Who's Chasing Whom?

       “Who has who surrounded ?”  the reporters asked the generals during the Tet offensive at the battle for Que in Vietnam.  A similar question is now on at the top of the agenda of the democratic nomination race.  Who’s chasing whom? According to print and cable media Bernie Sanders is in a hopeless race to catch candidate Hillary Clinton.  

        PBS Newshour anchor Judy Woodruff  and MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow every evening bear a strong resemblance to the school Marm who can’t understand why Johnny can’t learn.  Why doesn’t Bernie withdraw?  The answer is because Sanders has all the momentum and he has the young adult generation following him by 70 percent.  Truth to tell, Hillary Clinton is in an increasingly desperate race against Donald Trump that she can’t win without the Sander's 70 percent group.

       The growing confusion in both political parties has its common root in the failure of the U. S. economy to decrease inequality by increasing jobs, which is why both Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton have moved left on trade policy, health care finance, and higher taxes on the wealthy.  More surprising is Trump’s unhesitant support for continued full funding of Social Security and Medicare; an explicit contradiction of conservative dogma.

       Hillary Clinton’s shifts have a certain credibility problem which can seem to some to document her negative reputation for the ease with which she changes positions. The charge that Sanders has no foreign policy experience may seem like an advantage to some voters in light of Clinton's foreign policy choices in Iraq and Libya.  Worse, in both parties these shifts leftward to attract voter loyalty are creating the unintended effect of putting candidates into direct conflict with their large corporate and investment bank funders.  

       This confusing scene is generating bi-partisan chaos because while the candidates need votes, their parties do not want their traditional arrangements disturbed. This includes the links of both parties to huge business contracts for urban reconstruction and the politically potent patronage that hands out thousands of jobs. Within the Wall Street community itself the campaigns’ instability pose a threat to the dependable investment climate that among other things guarantee their practice of revolving doors—defined as moving your corporate  technocrats and lawyers into government jobs on the other side of the street where “your people” will write the regulations that govern your business.

      All this chaos stands in contrast to the Sanders momentum which continues to grow: winning more states (with more wins probably directly ahead) but also winning hearts and minds. It’s not only the data of Sanders’ popularity among voting adults under 40, but something else as well. His growing public seems to think Sanders is the genuine article.

     It’s not too much to say that this new form of identity seems increasingly potent and akin to the strong affinities among racial/ethnic groups bound together by the mystique of shared struggle and oppression.  Creating solidarity in the growing Sanders movement is a bond grown from their generation’s shared experience with an unfair economy. Theirs is a sense of U. S. exceptionalism as a wildly inappropriate national boast.  They also seem to own a more acute understanding that because of our national history of slavery and immigrant exploitation much of the so-called American story is a huge lie.

       While they understand that this needs to be re-written with a far different and new national consciousness, the under 40s think that such truth-telling could mean hope not despair.