I’m reading Bill Press’s Buyer’s Remorse: How Obama Let Progressives Down. After just finishing Chapter 1, “Budget Battles and the Obama Economy,” tonight’s fiasco seems all the more inevitable. Obama’s failure to relieve the plight of America’s working people, his cozening of the same Wall Street execs who had caused the financial crisis, his endless capitulations to the Republicans, all created a perfect storm. Too many people would have seen Clinton as more of the same, and too many millions in this country had been written off for too long by both parties–making them vulnerable to the sham appeal of a pseudo-outsider. And making them vulnerable to the hideous racial, sexual, and religious scapegoating of a demagogue like Trump.
Then, of course, there are the outright improprieties committed by the Republicans–hello, James Comey and Jason Chaffetz! Once Obama whiffed on that Supreme Court seat, the GOP knew it could get away with anything.
I certainly hope Hillary wins, but at one a.m. that seems unlikely. The only positive upshot I can imagine from all this is that finally. belatedly, the Clinton epoch of triangulation will have to come to an end. Democrats must again learn what it means to be an opposition party. The country, however, may not survive long enough to make that turnaround mean something. We will be run by a madman, steering the country off a cliff.
“Is America a failed state and society?” Paul Krugman asks. “It looks truly possible.”
But why, Dr. K, were you so dismissive of Sanders and so uncritical a booster of Hillary?
Sanders and his supporters are now completely vindicated. They warned us.