Hillary is cheating her way to the Democratic nomination
Hillary Clinton speaks at a campaign stop in Los Angeles on June 3. Photo: Shutterstock
Bernie Sanders continues his campaign in Cloverdale, California. Photo: Getty Images
By Kyle Smith June 4, 2016 | 1:13pm
The Democrats had a script for 2016. Backed by big-money donors, party insiders, liberal institutions, universal name recognition, the media and terror on the part of all other serious potential candidates, Hillary Clinton would glide to the nomination, her path marked by rose petals.
Gentlemen would doff their caps as smiling troubadours gently strummed their lutes by the side of the path to the nomination.
Somehow a coronation turned into “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Every time Hillary looked in the rearview mirror, there he was: a nutty old socialist chained to the grille of a monster truck and screaming imprecations into the wind.
How could Bernie Sanders still be whooping and braying and rousing his troops on her back fender as late as the California primary? (Which he’ll probably win — she’s up two points in the latest polls but there’s been a Golden State surge in voter registrations, always a sure sign that the power of Bernie is growing.)
Sensing that a loss in the country’s most populated state would be a devastating last-minute rebuke to a campaign that should have been over months ago, Hillary (who originally planned to be closer to home in New Jersey, which also holds a primary on Tuesday) is barnstorming California along with her husband: The Bill and Hill show is doing 30 campaign events in five days.
Democratic pollster Doug Schoen pointed out in the Wall Street Journal this week [ http://www.wsj.com/articles/why-hillary-may-not-be-the-nominee-1464780434 ] that Sanders could even still prevail at the convention by demanding a rule change that would push superdelegates to vote for the candidate who won their state.
Hillary has gotten three million more votes than Sanders, but Bernie lovers are not going to be pacified by that. They see Hillary as a lethally reactionary force that will stall out or maybe even throw into reverse their progressive dreams.
She’s awful enough in herself, but she’s also so much the cause of awfulness in others that she might actually deliver us a President Trump.
All spring, it looked like the Republican convention was going to be a mud-wrestling match without the bikinis. Now Republicans are grimly unified behind Trump and it’s the Democrats who have to plan for chaos. Sandersistas are young, organized and angry.
Sure, they may be losing by more delegates than Clinton lost to Obama in 2008, but even though their candidate is old enough to remember when Clint Eastwood was just a TV star, they don’t have the same temperament as the comfortable-shoe brigade of Hillary supporters.
Cue up those 1968 images and imagine the Bernie Bros finally occupying a stage as large as their ambitions. They’ll be playing dirty tricks, causing riots and being trucked away in plastic handcuffs. The Democratic convention is supposed to be an infomercial, but not for the Republicans.
This is all sweet justice for the Democratic party. Throw grievance bombs in every direction and you may find yourself getting cut by shrapnel.
Moreover, the Democratic brand as the party of the people looks like fraudulence: Elites rule. The supposed referee of the unexpectedly brutal Clinton-Sanders bout, DNC Chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz, has (as Sanders supporters rightly point out) been in Clinton’s corner the whole time. She scheduled debates on Saturday nights in the hopes that no one would watch and no one but Hillary would gain a following.
The Clinton candidacy had everything going for it except the candidate herself.
A damning illustration of that is in last week’s cover story for New York magazine [ http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/05/hillary-clinton-candidacy.html ], which must have been conceived as a puff piece by the progressive feminist writer Rebecca Traister, who was granted unusually close access to the candidate, no doubt because Traister is a committed Rodhamite. Yet even Traister points out that Clinton’s program “does not sound good at a rally,” that her team is caught in a “paranoiac cycle — Clinton and her team think that everyone is after her,” that Clinton’s need for privacy is “pathological” and her message “muddled.”
“There is something about the candidate that is getting lost in translation,” Traister delicately says, sounding the note we heard so often in the the final days of the Kerry and Dukakis campaigns.
Actually, after 24 years of being in the national eye, Hillary Clinton, and everything she stands for, are coming through loud and clear. That’s the problem.
I'm talking about how the word "rigged" keeps popping up everywhere, as if speech writers had a lexicographic central casting. Politicians use it to make the case for their candidacies. Voters use it to explain why they're hopping mad. Liberal movements use it as their raison d'etre. Conservatives use it to mock the liberal "elites" and government in Washington. Everything, it seems, is rigged -- from banks to tax codes and criminal prosecutions.
Elizabeth Warren put the word into political play in 2012, in a passionate speech .. http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/OTUS/transcript-elizabeth-warrens-democratic-convention-speech/story?id=17164726 .. at the Democratic National Convention: "People feel like the system is rigged against them, and here is the painful part, they're right. The system is rigged." The worst offenders: oil subsidies, low tax rates paid by billionaires, and Wall Street CEOs who, after the 2008 financial crisis, "still strut around Congress, no shame, demanding favors."
The Massachusetts senator hasn't let up. She put out a report last month called "Rigged Justice .. http://www.warren.senate.gov/files/documents/Rigged_Justice_2016.pdf ," which cites all the times corporations have been in trouble yet ultimately escaped the long arm of the law. Her mantra is aimed especially at banks that got bailed out after the housing collapse, when homeowners didn't. In Warren's world, it all happened according to some playbook cooked up by her sworn enemies -- who included Treasury secretaries Hank Paulson and Tim Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke -- rather than as the result of decisions made on the fly as the global economy was headed off the cliff.
Now Warren is overshadowed by Bernie Sanders, who believes the entire economy .. https://berniesanders.com/a-rigged-economy/ .. is rigged, having been "designed by the wealthiest people in this country to benefit the wealthiest people in this country at the expense of everybody else."
Congress, in Sanders's eyes, is likewise rigged, because Big Money donors allow lawmakers to ignore the needs of constituents. And when the average person works long hours for low wages while 58 percent of all new income goes to the top 1 percent, the compensation system must be rigged.
Conservatives see evidence of rigging everywhere: in the Obama administration's executive orders to circumvent Congress, for example, and more generally in the Washington cabal that aims to steal what is rightfully theirs. Famously comparing Congress to the World Wrestling Federation, Ted Cruz said .. http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/politics/2013/09/the-ted-cruz-talkathon-the-senators-greatest-hits/ : "the outcome is pre-rigged, the outcome is predetermined. They know who's going to win and it's all for show."
The answers revealed a lot about the voters' state of mind this year: 67 percent of Democrats said the system is rigged, and 38 percent of Republicans did.
Yes, voters in both parties have always expressed suspicions that the game is stacked against them in one way or another. But in 2016, it seems the party that owns the "R" word could own the election.
More than anything, that may explain why Hillary Clinton didn't put Bernie Sanders away in Iowa's Democratic caucuses on Monday night. She never uses the word.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
To contact the author of this story: Paula Dwyer at pdwyer11@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Katy Roberts at kroberts29@bloomberg.net
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