Clinton
triumphs; Sanders slumps. Now the real contest can begin
Richard Wolffe
It’s
past time for Clinton and the Democratic party to pivot towards the
general election, and concentrate on turning a victory against Donald
Trump into a rout
Wednesday 20 April
2016 04.12 BST
Like the Monty
Python parrot, the Bernie Sanders campaign is no more. It has ceased
to be. Its metabolic processes are now history. It’s kicked the
bucket and shuffled off its mortal coil.
Sanders was far more
interested in critiquing the system than running it
It has been an
ex-campaign since Super Tuesday, when Sanders fell so far behind
Clinton in the delegate count that he needed lopsided victories to
get back into contention for the convention.
That didn’t happen
in New York on Tuesday night. And according to the polls, it won’t
happen in any of the big states left: Maryland, Pennsylvania,
California and New Jersey.
Clinton will enter
the convention with a clear lead among pledged delegates. On that
basis, there is no room for Sanders to argue that the superdelegates
should ignore the popular vote and the mood of the party to flip
their support.
To the Sanders
supporters who have already pressed send on their tweets, comments
and emails: I know. It doesn’t matter. Numbers, facts, delegates,
convention rules, logic, reason, actual votes, party unity: none of
it matters.
In reality, winning
never really mattered to Bernie Sanders. The exercise of power was
never the point, even if it became a self-delusional diversion along
the way.
What mattered was
ideological purity. Like all good Cold War-era socialists, Sanders
was far more interested in critiquing the system than running it. It
was always easier to feel morally superior than engage in the messy
business of building a winning and governing coalition.
Then again, the
Clintons have some kind of unnatural desire to make you feel morally
superior. Between the paid speeches and the private email server,
Hillary Clinton seems determined to make life difficult for herself
and her campaign.
Her great good
fortune is that she won’t, ultimately, be compared to a
self-righteous socialist. Instead, she will be compared to a
self-inflated socialite.
There may be a
life-form on earth that cannot feel morally superior to Donald Trump,
but the planet has probably evolved too far already. There are Latin
American presidents, with large legal teams in Panama, who can feel
smug when they look at the Great Orange Hope.
Trump is the unique
political species who urinates on his own party as he celebrates
victory. “Nobody should take delegates and claim victory unless
they claim delegates with voters and voting,” said the man whose
previous experience of voting rules involved picking a Miss Universe.
“It’s a crooked system. It’s a system that’s rigged.”
Thus spoke the
winner of the crooked system’s latest contest, as he predicted
storming into the rigged party’s convention. With a party leader
like this, who needs opponents?
On the Democratic
side, Sanders claimed in recent days that New York’s closed primary
– where only Democrats could vote – was itself undermining
democracy. This is the kind of thing you say if you haven’t lived
your life as a Democrat.
Sanders has
traditionally counted himself as an independent, with an alignment –
but not an identification – with the Democratic party. That history
does not bode well for those who argue he should tone things down for
the good of the party.
In contrast, Clinton
started her victory speech by reaching out to her opponent’s
voters. “To all the people who support Senator Sanders, I believe
there’s much more than unites us than divides us,” she said.
But this is Hillary
Clinton, and the sense of outrage runs high against Sanders at a
deeply personal level.
“In this campaign,
we have won in every region of the country: from the north to the
south to east to the west,” she said at the very start of her
speech, in an unsubtle dig at the Sanders team for suggesting she had
only won among African-American voters in the so-called deep south.
“But this one’s personal.”
It sure is.
“Under the bright
lights of New York, we discovered it’s not enough to diagnose
problems,” she continued, “you have to explain how you solve
problems.”
Bernie is not going
to stop diagnosing the problems, starting with the Clintons
themselves.
But it’s past time
for Clinton and the Democratic party to turn towards the general
election. They have an unexpected and historic opportunity to turn a
victory into a rout: to win not just the White House, but to take
back the Senate and quite possibly the House.
They could use the
next two months to press their case, recruit down-ticket candidates
and organize early for November. Or they could continue to debate the
finer points of bank regulations and free trade deals.
It’s time to stop
pining for the fjords, and start running against the party that Trump
built.
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