so, i saw this article this morning while browsing my emails: Hillary Clinton Takes Aim at Voters Drifting Toward Third Party. two thoughts immediately came to mind.
one, where is bernie sanders, who said he’s go on the campaign trail for hillary? partly, this comes to mind because of a conversation with my father (a moderate liberal) the other day in which he asked the same question. so, has he been campaigning and i’ve just missed it, or has he changed his mind, or focus?
admittedly, i’ve withdrawn my attention largely from the presidential race; it a circus with two clowns covered by media only interested in the stories in which one of the clowns are gored by a bull, or miss landing in a safety net. yes, one is clearly better than the other, but in the realm of terrible clowns, it’s not saying much.
this, in a ‘round about sort of way, brings me to my second thought; typical. just as at the democratic national convention in july, the dnc and clinton campaign is only interested in what they can get from us (though i’ll vote for clinton, i put myself with the third-party voters because i understand their passion, point of view, and anger). clinton isn’t truly interested in WHY we are so opposed to voting for her so much as she is convincing us that she’s better than trump. for the begrudging pragmatist in me, that’s enough, but for the millions of sanders and stein supporters (johnson is closer to trump on the spectrum, so i’ll ignore him here) it’s not even close to enough.
neither the dnc, the clinton campaign, or her die-hard supporters seem terribly interested in “negotiating”. they’ve made no effort, zero, to try to understand where we’re coming from. sure, clinton has made strategic compromises on certain policy positions, but even the political newbies in the sanders camp weren’t fooled by the politically motivated, half-hearted attempts to be more progressive.
you’d think, looking at national polling, which has scared the utter bejesus out of institutional democrats and clinton supporters, they’d attempt to move closer to bernie’s positions. consistently throughout the primary season national polling indicated sanders would fair far better against trump that clinton would. now that democrats are scared that might be the case, it seems to me the answer is clear. still, when living in an echo chamber, as so many democrats seem to (too many sanders supporters live in a separate, but equally dangerous echo chamber), it’s hard to see, what to me, is the most direct solution.
i’m not sure that much less than a fundamental shift in clinton’s demeanor and policy positions will do the trick. but, let’s see how clinton and the dnc approach this problem. let’s see how they plan to try get support from the very same people the shrugged off almost two months ago at the democratic national convention. they’ll almost certainly need more than millions of dollars of fancy targeted online messaging.
