Does it matter that some Sanders supporters believe there's no difference between Dem and Repub now? [View all]

[Bluerome]

Last edited Fri Apr 22, 2016, 01:07 PM - Edit history (1)

I know that latching on to a candidate is sort of like latching on to a football team, and you can see the obvious similarities in the way football fans make excuses for their team, blame the refs, and believe every bad thing they hear about their rival (Dallas and Philly?). But I don't think that the people who start to dislike players on their own team, as some Sanders supporters have done, are that great in number (and the polls show that, compared to 08). Those people are a sub-category that were already opposed to Hillary, and were very willing to absorb any competitor's attacks against her, and transform, in their minds, political talking points into what they now consider concrete, undeniable fact. I know they believe, wholeheartedly, that Hillary is bought and paid for, a corporate shill who has taken money from big companies for no other reason than to do their bidding. They cannot consider that she's smart enough to take an idiot corporation's money and still regulate them when she has the power. I remember the artist Moby, who got famous by allowing his songs to be used in car commercials, defending this by saying that his strategy was to use that "sellout" money to fight against those same companies that paid him. He's very liberal and no one at the time questioned his strategy. The important thing to remember about the Moby comparison is that most people never even knew about the controversy surrounding Moby's decision; they just liked his music and bought his albums. Similarly, most dems don't even know that a famous liberal like Hillary is having her liberal credentials questioned by a minority within the party. They'll show up and vote for her.

So Hillary doesn't really need to counter the claims that she's no different than a republican. When the general election heats up, most people who have forgotten will remember it very quickly. And those who still harbor that grudge against her, still hanging on to this far-fetched idea that a liberal icon like Hillary somehow has always been a corporation-bot, they'll remain a minority not large enough to affect the outcome of the election.

I will say this, however, in defense of Sanders' supporters: I think his vision is the future of America. (And one that Hillary shares, she just, skillfully, doesn't shout it from the rooftops). Hillary supporters just disagreed with his supporters over whether he was the right candidate to take us there, whether he had the skills, and whether it was even possible to make such sweeping changes overnight. We can see that Obama's strategy works - look at the state of our country compared to when Bush left office. We ARE climbing that hill, and we are doing it intelligently, working the system the only way it can be worked. You don't walk into government and dictate to the other parties. You don't tell the millions of republican voters that your socialist vision is now going to be implemented and to get out of the way. You boil that frog by turning up the heat slowly, until Reaganomics is dead in the pan, never having realized it was dying. Turn the heat up too fast and it jumps out.

And this doesn't mean that Hillary isn't going to turn up the heat at a good pace. Don't forget what the Republicans have always known - Hillary is a liberal. But she's a clever one. She's going to get it done similar to the way Obama has. Are we better off now than 8 years ago? You bet your ass. I remember the long lines of the jobless. That's progress. And he's so good at it, even many Sanders' supporters don't even realize the progress we've made. That's smart change. You don't come out and say you're going to change everything. You just do it, quietly.

I see Hillary's Wall Street strategy this way -

“The supreme art of war is to subdue the enemy without fighting.”
― Sun Tzu, The Art of War