Connections: Democratic Choices

Don’t shoot the messenger: It’s a cliché worth remembering. We are, all of us, too liable to cast blame on whoever or whatever delivers unpleasant information. 

But the opposite is also true, and I think of it often during an election year:  My current cautionary catchphrase is “don’t credit the messenger,” just because you like what you are hearing.

I’m looking at you, Senator Bernie Sanders. The senator calls for many initiatives I would indeed like to see come to pass, but he has a tendency to reheat old-familiar, tried-and-true progressive platform points and repeat them to the point that they sound formulaic if not outright musty. 

For example, in a campaign email this week Mr. Sanders asked supporters to consider what life in this country would be like if he became president for eight years. He wrote: “The minimum wage is a living wage and students are graduating college without the crushing debt stifling their ability to pursue the career of their dreams. Health care is recognized as a right for every man, woman, and child, and the United States is leading the world in fighting climate change. There is no bank that is too big to fail, no banker too powerful to jail, and we’ve leveled the playing field so that the billionaire class is no longer able to buy and sell our candidates and elections.”

So far, so good (and so boilerplate). 

Senator Sanders strikes a populist vein by attacking “political elites and billionaire super PACs” — attributing to them everything wrong with the election process, if not the entire country. 

Well, sure, I agree with much of what he says. And, yes, it is indeed exciting to witness so many young potential voters joining Mr. Sanders’s “political revolution” in much the same way President Obama drew voters to his message of hope in 2008. Sometimes, however, I wonder if the reason all these college kids are “feeling the Bern” quite so fervently is because they haven’t heard all of this a million times before (as someone my age has). 

Also, I find it unfortunate that Senator Sanders’s simplistic assessment of Mrs. Clinton as someone who favors corporations over people and the Washington establishment over democracy is being echoed by the Bernie faithful, as it was in a letter to the editor of this paper last week. 

I was among those who switched allegiance from Mrs. Clinton to Mr. Obama in 2008, but I am not about to follow suit by supporting the hard-not-to-like Mr. Sanders this time. After eight years of the Obama administration’s struggles with America’s increasingly confounding right wing — and with an increasingly dangerous world — the best hope I can muster is for the election of Hillary Clinton. 

Did you see her face her interrogators over the Benghazi tragedy? Good Lord, she has the intelligence and fortitude to stand up to outrageous distortions of her record and the basest name-calling. I am sorry that she is not able to arouse the emotional fervor Mr. Sanders does, and also am concerned that his support by the young, and in particular young unmarried women, may sway the primaries. How do we all feel about Bernie versus Trump? Or Bernie versus Ted Cruz?

 Research shows that in addition to capturing the youth vote in 2008, Mr. Obama was re-elected in 2012 in large part because millions of single and reasonably young women, including women of color, backed him. By contrast, in 2012, a majority of white married women voted for Mitt Romney. Just what that might mean for next November is unclear.

  I don’t know Mrs. Clinton (although I shook her hand once when she was campaigning on the South Fork with her husband). Those who call her a friend say she is indeed caring and empathetic, qualities the pundits say are essential, but that she doesn’t seem able to project on television. I will, however, take issue with those who find her lacking as a human being of integrity, and will never forget her eulogy for East Hampton’s Tom Twomey after his untimely death in 2014.

Holding notes, but hardly referring to them, she showed extraordinary depth as she spoke about his personal qualities and professional accomplishments with emotion and, to me, surprising understanding of his place in Bonac. I was impressed. Mrs. Clinton is the best we’ve got going, and she will have my vote when the time comes.