It will not have escaped many of you that in an interview with the always-amazing-to-himself Chris Matthews of MSNBC this week, Hillary Clinton was asked the difference "between a Democrat and a socialist." Mr. Matthews was indeed amazing, in this case, in that he actually expected Mrs. Clinton to answer the question, and even pressed her after her rambling non-answer to try harder -- reminding her that DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz had looked bad failing to answer that same question, a few weeks ago.
OK, he didn't actually tell Hillary that Mrs. Schultz had "looked bad", but the implication was certainly there. Shoot, at least I thought he was trying to be a journalist, even though it was one question in a softball interview that turned out to be an embarrassment to actual softballs.
I won't bother with her answer, partly because she didn't bother with her answer, and mostly because, well, who really cares? She went off onto Mars with long sentences that weren't close to the topic of what Matthews actually had asked. No doubt, Hillary Clinton did not want to have to explain that difference.
If you've actually been on Mars the past few months, you will know why the question was even relevant. It's because Hillary's leading opponent for the nomination, the senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT), has declared himself to be a socialist, and unabashedly so. When Mrs. Schultz of the DNC was asked to define the difference between a Democrat and a socialist, she, too, took a trip to Mars to avoid the question.
So the question is out there as a legitimate one, and it made perfect sense to have asked Hillary that question ... except that MSNBC is trying to get her elected. Perhaps they forgot to run that question by her in advance. We'll know that's true if she never sets foot in a room with Chris Matthews again. Her answer, or non-answer, was really pathetic and embarrassing.
But the thing is, she could have answered it, and done a better job than she did without embarrassing anyone, even softballs, and certainly without doing anything to her candidacy. She could have said something like this:
"Chris, I'm glad you asked me that. Let me give you a direct answer. Being a Democrat and being a socialist are really talking about two different things, just as being a Republican and being a conservative are not the same thing either. When you say "Democrat", that means a member of the Democratic Party, or someone who regularly supports or votes for Democrats. What it means to be a Democrat is that you support most or all of the parts of our party's platform for that time, and its belief system, as a political matter. Being a Democrat is pretty much the opposite of being a Republican, someone who regularly votes for Republicans and supports most or all of that party's platform.
"Being a socialist, on the other hand, is only one factor in someone's belief system, mostly an economic one. Socialism measures the amount of government control someone believes is appropriate, especially over the economy. When someone feels that the government should manage a great deal of individual citizens' lives, and take a high tax rate to pay for it, and that redistributing most income is an appropriate role of government, then at some point further out on the scale than I am, they would be called a socialist. Most Democrats probably are not that far on the scale.
"But being a socialist doesn't say anything at all about how you feel about things like national defense, for example. Being a Democrat does mean, for example, having a certain stand on the role of the USA in the world that Democrats believe in. So being a Democrat does not mean being a socialist, but socialists are likely almost all Democrats, or at least likely to vote that way."
Of course, Hillary didn't say any of that, even though it would have been a perfectly reasonable answer that would have been pretty much unimpeachable, even if it were a bit simplistic -- but it was an interview, not a lecture. "Simplistic" would have been perfectly fine.
Now, why she didn't even try to answer that question is very odd. A perfectly reasonable answer (e.g., the one I just wrote above) was there for the taking. Moreover, since Debbie Wasserman Schultz had flubbed the question so horribly a few weeks ago, you would think that Hillary would have at least considered what a reasonable answer was, long before the interview. Shoot, I'm not running for president, and I did try to think of how I would answer the question the first time it came up.
So again -- with a bland, non-political answer right there for the taking, why did she so scrupulously avoid the question?
Let us go ahead and invoke Occam's Razor -- the simplest explanation for a conundrum is likely the correct one. Bernie Sanders has at least twice gone out of his way not to take an easy, available shot at Hillary, taking a vulnerability of hers off the table, even though she is the one standing in his way to getting the nomination, if she is not in prison by then.
Bernie Sanders does not actually want to become president; he just wants the actual nominee to be pushed far enough to the socialist side of the Democrats so he gets his way. If he wanted to be the nominee, he could have torn Hillary' record into tiny little snowflakes and tossed it all over the TV screen in the debates. She is that vulnerable.
Hillary Clinton, knowing that the socialist/Democrat question would look bad, if poorly answered, on Sanders -- socialism is a failed economic approach, after all -- simply avoided it entirely. Unfortunately, by doing so as artlessly as she did, we're going to be talking about it for weeks.
She could have simply answered it. But liars default to the worst replies, by their nature.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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