Dump Hillary, and Dump Her Fast: The Democratic Establishment is on a Suicide Mission, and it Will End With Trump
By
Brogan Morris | February 29, 2016 | 3:41pm
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After Bernie Sanders’ first real display of weakness in Nevada, the media by and large was prepped to write the campaign’s obituary. There was none of the nuance of, say, FiveThirtyEight’s
post-caucus analysis from the mainstream press, just an assurance that a loss in the Silver State meant it was time to write off the remaining 47. There had already been doomy assurances by the media after Sanders’ decisive win in New Hampshire, following his tie with Hillary Clinton in Iowa, before even a single vote had been cast, in fact. From the very start, the establishment narrative has been one of an inevitable Sanders demise and a roaring, unavoidable Clinton success.
Now, after South Carolina, it would seem reality is at last aligning with the view of the media commentariat: we are finally witnessing the beginning of the end of the Sanders campaign. With Sanders’ astonishing, near 50-point defeat in South Carolina, and with polls predicting he’ll lose in the majority of
Super Tuesday states, it has become clear that Sanders is failing to connect with the wider electorate.
With more diverse appeal amongst Democrats than Bernie Sanders could ever dream of, Hillary Clinton is indeed now the favourite to run against the eventual Republican nominee in the summer. Here’s where the media narrative and reality once again begin to diverge, though. According to the pro-Dem mainstream press, America’s second President Clinton will be sitting in the White House early next year. It’s such a sure thing, they may as well call it now, because the GOP competition isn’t any competition at all. But do just a little fact-checking – mostly you have to look away from print, and turn online to ‘alternative’ media – and you discover this might not really be true.
According to the polls, Hillary Clinton has a remarkably high net
unfavorability rating nationally, and it continues to rise steadily, as it has been doing for the past three years. The American people on the whole also find Clinton
highly untrustworthy. Most worrying of all, though, is how Clinton is shown to fare in
hypothetical match-ups with the GOP candidates. Polls show Clinton losing in an election to every single Republican still in the race except for Trump, with whom she’s almost tied. Bernie Sanders, meanwhile, would according to those same polls beat every Republican runner handily.
These are worrying statistics not just because it now seems very likely that Clinton will be the nominee, but because the Democratic establishment has always assured and still continues to assure Dem voters that Clinton’s presidency is inevitable, even though the evidence suggests otherwise. Worse, this Democratic establishment has failed to amply confront Clinton’s at-times dubious record, a record that the Republican establishment will happily start attacking as soon as her candidacy is confirmed.
For the most part, the pro-Dem mainstream media just won’t touch upon the more damning aspects of Clinton’s political past. Remember how
Time and
the Washington Post attempted to discredit Bernie Sanders’ Civil Rights record by disputing that he was ever even there? Note how the same press reporting that fake story never even touched upon Clinton’s background
campaigning for segregationist Barry Goldwater or attempting to
smear Barack Obama in 2008 as an ‘other’. Nor was the mainstream press prepared to bring to light Clinton’s
past comments about “super-predators” and bringing people “to heel” until Black Lives Matter activists crashed one of her fundraisers.
That BLM mini-protest sparked the hashtag #WhichHillary, which briefly exploded last week before it suddenly
disappeared from Twitter’s trending list. While it was active, though,
#WhichHillary saw hundreds of thousands of Twitter users highlighting Clinton’s history of inconsistency and double standards. That the facts were so readily available and spread so quickly exposed a couple of worrying truths for the Democratic Party going forward: that Hillary Clinton’s background looks shaky under proper scrutiny, and that voters don’t always react favourably when they find out the truth.
With the mainstream media currently maintaining a firewall that largely rejects and/or ignores Clinton-based criticism, what will be the average voter reaction when the GOP establishment begins its assault and really puts Clinton’s
shady weapons deals,
Wall Street ties and numerous
policy flip-flops in the spotlight? Make no mistake, this is exactly the kind of stuff that the establishment of the Right will be throwing at Clinton soon enough. That’s on top of the ongoing email controversy, which has prompted an FBI investigation, and a judge to threaten Clinton with
a subpoena. To reiterate, Clinton is
already predicted to lose to the GOP as it is, or – at best – tie with Trump.
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