The Clinton Campaign Is Screwed

[BainsBane]

136. If you consider voting against the Brady bill and for

immunity for gun corporations "spotless," I suppose you have a point. If voting to allow armed guns into National Parks, Amtrack, and in cockpits is "spotless" in your book, that's your call. If you consider voting multiple times against Immigration reform and for the Minutemen spotless, so be it. Not all of us, however, agree with those policies. The "99%" includes more than the upper 20 percent, and it includes more than white men. It also includes the poor, working class, women and people of color--the majority of whom support Clinton. It even includes those of us in the subaltern who actually believe organizations that fight for our basic civil rights are not "establishment" or less important than one politician's career.

If voting for the crime bills he railed against is a spotless record, so be it. If voting to deregulate Wall Street while railing against it is spotless in your book, so be it. It is in my second-class opinion, as a second-class citizen, that the idea that his record is spotless requires a willful decision not to consider his votes and ever-evolving statements on a number of key issues. I myself don't regard that as "spotless," but I understand that many insist that Clinton rather than Bernie is responsible for the votes he himself cast, just like Clinton made Bernie call Planned Parenthood and the Human Rights Council "establishment" and forced his campaign to harvest data from DNC servers.

Of all the adjectives I might use to describe Senator Sanders, spotless would not be among them. But then #ImSoEstablishment I think equal rights and organizations that have worked for 100 years to champion them more important than the career of a politician--any politician--even one deemed so superior to myself and much of the rest of the people he seeks to represent. But then I have an old fashioned view that our elected representatives are expected to work for the people rather than denounce them and the organizations that champion their basic rights, including those that work to protect my basic right to live rather than be killed in back-ally abortions.

But I fully understand that if one deems those causes and those segments of the population unimportant, Bernie's statements may not only be acceptable, they may attract new voters from the first-class demographic. You of course are within your rights to disregard concern for my life and my basic human rights, but you should really not use the term 99 percent when you are talking about a much more narrow segment of the population.

Bernie's attacks on Planned Parenthood has made clear he does not stand for me. His decision to leave the Hyde Amendment intact in his otherwise utopian medicare for all plan makes clear that he is comfortable with my remaining a second-class citizen (equal rights for me being "divisive&quot . That he attacks the only organization that provides reproductive healthcare to women throughout much of the US, tacitly encouraging some of his supporters efforts to join with the right in defunding Planned Parenthood, makes clear he does not stand for me.

I too am part of the 99 percent. True, I don't earn as much at the $80k+ a year that the average Sanders supporter does; I did not grow up middle-class and self-entitled. I do not long to return to the mid-20th century, when my family lived in crippling poverty, but I'm still an a voter, and I'm still part of the "99%", even if I started life at the 5 percent and through 40 years in the workforce manage to now be at the 50 percent mark, I still get a vote, even though it's quite clear that vote is deemed as inferior and second-class as my rights are.