I really enjoyed Bernie Sanders’ speech the first and even the second time I heard it — the third time was boring.
His comments are always the same: Corporate America has destroyed the middle class, Wall Street is thoroughly corrupt, the top 1 percent of earners is consumed by greed, international trade agreements have destroyed the American working class and the political system is rigged. We need, Bernie says, a “political revolution,” and he promises to lead us to the Promised Land.
I liked the message initially, so I donated to his campaign. Since then I have been deluged with requests to donate more, but I have not. Nor have I contributed to Hillary Clinton. But I probably will donate to Hillary once she gets the nomination. Bernie has mastered the poetry of campaigning. Hillary, I suspect, understands the complex prose of governing.
I like the 74-year-old senator from Vermont who collects Social Security. I wish he could be elected. But if he were, I do not believe he could govern. It is highly questionable that he could work with Republicans on any issue, save the Second Amendment, and I doubt he could work with moderate Democrats who questioned his ideological views. Bernie opines but does not engage in genuine debate.
He lives in an ideological vacuum that allows him to be pure and consistent and outrageously repetitious. I saw this first in the late 1980s, when I invited the former mayor of the “People’s Republic of Burlington” and not yet elected to Congress to speak to a government class I was teaching at Colby College. The students, almost to a person, were conservative Republicans, and I thought it might be helpful to their education to hear from a socialist. Bernie held forth for 60 minutes, giving almost exactly the same speech we hear from him now. Students asked him tough questions, and he responded almost exactly as he does in debates with Hillary. After Bernie departed, I asked this group of 20- to 22-year-olds what they thought. They all said that if he ran for president, they would vote for him.
History repeats itself — Bernie’s appeal to the college-aged demographic has not changed. Why? At the risk of sounding condescending or, worse, driveling like an old codger, I believe many young people seldom understand and thus do not appreciate moral ambiguity, political complexity, second-best choices and the tyranny of unalterable conditions that require compromise. Bernie, though an old man, is their soulmate.
Hillary is not. Interestingly, she possesses the outlook of an older, more cynical generation. She is a spry 68-year-old whose political battle scars have marred her public image, yet have also given her a deeper understanding that imperfect American democracy needs not a Moses who promises delivery from a world of woes but an Aaron who actually figures out how to cross the River Jordan. Hillary is a practical person whose experiences in multiple capacities have given her deep insights into how to deal with the imperfections of our own democracy and those that bedevil the wider world.
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” founding father James Madison famously wrote in Federalist 51.
Bernie seems to believe a “political revolution,” the actual details of which he seems clueless, will evoke our angelic nature, rid America of corporate greed and gross income inequality and deliver us from evil. Amen.
But prayers are not policies — his recent interview with the New York Daily News revealed his superficial understanding of settled law and public policy — and wishing it were so is different from delivering results. Hillary understands at least this much. She is a tried and true worker bee, while Bernie is a pie-in-the-sky dreamer. Hillary may be far from morally pure, and leveraging her public persona to the shameless pursuit of personal wealth, as her husband has done, tells us she is ethically challenged. Nevertheless, a six-figure speech to Goldman Sachs does not make her a gofer for the investment world.
Hillary is smart, experienced, understands public and foreign policy and, I believe, is dedicated to emulating her husband’s remarkably successful record as president — Monica, notwithstanding. Bernie wants to remake America in his own self-image; Hillary wants to strengthen America, deal with government as it is while reforming it around the margins and make history by becoming the first woman to achieve our highest office.
Roger Bowen is the former chair of the Gouldsboro Democrats and lives in Prospect Harbor.