The Race to the Electoral Bottom

WE HAVE DECIDED TO RESUME BLOGGING “PUBLIC  LITURGIES.”  After a long season of illness and family loss (a daughter and a wife) the growing realities of global inequality, demagoguery and rising nationalism call us to return to our prophetic tradition of speaking truth to power.

Hillary Clinton is beginning to look like the candidate who may not be electable as postmaster by next Fall. Bernie Sanders continues to stalk her as a candidate supported by Wall street money, asking her to release the transcripts of her highly paid speeches to Goldman Saks.  The landscape is changing rapidly  In Iowa and Nevada among voters between the ages of 17 and 29, Bernie Sanders won 84 percent of the vote to Hillary’s 14 percent. He also bested her 58 to 37 among voters aged 30 to 44.

Meanwhile Republicans are as one in questioning her home emails and Benghazi performance. Chris Christie’s endorsement of Trump today seems like piling-on; and Hillary is just not very exciting beyond her older middle aged women admirers.

Sanders, however, contiues to disappoint in recent appearances. In yestersay’s hour-long sympathetic MSNBC interview by Chris Matthews in froint of a mostly White University of Chicago student audience he was repeating slogans instead of articulating specific strategies. Never going near the details of his proposed tax on Wall Street speculation (Is it a “transaction” tax? Which transactions?)

Pressed again, and again by Matthews  to say just how he would turn the electoral tide to do campaign finance reform such as reversing Citizens United, he conspicuously avoided the need for a Senate majority and electoral strategies to make it happen. There may be insider democratic delicacies about this but Sanders is beginning to sound shallow instead of shrewd.

     His stump speeches iterate “When Congress sees millions of citizens rising up to demand fairness and justice it will happen” is hollow as anyone who reads history knows.  History does not support this fantasy. Millions opposed the Vietnam war; millions opposed the invasion of Iraq.  The incumbent Johnson and Bush warmakers did not fold.

     Charitably, hopefully, we might assume that Sanders’ ‘keep it simple’ message is tactical, but since it is so repetitive it sounds more and more like a man out of his depth.  Intentionally or not, he is avoiding getting into the water where it’s deep. Either he can’t swim or he is making a possibly fatal tactical maneuver.

It’s a cheerier footnote that film maker Spike Lee (“Do the Right Thing”) and The Atlantic writer Ta Nihisi Coates have endorsed Bernie.

     Hillary, on the other hand seems by now completely exposed as the establishment Democratic candidate. She and Bill have taken tons of Wall Street money and it will take a nuclear attack to get those Goldman Saks speech transcripts released. 

Meanwhile the Republican circus sounds worse than Hitlerian propaganda. Nearly always bombastic rather than factual, Rubio, Cruz and Trump use slogans and right wing mantras intended to please their following of angry, largely disenfranchised White evangelical and hardline conservative voters—many of them people left out of the often inherently unjust American opportunity system; ironically they are the very neglected people Sanders and maybe Clinton are talking about.

     There’s something else:  Eight of the eleven Super Tuesday states have their roots in the practice of slavery. This underlying culture has clearly shaped the anti-Obama obstruction of the Republicans in and outside Congress who now draw on the same slavery roots to run their election season circus.