the world. The effects will be probably negative, and at worst disastrous for low income employment. Sanders proposes mitigating this by increasing federal programs. But this increases the reliance of people on federal programs for basic living, a longheld conservative complaint. Robert Reich says that even though there will be job losses, such jobs which pay below 15 an hour are not worth working. But who is he to decide for the least privileged that they should be relegated to government entitlement programs and not have the opportunity to work? The smartest thing to do would be to observe such a wage increase in controlled settings like LA and Seattle, and then adopt nationally after economists tease out the effects.
Sanders wants to break up the big banks. But is that so wise? Goldman-Sachs was not even a top 20 bank during The financial crisis, and Bear Stearns wasn't even a mega-bank so it seems that being mega-sized is not the problem. If JP Morgan were divided into smaller components based on function, like Glass-Steagall might (re-)do, those components would actually still be "systematically important" to the world economy. The most damaging fact for me, however, is learning that one of the reasons the Great Depression was so bad was that smaller banks were failing by the hundreds, and due to their size they did not have the capital to mitigate the effects of losses. Meanwhile, our Great Recession was not so bad partly because huge banks in fact did have the capital, size, and infrastructure and were compelled by government to absorb/manage failing smaller banks! The big banks were instrumental in fixing the crisis that risky lending and removing Glass-Steagall had partly caused. Something that Sanders likes to quote is that 3 out of 4 of the big banks are larger now than right before the financial crisis. This is terrifying! Or is it? The fourth bank of course is Citigroup, who lost big-time during the crisis. The reality is that the other 3 banks are so large now because they took over the corpus of Citigroup's losses and the other smaller banks which could not survive the recession, not because they have expanded like bloated oligarchs ready to burst in their depraved opulence. But none of this matters to Bernie because, as he likes to point out, nobody went to jail for the financial meltdown. But why should they? They didn't do anything illegal! They just played by Greenspan's risky rules. The important point here is that the Bernie Sanders policy is primarily a take-revenge-on-the-banks policy. People need to feel justice. Heads need to roll. Banks need to fracture. It doesn't matter what actually works or what's actually true.
I risk repeating most of what is in the other NeoGAF thread about Sanders' healthcare plan being unfeasibly expensive. I will just say that while I support single payer, it is pretty obvious that Europe has adapted over decades to single payer, while the United States has not. Replicating the savings would be pretty difficult, but more importantly it would be impossible to even pass this kind of legislation in the republican house for four years. On this matter, Hillary Clinton has a wide range of moderate proposals that expand on Obamacare and improve it.
And in fact, the same is true about college. Universities in the United States are hugely different in structure than those all across continental Europe. In Germany, school is like a public utility that citizens are entitled to. Here, it is like an expensive resort where higher learning is supplemented by a massive amount of other costs (sports, dormitories, on campus facilities...) The funding model cannot work the same across the Atlantic because the cost model has not been the same for decades, and this is semi permanent because it is infrastructural. Europe has adapted to this for decades. It will take years to move to free education, but switching immediately to all-public-costs covered would actually encourage schools to not reduce their cost and would hinder widespread institutional transition merely because of the cost.
On these and on other issues, Hillary Clinton is usually more reserved than Sanders for the very reason that she is simply a careful and calculating candidate. As the New York Times endorsement wrote, when people criticize her for flipping on TPP, it is because they are criticizing her for not steaming blindly ahead with ideals instead of being willing to learn and adapt as new information comes out. She doesn't fight for single payer in this country anymore despite being one of its strongest proponents not because she is a Pharma shill, but because the reality is that it would never pass Congress and wasn't going to even with democratic supermajorities. For those of you waiting for a political revolution to sweep the country, not only would it need to retake the Congress, but it would need to convince all those conservative democrats from 2008 to suddenly adopt ultra progressive ideals (which as I stated before are sometimes misguided and at other times uninformed). All of this would need to happen in a country whose political system was designed to hinder change and represent the political viewpoints of the majority of Americans.
The NPR referred to her jokingly as "Wonk in Chief" because of the 50,000+ words of policy papers her campaign has released (all with footnotes!). But in a time of political partisanship and fervor, being data-driven is more important than ever. And this is why it is unsurprising that Bernie Sanders is more popular than Hillary Clinton. Data is not sexy and you cannot win voters with facts. For the majority of Americans, you need to feel political change, not read about it on wonk blogs and debates.
And then there's her reputation. The common assessment among my voting bloc is that she is inauthentic and untrustworthy. But what real scandal is she even responsible for? From emails to Benghazi, from looting the White House to being "broke", Hillary Clinton has been the subject of conservative political hitpieces for the past 24 years. And all of this has worked not only on Republicans, but many Democrats. The truth is, Hillary Clinton is a hard left progressive with a long history of fighting for the liberal cause. And that's it.
If you don't believe that, then Newt Gingrich really did win.
You know what's the standard for political scandal? The Bush administration. Dick Cheney. Donald Rumsfeld. The Bush administration lied to Colin Powell so they could get him to lie to the American people about Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration forced a 5 star general to resign because he wasn't on board as a yes-man for liberating Iraq. The Bush Administration fired career appointed lawyers (which they had no authority to do) for targeting Republicans who were wrongdoers. You want to talk about emails? When shit finally hit the fan over "Lawyergate", millions upon millions of emails suddenly disappeared related to this scandal even though higher level officials would have been implicated. The Bush administration caused Dick Clark to resign before 9/11 because they weren't listening to his warnings about al-Qaeda. The Bush administration regularly controlled the media representation of the Iraq War so that public support would continue even though boys were being sodomized in front of their mothers in Abu Ghraib. The Bush administration escalated Guantanamo Bay to the point of breaking the Geneva Convention and sullying America's reputation.
There is your political standard for lies and scandal. If you remember that the same people who have shouted in your ear for a quarter century that Hillary Clinton is untrustworthy were the staunchest supporters of the Bush administration, then you realize that there is absolutely no comparison. Making a remark that sometimes Clinton feels cold or unenthused is splitting the most microscopic of hairs. She is not your grandmother. She is a political leader. You are not getting a hug, you are getting borrow-free college tuition and sane gun control.
So the curious case of Hillary Clinton is that she is a candidate whose reflection is much uglier than who she really is, but only if you bought a dirty mirror. The curious case is that she is a woman and a hard left progressive, and yet youth enthusiasts are overwhelmingly supporting Sanders, because he is farther left. The curious case is that conservative hit-pieces and biased media reporting eroded the trust of working class liberals and young democrats. Having been a Sanders supporter for a solid 8 1/2 months and then stepping back and changing my mind has made me realize that this is a predictable but altogether unfortunate situation for her to be in.
Bernie Sanders does not have a very good chance of winning, so why am I complaining? Who cares? Because there are millions of young democrats right now who are going to be very disappointed when Sanders loses the nomination. They are going to feel disenfranchised with modern politics, bemoan the power of big money interests (did you know campaign finance reform is also Clinton's biggest platform issue?), and feel like they got cheated with a very subpar candidate. They should not feel that way. Both candidates are very good candidates. They are both progressives. Just watch a good Clinton speech from the 90s or the early 2000s and you will see the same progressive fire that Sanders has (she has calmed down in recent years). And they agree on 95% of everything.
This is my insignificant take on the two remaining Democratic candidates for the presidency, and why I am both unsurprised and yet also slightly upset by the accelerating flight of Democratic voters from longtime favorite Hillary Rodham Clinton to the populist and democratic socialist Bernie Sanders. This is also a small message to Bernie Sanders supporters on this website to reconsider in fact why they are feeling the Bern.
I am an under-30 millennial who immediately jumped on the Sanders bandwagon as soon as he announced his campaign last summer, due to long-standing familiarity with his name and policies, having been brought up in a staunchly progressive populist household. The appeal was obvious: here was a candidate who was going to tax the wealthy, break up the big banks, enact single payer healthcare, protect American labor, keep us out of middle eastern quagmires, etc. Hillary was only a good choice in a vacuum, as the "Not-a-Republican" candidate. After all, isn't that what we were told in 2008? She was less authentic as a progressive, too, having supported the Iraq War, being against gay marriage (for "deeply held moral convictions"), flipping or remaining reticent on Keystone XL and TPP, personally advocating for a policy that essentially destroyed Libya, etc.
Most people that support Sanders are deeply convinced of his authenticity, and people across the board are actually convinced of Clinton's inauthenticity! "Bernie Sanders will fight for the people." This is what I believed.
But the moral integrity and authenticiy of a candidate, despite being highly effective and important factors in wooing the electorate, are not actual, objective reasons to vote for someone. The reality is that politicians have consistently betrayed their campaign promises and moral compasses as a matter of course. Why is Guantanamo Bay's detention center for enemy combatants and terrorist suspects still active? Why did Bush raise taxes, after asking people to "read his lips"? The mind is willing, but the flesh is weak (to the political calculus).
No, the fairest way to compare candidates is to compare record and policy, not arbitrary notions of having one's heart in the right place. And on the matter of policy, you might accurately say that Clinton and Sanders are 95% identical!
Where do they differ? You might be able to describe Sanders as a Clinton-Plus Package, where the Plus consists of $15 minimum wage, breaking up big banks and reinstating Glass-Steagal, expanding single payer healthcare, free college for everyone, and an increase in most federal programs like Medicare and Social Security. And it turns out that on most of these issues, Sanders is wrong (and conversely, Clinton is right).
Most economists agree that raising the minimum wage as high as $12.10 an hour would not produce any significant change in employment around the country, but would have the very real effect of increasing the standard of living for millions of Americans. This is Clinton's position. But raising it as high as $15 is an unheard of socioeconomical experiment that has no equivalent anywhere in the world. The effects will be probably negative, and at worst disastrous for low income employment. Sanders proposes mitigating this by increasing federal programs. But this increases the reliance of people on federal programs for basic living, a longheld conservative complaint. Robert Reich says that even though there will be job losses, such jobs which pay below 15 an hour are not worth working. But who is he to decide for the least privileged that they should be relegated to government entitlement programs and not have the opportunity to work? The smartest thing to do would be to observe such a wage increase in controlled settings like LA and Seattle, and then adopt nationally after economists tease out the effects.
Sanders wants to break up the big banks. But is that so wise? Goldman-Sachs was not even a top 20 bank during The financial crisis, and Bear Stearns wasn't even a mega-bank so it seems that being mega-sized is not the problem. If JP Morgan were divided into smaller components based on function, like Glass-Steagall might (re-)do, those components would actually still be "systematically important" to the world economy. The most damaging fact for me, however, is learning that one of the reasons the Great Depression was so bad was that smaller banks were failing by the hundreds, and due to their size they did not have the capital to mitigate the effects of losses. Meanwhile, our Great Recession was not so bad partly because huge banks in fact did have the capital, size, and infrastructure and were compelled by government to absorb/manage failing smaller banks! The big banks were instrumental in fixing the crisis that risky lending and removing Glass-Steagall had partly caused. Something that Sanders likes to quote is that 3 out of 4 of the big banks are larger now than right before the financial crisis. This is terrifying! Or is it? The fourth bank of course is Citigroup, who lost big-time during the crisis. The reality is that the other 3 banks are so large now because they took over the corpus of Citigroup's losses and the other smaller banks which could not survive the recession, not because they have expanded like bloated oligarchs ready to burst in their depraved opulence. But none of this matters to Bernie because, as he likes to point out, nobody went to jail for the financial meltdown. But why should they? They didn't do anything illegal! They just played by Greenspan's risky rules. The important point here is that the Bernie Sanders policy is primarily a take-revenge-on-the-banks policy. People need to feel justice. Heads need to roll. Banks need to fracture. It doesn't matter what actually works or what's actually true.
I risk repeating most of what is in the other NeoGAF thread about Sanders' healthcare plan being unfeasibly expensive. I will just say that while I support single payer, it is pretty obvious that Europe has adapted over decades to single payer, while the United States has not. Replicating the savings would be pretty difficult, but more importantly it would be impossible to even pass this kind of legislation in the republican house for four years. On this matter, Hillary Clinton has a wide range of moderate proposals that expand on Obamacare and improve it.
And in fact, the same is true about college. Universities in the United States are hugely different in structure than those all across continental Europe. In Germany, school is like a public utility that citizens are entitled to. Here, it is like an expensive resort where higher learning is supplemented by a massive amount of other costs (sports, dormitories, on campus facilities...) The funding model cannot work the same across the Atlantic because the cost model has not been the same for decades, and this is semi permanent because it is infrastructural. Europe has adapted to this for decades. It will take years to move to free education, but switching immediately to all-public-costs covered would actually encourage schools to not reduce their cost and would hinder widespread institutional transition merely because of the cost.
On these and on other issues, Hillary Clinton is usually more reserved than Sanders for the very reason that she is simply a careful and calculating candidate. As the New York Times endorsement wrote, when people criticize her for flipping on TPP, it is because they are criticizing her for not steaming blindly ahead with ideals instead of being willing to learn and adapt as new information comes out. She doesn't fight for single payer in this country anymore despite being one of its strongest proponents not because she is a Pharma shill, but because the reality is that it would never pass Congress and wasn't going to even with democratic supermajorities. For those of you waiting for a political revolution to sweep the country, not only would it need to retake the Congress, but it would need to convince all those conservative democrats from 2008 to suddenly adopt ultra progressive ideals (which as I stated before are sometimes misguided and at other times uninformed). All of this would need to happen in a country whose political system was designed to hinder change and represent the political viewpoints of the majority of Americans.
The NPR referred to her jokingly as "Wonk in Chief" because of the 50,000+ words of policy papers her campaign has released (all with footnotes!). But in a time of political partisanship and fervor, being data-driven is more important than ever. And this is why it is unsurprising that Bernie Sanders is more popular than Hillary Clinton. Data is not sexy and you cannot win voters with facts. For the majority of Americans, you need to feel political change, not read about it on wonk blogs and debates.
And then there's her reputation. The common assessment among my voting bloc is that she is inauthentic and untrustworthy. But what real scandal is she even responsible for? From emails to Benghazi, from looting the White House to being "broke", Hillary Clinton has been the subject of conservative political hitpieces for the past 24 years. And all of this has worked not only on Republicans, but many Democrats. The truth is, Hillary Clinton is a hard left progressive with a long history of fighting for the liberal cause. And that's it.
If you don't believe that, then Newt Gingrich really did win.
You know what's the standard for political scandal? The Bush administration. Dick Cheney. Donald Rumsfeld. The Bush administration lied to Colin Powell so they could get him to lie to the American people about Saddam Hussein. The Bush administration forced a 5 star general to resign because he wasn't on board as a yes-man for liberating Iraq. The Bush Administration fired career appointed lawyers (which they had no authority to do) for targeting Republicans who were wrongdoers. You want to talk about emails? When shit finally hit the fan over "Lawyergate", millions upon millions of emails suddenly disappeared related to this scandal even though higher level officials would have been implicated. The Bush administration caused Dick Clark to resign before 9/11 because they weren't listening to his warnings about al-Qaeda. The Bush administration regularly controlled the media representation of the Iraq War so that public support would continue even though boys were being sodomized in front of their mothers in Abu Ghraib. The Bush administration escalated Guantanamo Bay to the point of breaking the Geneva Convention and sullying America's reputation.
There is your political standard for lies and scandal. If you remember that the same people who have shouted in your ear for a quarter century that Hillary Clinton is untrustworthy were the staunchest supporters of the Bush administration, then you realize that there is absolutely no comparison. Making a remark that sometimes Clinton feels cold or unenthused is splitting the most microscopic of hairs. She is not your grandmother. She is a political leader. You are not getting a hug, you are getting borrow-free college tuition and sane gun control.
So the curious case of Hillary Clinton is that she is a candidate whose reflection is much uglier than who she really is, but only if you bought a dirty mirror. The curious case is that she is a woman and a hard left progressive, and yet youth enthusiasts are overwhelmingly supporting Sanders, because he is farther left. The curious case is that conservative hit-pieces and biased media reporting eroded the trust of working class liberals and young democrats. Having been a Sanders supporter for a solid 8 1/2 months and then stepping back and changing my mind has made me realize that this is a predictable but altogether unfortunate situation for her to be in.
Bernie Sanders does not have a very good chance of winning, so why am I complaining? Who cares? Because there are millions of young democrats right now who are going to be very disappointed when Sanders loses the nomination. They are going to feel disenfranchised with modern politics, bemoan the power of big money interests (did you know campaign finance reform is also Clinton's biggest platform issue?), and feel like they got cheated with a very subpar candidate. They should not feel that way. Both candidates are very good candidates. They are both progressives. Just watch a good Clinton speech from the 90s or the early 2000s and you will see the same progressive fire that Sanders has (she has calmed down in recent years). And they agree on 95% of everything.
