After Tuesday's primaries in Oregon (won handily by Bernie Sanders) and Kentucky (splitting the delegates down the middle), Sanders committed again to compete with Hillary Clinton all the way to the Democrats' convention in Philadelphia. He is now also chasing those "super-delegates" that the Democrats put in place to ensure that Hillary would be the nominee, if she is not in prison by then.
Most of us have the gut reaction that the "big deal" this is, for Hillary, is that she has to burn up lots more of her super-PACs' money going after primary wins against Sanders (which themselves are getting pretty rare for her any more) rather than saving it for the general campaign against Donald Trump. And that is truly a big deal, no argument there.
It is also true that the further along primary season goes, with Sanders seemingly winning every contested primary but not getting the nomination, the angrier his supporters get. And they are indeed pretty angry. That anger is directed toward Hillary and the Democrat establishment that wired the whole process for her to win -- and that should translate into a lot of voters who may stay home in November. Donald Trump is actually courting those voters, and it's even worse for Hillary if they cross over to Trump than if they stayed home.
But I want to touch on a different aspect of the difficulty that Sanders causes for Hillary.
Bernie is, as we all know, an extremely left-wing fellow. He is an avowed socialist, and it is not an editorial opinion but obvious fact that he regards property as belonging to the government, and that private property is simply an annoyance to a huge government, the one he favors. You see that in proposed 92% tax rates, government control of health care and education, that sort of thing.
Yet he is winning the primaries. So, to compete with him, Hillary has to keep pushing to the left, further and further. Now, because she has completely lost credibility with the public after years of lies, planned deceptions and multiple changes to stated positions (NAFTA, gay marriage, Iraq, immigration, etc.), we don't know what her actual, look-in-the-mirror positions are on anything. She may be moving in the direction of what she (as opposed to the less-leftist fellow she married) actually believes. Who knows?
That pushing to the left, though, is a big problem, precisely because of, you guessed it, Bill Clinton himself. Hillary is inextricably linked to her serially-philandering hubby, the former president. But his policies were nowhere near as leftist has the ones that Hillary is having to declare now. And because she was "married" to Bill during his presidency, she had to make repeated public statements then in support of those not-so-left policies.
Got it now? Because of Bernie, Hillary has to state positions on a series of issues that conflict with public statements she herself made way back ... well, not all that long ago. And those public statements by Hillary, not to mention those by Bill that caused her to say what she did then, are sitting out there on video for all to see.
So now we get things like the famous "13-minutes of Hillary lying" video (at this site, in case you hadn't seen it) that juxtaposes opposite sentiments out of the same mouth. We get the airing of Bill, as president, declaring that we needed to secure our borders, and threatening businesses that hire illegal aliens -- juxtaposed with Donald Trump saying pretty much the same thing. And there will be plenty more; it is a blessing and a curse that every famous person has archives full of video out there to be searched.
Hillary Clinton has one problem with the voting public that trumps all the others (pun intended) -- she has no credibility. She is a serial liar, and all this video content shows it for all to see. The more Bernie sticks around, the further left she is pushed -- meaning "the further she is pushed away from views she once espoused, for which there is plenty of evidence." Each leftist policy statement generates plenty of searches for where she has said the opposite thing in the past. And they're easy to find.
It is not fun for her that she is having to blow money on a primary campaign that she might not get or have later. It is not fun that the long campaign, and the persistent losing of primaries, is agitating Bernie supporters into the anger that will keep them from voting for her.
But most of all, it is not fun for Hillary Clinton that she is being forced into advocating for issues on which she is blatantly in the public record opposing in the past. Others can't really get away with that too easily; when you have a public perception already of being corrupt and a serial liar, there's no way that she can recover from that.
Except, of course, to deflect. Look for a dirty, dirty campaign.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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