In the coming weeks it will be interesting to see how Hillary and her handlers address this dilemma. Attacking Donald Trump is already in play. He's a racist and a liar and therefore "unfit" to be president. But maybe the more pressing issue for Clinton is how to convince progressive voters to support a candidate who is the antithesis of Bernie Sanders, his politics and his policies. It should come as no surprise that we've begun to hear comparisons between 2008 Clinton supporters, who said they'd never vote for Obama, and 2016 Sanders voters, who say they'll never vote for Clinton. In 2008, once the general election got under way, Clinton voters came around. Thus, the comparison suggests, after the Democratic Convention Sanders voters will inevitably join forces with the Hillary team.
The comparison is of course wildly misleading. In 2008 it was progressives -- the young, people of color, women and first-time voters -- who got our first black president elected. They got involved. They changed the political landscape. They pushed Obama's candidacy, unfortunately, as we now know, because he was able to deceive them into believing he would govern as one of them.
The opposite is true today. Progressive voters are virtually unanimous in their objections to Clinton's campaign, and they've mobilized to fight against it. Secretary Clinton likes to say she's a "progressive who gets things done." But when one takes a look at the things she's gotten done, at her actual record, one finds a neoliberal waste land laid low by the scourge of pro-corporate, anti-worker policies. She is the face of US imperialism abroad and a slick peddler of austerity politics at home, a toxic brew of hubris and historical ignorance reminiscent of the incomparably incompetent Condoleezza Rice .
From this perspective, it's hard to see how Hillary the Hawk can repeat the scam.
Then again, she's half way there.
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