As a woman, I would have liked to be enthusiastic about Hillary Clinton’s candidacy for President of the United States. But when the Democratic primary comes to Massachusetts, I’ll be voting, enthusiastically, for Bernie Sanders.
It’s not that I think Hillary Clinton would make a bad president, or that she isn’t up to the job. It’s that a vote for Hillary Clinton is a vote for the status quo—a strange thing to say about the first viable female presidential candidate in U.S. history.
Like many women around the world who gained political power through their husband’s or father’s political legacy, Hillary represents an established—and an establishment—vision. She has a bunch of policy ideas thrown up in alphabetical order on her website, so that it appears, bizarrely, that “fighting Alzheimer’s disease” is her number one priority. But her short takes on the issues don’t add up to a clear, convincing vision of her own. She appears to be running mostly on the strength of being a voice of moderation in the howling wilderness of the Republican field.
I want to hold back the Republican beast as much as anyone, but I’m not willing to settle for Hillary when I could have Bernie instead.
What Bernie has that Hillary lacks is, quite simply, heart and soul.
Like Barack Obama, he has the ability as an orator to connect with a crowd and get them on their feet and cheering. He does it by speaking clearly, without artifice or manipulation, about the injustices that have been woven into our social system here in America, which most Americans must navigate on a daily basis.
Bernie is not afraid to call out today’s robber barons and hold them accountable for a disparity in wealth not seen since the last gilded age, right before the Depression.
According to Emmanuel Saez of the University of California, Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman of the London School of Economics, American inequality in wealth is approaching record levels. As The Economist summarizes, “In the late 1920s the bottom 90% held just 16% of America’s wealth—considerably less than that held by the top 0.1%, which controlled a quarter of total wealth just before the crash of 1929. From the beginning of the Depression until well after the end of the second world war, the middle class’s share of total wealth rose steadily, thanks to collapsing wealth among richer households, broader equity ownership, middle-class income growth and rising rates of home-ownership. From the early 1980s, however, these trends have reversed. The top 0.1% (consisting of 160,000 families worth $73m on average) hold 22% of America’s wealth, just shy of the 1929 peak—and almost the same share as the bottom 90% of the population.”
As we know, a handful of billionaires are spending a lot of money to maintain the status quo, by buying politicians to do it for them.
Bernie won’t have any of that. Like Barack Obama, he is raising record campaign contributions in small amounts—in fact, as of December he had more contributions than Obama did at that stage of his 2008 campaign.
Hillary still has a little more money in her war chest (according to a recent report, she has raised just $4 million more than Sanders), but that could change as Bernie continues to gain traction and momentum.
The rumor that he might choose Senator Elizabeth Warren as his running mate generated a ripple of delight among those of us who want to see a woman in a top U.S. office. Although presidential tickets are usually picked by geography (a Southern presidential candidate choosing a West Coast VP, for example), it might be time to make an exception and let these two amazingly inspiring leaders out of the starting gate to show what they can do together.
Bernie Sanders’ issues page has an entirely different feel than Hillary’s. He’s not just running down a laundry list of issues that have been generated by polls and focus groups as the ones every candidate should respond to. No, Bernie Sanders has a thoughtful and passionate take on every one of the issues he lists on his website, from climate change to a living wage, from health care and social security to foreign policy and educational reform. He’s got the big picture AND he’s got the details.
Most importantly, he really cares. He’s not running for President on some kind of ego trip. He’s running because he looked around and saw that he was the leader he’d been waiting for. No one else in the Democratic Party had the guts or the smarts to challenge the Clinton establishment and the status quo party backers. He looked and he leaped and he didn’t look back. He’s been giving it all he’s got, and he’s clearly got a tremendous amount to give.
I have always been a closet Green Party supporter, and I hate the fact that no one pays any attention to Jill Stein, who continues to run anyway, off in her own parallel universe. Bernie represents something new in American politics: a Green Democrat. He’s the homegrown hybrid we need to successfully navigate all the challenges facing Americans and the world in the 21st century.
Yes, I know the Republicans will do everything they can to stop him, during the campaign and if he were to gain the White House. I know they play dirty. But Bernie is tough, and he’s got something none of the other big players have: integrity.
Americans are hungry an honest politician who means it when he says he is on their side—and doesn’t just say it, but lives it. That’s why we elected Barack Obama in 2008 and 2012, despite all the Republicans’ dirty tricks, and that’s why we’ll elect a Democrat again in 2016.
Much as I’d like to see a woman President, what matters to me more than external appearance of our next leader is what’s inside that exterior shell. I’ll take Bernie’s heart and soul over Hillary’s, any day.
Check out Bernie’s Jan. 9, 2016 discussion of his “electability” here.
In my work—
We have a candidate for the American Presidency now who is not afraid to take up these values and call them by their old, 20th century name: socialism.
Transition Times 